Massez consumption in America

Mass Consumption in America

Emna Rabai

Mediterranean School of Business

G3

Mass consumption is defined as mass production and a system of mass sales which implies an ever-increasing availability of goods in a culture that favors buying and selling, desire and consumerist identities. Although this paper builds on and borrows elements from the emerging field of consumer studies, its purpose is limited to the manifestations of mass consumption commonly associated with America in the twentieth century.  This article provides an interpretation of the history of the American model of mass consumption in the United States.

Mass consumption is developed in parallel with two other phenomena specific to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: industrial mass production and mass psychology techniques, based on new media and appropriate psychological tools. Although mass consumption is not an exclusively American one, as the work among others by Lisa Tiersten and Victoria de Grazia has shown, the United States is what many observers perceive as the most dynamic, and possibly the most threatening. Discourses on "Americanization" and mass consumption have become closely intertwined throughout the twentieth century.

This article focuses on the characteristics of the American model of mass consumption as it has been established in the United States during the twentieth century. This American model developed as an answer to the problems of wealth and the need to constantly find new markets. The article then looks at the export of American images and goods, as American leaders chose to export their mass consumption patterns to the world as a whole. It then shows that in the 1970s and 1980s the attractiveness of mass consumption became very varied and adapted to the "local", a process known as "glocalisation" or "multilocalism" ( Robertson, 1995). Consequently, mass consumption no longer automatically connoted "Americanization", as it did for much of the twentieth century. The spread of multi-local consumption played an important role in the end of the Cold War. The article concludes by suggesting that mass consumption was in practice very flexible to seduce all cultures, even if it continues to reflect an anachronistic conception dating back to the late nineteenth century, based on the need to stimulate demand Uninterrupted in a world of abundant resources.

Historical context

First, the American model of mass consumption depends on the intensive use of the continent's natural resources, considered to be inexhaustible. In a second phase, entrepreneurs sought technological solutions to face the country's vast continental distances and its relative lack of labor power. The emerging consumer society was based on technological innovations that accelerated revolutions in transport, communications and mass production. In the late 1890s, the revolution in transportation (and therefore in marketing) and the labor economy in agriculture and industry created many of the giant American companies whose names - and Consumer goods - were to become famous in the next century (Lamoreaux, 1985). The emerging domestic market accelerated a distribution system that could easily extend beyond US borders.                

In fact, the production capacity of the United States became so vast that when a global phase of economic contraction created a cycle of depression in the 1890s, businessmen, politicians and journalists all concluded that overproduction And not the scarcity of goods) had become the main social problem of the time. Using this astonishing wealth, America contradicted the dominant scientific discourses in Europe, based on the idea of ​​economic rarity. Simon Nelson Patten, for example, felt that "the rarity period" was replaced by an "age of wealth" in which workers could boast of their upward mobility and broaden their horizons. In many works, including The New Basis of Civilization (1907), Patten believed that greater wealth could be the driving force behind a process of global civilization (Lears, 1994). Finding buyers for mass-produced goods became a major concern for US exporters and politicians, and many historians felt that attraction to potential overseas markets had been at the root of US foreign policy at the dawn of the twentieth century. The conquest of markets, both abroad and within, became essential for prosperity and growth.

During the twentieth century, consumption offered a shifting semiotics of inclusion and exclusion of the imaginary American community. Leisure and consumer culture in the United States defined ideas about democracy and helped to erase certain ethnic and class divisions. By participating in the Republic of Consumers in the early twentieth century, the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews slowly became "white" and "Americans." Certainly, individuals from Africa, Asia, speaking Spanish, or of Indian origin felt strongly excluded from this nationalism. After the Second World War, however, the images of the national community changed gradually. Groups previously perceived as different were now welcome as members of an expanded vision of this nation of consumers. Moreover, during the 1970s and 1980s, advertisers endeavored to seduce ethnic minorities by segmenting the market, inviting Irish-Americans to fly to Ireland and African Americans to buy black Barbies. Being "American" at the end of the twentieth century, almost by definition, meant having "roots" in other parts of the world (Chambers, 2008) . Mass consumption, then, was not only central to modern American economic life but constructed and reconstructed representations of identity and citizenship.

Advertising

During the 1920s, advertising became an art of psychological suggestion. Its purpose was to transform membership and loyalty into a product in such a way that the latter would appear to be the result of a personal and deliberate choice (Leach, 1994).  Moreover, American advertisers believed that their social role depended more on the supply of products specific to consumers than on the construction of groups of buyers whose loyalty could then be sold to producers. Under the influence of advertising pioneers like Edward Bernays, advertisers used new techniques based on psychology and social surveys. While advertisements in the European tradition continued essentially to associate products with artistic images that appealed to business leaders, Americans sought to understand what could motivate consumers, their needs and desires.

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