The Gospel of Consumption

[ciaoant1]

[...] Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.

But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.
It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”
[...]
Businessmen were not happy about this prospect -> Read the rest of the story here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2962/

[saras]

1. A simple demonstration of how stupid it is to have business run society

Anyone else would have said "cool. we have enough of that. we can fulfill everyone's basic needs so that no one starves or freezes to death. after that, let's move on to something more interesting than producing and consuming.

The production/consumption system as a whole should be about as visible as the sewer system is. We've made our whole lives a fetish of eating and shitting.

[snappyturtle]

2. Bookmarked to re-read whenever I feel there is no way out

of our crazy lives. I feel this is a most important article.
I had no idea of the thirty hour work week....which could
be wonderful.

"We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around."

[fasttense]

3. This describes the basic problem with our form of economic capitalism

The world can produce more than needed. Corporations and businesses can provide enough for everyone. But, as corporations and businesses provide more faster, someone has to buy it. In order to buy up all the stuff we can make, we have to have well paid workers, with money in their pockets to be able to spend it on other things besides survival. But corporations and businesses don't want to pay a decent wage to workers. (Yes what rich men want, a whim, a mere desire, it has nothing to do with the cost of producing an items, it has to do with what rich men want.) If they pay a decent wage, they only make a 30% return on their money instead of a 60% return. So, now there are NOT enough people with decent wages to buy the crap our corporations produce.

The uber rich have cut off their nose to spite their face and they don't care if we all rot in hell.

[Creideiki]

5. Henry Ford, while hardly some beacon of progressive thought

and really not a "nice guy", per se, really said it best:

“There is one rule for industrialists and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.”

While his plan was to make it so that his workers could afford what they made--appalling by capitalista standards of the day, they set things in motion. The next fear was that freeing the workers from constant labor would allow them leisure to think. Then workers might insist on some mobility among jobs, and that couldn't happen, so they tied our healthcare to our labor. And from there, the cake was in the oven.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. The birth of Affluenza

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza

http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/

[Livluvgrow]

6. This will fit my lesson plan

Just this week I played Annie Leonards The Story of Stuff video and this article will be a perfect followup to open up the students eyes to responsible purchasing and to limit consumption

[Viva_La_Revolution]

7. Welcome to DU, ciaoant1!

Excellent article. thanks

[CrispyQ]

8. The Kellogg segment was especially good.

There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”

This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”

more ...

A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a “personal letter” to employees, Brown pointed to the “mental income” of “the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents.” Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to “higher standards in school and civic . . . life” that would benefit the company by allowing it to “draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate.”

It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”

-emphasis added

Fast forward to the 21st century where leisure time is only for the elite.

There is a book, "Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic" that I recommend to anyone interested in this topic. It's a bit simplistic, but eye opening & chock full of Horsey cartoons! That alone makes the book worth it!

http://www.amazon.com/Affluenza-The-All-Consuming-Epidemic-Currents/dp/1576753573/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335029063&sr=8-1

K&R

[raccoon]

9. They need to change the name of their magazine, I keep thinking it's the Onion until I look again.nt

[TBF]

10. Excellent article - thanks for sharing this. nt

[ciaoant1]

11. Great video

Check it out:
http://whataboutmarx.blogspot.com/2012/06/video-planned-obsolescence-lightbulb.html

[RobertEarl]

12. Gospel? In one word with a kick

[font size+4]MORE!

[Sekhmets Daughter]

13. Thank you so much

For sharing this great article. Madison Avenue and Wall Street...the bane of our existence.