Fallacies of Consumerism: An Analysis of Its Impact and Depth in Today's Society

Introduction

Can consumption ever be responsible when most of the circumstances surrounding individuals are not? This is one of the great dilemmas of today's society: the reconciliation of the nature of consumption and the facilitating elements that promote it. Certainly, powerful forces work in collusion to make the dilemma seem unresolvable, from the ever-increasing expenditure on advertising to the establishment of stimulus controls by governments or the continuous bombardment in the media (especially when these are owned by companies such as Amazon following its recent purchase of The Washington Post¹). There is also the exogenous control exercised by the market when it withholds investment in advertising for media that are contrary to corporate interests. The result is consumption based on a lifestyle that appears to have no alternative: buy, throw away, buy more. In this model, individuals’ happiness is deliberately connected to their level of spending but not to its consequences (Luque, 2017; Vanity Fair, 2021). The cycle appears unbreakable: according to Chernin (2021), “It never seems to be the right time to talk about our consumption problem. When the economy is strong, we’re told that slowing our ever-expanding appetite for goods, services, and experiences could turn the boom into a bust. When the bust comes, we hear that the solution is to get to back to the malls and shop”. Meanwhile, the economic model that generates this appears unstoppable: According to World Trade Organization (WTO, 2021a) “The volume of merchandise trade was up 5.7% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021, the largest increase since a 5.8% rise in third quarter of 2011”; in fact, world trade in goods and services amounted to US$ 22 trillion in 2020. China was the top exporter of merchandise trade in 2020, accounting for 13 per cent of the world’s total (up from 12 per cent in 2019) and totaling US$ 2,323 billion (WTO, 2021b).

Purchasing processes are also diverse; although sometimes related to acts of responsibility, they often provoke feelings of guilt, especially when they involve leveraged purchases, that is, the use of credit. Guilt may also arise from the perceived working conditions of employees at all points of the value chain, from the conception of the product to its delivery. This is compounded by the unrestricted use of outsourcing, which breaks the causal links of labor relations by removing any type of legal liability on the part of transnational companies. Much of the made-to-measure business architecture that has been put in place around these value chains are a legal fiction that allows corporations to wash their hands of their own outsourced workers by interposing affiliate companies, thereby disguising what are really labor relations as those of a mercantile nature (Luque & Guamán, 2021). Sometimes the process of buying is anything but enjoyable. Consumers experience stress from their purchases: for example, the delivery process can be viewed as complex, generating doubts as to when the product will arrive or, if the delivery is missed at the appointed time, how it will be received and whether a new obstacle will then be imposed. Once the goods are obtained, the process of purchasing can also generate uncertainty about whether the product is really what was ordered and whether it matches the desires of the consumer that were originally provoked by the seller through their advertising; in other words, does the consumer feel they have got what they wanted? These are understandable feelings of anguish, and they persist despite the industry having striven to minimize the pain of the expense itself through the use of reverse logistics or the elimination of the notion of purchasing altogether: Advertising replaces the idea that certain products are bought with the concept that experiences are sold, portraying the purchase as something exciting and exclusive.