Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Why Shop-a-holics - Where It All Began

From Care2.com

The Story of Stuff is a powerful video about how we got here and what it is doing to our planet.

It talks about how my grandmother’s generation was committed to resourcefulness, stewardship and thrift. So what happened between then and now to bring us to this place of ultra consumerism which threatens the extinction of our planet?

It all started right after WWII. In order to jump-start the economy, President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers had to come up with a plan to get people to buy – and quickly! The guru and retail analyst of the day, Victor Legough, wrote in 1955:

Our Enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…we need things burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.

Egads! Consuming was linked with spiritual satisfaction and ego satisfaction (Sounds like an oxymoron to me!) Shopping became a ritual and it promised fulfillment.

So the era of “shopping as a spiritual practice” began! It was a message crafted by the government in cooperation and collaboration with the advertising media. The people bought it, and continue to do so to this day. Read the entire article.


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