• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 2, 2009

Has America's 50-year shopping spree hit the wall?

Consumerism was never just about buying stuff.

It was about a faith in boundless economic growth. Tomorrow brings more goods, more choice, more shopping.

It was about binding our personal identities with the brands we bought and the market segments we inhabited.

It was about accumulating more goods as "reward" for enduring less satisfying work lives.

It was about social and community structures where shopping malls became centers of community, where suburbia and home-ownership were vehicles for displaying our purchases.

It was about a cult of celebrity that lionized Trump, Brangelina and Hannah Montana. Fame means turning yourself successfully into a commodity on the open media market and becoming an icon of unlimited acquisitiveness. 

It was about an ethos of persistently believing our lives were so hard or unfair that any range of commodities could even the score because "you deserve it."

And so when President George W. Bush suggested after 9/11 that the patriotic American response to terrorism was to go shopping, he may have been close to the mark. Since World War II, consumerism has been not just an activity but a culture of values, institutions and social organizations designed to reinforce a system of mass consumption and align the buying of stuff with national interests.

As Harvard history department chairwoman Lizabeth Cohen argues in her landmark book A Consumers' Republic, almost all of the public and private institutions in post-World War II America have been shaped by and serve to reinforce a system of mass consumption to find satisfaction, even democracy, in the buying of goods. Women go into the workplace to expand household purchasing power, home ownership finances and displays our goods, and there is "the expectation that tomorrow will be better than today, and that you judge success by the materials you surround yourself with," Cohen says. Even our sense of social justice and civil rights is tied to widening the access to goods.

Which begs an obvious question: If the very financial underpinnings of a consumer economy are disintegrating, is American consumer culture itself poised for a crash? "That is why this is so enormous," Cohen says. "All of those strategies to keep the consumer republic afloat are collapsing. The house of cards is really collapsing." Pundits worldwide have begun to wonder aloud whether this crisis signals an even deeper shift away from the values and institutions that rationalized consumerism itself. New York Times columnist David Brooks called it an unfamiliar American moment of "stone-cold scarcity," while Times of London counterpart India Knight declared "the decades of vulgar excess are finally over." Clinical psychologist John F. Schumaker characterized recent years as an unsustainable "mother of all greed binges" that might lead to "a more sustainable life orientation." And NPR commentator Daniel Schorr said outright what others left implied, that the "age of American consumerism may be over." 


The Exhausted Consumer

The numbers suggest this crisis may be different in kind from previous downturns, and even that Americans themselves want to change their ways. In the third quarter of 2008, consumer spending declined for the first time in 17 years, the sharpest dive since 1974. Personal debt levels were at historic highs. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans last year spent more than they earned and moved into a negative savings position, according to the Economic Policy Institute. "The American consumer is finally hitting a wall," economist Jared Bernstein told The New York Times.

More important, the values and attitudes fueling our spending binge and consumer culture itself may be exhausting themselves. Two years ago, even at the height of the housing boom, surveys from marketing firm DYG showed Americans getting nervous about natural limitations and fearing they couldn't get the same level job if fired. In October 2008, for the first time in six years of BIGresearch surveys, a majority of Americans said they were being more "practical and realistic" in their purchases. We remained restrained and doubtful even after gas prices plummeted this fall, which indicates that attitudinal shifts may be running deeper than market changes.

"We are dealing with a changed consumer," says BIGresearch senior analyst Pamela Goodfellow. "We learned our lesson about credit spending and what we can afford." This crisis strikes deeper even than 9/11, because "there has been a shift away from authority," says Denuo CEO Rishad Tobaccowala. "There is a loss of trust with pretty much any established player or organization," and that means consumers will relate very differently to everything from government to celebrities and brands.

But most of all, consumption itself is becoming less fun. Radical consumption was getting so detached from need and satisfaction that we had started buying blindly for its own sake, researcher Ira Matathias of BrainReserve found. "It wasn't making us happy at all," he says.

Almost 90 percent of Americans last summer were already saying they were considering a simpler life, almost as a relief from a binge of pathological consumption. Fully 70 percent blamed the economic crisis on personal and corporate greed. We may be hitting three walls at once, Matathias says. The global environment, the economy and faith in ethics all seem to be crumbling at the same moment. People may be framing consumption at long last as a moral issue - and that is the kind of imperative, the kind of secular revivalism that moves people to change. Consumption is being viewed with a bit of shame now and even as anachronistic. "This is kind of the end of the consuming world as we know it," he says. "We are convinced that it is a fundamental change that is really permanent."

Jeremiads and Wishful Thinking

Everyone has an ox to gore in an apocalypse. The usual left- and right-wing critics of consumer culture lined up early with told-you-so glee over how far we'd strayed from laws of nature or God. Their vision of post-consumer America is already at hand. "We considered ourselves not subject to basic laws of nature," says Philip Slater, sociologist and author of The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture. Greed-driven, consumer-based economic models revealed their big lie - limitless growth. "You can't keep on making junk forever," he says. "We either make drastic changes in our values and habits or we go the way of the woolly mammoth." He envisions "steady state economies" of the sort that ecological economist Herman Daly proposed: constant populations, constant standards of living and fair distribution of wealth.   

At perennial foe of mass marketing Adbusters magazine, a "post-materialist culture" is nigh, preaches founder and editor Kalle Lasn. "Two or three more years of very hard times, and during those hard times we will see our consumer culture sway." Like many on the cultural left, Lasn asserts: "The real root of this meltdown is that we were a decadent vulgar consumer who didn't want to wake up to this."

The end is near, he hopes. "We have a real opportunity to finally break through the denial and confront this bubble that has taken 50 years to build up." He envisions commercially driven mass media replaced by social networks and people crafting their own information-gathering systems. Lasn's future America is slower, more localized, community-based and thrifty. Not surprisingly, an ideal future resembles an idealized past. "It would look a lot like the way I lived when I was young," he says.

Less radical dreams see this crisis as an opportunity to rethink core presumptions about why, what and how much we consume and how consumption deflects us from core happiness and social responsibility. At religious sites like Beliefnet and Crosswalk, for instance, commentators suggest that historically deep, majority trends like consumer culture reverse themselves when people start arguing first principles, then how social structures and behaviors express core beliefs. Conservative Beliefnet columnist Rod Dreher has been arguing on the site that Americans should consider a counter-consumer culture of thrift, modesty and self-restraint. "The culture of consumption we've created ... depends on a distortion of human nature," he says. The founder and president of the family-oriented Institute for American Values, David Blankenhorn, argues that unchecked self-absorption and personal pleasure directed rampant consumerism in recent years without any connection to higher values. Lotteries, payday lenders and rent-to-own have become the predatory institutions that characterize not just a consumer culture but a "debt culture that is unsustainable," and we have reached the end of the line, he contends: "Debt culture is dead."  

But is all this just wishful thinking? Is this pang of anti-materialist conscience a momentary interregnum in attitudes, a fashionable response to crisis - one that we buy into the same way we buy new shoes? After all, many of the economic solutions, bailouts and stimulus packages are aimed at re-establishing the old status quo of consumption-driven growth.

Given the same opportunities for unlimited acquisitiveness, wouldn't Americans take it up again? Smith College historian Daniel Horowitz, author of The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America reminds us that the Great Depression, WWII rationing, and the 1970s gas and inflation crises failed to break last century's underlying faith in consumerism. These crises "proved short-lived in their power to change long-term behavior," he says. "In the long run, this won't change our aspirations."

Even Cohen, who acknowledges the depth of the cultural crisis, expects there will be "pent-up demand for the new car and latest toy" when this is over. And then there is the small matter of figuring out how to employ Americans when 70 percent of the GDP starts deflating permanently. "There is no way we aren't going to live in a consumer economy," she says. 

And don't think for a second that the Don Drapers who helped fuel the consumer culture 50 years ago will fade away. Echoing that fictional Mad Man's faith in universal human need, Tobaccowala says that no matter how deep the crisis, "I don't believe you can undercut the three driving forces of people:" competitiveness, the need to feel sexy and a deep desire to be distracted. Those forces may express themselves in more efficient ways, but they will win out in the end, he says.

Even persistent culture and policy critics like David Rieff warn that it is hard to put such an alluring, powerful genie back in its bottle. "Consumerism is Promethean knowledge," he wrote recently in an exchange on Beliefnet. "The only alternative to it is economic catastrophe."

"The Way to Wealth"

Anthropologists say that cultures undergoing substantial changes in values experience a "luminal state" in which people are most open to new ways of thinking about themselves and social relations. In our imploding consumer culture, alternative narratives are already starting to suggest what a post-consumer culture might look like.

Several books in the past year extolled thrift culture as a homegrown, American tradition that can reassert itself against consumerism. "Thrift is a secular version of theological stewardship," says Blankenhorn, also the author of Thrift: A Cyclopedia. Unlike a self-absorbed ethic of acquisition and pleasure, the thrift ethic sees material wealth as a gift from God that we hold in trust and must exercise with community responsibility.

Working hard, saving and giving back are its hallmarks. But a consumer culture of multiple credit cards, state-run lotteries and payday loans has institutionalized a cult of debt instead. Citing Ben Franklin's treatise on true success, "The Way to Wealth," Blankenhorn says prosperity is celebrated in this alternative view but "it is shared and sustainable and is ethically serious." Local banks and credit unions, layaway plans, consumption taxes, and even children's saving plans at schools (anyone recall class "bank day"?) are the counter-institutions that would re-establish a sensible posture toward a material world. And thrift might stick: The personal savings rate in the United States actually increased in the third quarter of 2008 to 3 percent after four years below 1 percent.

Just about all critics of hyper-consumerism eventually come back to prescribing a large dose of green ideology. If consumer culture served to rationalize boundless self-interested acquisitiveness, disposability and unlimited growth, then global warming seems ready to enforce upon us not only different behaviors and buying habits but different values. "It doesn't seem accidental that we are surrounded by the higher consciousness of green solutions," Cohen says. "It may contribute to people being more able to accept living within limitations."

Limited resources, measured consumption, recycling and regrowing, and shared responsibility for a common ecosystem are green values that themselves have been shaped in opposition to the excesses of consumerism. "In the real discussion of this seismic shift, the economic meltdown is just a surface thing compared to the green narrative," Lasn says. "This is the moment in human history that will change everything."

With 70 percent of the GDP riding on consumption, it seems unlikely consumer culture will collapse so much as reorient itself. After a few years of scarcity, Americans may well come out on the other side finding that acquisitiveness and happiness are not necessarily linked after all. Consumption may still be "patriotic," but in a deeper sense of targeted, value-driven purchasing aimed at making a difference. Consumers are angry and untrusting, says BrainReserve's Faith Popcorn, and they will demand products and companies that demonstrate "new values of goodness, empathy, simplicity and happiness." In her research, 71 percent of Americans believe our personal actions will improve society, and 53 percent consider a company's ethics before purchasing from them.

One possible outcome of the crisis may be that Americans re-establish what Cohen sees as a lost link between consumption and production: that the purchase choices we make affect specific businesses, individual livelihoods and local economies. We may start seeing consumers pursue "the worthy purchase ... recognizing the power of their consumption in our economy," she says. Tobaccowala agrees that post-consumer shoppers will still define themselves by the brands they buy, but adds that now they will look for brands that make them "look smart and actually stand for something." The consumer-based economy won't stop. But buyers will look for their purchases to align with other values. Companies will be scrutinized more carefully and will need to deal with their customers more transparently, saying clearly who they are and what they stand for.

In the most extreme scenarios, we reimagine ourselves less as consumers and more as citizens whose buying power has meaning and social effect. "It implies a mutuality of interest and coming together for the common good," says Matathias. "Post-consumer society is a way to think about it. We are evolving to that next level."

We won't stop going to the malls, but now we will shop as if we mean it.