With the holidays freshly over, perhaps now may be a good time to discuss what for many is the elephant in the room – consumerism. While some may believe that this concept has become inescapable in our everyday lives, it is, perhaps, more noticeable during the holidays, when near universal gift-giving and overall consumption of goods are at their collective height.
2014, being one of the first truly economically prosperous years since the Great Recession, seems ready to advance the holiday trend of excessive spending. The Saturday before Christmas, commonly called “Panic Saturday,” saw £1.2 billion in sales, or £18.75 per person living in the UK. And moreover, for the 5 day period before Christmas, sales surpassed £4.7 billion, an increase of 21% from 2013. Beyond the build-up to Christmas is the bargain shopping done during and after Christmas: online sales on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, which average approximately £480,000 a minute.
Originating in the United States in 1915, the term “consumerism” was first used in Colman’s Rural World as a means of explaining the simple economic laws of supply and demand, “In the end crusaderism will stand for consumerism and the demand for milk in the cities, and producerism will stand in possession of the supply of milk.” By the 1920s and 1930s, as explained by the Massillon Evening Standard’s (of Ohio) review of a book by Professor Henry Pratt Fairchild, the term had morphed into meaning a system where consumers and their wants/needs are the main driver in an economy. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that the term began to garner the negative connotation that we now associate with it.
Regardless of whether or not a person thinks that consumerism detracts from the true meaning of Christmas holidays or whether it is a product of the targeted informational age in which we live, many people have strong feelings about the concept behind the word. Though a cognitive understanding and questioning of the pitfalls of modern materialism may be a relatively new thing, the word consumerism definitely is anything but new – only the definition has changed over the last 100 years.
