Essentials of Sociology. George Ritzer
for children. More recently, children have come to be targeted directly by advertisers on Saturday-morning TV shows and cable channels such as Nickelodeon that specialize in children’s programming.
In fact, marketing aimed at children is now pervasive. This is portrayed in detail in the documentary Consuming Kids (2008). For example, the Walt Disney Company directly markets baby products, and thus the Disney brand, to new mothers in maternity wards. In schools, branded products are sold at book fairs, and corporate sponsorships adorn everything from sports stadiums to classroom supplies. Brands and logos are woven into textbook problems and examples. Market researchers observe the way in which children use and respond to products and advertising messages not just in focus groups and in the lab but also in natural settings such as school and the home. Marketers have also discovered the importance of the “pester power” of children. This is the ability of children to nag their parents into buying things. It is effective not only for selling children’s products but also for getting children to influence their parents’ purchases.
Overall, children are much more immersed in consumer culture today than ever before. They learn at an early age to value it as well as the norms involved in participating in it. As adults, then, they will fit well into a culture with consumption at its core.
Nontraditional Settings for Consumption
An interesting aspect of consumer culture is the way in which it has spread beyond the economy to other aspects of society. For example, higher education is increasingly characterized by consumer culture. Students and their parents shop around for the best colleges and the most conspicuous degrees or for the best values in a college education. College rankings, such as those published by Kiplinger and U.S. News & World Report, are a big business. In spite of a great deal of criticism (and some recent failures) for-profit colleges have become a booming industry. Enterprises such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University enroll hundreds of thousands of students who pay for the opportunity to earn their degrees on a flexible schedule (Cottom 2017; see Trending box in Chapter 11).
Not long ago, students were largely passive recipients of what educational systems had to offer, but now they are more active consumers of education. For example, college students shop for the best classes, or the best class times, and regularly rate their professors and choose classes on the basis of the professors’ ratings. They are also much more likely to make demands for up-to-date “products” and attentive service from their professors and colleges, as they do from shopping malls and salespeople.
A key site of consumption is now the internet (Miller and Slater 2000; Zuev 2015). A good portion of the time people spend online is related to consumption, either directly (by purchasing items on sites such as Etsy or Amazon) or indirectly (by buying things on game sites such as CastleVille Legends with real dollars). Among the changes wrought by the internet is a great increase in consumer-to-consumer sales on sites like eBay. In 2000, only 22 percent of Americans had used the internet to buy products online, including books, music, toys, and clothing. By 2015, 79 percent of Americans shopped online (Smith and Anderson 2016). The growing importance of online consumption is reflected in the increasing amount spent each year on “Cyber Monday” (the Monday after Thanksgiving). Cyber Monday 2018 set a new record for online shopping, generating almost $8 billion in sales. Significantly, consumers used their mobile devices to generate over $2 billion in sales. In addition, in a process known as “contextual advertising,” advertisements are often woven seamlessly into the content of internet sites—even into games designed for children. Beyond that, many websites carry pop-up ads for goods and services targeted to the interests of the individuals viewing the sites. More specifically, if you use Google to shop for shoes or Amazon for books, ads for shoes and books will pop up for days, or even months, later on many of the sites you visit.
YouTube offers several innovations in consumption, including “shopping haul” and “unboxing” videos. In shopping haul videos, consumers, often women, show viewers the results of their recent shopping trips. Haulers describe and display clothing, accessories, and cosmetics from popular chain stores (such as Superdry, Bebe, and Victoria’s Secret) in malls and shopping strips around the world. Prices and bargains are mentioned frequently. Unboxing videos are a curious hybrid of unofficial marketing and product demonstration. Technology unboxers might demonstrate the features of new iPhones or computer games, while toy unboxers film children playing with various toys. Unboxers might assemble Lego kits, break open Disney Frozen-themed chocolate eggs, or open up McDonald’s Happy Meals and then have children play with the toys.
It could be argued that people in general, and especially children and teens, are becoming more immersed in consumer culture as they become more deeply enmeshed with the internet. This is even more the case now because we increasingly carry the internet—and the ability to shop there—with us all the time on our smartphones. As a result, consumer culture has become an even more inescapable part of our daily lives. Furthermore, consumption on the internet is increasingly wedded to the material world. You can pay for parking and rental cars using smartphone apps. An app allows a driver to open the doors of her rented Zipcar with her phone and honk its horn to locate it. The Hunt app brings into play a community of fashion-minded people to help us hunt down desired fashion items.
Ask Yourself
How much of the time that you spend online is devoted to shopping or purchasing? Try keeping a log of your internet use for a few days. Note how many times you went online and on how many of those occasions you bought something or browsed sites devoted to consumption. Are you a typical internet consumer? Why or why not?
A Postconsumer Culture?
Many people are now doing something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago—saving money. The personal savings rate in the United States has changed over the past few years. In late 2007, it dipped to close to 3 percent of disposable income. At the height of the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, it spiked to more than 8 percent. By late 2018, even though the economy had improved considerably, the personal savings rate was still a comparatively high 6 percent (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis 2018). People who are saving more of their money are obviously using less of it to consume.
These changes in the behavior of consumers and their attitudes speak to a change in the larger value system. Consuming less is a sure indication of at least a temporary decline of consumer culture. It may even be the beginning of a postconsumer culture. Among the characteristics of such a culture, beyond buying less and saving more, are sharing more things in the “sharing economy” (Belk 2014; Sundararajan 2016), renting consumer items (such as dresses on sites like Rent the Runway), taking pride in buying less expensive or even recycled items, buying less showy brands (a Kia rather than a BMW), dining at home more often than eating at restaurants, and showing a greater concern for the environment in terms of what we buy and, more important, do not buy. It is not clear that we are in a postconsumer culture, and if we are, it is uncertain how long it will last. However, just as we entered what is best described as a consumer culture in the last half of the twentieth century, it is at least possible that we are entering a postconsumer culture in the first half of the twenty-first century.
Another chink in consumer culture has been created by organized groups actively seeking to subvert aspects of both consumer culture and the larger culture. The success of Burning Man is one indication of such subversion. Begun in 1986, this annual weeklong event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert today attracts 50,000 participants who commit themselves during their stay to self-expression, decommodification (for example, cash transactions between participants are banned), and community building (Chen 2009; Jones 2011).
Culture Jamming
Culture jamming radically transforms mass media messages, often turning them on their heads completely (Kuehn 2015; Lasn 2000). It is a form of social protest aimed at revealing underlying realities of which consumers may be unaware. The hope is that once people are made aware of these realities through culture jamming, they will change their behaviors or perhaps even band together to change those underlying realities.