Best Consumerism Quotes

"There's nothing more profitable than convincing a generation that they can remove those negative emotions if they pay enough."

"If you think about the things I just said, regular sleep, sunlight, exercise, quality nutrition, social connection...none of which by the way require that you purchase anything."

"People need to consider is that the food industry and the pharmaceutical industry really have built-in incentives for you continuing to buy their products."

"It really changes your life when you shift from being just a consumer to being a creator."

"When you lose a sense of mission for the purpose of man, for what can be done when there is peace on Earth and how we can flourish, then you're just left with buying more stuff, and that is degrading."

"If you got the Galaxy... you are the Supreme boss."

"You cannot shop your way out of an unhappy life."

"If you think that brands wearing corporate logos on your body increase your status, you have officially become brainwashed."

"Remember that loyalty to any brand or company, be it Critical Role or Wizards of the Coast, or even me and the books that I create, only hurts you. You are the person with the money. Don't be loyal to a company, be loyal to yourself."

"Consumerism and materialism will be more prevalent than ever... people will now pay for virtual clothes, virtual mansions, and virtual supercars as if they were real."

"A season pass for an interactive movie? We really are living in the Golden Age of gaming."

"It's a sad reflection of our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product."

"If we approach the things we buy strictly in regards to their utility, we find that most of it is totally unnecessary."

"Reese's should come out with a queen size as well. I think that would do well."

"Skincare is more than just the ingredients and how they work on your skin; it's also about the ethics and the morality of the brands that you support."

"The vast majority of American consumers could care less about where products come from; they simply want the best quality for the best price."

"You can't buy something for two pounds that's been made, manufactured the fabric, who made it, in what conditions, you can't make stuff that cheap and have any good come of it."

"All we want is great games that are worth what we pay for."

"Fast fashion has turned us into these passive consumers who are constantly chasing the fantasy that buying more clothes will make us happy."

"It's easy to point the finger at a brand for not having a transparent supply chain, but we have to really take responsibility for our choices."

"Life is too short, man. Go buy a new knife and enjoy your life."

"In 1971, Magic Kingdom opened with a ticket book system in which guests had to pay to ride each ride, and exactly 50 years later in 2021, guests are once again paying to ride rides, or at least skip the line."

"We're still going to poke at culture, wealth, consumerism, and ethics and corporations. Parody is a poke."

"As Judge Dennis Jacobs accurately stated in oral argument, the piece critiqued the objectification of the holy consumer product of sneakers to be a collectible, and that that is absurd and a sign of cultural crisis."

"Nostalgia encourages us to buy a piece of a memory, a moment in time when things seemed simpler, and we thought we were happier."

"The individual consumer should be concerned about economics and economic theory because... they would like to have the largest choice of products at the best possible price and there's one system that tends to satisfy that, and that's the free market system."

"We are supposedly shallow, obsessed with the self, narcissistic, and vain, building personal castles of consumption on the foundations of things we don't really need."

"Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals."

"Our consumer society is messy, complex; it can both sustain us creatively and can destroy the planet."

"The more designer items you buy, or really anything that you buy, the more of your life you're trading away."

"We don't understand the power we have as consumers, and we've just fallen victim to these mega corporations."

"Live your life the way you want to live it, not how advertisements want you to live."

"The market system can theoretically give us everything we want and still leave us unsatisfied."

"The biggest opponent we can [muster] would be humanity itself. If people can get out of the survivalist consumerist mindset, then we can start to say, 'Well, what can I start to do differently?'"

"The way we take power back is by deflating the whole corporate landscape, and we do that by buying less, by sharing more."

"It's gonna make us want to buy more skincare products."

"Everything we buy takes resources from the earth, energy to produce, and greenhouse gas emissions emitted to ship it all over the world."

"Even Americans who weren't millionaires desperately wanted to participate in the consumerism and flexing frenzy."

"Fifty bucks for just one rose? That's really a rip-off."

"The thing I notice is like certain things, like say you buy something, it might make you happy for a little bit, but I don't think it provides you long-term satisfaction."

"The story of disposable vapes is in many ways the story of our times: one of addicted customers trapped in coercive consumer relationships."

"With global warming on track to exceed 1.5°C by 2027, the idea of a 'Shein haul' horrifies me."

"I'd like to today buy a bed and a trash can because in an ideal world I'd like to sleep through the night."

"If you're not paying, then you're not the customer; you're the product."

"Spontaneous purchases and retail therapy don't do it; just get real therapy."

"I would have saved close to $8,000 not buying this stupid stuff. So, learn from me, save your money."

"I'm not sure if people in real life surprise their significant others with new cars wrapped in comically large bows as the car companies would have us believe, but our Valentine's Day gift to you, the viewer, is some lovely cyber truck news."

"Advertising's two main goals: make you secretly compare yourself to others...and to give you the impression that you are not enough."

"But what I've come to realize is that the antidote to this frivolous overspending and micro trend cycles is more about finding a community."

"He wasn't done there. Oh no. He even said, 'We even sell a pair of earrings for under a pound, gold earrings as well. And some people say, well, that's cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencers, but I have to say, the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings.'"

"Nowadays, people will buy things they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't even like."

"Modern life has become defined by consumerism, sometimes called consumptionism, in which one's happiness depends on one's quality of life achieved by the attainment of material goods."

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."

"We are just consumers, we consume and because of this behavior of consuming things we don't understand, we can be sheep led to slaughter."

"How the Grinch Stole Christmas... seems to offer one of the most explicit explorations of whether or not Christmas is nothing but an excuse for us to go into credit card debt buying stuff we don't need for people we don't like, or if it shows us how Christmas is something more."

"When you spend money, most of the time you are a consumer... When you invest your money, you become a producer."

"The real question is, do we need to be more selective and more careful with who we listen to, who we trust, and who we shop from when they promote?"

"Minimalism isn't about not buying anymore, it's about being more deliberate with the resources we have."

"At the end of the day, you know, you can have fun with trends, no one's saying like oh, if you buy into any of these trends or participate in it, you're being brainwashed and you're a victim of consumerism and a slave to capitalism, like it's all in good fun."

"Consumerism is not part of the human condition. But it is, I think, fueled by it."

"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so you might as well just let people enjoy the things that they like."

"There's just too many people in this world promoting things, selling things, and just thriving off this capitalist hellscape that we live in."

"I would much rather buy a much more affordable product and donate the rest to charity and make a positive impact that way."

"Stop spending money on jewelry, clothes, designer for the next two or three years; it's not worth it."

"We're always taught to be consumers rather than investors."

"When you buy something, buy something because you want it and you like it, not because of what you think it says about you or what you think it's going to make you feel."

"It's Bernard Arnault's luxury world and we're just shopping at it."

"Consumption is the biggest problem. But design is one of the best solutions."

"If we're going to keep designing, buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do, there are seven billion people who live in the world right now. There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year."

"We're like most of us in America, we're just stuff obese. We just have stuff coming out our ears."

"You don't need nearly as much as what the advertisements tell you that you need."

"Having a thrifty mentality is something that we've lost in this consumer-driven and convenience-led world, but it holds so much value."

"By literally going to Walmart, I am making a political action by reinforcing the capitalistic framework and consumerism."

"The fact of the matter is that people get overly upset about products and I don't really know why. I think it's very much a first-world problem."

"We once created kaijus only to destroy them to sell a product the world had no need for; now we fight the monsters of our own making not to thrive but to survive."

"The world is full of so many mugs... if you just go to a thrift store and just go rescue a bunch of mugs from the landfill."

"It's not even buying something useless just because it's on sale. I was already gonna buy it, and if I can get some rewards points, some cash back from that, I'm gonna do it."

"Every purchase you make is a vote on what you want versus what you don't want."

"If you gave people a $15 minimum wage, there'd be more customers. That's what businesses really want."

"Stop spending money you don't have on things you don't need to impress people you probably don't even like."

"This incredibly wasteful misunderstanding is something the food companies have no desire to dispel – if you throw it out before you finish it, you’ll go buy more and they make more profit."

"Corporate capitalism doesn't care if you hate it; in fact, it can take that hate, package it neon and chrome, and sell it right back to you for sixty dollars."

"I don't care about designer stores, what s**t is dead. I graduated beyond Gucci."

"You're not just a consumer, and even if you were, you don't make decisions in a vacuum."

"Nobody needs this stuff, you know, if you can live your life and feel good about yourself without any of it, then more power to you."

"If you can't fix it, do you own it? I would argue no, you don't; you are renting it."

"Are we purchasing a temporary, completely revocable license that can be taken away at any time?"

"There's a war on ownership in our culture. The powers that be don't want you to actually possess and own anything."

"People sit there and they will justify their beliefs, justify that purchase, just because they want it."

"The wanting of things is stronger in our brains than the having of them, so we continually want to buy more."

"I love the desk, and I think you guys probably will too."

"I bought it new. New, yeah. Wow, that could have fooled me. And I'm feeling sexy."

"You may not know that many of the items that you're purchasing are fundamentally unrepairable in a way that older items were."

"We have created an ecosystem where we have essentially been given a drug to the consumer, which is these rewards cards."

"Rampant consumerism is really fucking cancerous as part of a lot of capitalist systems."

"They fucking marketed it to you to feed you crap."

"Consumption snobbery is a real thing and it's a great helpful thing to tap into."

"Everything we've seen thus far has all just been corporations wanting to find new ways to monetize, new ways to extract from people's wallets."

"We shifted...from an empire of production to an empire of consumption."

"The truth is, quality is becoming something that is a thing of the past."

"One of the things I've noticed... is that during my lifetime, the word 'citizenship' seemed to be replaced by the word 'consumer,' which I always thought was a bad replacement."

"It's a satirical look into everyday struggles and dealing with the fact that we live in a consumerist culture."

"Wish is a fun place. It's like the promise of saving you money, but the number of items that show up that are just abominable and you cannot use them at all... Did it save you money? Yeah, so we're gonna waste Alex's money to find out if it's a waste of money."

"We don't think about that much, do we? We go to the grocery store, we get whatever we want."

"We've got rows and rows of canned whatever. These things are already preserved for us."

"Damn, you guys ever think about consumerism and capitalism?"

"Flex culture might be here to stay, but there is one way we can kill it, and that is with self-awareness."

"Stop buying so much stuff. It's one of the biggest things that you can do to reduce your waste."

"The people of Wall-E's world were only interested in quick and easy pleasure; overexploitation of the planet to provide these pleasures have left it as a barren wasteland."

"I had to make that change. And so within that, I started de-cluttering. And within starting to get rid of my stuff and really paying attention to what I owned, not only did it make me understand how much I had spent. But it also, over time, helped me sort of curb that compulsion to shop all the time, because I had started to familiarize myself with what I already owned."

"It's an examination not only of our own modern-day consumerist culture, but of the human condition itself: the ways we find meaning both in ourselves and in the world around us."

"People have so much money that they're willing to waste it on the dumbest stuff."

"The self-help industry is a huge business and it is reliant on you not being content for you to continue consuming the goods and services that it produces."

"With every online purchase...it's basically free money on a purchase you would have made anyway."

"If we allow [markets] to tell us what to want, what they will do is explore every defect of human character and exploit it to somebody's benefit but not to our collective benefit."

"This world is going to keep moving whether you buy this stuff or not."

"The self-help industry is a huge business and it is relying on you not being content for you to continue consuming the goods and services that it produces."

"Fallout 76 has one plot, one moral, one law: shop till you drop, then respawn and shop again."

"The guiding principle: shopping but make it feminist."

"If you can't trust the reviews, how do you know what you're buying?"

"Using a product that is intentionally inferior...solely based on taste and hype rather than actual efficacy."

"The more money you spend, the more you feed consumerism and the more you stay in debt, and that's how 'the man' keeps everyone in line."

"Modern life has become defined by consumerism... forgetting about human relationships."

"You're not really saving the planet when you go out and buy a new cup every couple of years while your old ones end up in a thrift store or the landfill."

"Modern life has become defined by consumerism, where one's happiness depends on the attainment of material goods, often forgetting about human relationships."

"The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."

"Sustainability for me is a lot more than just not consuming fast fashion."

"Tick Tock has played a really big part in putting these ultra-fast fashion companies on a pedestal and promoting this excessive overconsumption."

"The story of disposable vapes is the story of our times: one of addicted customers, trapped in coercive consumer relationships, of cash-strapped state regulators struggling to bring rule-breaking corporations to heel."

"We're seeing a decrease in the size of products but an increase in the pricing, and this is skimpflation, which then turns into greedflation."

"We are not the customers of Big Tech; we're its products."

"How very nice and wonderful that I got it for the low, low price of free with my personalized promo code. What a money saver!"

"This tongue-in-cheek mockumentary was intended to be a commentary on the vapid consumerist mindset."

"The real job creators are the American consumers because that's where most of the demand comes from."

"If you're not paying for a product, you are the product."

"As 86% of consumers, we, women need to consume better, we need to consume more consciously."

"Children are not cash cows to exploit for profit."

"Who could seriously live with themselves for buying a bottle? The thing is, the reason it’s so expensive is that it’s not just the 'purest and softest vodka', but because when it was made the water flowed over diamonds."

"It's a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled branded consumer product."

"It's no longer about 'What do the fans want?' but rather 'What can we get away with?'"

"As Americans, we make a ton of trash, the most in the world. We actually have made more trash by three times since 1960. We keep buying more and throwing it away."

"The squandering and waste of resources is no longer a societal taboo, but an active part of the capitalist machine."

"You have to market food first because in a kind of dark statement on consumerism, nobody actually wants anything you're buying until you force them to want it first."

"The commodity has become a fetish... we are no longer a society of human beings; we're a society of things."

"They don't want you fixing something and getting another two years of life out of it; they want you to go back to the store and buy a new one."

"The slogan of young consumers has changed from 'Are you cutting off your hand?' to 'Save 100% by not buying.'"

"If you buy things you don't need, soon you will have to sell things you need."

"I happen to be one of those people who'd get shoes or any item of clothing repaired if I can rather than just throw it away."

"There is no ethical consumption under a capitalist organization of the economy."

"But here's the thing, nobody has ever, throughout the entirety of history, been expected to own the quantity of clothes that fast fashion allows us to accumulate today."

"I would rather spend my money on things that cost 10% of my current car that make me 200% happier than to spend 200% of the price of my current car to only get 10% happier."

"Stop giving your money to companies that hate you. Start spending your money and your dollars wisely, support businesses that support you."

"We are a nation in pursuit. We pursue just about everything you could imagine, not only wealth and relationships, clothing, gadgets... We're after this and after that and after the other, that's who we are."

"Americans are now spending an average of $322.88 every year on skincare, totaling an incredible $15,000 in their lifetime."

"I'm a real consumer. Every single phone that you see me review on this channel is the phone that I bought myself, so I got no reason to be biased, and I got no reason to give you out no bogus information."

"I hate when you upgrade your phone and it feels like you're buying the same phone twice."

"Those liquid lips are so beautiful and the colors are so gorgeous that even if it was like talc, synthetic this and that, I'd be like, okay, Dior, bring it to me."

"I felt so happy that somebody trusted me enough to spend their money on something that I recommended."

"If you weren't charged for whatever you were entering the information for, well, unfortunately, if there's no price, you're the product."

"Planned obsolescence is turning everyone into mass consumers."

"There's no such thing as a free market. Markets are invented by guys who have stuff that they want to sell."

"Why would we be okay consuming sex at her expense?"

"Authenticity and vulnerability is the enemy of consumer capitalism and is the enemy of the social media platforms."

"If you buy things that you don't need one day, you'll have to sell the things that you do need."

"You see, a man will never love you or treat you as well as a store."

"Planned obsolescence - it’s an insidious thing."

"The Centennial Light, an incandescent light bulb that has been burning nearly continuously since 1901, surely proves that light bulbs never truly 'need' to burn out."

"What funeral companies try to sell us. What we really want. Yeah, the Viking sendoff, man. That's what we all want, right?"

"Always less product is better than more product, and we know for sure that hats don't cause cancer."

"We've allowed these companies to have access to our minds, our homes, our fingerprints, and now our DNA because we believed we were the customer when we were actually the product."

"We're so bombarded with stuff that the question 'what are we going to do with it?' isn't a natural question. But 'why did we invent so much stuff?' is a more fascinating question."

"One film in Pixar's catalogue truly shows us the dangers of the rampant consumerism in today's culture."

"It's a statement on the human desire to accumulate more and more and more useless stuff that just becomes garbage, meaningless trash that eventually cycles back to becoming meaningless trash."

"The earth has been transformed into a post-apocalyptic wasteland; left in a ruined state by humanity's wasteful consumerism."

"I, in my personal life, have become a lot more happy in rejecting that consumerist mentality. When I spend my money, I spend on quality items that are going to last."

"People probably buy too much... It's really trying to understand what pieces reflect you."

"But as anyone who has seen Andy Warhol's soup cans knows, this wouldn't be the first time that an underground artist's performative critique of consumerism was appropriated by the very culture it's set out to critique."

"Consumption itself is a flawed motivational platform for a society."

"The goal for corporations is to maximize profit and market share, and they also have a goal for their target, namely the population: they have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want."

"Etsy is great. I love shopping on Etsy, especially when the holidays come around."

"The institutions want you dead... They want you barely alive, sick, fat, and in debt."

"Beer should not have a political party. I don't need every single product that I get to have a political party attached to it."

"Owning a thing just because it's some historically significant special object doesn't mean anything when it clearly means so little to you that you were willing to buy a tiny speck of it that the company allegedly smashed on purpose."

"Who cares introducing the $120 soul-sucking toad bag."

"Create your own world and live in your own world, and don't buy it. Like everything that they're selling you is so that they can make money off of you as puppets."

"Companies are releasing more products than necessary."

"If Amazon returns, or being repackaged and sold to people at a discount instead of being disposed of, then we wouldn't have to have this question about whether it's better or worse to bury plastic or burn it."

"The way the world works is when you spend money, you vote for something. My whole goal has been to remove as many of my dollars from supporting factory farming."

"A business model that is designed to force you to buy more is unethical at best, which in my mind is just another word for something that should be illegal, but just isn't yet."

"Stop trying to fool us into liking things just because you want us to like them because we won't."

"It's not complicated. Prefer items that last a long time."

"It seems like the corporations, with the money, just buy everybody out and everybody's a bot."

"We should pay no attention to the fact that things cost money."

"Just make dupes of more expensive products, not completely copying, just making dupes for people that can't afford the higher-end Brands."

"Know where your money goes and what you support with your hard earned dollars."

"I'm not saying you should go out and spend $45,000 on a couple melons, but I am saying that you should be more mindful of what you put your money towards."

"Yeah, I've never said 'Buy my nail polish to help me put food on the table.' Like that's bullshit."

"Who needs to spend loads on a TV when you can make it absolutely massive?"

"People like getting gift cards. This is complete permission to give gift cards."

"They give back with every purchase you make."