Consumer glee - short-lived and shiny

Particularly during and after WWII the idea of disposable (single-use, discard, landfill) products and planned obsolescence has grown to the point that any other relationship to one's tools, chattels, supplies, and stockpiling is hard to imagine. Before the age of consumerism many people selected things in terms of value (function, durability) for price paid. In those days there were fewer choices of maker, design, and retail source. But now a given item can be bought new, used, donated, cannibalized from other parts. And there will often be several styles, build-quality, status (brand name) perception, and so on. Besides the historical changes in the buying, using, repairing or discarding life cycle, another set of questions concerns the emotional sequence of events that culminates in purchase.

neighborhood dollar store with diverse stock of low-priced items (author photo 12/2019)

 At first glance it might seem that parking your car and going into the brightly-lit, abundantly stocked, colorfully packaged and cheaply priced dollar store would be so different to a suburban indoor shopping mall or a city center department store as to be impossible to compare. That may be so when it comes to prices and expectation for employee service, but looking at the buyer's emotional response perhaps there is a similar stimulus-response pattern at play.

Sales experts learn to recognize "buying signals" that point to the person's willingness or objections to completing a transaction. These vary by personality, financial experience, and conditions of engaging with the potential purchase and way of coming to a decision. But normally they say that a decision begins with emotional force - either attracted or repulsed by the matter at hand. Later on some reasons can be produced, if necessary for self or others, to tell why the particular item was needed or was merely desired. This same order of operations (first emotion, afterward reasoning) can be found whether buying a house, a heifer, or a hat. So in this way the dollar store, above, or a fancy boutique on an exclusive street have something in common when it comes to tickling the buyer's imagination or tugging on their heartstrings.

The in-person experience includes deciding to travel to a retail location, making oneself presentable to go out in public, browsing without aim or consulting with a worker to find a product, admiring the labeling and packaging, making a comparison of the brand-name item with the store-brand item, and then committing to one to take to the cashier for purchase. Many times now it is possible to return an unopened item that is accompanied with sales receipt to receive refund or credit for another purchase. But a generation or two ago this was customarily not allowed.

Beyond the in-store shopping experience now there is the added complication online of being able to window shop endlessly for items of an even larger inventory of things still being produced as well as some things that are vintage or no longer in production. With the spread of commercial and home-use 3-D printers, maybe even long ago items can be ordered and "printed" on demand, thus expanding the universe of possible purchases back in time to very old models indeed.

Money and research time is spent on understanding the science of marketing and purchase-decisions. But so far very little study has gone into the end of the life-cycle to understand the factors surrounding a decision to abandon, give away, throw away, or shove to the back of the storage area (pole barn, basement, rental storage space, spare closet, attic or garage) to make possible a whole new purchase. In other words, what sorts of things trigger a change in status from trusty tool to useless clutter: broken, difficult to use after one's powers weaken or change, fashion, eclipsed by newer or better instance of the thing, and so on.

In contrast to the universe of meanings and materials for ancient humans who were highly mobile and were burdened with relatively few pieces of material culture, nowadays there is a constant stream of shiny new things to gaze at, covet, and sometimes obtain as gift from others or by oneself, or simply purchase outright in cash or by credit that is divided into monthly or weekly payments. The idea of "retail therapy" has been described by others to mean the momentary elation in claiming ownership of a tastefully packaged item of delightful design. The psychological equation of having more things with having more joy, social status, or peer respect is surely present in some instances of browsing or purchasing. It does cause a temporary boost in self-esteem or feelings of being unrestricted in getting something that fulfills a desire or even an impulse. So whether a shopping cart is cashed out in the dollar store or is paid for in a luxury boutique, the consumer narrative of seeking (hunting and gathering?) and finding the object desired seems to be about the same, although the size of the bill will differ in each of these two very different locations. And while very expensive-looking cars park at the dollar store right next to vehicles that seem to be near their end, at the pricey shops it will only be the fancy cars parking nearby. But all consumers setting out to buy something are rewarded with that emotional response that comes from completing a transaction and leaving the store with the new possession in hand.

Will the consumerism mode of economic life ever go back to the pre-consumer patterns? Or will things somehow combine both logics: one of durable value, the other of disposability that leads to the next new thing. Those questions belong to the future. But, of course, in the words of near-future writer William Gibson, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed" (quoted December 4, 2003, The Economist).