I have mixed feelings about this idiot. He believes "Shoppers have little regard for how or where or by whom the products they buy are made." Quite rightly. Why should they care? "They have almost no resistance to the media messages that encourage them, around the clock, to want things and buy them." That's their problem, isn't it? He considers smiley-faces "one of the most nefarious of marketing tools. He found them on signs, on children's pajamas, on stickers. Few of the shoppers, however, were smiling, he noticed. And that is part of the problem. 'The smile has been so thoroughly appropriated by transnational capital,' he said. 'They discovered that smiling makes money.'" So there we have it. Those annoying smiley-faces are bad because it's wrong to make money. Why? "Creeping consumerism threatens the fabric of society, in the form of chain stores, sweatshops and more. But to the public, it mostly just means more stuff to buy at a good price." He would no doubt prefer to force everyone to pay more for everything and raise wages to the point where companies would be forced to hire less people, raising the unemployment rate. Hey, it works in France and Germany, doesn't it? (The scariest thing about the report is that the reporter Constance L. Hays takes all this as gospel without challenging it--and she's a business reporter for the Times.)


Nonetheless, this I do agree with: "He sees a population lost in consumption, the meaning of individual existence vanished in a fog of wanting, buying and owning too many things." However, although I agree with him on the futility of excessive materialism, I can't agree that it's "at the expense of the spiritual". Here I am, a non-believer who doesn't shop much, while most of the shoppers are religious believers. Maybe it's because of their rampant materialism.


And yet, if Americans didn't spend so much, although there would be more money for investment, the American economy would suffer in the short term. And even for people like me who don't consume much, I still like low prices, without this rampant materialism, I couldn't enjoy the stuff I do eventually buy.


(link via Virginia Postrel)