a price of $798.
The paramedics who came to help were also jostled and stepped on by the shoppers. Damour was pronounced dead of asphyxiation just after 6:00 a.m. Unbelievably, after the police declared that the shop was closed because it was now a crime scene, people kept shopping. Some even refused to leave, yelling, ‘I’ve been queuing since yesterday morning.’ The next day, when this same Wal-Mart reopened, crowds lined up again.
The courts have not yet concluded the Damour manslaughter case, but reports indicate that there were ‘so many contributing causes to this tragedy’ that it will be difficult to assign individual blame. No matter who is to blame for the incident, Damour’s terrible end is a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff.
Hyper-Consumption
Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian economist and sociologist, first coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ in 1899.1 He used the term to describe the nouveau riche, a class emerging during the nineteenth century made up of people eager to display their wealth and social power. They spent lavishly on visible goods such as jewellery and clothing to show they were prosperous and to differentiate themselves from the masses. In this sense, the nouveau riche, just like their counterparts in earlier Roman, Greek and Egyptian civilizations, bought and consumed goods for self-advertisement as much as, if not more than, utility.
What interests us the most is not the luxury status or elitist side of conspicuous consumption that Veblen referred to, but the excessive mass consumption binge kick-started in the 1920s that exploded in the mid-1950s. We refer to the endless acquisition of more stuff in ever greater amounts as ‘hyper-consumerism’, a force so strong that there are now more shopping centres than high schools in America.2 There is now more than sixteen square feet of shopping centre for every man, woman and child in the United States.3 Our challenge is not the fundamental consumer principle in itself but the blurred line between necessity and convenience; the intoxicating addiction of defining so much of our lives through ownership; and the never-ending list of things we ‘have to have’. And hyper-consumption has brought us to a place where the real cost of a bargain is that some consumers will trample over a man in the quest for a ‘good deal’.
There are four big forces that have played a critical role in manipulating and feeding hyper-consumption: the power of persuasion; the buy now, pay later culture; the law of life cycles; and the ‘just one more’ factor. These forces offer some way of making sense of why we consume at the rate and in the way we do and help answer the question: How did we end up with so much stuff?
Power of Persuasion
In 1917, twenty-six-year-old Edward Bernays went to work for President Woodrow Wilson. His first job was to help form the Committee on Public Information alongside renowned political journalists Walter Lippmann and George Creel. By this time, the word ‘propaganda’ was gaining a sinister connotation in the West due to its association with communism, so Bernays coined the term ‘public relations’ as a positive alternative. The committee crafted the irresistibly patriotic slogan ‘Making the World Safe for Democracy’ to influence gun-shy America into an anti-German frenzy to go ‘over there’ and fight in World War I. They used newsprint, posters, radio, telegraph, cable and films to broadcast this message.
After the war, Bernays, like many PR political gurus of that time, went to Madison Avenue, where he applied his talent for influencing the masses to the nascent advertising industry. He received a letter from his uncle Sigmund Freud asking for money. ‘I disdain to ask you for this favour, but times are hard in Austria and my research thus far has not been well received. Is there a way I might borrow from you a sum to help cover some recent expenses?’ Freud wrote.
Bernays, knowing his uncle was fond of cigars, enclosed a box of Cubans along with the cheque. Grateful for the loan and the gift, Freud sent Bernays a copy of his unpublished book, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Within his uncle’s writing, Bernays found the scientific backing for his ideas about the power of emotions to persuade. The book reinforced his profound belief that you could manipulate consumers’ behaviour by connecting with them on a deep subconscious level, particularly their drives towards aggressiveness and sexuality. To get people to want stuff, desire should be linked to rudimentary human patterns – what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear.4 He was so impressed, in fact, that he arranged for his uncle’s book to be published in America. Freud became famous, and to a lesser degree, so did Bernays as the father of spin.
Bernays understood the power of psychology to design effective public marketing campaigns. ‘If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?’ Bernays wrote.5 He reasoned that if he could tap into people’s desire to feel good, powerful and sexy, he could sell just about anything, and he proudly referred to this concept as the ‘engineering of consent’. We call it the power of persuasion. From soap to silk to bacon to even Wall Street stocks, Bernays got consumers to buy not what they needed but what they desired, connecting not just to who the consumer is but who he or she wanted to be. He realized that the power in this principle was that unmet desires have no fixed point. One of his favourite techniques for influencing consumer wants was to use indirect third-party endorsements. ‘If you can influence the leaders,’ he posited, ‘either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.’ Through techniques such as these, he didn’t just change what people bought; he transformed time-honoured social habits.
In the mid-1920s, despite the widespread popularity of cigarettes, it was not considered acceptable for ladies to smoke in public. The American Tobacco Company hired Bernays to change this social norm. He realized that the real desire for women was not the cigarettes themselves but the liberty to pursue the same things as men. During the 1929 New York Easter Parade, he arranged for a group of attractive young debutantes, including his own secretary, Bertha Hunt, to march in their Sunday best. On Bernays’s signal, the women all lit up a Lucky Strike cigarette. Hunt’s press release described the march as ‘Lighting the Torches of Freedom’ in the interests of gender equality. And being the master of PR, Bernays saw to it that the media throughout the world covered the event. The idea was that anyone against the idea of women smoking would appear to be against their liberty and freedom. Although this did not completely do away with the taboo against women’s smoking, the number of women taking up smoking skyrocketed (American Tobacco’s revenues jumped by $32 million in 1928 alone).6 In his memoirs, Bernays wrote, ‘It was on this day I learned that age-old customs could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media.’7
When you consider that the average person sees more than three thousand advertising messages per day, it is not surprising that we have become so seduced by the pull of the new and the desire for more.8 Influencers such as Bernays were part of a wider force, which engineered and reinforced a system that converted consumers’ wants into needs into everyday habits.
The Diderot Effect
In 1919, an advertisement from the department store Sears exhorted, ‘Use your electricity for more than light.’ Before World War I, the average household did not have an electric toaster, blender or dishwasher, or electronic waste disposal. Families used other means, even if it took a bit longer to toast a piece of bread or wash the dishes. The consumer revolution had barely begun, yet we learned to need and depend on these gadgets. Few people today will deny that these products make our lives easier, and most of us use them every day. But around the same time, superfluous gadgets also entered the kitchen, such as the spiral slicer and other garnishing tools as specific as melon ball scoopers. If you have ever created dramatic spiral strands, ribbons or thin slices from vegetables such as a cucumber, you have probably used a spiral slicer. Advertisers not only touted
