Consumerism

Consumerism is a social pattern that gives high importance to acquiring and consuming goods and services. It shapes identities, aspirations, and economic activity around consumption.

Advertising: Advertising is paid communication designed to promote products, services, or ideas. It creates and channels desires that sustain consumer demand.
Industrial Revolution: The Industrial Revolution was the transition to mechanized production that began in Britain in the eighteenth century. Industrial production expanded the volume and availability of consumer goods.
Thorstein Veblen: Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and sociologist known for analyzing status competition and leisure-class behavior. His account of status display supplied a lasting critique of luxury consumption.
Materialism: Materialism is the belief or value orientation that assigns high importance to possessions and material wealth. Consumerism can encourage treating possessions as central measures of success and happiness.
Planned obsolescence: Planned obsolescence is the design or marketing of products to become unwanted or unusable sooner than necessary. It encourages repeat purchases by shortening products’ perceived or actual useful lives.
Department store: A department store is a large retail establishment organized into sections for different kinds of merchandise. Its nineteenth-century rise made shopping a public leisure activity as well as a transaction.
John Kenneth Galbraith: John Kenneth Galbraith was a Canadian-American economist and public intellectual who wrote about corporate power and affluence. He argued that advertising and production shape wants rather than simply satisfy them.
Hedonic treadmill: The hedonic treadmill is the tendency for people to adapt to changed circumstances and return toward a baseline of well-being. Adaptation helps explain why acquiring more may produce only temporary satisfaction.
Consumer credit: Consumer credit is borrowing by individuals to finance personal purchases or expenses. Credit lets households consume before they have saved the purchase price.
Fordism: Fordism is a system of mass production associated with standardized goods, assembly lines, and high-volume output. Mass production and rising wages helped make standardized consumption widely attainable.

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