The Conundrum of Consumer Spending

"What's good is bad, what's bad is good
You'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom."
--Bob Dylan, Idiot Wind

The Wall Street Journal had a story this morning that began like this:

"Stocks edged lower Tuesday on worries about consumer spending, after Dick's Sporting Goods and Macy's reported weaker sales, sending their shares sharply lower."

It's a perfect illustration of the contradictions inherent in modern life. The other day I wrote about the massive self-storage industry that has been generated by consumerism. America's "I gotta have it" attitudes have morphed into "Where can I put it?" Eventually, we get to this point: "How do I get rid of it?"

And yet, if American's don't fulfill their duty and continue to be good consumers, businesses fail, people get laid off, and the economy weakens.

It seems like we put a lot of responsibility on consumers to keep the economy afloat. Naturally, the banks and financial institutions will continually remind you that the benefits of this or that new credit card can help solve your money problems. 

Haha. More debt is a solution? According to one recent source, "As of the second quarter of 2023, the total consumer debt in the United States is $17.06 trillion."

KEEP IN MIND that this does not include the U.S. government deficits. That's right, American's are on the hook to help pay that down, too. That is, if our legislators had the courage to tell us that we will all need to chip in and pay the bills our taxes are supposed to be used for to run the country. We're talking more than $30 trillion on that deal.

Hmmm. So we have mixed messages to consider. Be responsible vs. Spend like there's no tomorrow.

Good luck.

Materialism Gone Amuck: A Nation of Hoarders

Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

When I was at the library last week the book Shiny Objects caught my eye. I brought it home and couldn’t put it down. The book’s subtitle says it all: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy.

The message of the book dovetails with a range of thoughts I have been having lately (again) about clutter. One of these thoughts had to do with storage facilities. It’s bad enough that our homes are stuffed to the gills. Our nation has more stuff stored in storage lockers than any generation in human history.

According to this Huffington Post article, “There are more self-storage facilities in America than there are McDonald's restaurants, according to a recent report from the commercial real estate publication REJournals. There were 48,500 self-storage facilities in America at the end of 2014, Curbed points out, compared to a mere 14,350 McDonald's restaurants.”

I dug into another site and found these startling storage industry stats.*

Annual revenue generated: $38 billion
Number of storage facilities: 45,000-52,000
Total rentable storage space: 1.7 billion square feet
Self-storage space per person: 5.4 square feet
Percentage of households renting storage space: 9.4%
Average monthly cost per unit: $88.85

The book goes into detail about many aspects of consumption, including credit card debt, the American Dream’ false hopes, and a pointed chapter about The Prosperity Gospel. Our unhealthy consumerist culture of accumulation is not only killing us but also our relationship.

In the Sixties there were many voices emerging to warn us about this mass consumption. I remember a 1973 book that I read in college called Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher. I liked the subtitle here, too: Economics as if People Mattered. The Oxford-trained economist argues against excessive consumption.

One reviewer says Schumacher’s book should be placed alongside many of the most important and influential in history, writing, “I think this is the most underrated book on economics out there—because with the sheer degree of soundness of its discussions and the scathing critiques of our current materialist economic paradigms (both capitalist and socialist), it provides a blueprint for HOW to think about what economics actually IS in the context of its place in human civilization on planet earth.”

For a good read about what it’s like to grow up in a home where hoarding has gotten truly out of control, check out Eddy Gilmore’s Emancipation of a Buried Man.

Shiny Objects has many important messages. One is to live within our means. The second is to question the messages of our culture that prod you to consume more, as if things can truly lead to happiness.

*Storage industry stats

Is That Really What You Want? How Do You Know? Thoughts from The Century of Self.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes 1:18

A couple weeks ago I saw a question on Quora that intrigued me. Someone asked, "What is the hardest truth?" Several thoughts came to mind, one of them being the awareness of how chained we are by habit, genetic disposition, the formative influence of our upbringing, our tastes, our temperaments… and that to change our selves is exceedingly hard and far more difficult than we imagine.

The irony is that we believe we're free agents. It certainly feels like we're free. I can order anything on this menu that I want, right? I can watch any movie I want. Or read any book I want.

In 2002 the BBC broadcast a four-part documentary called The Century of Self. It's an eye-opening look at recent history from a new angle, from "behind the curtain" as it were.

When we think of influential people in our lives, I doubt that very many of us think of Sigmund Freud. Most people (I have no evidence and am only guessing here) associate Freud with the idea of a patient lying on a couch talking to a psychologist taking notes, or with what seem like strange notions of repressed sexuality, Oedipal complexes and the like. The Century of Self addresses another way in which Freud influenced us, through techniques of mass manipulation developed and implemented by his nephew Edward Bernays, the founder of modern Public Relations (a term which itself is a euphemism for propaganda.)

"By satisfying the masses' inner selfish desires one made them happy, and thus docile." Bernays, this program claims, was central in the development of "the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today."

Why are there so many hoarders among us these days? How is it that there are so many storage facilities in existence today, a whole industry that sprang up to store excess stuff, stuff that people don't use or need or know what to do with because they have so much other stuff?

* * * *
The series has four parts. They were:
"Happiness Machines"
"The Engineering of Consent" 
"There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed" 
"Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering"

A description of Part 1 includes this paragraph:

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticizing the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.

The BBC PR for this documentary describes the program this way:
To many in politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly, the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

* * * *
There's much more that can be said here, but it's time to start my day. If you have time, the programs are enlightening. You can also read a synopsis here on Wikipedia.

Meantime, life outside goes on all around you. Think about it.