If you have the Black Friday blues, take comfort in a few posts on consumerism:
- George Ritzer has a guest post on Sociology Compass about hyperconsumption and how we got ourselves into this mess.
- Karen Sternheimer wrote an excellent piece on “the virtue of not buying” on the Everyday Sociology Blog that includes some useful links. In particular, she points to a book by Ellen Ruppel Shell that sounds great.
- Joel Waldfogel, an economist from Penn, has been making the rounds thanks to well-timed book called Scroogenomics from Princeton UP. You can hear an interview with him about why gift giving is bad for the economy here.
- Finally, an op-ed (predating the economic crisis by a several years) by Paul Boyer in the Christian Science Monitor highlights the psychological freedom that shedding unnecessary “stuff” can give us. Paul writes:
Consumption is presented as our right, even as a patriotic act. We celebrate stores filled with goods. But once the novelty of my purchases wears off, I often feel more burdened and dissatisfied. In my heart I know that most of the things I buy will end up in the trash or a Salvation Army sales rack – adding to the huge surplus that is the inevitable, although hidden, part of our society’s unprecedented wealth.
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