The Idea of progress : the consumer society

Idear of progress

The notion I am going to deal with is idear of progress, for me the progress is what makes people’s lives better (economically, socially) and the topic of my presentation is the Consumer society. We can wonder in what extent our purchasing in power can play an important role in the world arounds us. We will see at first today’s consumer society and its negative consequences. Then we will see a consumption pattern that we should follow to avoid these consequences

to begin with the consumer society has rather negative consequences such as over consumption which means that people live beyond their means, they borrow money live on credit. it transforms people, they want to show off or make people jalous.

- In order to illustrate this notion, I will take the example a drawing where we see mad buyers rushing, it shows that is compulsive buyers and they’re shopaholics.

- Another example could be days when stores make big sales for encourage customers to buy. People go to buy items on sale, they think they are getting a goof deal, When in reality they buy more than they need. The history of Walmart a employee was trampled to death by frienzied customers on balck friday as a door didn’t open fast enough, the crowd go out of control and broke the doors hillink the man. I have chosen this story because it shows that some buyer goes frenzied for sales.

However, there are different ways to avoid this

- Like second hand shopping, To reduce the consequences of our consumption we could try second-hand shopping, which as we have studied on the document « Reasons to shop second-hand » this second-hand shopping has a lot of advantages such as low prices, good for the planet…

-Finaly many campaigns are organized to fight against over consumption, I take the example of “Buy Nothing Today”, as its name suggests, it’s intended for consumer, everywhere, particulary Americans to reconsider their spending habits and take a moment to consider what rampant consumerism does to the earth. These campaigns try to improve society and they succeed because it is tkanks to them that there are no plastics bags in the stores

to conclude we have seen that there are negative consequences for our consumption mode, but that there are solutions, not perfect solution but they can improve all that. For me we can not continue like this, we will have to change our consumption. And despite the many disadvantages of online shopping it may be one of the solutions or Second-hand shopping that can make a difference in today’s world

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