consumerism Quotes

The things you used to own, now they own you.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

“As people eat more meals outside the home, they consume more calories, less fiber, and more fat.”

“…It helps to know you’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is. You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product...”

“Her face, it was like, I don’t know, it was beautiful. It just, it wasn’t the way--I guess it wasn’t just the way it looked like, but also how she was standing. With her arm. I just started at her. I was getting some meg feed on the food bar and the pot stickers were really cheap.”

“There’s nothing but the feed telling you, This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen.”

“We got there and it had been torn down. They had built a pretty nice stucco mall there, so Loga and Quendy said we should go in and buy some cool stuff to go out in. That seemed good to us. I wanted to buy some things but I didn’t know what they were... Quendy bought some shoes, but the minute she walked out of the store she didn’t like them anymore. Marty couldn’t think of anything he wanted, so he ordered this really null shirt. He said it was so null it was like ordering nothing.”

“The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.”

“They have charts that show which chords are the most thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles.”

“What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”

“It’s Riot Gear. It’s retro. It’s beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It’s been big since earlier this week.”

“Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.”