From JSTOR Daily:
There may be nothing as American as consumerism. Across the globe,
for better or worse, our national identity is linked to Big Macs and
SUVs. Nigel Whiteley tells the story of how we became a nation that buys stuff and then throws it away at an astonishing pace.
Even before the Second World War, Whiteley writes, some businesses
began to embrace what one influential 1932 book termed “creative
waste”—the idea that throwing things away and buying new ones could fuel
a strong economy. Its authors, Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens, identified
the desire for ever-more-modern consumer goods as something unique to
America, with its “enormous natural resources.”
“We still have tree-covered slopes to deforest and subterranean lakes of oil to tap with our gushers,” they wrote.
In the 1930s, Whiteley writes, many families were still
saving for their first refrigerator or car. But, with the economic boom
of the war years, Sheldon and Arens’ arguments quickly became more
relevant. Average family incomes doubled in real terms between 1939 and
1945. Soon, middle-class families had all the televisions, cars, and
home appliances they wanted. In the 1930s, consumerist pioneer Sears
Roebuck began introducing a new refrigerator model each year. Though
they were all essentially the same machine, “visual trappings of
progress desired by consumers” kept sales up.
The problem for businesses now became continually “stimulating the urge to buy,” as J. Gordon Lippincott argued in the book
Design for Business. “Any
method that can motivate the flow of merchandise to new buyers will
create jobs and work for industry, and hence national prosperity,”
Lippincott wrote. “Our custom of trading in our automobiles every year,
of having a new refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or electric iron every
three or four years is economically sound.”...
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