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Extravagant?
Pop psychology!
No kidding
What a leap: 19th cent. To atomic age.
Chicken or the egg? Who created the demand?
Stereotype
“pert” nose? I think Packard made up this whole episode.
So what’s so bad about this?
She’s probably making more money than her parents did.
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Americans traditionally have liked to think of themselves as a frugal, hard-working, God-fearing people making sacrifices for the long haul. They have exalted such maxims of Ben Franklin as: "A man may, if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose to the grindstone."
Puritanical traits were esteemed necessary to survival by the settlers struggling to convert forest and prairie into a national homeland. By the nineteenth century, however, a flamboyant streak was beginning to emerge clearly in the American character. Emerson observed that Americans, unlike Europeans, exhibited "an uncalculated, headlong expenditure." As more and more Americans found themselves living in metropolitan areas, hedonism as a guiding philosophy of life gained more and more disciples. People sought possessions more than formerly in emulation of, or competition with, their neighbors. Quite possibly, the environment of thickly settled areas brought a lessening of serenity and a feeling of being swallowed up that impelled the people to strive for distinctive emblems and gratification through consumption. The growing availability of manufactured goods undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the rise in hedonism. The upheaval of wars and the uncertainty of life in an atomic era also contributed to the life-for-the-moment spirit.
During the fifties, however, another force came powerfully into play in the promotion of hedonism. Many marketers, as a calculated strategy, sought to promote a mood of self-indulgence in order to promote sales. The puritanical inhibitions of Americans were seen as blocking consumers from enjoying the wondrously rich, full new life that marketers were ready and eager to provide. . . .
The joys of self-indulgence were stressed, consciously or unwittingly, in many sales messages. A New York department store told women in a full-page advertisement: "Even If You Own a Dozen Coats, You Can't Afford to Miss. ..." A San Francisco store featuring luxurious fixtures and accessories for bathrooms beckoned passers-by with the sign, "PAMPER YOURSELF! ..."
An elderly supermarket operator in Indianapolis shook his head sadly as he pointed out to me all the "convenience" foods he was selling to bridge-playing wives. He muttered: "The husband works all day and then comes home to a dinky little рге-cooked pot pie." He said he would not permit them in his own home. Ready-to-serve meals are likely to cost up to 50 percent гроге than home-prepared meals.
He told of jesting with one young redheaded wife who was inspecting his bakery-made cherry pies. He asked her why she didn't make one herself. She replied: "I wouldn't know how to begin." This elderly man began showing her by listing the ingredients. When he said "shortening," she asked "What's that?" He explained and began showing her how to roll out the crust. She wrinkled her " pert nose and said, "It sounds terribly messy. I think I'll take this one here." Hundreds of wives, he told me with a shrug, buy his expensive jars of chicken a la king every week when ,, they could make it themselves for less than a third the cost. ...
Still another aspect of the promotion of hedonism, we should note, has been the drive to make Americans more impulsive in their shopping habits. Du Pont found that impulse buying in supermarkets had soared nearly a third in a decade. Supermarkets changed from being simple, stripped-down marts designed to pass on the economies of mass buying to the consumer. Originally they operated on a slim 12 percent markup. Now the supermarkets have become shimmering carnivals offering free automobiles as prizes, offering premiums, trading stamps, soft music, and hundreds of packages that have been shrewdly designed, at considerable expense, to present an imagery that will cry out to the passing shopper: "Grab me!" The result of all these changes in the supermarkets is that markups have risen on the average to nearly 20 percent.
Perhaps the most impressive report on the swing to hedonism was made by the research division of The Chicago Tribune. Its study, entitled The New Consumer, was based on a $100,000 study of homemakers from three different social layers in the suburbs of Chicago. At all three levels a trend toward hedonism was evident. Mr. Martineau, director of research and marketing for the Tribune, summed up the findings of the investigators as they related to this trend in these words:
There has been a shift from the philosophy of security and saving to a philosophy of spending and immediate satisfaction ... more self-indulgent spending, a tendency to equate standard of living with possession of material goods. ...
One wife said that the difference between herself and her parents was that she buys "new furniture and lamps because we get tired of looking at them any longer." Another woman said; "Today, we're always looking tobuy something that's a time saver so that we can have more time to relax and enjoy life." Still another woman said that when she and her husband buy draperies, rugs, and furniture they hope the goods "don't last as long as our parents' did."
Women in the . . . community of Home Town, primarily a working-class and lower-white-collar suburb, revealed this same fascination with accumulating material things. The report stated that in Home Town "the gadget . . . becomes the symbol of 'finer living.'"
Vance Packard
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Really?
What caused this “flamboyance”? Perhaps Americans only had more opportunity.
Then again, maybe it didn’t.
Are customers really the helpless victims of such appeals?
Perhaps time is important: Evidently it is to those who buy the pies.
Condescending
My, we are so helpless.
I wonder what his source is for this figure?
What else?
Why not?
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