All Hail the Gospel of Consumerism

Friends, welcome to one of the best months of the year – it’s April, yes, but more importantly, it’s Earth Month. When we at Strawberry Mountain pondered what, if any, content we wanted to make surrounding Earth Day, we were a bit stumped. We don’t want to be another brand on Instagram feeding you nifty tips and tricks that may (or may not) help the planet – things like planting a tree (seems logistically difficult); recycling (does recycling actually even work?); or shopping secondhand (we do that 24/7 already!). Not that these things aren’t beneficial - they are! They are simply not as beneficial as doing… nothing.

Well, that’s a bit of a simplification. Really, what helps the Earth more than anything, is simply not purchasing anything. Here at SM, we work hard to recycle the clothing that’s already been made and purchased, giving you the luxury of being able to keep up with ever-changing trends while also giving new life to your clothes. But as we all know, what’s better than recycling is to not produce to begin with. So today, we’re going to look at how we started to consume so much stuff.

Let’s pretend it’s April of 1824. Most likely, you and your family live in a rural setting and probably produce your own food, most of your clothing, and generally don’t have access to shopping anywhere other than where you can get by foot or horse. Critically, whatever you do for work, you likely are in charge of the whole process – if you’re a farmer, you plant, tend, and harvest your crops; if you’re a dressmaker, you purchase, cut, and sew materials to create end products. This gives you a sense of fulfillment, and you likely do these things on your own time, rather than as directed by a boss. In this time, wanting (and spending) beyond your means is nearly unheard of. It would actually be embarrassing to spend on frivolous goods, and the idea of spending on credit is practically non-existent (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, n.d.).

Skip ahead to 1924, and things are very different. The American industrial economy has exploded thanks to World War I, and most Americans are experiencing prosperity – it’s the roaring twenties after all! At this point, you’re more likely to live in an urban area than rural, and your job, while not as time-consuming as it was in the 19th century, has been broken into parts. This, famously, is the idea behind industrialization – break production down into pieces, as in an assembly line, and bring workers together to centralize labor output in a factory. This change likely makes you feel more alienated from your work and your peers, and you spend less time in your community than at work. However, you also have access to monumental changes that your ancestors did not – namely, electricity, highways and railways for traveling, the telegraph, and even mass consumer financing (Obschonka, 2018).

In many ways, the economy of the 1920s is pretty similar to the 2020s, with one exception. In the 1920s, the American economy reached a point where it had pulled the majority of Americans out of poverty and provided them with basic security (Higgs, 2021). Soon after, economists of the time had a question: what next? The economy had reached these great heights thanks to the constant demand of the wartime machine America had become during World War I. So, the economists had a choice. They could either allow the economy to hold steady, providing a stationary state, as economist John Stuart Mill called it, or they could figure out a way to manufacture demand, and continue to produce massive profits for the top percent of business owners. I think we both know which they chose.

If this is shocking or upsetting to hear, it should be! Yes, economists knew that they could allow the population to prosper under a healthy, albeit conservatively progressive, economy, and instead they chose to maximize profits for economic stakeholders, fully knowing that this gain would likely come from a decrease in the livelihood and health of the lower classes. To put it plainly, the rich could only get richer if the lower classes spent themselves to death. Economists actually knew that they needed to manufacture demand to meet the supply they were churning out. This is actually how public relations and advertising were born: in his pioneering 1928 book, Edward Bernays describes how businesses “cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable” (Higgs, 2021).

This is the key difference between the economy in 1924 and the economy now. Our current economy relies on and even invented our consumer behavior. In some ways, increased consumerism in the early 20th century makes sense – many people were new to the idea of disposable income, and thus wanted to take advantage by purchasing goods to reflect their new higher status in society. Buying new things also filled a new hole in the American psyche, one that had been slowly torn open by the demands and inadequacies of industrial work. And indeed, modern factory workers experience the same mental stress their forebears did (Dacosta & Strassfield, 2019). In general, these trends hold true today: many of us shop to reinforce and signal our identities to others (both IRL and over Instagram), for retail therapy (any email-job holders out there?), and to keep up with the Jones’s (or, I should say, the Kardashians).

So if our spending patterns were created, surely they can be deconstructed. This is a goal I think is worthy of pursuing, as both a pro-environmental and anti-capitalist action (badass, right?). And while it’s a difficult goal, the history of the rise in consumerism can teach us where we might be able to supplement our lives to decrease our incessant need to spend.

As I mentioned before, a big part of the transition towards the gospel of consumerism was the decrease in quality of life during industrialisation – and I don’t mean quality as defined by your income, I mean the actual quality of your life: how happy you are, your view of yourself and identity, etc. As these things were lost, people shopped to make them feel better (retail therapy is a thing after all). So, in reverse, investing more time in ourselves and our emotional worlds might help kick some of the spending. Here are some quick tips I thought of that can move you towards an inner sense of contentment, rather than one driven by material things:

Get a hobby!

If you find yourself doing some shopping in your downtime, perhaps invest in picking up a new hobby. It could be one geared towards sustainability (such as, learning to make and mend your own clothes) or one that is for the pure joy of it (pickleball anyone??). Spending time with yourself or others on something non-productive (in the capitalist sense) can help build that sense of community we lack these days. And if you find yourself returning to your go-to shopping app, perhaps try a new tack and try shopping your closet – what new ‘fits can you come up with using what you already have?

Develop a sense of personal style

One of the most modern drivers of consumerism is the accelerated trend cycle we experience thanks to the internet and social media. One way to avoid a frenzy of purchases is to really identify your sense of personal style – likely, there are some current trends that fit in with that broad aesthetic, but lots of them might not, and that’s okay! Participating in trends for the sake of it can alienate you from your own sense of what looks best to you (we’ve all tried a trend and felt horribly out of place in it, haven’t we?). Narrowing down what styles you like, how you like clothes to fit, and what you gravitate to on a daily basis can help distract you from staying on top of every trend that TikTok is shoving down your throat.

Invest in third places

You’ve probably heard this one, but maybe not as an antidote to over-shopping. If you haven’t: a “third place” is somewhere you can go to spend time that isn’t your home (first place) or work (second place). It’s critical for community building and has largely been lost to online communities, which are not as effective for real relationship building as a third place IRL (Butler & Diaz, 2016). These could include your gym, a park, a local cafe, or a bar (a pub, after all, is short for “public house”!). Investing time and energy into making connections in your third place can expand your network of acquaintances and lead to new experiences – better than an afternoon on Shein in my opinion!

In short, slowing consumer culture is multi-faceted and very, very difficult, as it’s part of the programming of capitalism. But, as with anything, you move a mountain an inch at a time, and whatever we can do to identify and tamper our own over-shopping habits is a plus! Next time, we’ll talk more about the personal psychology of dressing – how we use dress as a communication tool, and how what we wear can impact our thoughts and actions. See you then!

Works Cited

Butler, S.M., & Diaz, C. (2016). “‘Third Places’ as Community Builders”. Brookings Institute. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/third-places-as-community-builders/.

Dacosta, J., & Strassfield, A. (2019). “Factory workers are facing a mental health crisis. Here's how to respond”. World Economic Forum. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/05/factory-worker-mental-health-fourth-industrial-revolution/.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (n.d.). “Credit History: The Evolution of Consumer Credit in America”. The Ledger. Retrieved from https://www.econlowdown.org/v3/public/credit-history-the-evolution-of-consumer-credit-in-america.

Higgs, K. (2021). “A Brief History of Consumer Culture”. The MIT Reader. Retrieved from https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/.

Mill, J.S. (1848). Of the Stationary State. In Principles of Political Economy, Book IV. Retrieved from http://gesd.free.fr/millst.pdf.

Obschonka, M. (2018). “Research: The Industrial Revolution Left Psychological Scars That Can Still Be Seen Today”. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-left-psychological-scars-that-can-still-be-seen-today/