Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture. The term “consumer culture” refers to cultures in which mass consumption and production both fuel the economy and shape perceptions, values, desires, and constructions of personal identity. Economic developments, demographic trends, and new technologies profoundly influence the scope and scale of consumer culture. Social class, gender, ethnicity, region, and age all affect definitions of consumer identity and attitudes about the legitimacy of consumer‐centered lifestyles.

The intellectual roots of consumer culture date to seventeenth‐century Western Europe and the antimercantilist idea that domestic markets could adequately sustain national economies. By the 1770s, as early capitalist ideology and early industrialization took hold in England, a widespread culture of consumption arose. This early English consumer culture influenced life in colonial America. Colonists acquired English‐made goods as markers of status and respectability. Despite Jeffersonian Republican and religious protests against luxury and aristocratic emulation, the ties between gentility and commodity consumption grew after the Revolutionary War, especially as early industrialization and commercial and transportation revolutions made consumer goods more easily available and less expensive. These developments led white women in middle‐class, urban communities to relinquish many familiar tasks of domestic labor, such as making soap. By the 1830s, consumption had become central to how middle‐class women defined themselves as wives and mothers.

Consumer culture began to assume its modern contours after the Civil War. The explosive growth of industrialization and its accompanying techniques of mass distribution made the consumption of ready‐made goods possible on an unprecedented scale. Urbanization and population growth broadened markets for consumption. By 1900, department stores, mail‐order catalogs, and mass‐circulated magazines made consumer culture broadly accessible. As mass production pushed prices down, and as department stores offered cheap knockoffs of expensive goods, immigrants and working‐class Americans got their own taste of consumerism. Consumer culture had also expanded beyond its urban base. Mass magazines and catalogs kept the remotest corners of the nation abreast of new styles and merchandise.

Some Americans resisted consumerism. In 1899, the cultural critic Thorstein Veblen derided what he called the “conspicuous consumption” of luxury goods. Progressives both condemned the “profligate” consuming patterns of workers and immigrants and reacted politically when corporate monopolies, inflation, and unsafe merchandise threatened their own increasingly commodity‐centered lifestyles. Some, like Florence Kelley, sought to organize a consumer movement as a force for reform, but most middle‐class Americans simply took consumerism for granted.

The rise of national “brand name” products added a new dynamic to consumer culture. During the early 1900s, merchandisers began promoting brand names in order to gain leverage in marketing and distributing their wares. By the 1920s, much of this promotional work had passed to advertising agencies. Using dramatic graphics and carefully honed copy to associate brand name products with desirable personality traits and social values, advertising agencies became cultural arbiters of style and taste.

Some historians suggest that brand names, national advertising campaigns, the movies, and, by the 1930s, chain stores and radio led to a homogenization of American culture. But ethnic enclaves, unions, and competing values contributed to distinct cultures of consumption. During the 1950s, however, economic prosperity, suburbanization, and a Cold War emphasis on Americanism and idealized nuclear families undermined these distinctions. With the advent of television and ubiquitous commercial icons like Holiday Inn and McDonald's, and the spread of shopping centers and malls, Americans absorbed a larger set of shared cultural references and consumer‐centered aspirations.

Critics like Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders, 1957) and cultural subgroups like the Beat poets and writers of the 1950s and the 1960s counterculture rejected what they saw as the homogenizing effects of mass consumer culture. But even in the postwar era, demographically distinct cultures of consumption existed—in part, because marketers increasingly relied upon market segmentation. Women's consumerism continued to revolve primarily around home and family. Leisure and entertainment industries, in particular, triumphed by targeting previously untapped markets. Record companies focused on the ascendant youth culture and its growing access to disposable income. Sporting‐goods makers and magazines like Playboy profited by exploiting the consumer interests of men. African‐American entrepreneurs succeeded by meeting the needs and interests of black shoppers. Other manufacturers courted consumers abroad. U.S. foreign policy‐makers encouraged this globalization of American consumer culture as a weapon in the Cold War.

Consumer culture's ability to nurture common bonds while appealing to the interests of distinct groups continues. By meaning different things to different people, while nonetheless upholding the centrality of commodity consumption, consumer culture managed to deflect critics and become a powerful presence in American society.
See also Capitalism; Fifties, The; Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Daniel Horowitz , The Morality of Spending, 1985.
Elaine Tyler May , Homeward Bound, 1988.
Elaine Abelson , When Ladies Go A‐Thieving: Middle‐Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, 1989.
Susan Strasser , Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, 1989.
Lizabeth Cohen , Making a New Deal, 1990.
William Leach , Land of Desire, 1993.
Lizabeth Cohen , A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003.

Margaret Finnegan