CONSUMERISM
1. The movement seeking to protect and inform
consumers by requiring such practices as
honest packaging and advertising, product
guarantees, and improved safety standards.
2. The theory that a progressively greater
consumption of goods is economically
beneficial.
3. Attachment to materialistic values or
possessions: deplored the rampant
consumerism of contemporary society.
Public concern over the rights of consumers, the
quality of consumer goods, and the honesty of
advertising. The ideology came into full focus in
the 1960s after President John F. Kennedy
introduced the Consumer Bill of Rights, which
stated that the consuming public has a right to be
safe, to be informed, to choose, and to be heard.
When corruption of government officials in the
Watergate scandal of the seventies, and inflation
and widespread consumer disenchantment with
the quality of many American products were
combined with the greater sophistication brought
about by consumer advocates, consumerism
became a powerful, action-oriented movement.
1. S.U.V.'s: That's S for Status, V for
Vanity
Published: June 21, 2002
To the Editor:
I was appalled to read that many California
communities are accommodating the owners
of sport utility vehicles by increasing the size
of parking spaces. Apparently, officials in
these cities just want to go with the flow,
when they could be using parking-space
politics to encourage the use of smaller, more
fuel-efficient cars.
When will Americans come to their senses
and see the S.U.V. for what it is? It's an
outsized extension of egotistical
consumerism: I'm bigger (read ''richer'' and
''better'') than you are, so give me one and a
half parking spaces for each ''ordinary'' car.
I'm sick of being pushed around by the
egotists in their expensive cars who think
nothing of misusing nonrenewable oil and
gas reserves, as well as increasing pollution.
JANE F. CARLSON
Weston, Mass., June 18, 2002
2. Oil Isn't Reason Enough for War
Published: January 07, 2003
To the Editor:
Re ''A War for Oil?,'' by Thomas L. Friedman
(column, Jan. 5):
We can't make a stronger case for fighting a war
partly for oil by making clear to the rest of the
world that we are acting for the benefit of the
planet, not simply to fuel American excesses.
The reason we can't is that it isn't true.
We are a country of consumers who worship daily
at an altar of excess fueled by oil. We need an
endless and uninterrupted supply of oil to practice
our national religion, consumerism.
On an international level, we have become a
country that has replaced ''life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness'' with simply the pursuit of
petroleum, and the world knows it even if we don't.
DAN BRUCE
Conyers, Ga., Jan. 5, 2003
5. Is American Culture Unstoppable?;
Rampant Consumerism
Published: March 10, 1999
To the Editor:
Salman Rushdie's March 5 Op-Ed article
provokes us to consider alternatives to global
cultural defensiveness lest it result in
widespread cultural and ethnic fanaticism. In
advocating the endorsement of a universal
ethic of freedom to replace the universal
interests of conglomerates and superpowers,
Mr. Rushdie is putting his pen precisely on
what is missing in the globalization
movement. Without global mechanisms to
safeguard basic freedoms, access to markets
becomes the new fanaticism driving the
advancing monoculture. It is called
consumerism.
(Sister) ARLENE FLAHERTY
Blauvelt, N.Y., March 5, 1999
…………
6. WHAT'S NEW IN NEW-AGE
MARKETING; Of Cash, Crystals and
Consumerism
By JENNIFER STOFFEL; Jennifer Stoffel is
a writer based in Cleveland
Published: October 09, 1988
''New Age'' often conjures up the unlikely from an awareness of past lives to
reinterpretation of the energy inherent in
crystals. But despite a persistent image of
hucksterism, business is discovering that the
New Age movement is a growing and
affluent consumer market.
Marketing to the New Age these days has
become so successful that the label is being
used with abandon to push products and
services as disparate as holistic health care,
vegetarian groceries and astrological
interpretation.
It is hard to put a dollar amount on New Age
merchandise, but businesses big and small are
cashing in. They range from such major
publishers as Time-Life Books and
Doubleday to television programmers like
Home Box Office or PBS to ''mom and pop''
rock stores being repackaged as crystal shops.
''It's not just New Age, it's a consumer
revolution,'' said James Turner, an attorney
and consumer advocate in Washington. Mr.
Turner sees a link between New Age and the
generation that grew up in the 1960's as
responsible for a new consumer market - one
in which people demand products that fit
their needs, as well as their ideas.
For some, the New Age of the 1980's is merely an
extension of the self-awareness of the 1960's. As
the generation has aged, its members have become
wealthier, gained positions of influence and yet, are
still individualistic. This explains why many ideas
that are labeled New Age - macrobiotic diets,
Rolfing, Ram Dass - may seem to have a familiar
ring to them.
''We're still covering the same things as we did in
the 1960's, they've just become accepted,'' Ms.
Graves said.
………………….
7. In SoHo, Consumerism Is an Art; High-End
Stores Help Re-create Madison Ave. Downtown
By TERRY PRISTIN
Published: September 26, 1998
A uniformed security guard stands by the door of
the imposing new Louis Vuitton store on Greene
Street. Inside, fashionably dressed couples, many
from Europe or Japan, eye the rich leather bags
arranged one to a shelf like exemplars of a rare
type of ancient pottery. Downstairs, clothes are
displayed with a studied casualness -- a long skirt
here, a jacket there. A steamer trunk with a price
tag of $25,000 rests on the highly polished floor.
Louis Vuitton? In SoHo?
Yes. And yes. And it is hardly alone. Before long,
Vuitton will be joined by the likes of Yves Saint
Laurent, Prada, Helena Rubenstein and the jewelers
H. Stern and Bulgari.
Madison Avenue is migrating downtown, hoping to
draw a mix of affluent customers, including
inhabitants of increasingly costly TriBeCa and
SoHo loft buildings, foreign guests of two new
SoHo hotels and weekend daytrippers from the
suburbs. Some retailers say they plan to use their
new stores, many in former gallery spaces, to try
out new ideas, broaden their customer base or
display a wider range of goods than they could
accommodate uptown.
Around SoHo these days, a good number of oldtimers are more than a little upset that all of this is
happening to a place that has long defined itself as
an antidote to uptown taste in art and fashion.
Of course, as with pretty much any hip New York
neighborhood, SoHo has been getting steadily less
so ever since it became an acronym.The high-end
retailers' southward stampede is actually only the
latest change to wash over a neighborhood that
became an artists' enclave nearly three decades ago
as loft buildings once occupied by light
manufacturing were converted into studios and
living spaces. In recent years, as rents rose, many
of the art galleries that followed the artists have had
to give up their storefronts and were replaced by
home furnishing shops.
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
consumerism sentence examples
Consumerism is the protection of the rights and interests of the general pool of
buyers, or an obsession with buying material goods or items. (noun)
1. Laws and rules that protect people who shop
and spend are examples of consumerism.
2. An obsession with shopping and acquiring
stuff is an example of consumerism.







Soelle: in a language world dominated by
consumerism, we can only express ourselves
in the categories of having.
Promotion of consumerism to local business
three guest speaker lunches are to be arranged
to promote consumerism with local business.
Christmas has become yet another victim of
society's rampant consumerism.
Consumerism as a way of evading a deeper
search for national identity.
The unique japanese combination of
miniaturization, mass consumerism, industrial
design and creativity appeals to artists and
technicians alike.
How we need to pray for people today so
many of whom are consumed by consumerism.
The bugatti, the telephone, the female skier
and the urban skyscraper include rather than
reject the new consumerism.







Either we find the nearly impossible, adequate
response to mindless consumerism and
accumulating technological power, or there is
no hope.
A film which in many respects goes against the
grain and openly challenges consumerism.
Growing consumerism is the downside the
picture, however, is not all rosy.
Should we think in terms of a linear expansion
of western consumerism ending in global
convergence?
Consumerism taken over where religion
formerly reigned?
These are western materialist consumerism,
and its concomitant ideologies of the
superiority of the new and the rejection of the
old.
It is more evidence of the growth in green
consumerism in Britain.
(discuss the meaning of expressions in bold)
`and I am a Dutchman’ or
`then I am a Dutchman’
When someone says something and you respond by
saying `and I am a Dutchman’ or `then I am a
Dutchman’, it means that you don’t believe what
the person has said.”
*“Angelina and Brad are coming to my place for
lunch”. “..oh yeah? Then I am a Dutchman!”
* “ If that painting is Picasso’s, then I am a
Dutchman.”