Two-thirds of our newspaper space and 40 percent of our mail is unsolicited advertising.61 In 2002, global spending on advertising reached $446 billion, an almost ninefold increase since 1950.62 In 2005, in the United States alone, $276 billion was spent on ads.63 China, meanwhile, spent $12 billion in 2006 and is projected to reach $18 billion by 2011, which will make it the third-largest advertising market in the world.64 In 2007—the year before they requested massive government bailouts to keep them from going bankrupt—the big three automakers in the United States spent over $7.2 billion on ads: General Motors spent more than $3 billion, Ford spend more than $2.5 billion, and Chrysler spent $1.7 billion.65 In 2008, Apple spent $486 million on advertising.66 These staggering sums provide no service to humanity at all.
The ads I remember from my youth focused on why a particular product was better than its competitors: for example, one dish soap had special ingredients that made your glasses sparkle or removed the soap scum from your plates. Or this laundry detergent would prevent you from having embarrassing ring-around-the-collar. In that era, we bought Stuff because we were told it would perform some function we needed or wanted.
But these days, with literally hundreds of brands of soap and shoes and just about everything, there’s no way that brands can even hope to distinguish themselves with actual information on their product alone. So today’s ads often don’t even bother with describing the product, but instead associate it with an image, a lifestyle, a social status. Rather than describe qualities or ingredients, we see advertisements showing the kind of people who use this product. The implication is that if we want to be like those people (thin, happy, loved, surrounded by other beautiful people, etc.), we need that product. A current ad for a television actually states, “Change your TV, change your life.”67
In addition to getting more sophisticated, ads are also more intrusive. They seem to be everywhere these days, even places that, one would hope, would be off-limits to commercial messages. When I was leaving the hospital with my newborn daughter, a nurse handed me a package of “educational” materials, which turned out to include credit card applications and advertisements for baby products. When I walked across the border from Pakistan to India, the archway under which I entered the country had painted across the top “Welcome to India—Drink Pepsi.”
An innovative company called the Hanger Network developed clothes hangers covered with cardboard on which advertisements are printed. It distributes these free to dry cleaners around the country. Hanger Network says their hangers are even better than direct mail: for starters, dry-cleaning customers tend to be in higher income brackets, so are great advertising targets. Second, most people put dry-cleaned clothes directly into their closets on those hangers rather than throw them away, as they increasingly do immediately with junk mail before even opening it. So they wind up looking at those ads every time they open their closet, for weeks or even months, making them “an ongoing billboard in (their) bedroom.”68 Yuck. Who wants a billboard in their bedroom?
There seems to be no limit to how far advertisers will go. Some corporations have even paid people hundreds or thousands of dollars to have brand logos tattooed onto their bodies. In 2005, Kari Smith, a mother in Utah, sold the space on her forehead on eBay to raise funds to pay for private school tuition for her son, who was struggling in the local public school. A Canadian online gambling company paid Smith $10,000 so it could tattoo its website address onto her forehead.69
Then there are the sneaky ads that many people don’t even think of as ads. Rampant product placement is all over TV and movies (an Apple laptop on the desk or a can of Pepsi on the counter). Or Tiger Woods and those Nike products... is that cap Super Glued to his head or something? Does his contract forbid him from ever being Swooshless in public?
Worst of all, advertisers have identified children as the final frontier in target audiences. Advertisers have not only succeeded at getting kids to influence their parents’ purchasing, but also at influencing kids’ own not insignificant spending. Of course they are simultaneously creating the next generation of brand-loyal customers. Tragically, many cash-strapped boards of education are inviting advertisers right into the schools. So now we have corporate logos on sports uniforms, educational posters, and book covers. The math curriculum comes complete with product placement (12 M&M’s + 24 M&M’s = how many M&M’s?); there are brand names on cafeteria menus. Channel One, which at its high point in 2002 was viewed daily by 10 million teens (ages eleven to eighteen) in 320,000 classrooms70 provides programs with “educational content,” news, and commercials. To its captive audience of kids in classrooms (and on school buses via similar BusRadio programs), Channel One ads promoted violent and/or sexually provocative movies and TV shows, online social networking sites, the U.S. Army/Navy/Marine Corps, and, before opponents prevailed in 2007, junk food.71
I had read about the relentless advertising to children, but I didn’t really get how well coordinated it was until I had my own daughter. Advertisers defend their actions by claiming it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their kids from excessive marketing. But, in my experience, despite my best efforts, it’s been impossible to keep ads from influencing her. I find that the hardest advertising to resist is the kind that appears in different settings, across a variety of platforms. Dora the Explorer, whom my daughter actually resembled when she was younger, was my biggest nemesis. Dora popped up everywhere—on TV, toothbrushes, shampoo, backpacks, electronic games, pencil sets, underwear, bikes, sweatshirts, birthday party goodie bags, pillowcases, beach pails, ice cream, and even breakfast cereal. I noticed that my daughter, who was about three years old at the time, would respond to Dora as if she were seeing a friend. “There’s Dora!” she would squeal in the toothpaste aisle of the supermarket (which is not usually a place that generates excitement among preschoolers). Buying that toothpaste became like bringing a friend home. And who doesn’t want another friend?
Free to Be You and Me
The success of fashion (that most visible form of perceived obsolescence) and brand marketing (how companies and their advertisers sell us on the lifestyle image of a product as opposed to its inherent qualities) are related to some pretty fundamental ideas we hold about ourselves as citizens of the U.S. of A. We pride ourselves on being individuals: rugged individuals, pioneers, the first man on the moon; quirky individuals, someone with a strong individual style or mark. We also cherish the idea of our boundless freedom. Our country was built on ideas of liberty from persecution and the freedom to be individuals. And last but certainly not least, there’s the sacred American Dream, the self-made man, the rags-to-riches success story. We love the idea that our wide-open, bountiful country allows the least among us to achieve tremendous status, if we just work enough for it.
Or shop enough for it. The engineers of consumerism have played into these values that we hold dear in a big way. They took these sources of national pride and twisted them into reasons to buy Stuff. And then at some point it was like the transitive property kicked in: all we have to do now in order to achieve or display our individuality, or to express our freedom, or to go from the pauper to the prince, is shop. How on earth did they accomplish that, and what does that mean for us as people, exactly?
Today the pressure to buy more, newer, fancier Stuff has everything to do with the pressure to express our identity and status. In The Bridge at the End of the World, Gus Speth writes, “Psychologists see people as hardwired to find security by both ‘sticking out’ and ‘fitting in.’ Consumption serves both goals; the culture of capitalism and commercialism emphasizes both ‘sticking out’ and ‘fitting in’ through possessions and their display.”72
That’s why we tend to spend more extravagantly on Stuff that is visible compared to Stuff we consume in private. Economist Juliet Schor has identified the house, car, and wardrobe as the “visible triangle.” We spend less on Stuff others don’t see. For example, the popularity of health clubs, Schor says, contributed
to the creation of designer underwear. And women spend far more on lipstick—which is applied and worn in public—than on facial cleanser, which seldom leaves the bathroom.73
This phenomenon is based in large part on social comparisons. Schor, along with other economists, has documented how our sense of wealth and material well-being is relative; that is, it has to do with how much Stuff we have compared to other people. So, if we’re hanging around a bunch of ostentatious spenders, we feel poor. If we’re hanging around with people who are lower than us on the economic ladder, we feel rich. The saying “keeping up with the Joneses,” inspired by a comic strip from the early twentieth century, refers to our tendency to compare our material well-being with our neighbors’. Back then, we were most likely to compare our living room furniture with that of our neighbors and families, because there weren’t other people around to be our yardsticks. But that all changed with television.
In 1950, only 5 percent of U.S. households had televisions. A decade later, 95 percent of U.S. households had them.74 On average, American homes now have more television sets than people. In 2008, the average American watched an all-time high of about five hours of TV a day, or 151 hours a month, up 3.6 percent from the 145 or so hours Americans reportedly watched the previous year.75 In The Overspent American, Juliet Schor explains the link between TV viewing and consumer spending and debt; each additional five hours of television watched per week led to an additional thousand dollars of spending per year.76
Each of us in the United States is bombarded with up to three thousand commercial messages a day, including TV ads, billboards, product placements, packaging, and more—but it’s not just the actual commercials, it’s the images promoted in shows and movies too, big time. On TV shows, people are disproportionately rich, thin, and fashionable. So all of a sudden, rather than comparing ourselves to the Joneses in the house next door, we are comparing ourselves to millionaires and celebrities. That’s why the more television people watch, the more they overestimate how wealthy everyone else is, making them feel poorer by comparison.77 What peer pressure! Not only do my clothes and house and car have to be on par with my colleagues and the other parents at my kid’s school, but now also with the lavish lifestyles of Jennifer Aniston and Beyoncé. Juliet Schor calls this phenomenon the “vertical expansion of our reference group.”78
As soon as I read about that concept in Schor’s The Overspent American, I remembered countless times when I had fallen into that trap myself. For many years, my work required a lot of international travel. I noticed that wearing the exact same outfit could make me feel stylish and good in Dhaka but shabby and outdated in Paris. I live in Berkeley where, fortunately, there’s not a lot of fashion pressure. I wear my flip-flops or clogs most days and am just fine, reassured by the fact that a good number of the people I pass are wearing the same. But for years, every time I’d go to Manhattan, I’d see women with gorgeous designer shoes everywhere. I’d just have to buy a new pair of shoes even though—believe me—I really do not need any more shoes. It was irresistible. They have such good shoes there and they are for sale on almost every corner. Then I read Schor’s book. In my experience, a powerful way to free oneself from an unhealthy dynamic is simply to name it. Now when I am in Manhattan and I get that rush of need, I can call it out: “There’s that vertical expansion of my reference group thing again; just gotta hang on until I get home,” and I can walk right past those shoe stores.
To my mind, my ability to see the peer pressure exerted by an unrealistic reference group like that and refuse to yield to it is real freedom. I consider myself freer for being able not to bow to the pressure. But the economic system, on the other hand, wants me to associate my personal freedom with consumption.
Our obsession with individual rights got off track in this country. Putting aside the hugely significant issues of the native Americans and African slaves whose rights were obliterated, the United States was built upon the promise of the unassailability of individual rights. But I am pretty sure those early patriots meant political rights, not consuming rights. I am not saying consumers should have no choice in what we buy, but freedom in the marketplace is simply not the most important freedom.
Consumer Choice
Currently we have this great illusion of choice in this country—but it is almost entirely limited to the consumer realm. Walk into any supermarket these days, and what do we see: choice, or actually, the appearance of choice. Thousands of products. Producers gladly offer different hair conditioners for dry, limp, color-treated, or healthy hair, but can I find one that is free of toxic chemicals? I can pick between a variety of pajamas for my daughter or furniture for my living room, but I can’t pick any that aren’t treated with toxic flame retardants, because such treatment is still required by law. If I want a cup of coffee, I may choose between grande, venti, single, double, tall, short, skim, soy, decaf, etc. But the meaningful decisions about coffee have to do with where and how the coffee was grown, transported, processed, and sold—everything from farm and labor conditions to international trade agreements—not the decisions offered at the counter.
In 2002, a few thousand people in Berkeley, California, signed a petition to put a measure on the ballot that would have required all coffee sold in Berkeley to be Fair Trade certified, organic, and shade grown—all things that have enormous positive environmental and social benefits for the coffee growers and the environment. While the ballot didn’t pass, it was exciting: that is the kind of discussion we should have about coffee specifically as well as our consumer choices in general. The bill garnered intense opposition from many who insisted that they had the right to drink whatever they want (including a cheaper and more destructive product). Some in the business community also opposed the proposal. John DeClercq, the chair of the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce, said, “It’s an improper restriction on business... anti-free choice. If coffee can be restricted, do we have politically correct chocolate, beef, vegetables? There’s just no end to it.’’79
The voice of the consumer, stoked by the crafty engineers of our consumerist economy, demands unlimited choice in coffees, anytime, anywhere, and claims that anything else operates against freedom. But isn’t that a fairly childish notion of freedom? In his book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Benjamin Barber very convincingly argues that consumerism effectively keeps adults in a childlike mental state where it’s always OK to demand “Gimme that!” Consumerism privileges impulse over deliberation; instant gratification over long-term satisfaction; narcissism over sociability; entitlement over responsibility; and the now over the past and future.80
If we are going to be adults about the issue of coffee (or any consumer product), we need to recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights. We know that the world is complex and interconnected and that each act (and purchase) has consequences. Coming at it from this angle, it makes sense to prefer coffee that doesn’t deplete the soil or move more pesticides into our water, air, or bodies. We recognize that Joe Coffee-Grower is a person just like me or you and has just as great a right to a decent, family-supporting wage and a healthy work environment. We might even grasp the notion that supporting the prosperity and self-sufficiency of coffee-growing communities around the world contributes to our national security. From a childish point of view, I want the best, cheapest, fastest coffee. From an adult point of view, I want coffee that makes the world safe, healthy, and just.
WHO’S REALLY DRIVING?
Is consumer demand really the key force that causes Stuff to be made and sold? A lot of people believe that, and I guess it makes them feel good about themselves, thinking they’re holding all that power. But I’ve got to beg to differ. As just one example...
I mentioned above how right after giving birth to my baby daughter, a nurse gave me a packet of “educational” materials, which turned out to be credit card applications, coupons, and advertisements. That wasn’t all they gave me. The other “
welcome new mommy” goodies included a one-pound can of Enfamil-brand baby formula, disposable diapers, and a diaper bag. Guess what the diaper bag was made of? Easy-to-clean, entirely-toxic PVC. I flipped out. The hospital was allowing corporations to distribute hazardous schlock to new mothers and their precious infants?
I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper about what a moral outrage this was, how corporations overstepped all ethical boundaries. The story promptly got picked up and became front-page news. As a result, I received a bunch of letters from mothers, some of whom were grateful and others of whom objected to what I’d said.
I still have one of the letters I received, along with my response, which I’m excerpting here:
Dear Ms. Leonard,
Congratulations on the birth of your baby! Now stop spoiling it for the rest of us. I am referring, of course, to the article... concerning your displeasure at receiving a free diaper bag with samples, etc., from your maternity hospital... You voiced the notion that “rampant commercialism... has affected the hospital-patient relationship.” Good Lord, woman, of course it has! We do, after all, live in a consumer-driven society, or weren’t you aware... We, the consumer, control the manufacturers. It is never them controlling us, and it never has been. Don’t like the free coupons? Toss ‘em! Ha ha, that’s money that they’ve spent to no avail!... Get it now? Most of us in this world are not the stupid, biddable sheep you seem to think we are... Everyone has a mind of their own. I certainly hope you weren’t being so patronizing to the “poorer mothers” on purpose—I can assure you that most of them aren’t likely to run out and buy formula just because they now have a coupon for it! The vast majority of women giving birth in today’s maternity hospitals are simply not as gullible as you think.
And that includes me. Little Toby is now four months old, and I use his free Enfamil diaper bag every day. To date, I have received innumerable coupons and freebies from manufacturers and formula companies, and it’s been a blast getting free stuff.
THE STORY OF STUFF Page 26