NEGATIVES OF CONSUMERISM
Consumerism is an economic and societal way of viewing and understanding the economy, which focuses on the idea of the consumption of a steady supply of goods and services by the citizens of a given country. The consumption of goods and services by individual consumers helps drive the economic engine of a consumerist society in that it creates jobs for workers and wealth for businesses owners. While consumerism as an ideology can be present in several different types of economic systems, it is most often associated with capitalism. In particular, consumerism plays an important role in modern democratic countries with mixed economies such as: the United States, England, France, Canada, etc. Furthermore, consumerism is an important component of the concept of supply and demand because it involves the supply of goods and services and the demand (consumption) of goods and services by individual consumers. To fully understand the significance of consumerism as an ideology it’s also important to understand its development throughout history as well as its positives and negatives.
In general, there are five main negative aspects of consumerism, including:
- Causes more pollution.
- A major contributor to resource depletion.
- Leads companies to develop low quality products.
- Promotes poor labor standards and pay for workers.
- Does not necessarily lead to increased happiness beyond a certain point.
The first main negative of consumerism as a system is that it can have devastating effects on the environment. As stated previously, consumerism developed and intensified alongside the events of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. As part of this process, society shifted away from small home-based production to the factory system. The factory system is a term that historians use to refer to the development of centralized factories or mills that produced goods on a mass scale. These factories created large amounts of air and water pollution as a byproduct of the production process. As consumerism intensified throughout the 20th century pollution levels increased and spread around the world as factories moved to parts of Asia. Also, another effect of consumerism is the amount of waste or trash it produces. For example, it is common for the packaging of a good to be immediately thrown into the trash after the consumer has opened the product. As a result, modern societies have struggled to deal with the large amounts of waste produced by constant consumerism. This has led to incinerators (burning of trash) and large landfills (burying of trash) which caused further pollution of the environment. Therefore, consumerism has led to a polluting of the environment and has cost society in environmental loss of expense.
The second main negative of consumerism is resource depletion. Simply put, resource depletion refers to the idea that human beings are using up the resources on the earth as an ever increasing rate such that we will ‘deplete’ or completely use up some resources. This issue is related to consumerism because the creation of goods and services is using up some resources on the earth at an incredibly fast rate. This is due in part to the increased rates of consumption throughout the last century, especially in consumerist societies in Europe and North America. An example of resource depletion is the over use or overfishing of fish in the oceans. Due to a range of different issues, among which over consumption is one, large fish in the world’s oceans are depleting at a very fast rate. Some studies claim that there will longer be any large fish in the world’s oceans by the midpoint of the 21st century. Therefore, consumerism is putting immense pressure on the environment and the resources that human beings depend on.
The next major negative impact of consumerism is that it has led to the creation of low quality goods. Consumerism is a common attribute of societies based entirely or partially on the principles of capitalism. For example, the capitalist principle of competition is vitally important in a consumerist society. It promotes the idea that companies should compete with one another in the production and sale of their products. As such, this competition pushes companies to offer goods as lower prices than their competitors. In order to do this, many companies have lowered the quality of the products. Further to this idea, modern companies practice a technique called ‘planned obsolescence’. In general, planned obsolescence is best understood as products that are designed to fail. Modern companies do this to encourage consumers to repurchase a product over and over again. As such, some modern products are designed with short lifespans with further intensifies the pollution and resource depletion discussed the in the previous paragraphs.
The fourth main negative impact of consumerism is that is leads to low working standards and pay for workers. Similar to the last paragraph, consumerism leads to competition between companies. This competitive drive between companies causes them to seek ways to decrease the price of their products. One of the ways that companies do this is by outsourcing their manufacturing to other countries, usually in parts of Asia. In general, outsourcing is when companies in western countries such as the United States and Canada send their manufacturing to other countries such as Mexico and China. Companies do this to lower the overall cost of wages when developing a product because workers in countries like China and Mexico will work for much smaller wages than similar workers in the United States and Canada. Outsourcing as a concept became popular throughout North America and Europe throughout the 1980s and continues still today. This is negative because it causes people in North America to lose their jobs while also promoting low paying jobs in other parts of the world. Some of the manufacturing jobs in Asia are often criticized for containing long hours, dangerous work and little pay. This means that consumerism promotes poor working conditions for some people while causing others to lose their jobs altogether.
The final main negative aspect of consumerism is that it does not necessarily lead to higher levels of happiness for people. In general, consumerism as a whole has increased the standard of living and quality of life for many people, and therefore has increased happiness levels. However, some researchers have suggested that beyond a certain point consumerism cannot increase happiness forever. For example, they point to the fact that consumption has increases dramatically throughout the 20th century but happiness levels have remained relatively stagnant. As such, when consumerism is dealing with a person’s basic needs (food, shelter, clothing) it increases happiness but beyond that it has a much less impact. This evidence suggests that ever-increasing consumption does not make us happier and may actually decrease our quality of life with the increases in pollution and resource depletion.