Marketing drives the consumer society
"creating awareness"
i.e. making you buy goods you don't need
They say that the average UK home has £4000 of unused items just 'hanging around' - which makes you wonder why you bought them in the first place?
The problem is we live in a 'consumer' society. Since we started living in fixed abodes, we have evolved beyond daubing cave walls and home styling has taken on a new mantle of acquisition, we are all guilty of this to some extent.
With Christmas approaching soon, we are faced with the annual consumer splurge. The consumer racket has hijacked this religious festival as it has with Halloween and Easter.
The consumer society is part of an analogous ball of attraction, an ethereal but solid looking piece of legerdemain. It looks solid but it isn't. It is a falsely created self-perpetuating system that has to 'perform' or die.
If you work in sales, companies are always looking for 'increased sales' and higher and higher targets. The reality is that there is only so much business out there.
Markets change as the buying demographic does. The people with the biggest spend are the older generation and as they die off, so does your income stream.
They say that the average credit card debt is £7000. Yes, £7000! I don't have any and many people I know have far less than that, so who has these massive amounts of credit? That's a frightening statistic.
Beyond the spending, we should consider the resources that go into our 'false economy' that we have created and we call the 'consumer society.'
We have limited resources on this planet and a growing population, that is not a good metric. We see immigration for largely financial reasons these days, half the world wanting to move to the 1st world.
This is not workable and is leading to trouble in mainland Europe, beyond the imported terrorism that comes from those that sneak in as 'migrants.'
We really need to say we need to revise our lifestyles. But that would be a difficult thing to accept politically. Money makes economies and countries function, or not, if it is not there.
The onset of mass automation is creating mass unemployment with jobs lost to automation. This is a signal our world has to change, but those in charge are just hunkering down, pulling up their collars and trying to keep the wind of change from their necks.
They are failing to see the future that will come. If they fail to plan now, then it will be much worse when the arse eventually falls out of their trousers.
The fate of the High Street is going this way too. With BHS relaunched Frankenstein-like (i.e. resurrected from the dead by electricity) as an on-line only business, ala the Amazon style of model, possibly, then if BHS can't make it on the High Street, it won't be long before others shut the doors and go on-line.
Once the big beasts desert the High Street, the High Streets become ghost towns, full of coffee shops, charity shops and the odd independent trader hanging on until their lease expires or their retirement is reached.
Is anyone looking to the future? Or just shrugging it off as 'tomorrow'.
What are we working for? Largely to service mortgages and a consumer lifestyle. Society has to change and will have to when the 9 million jobs are no longer in the workplace by 2026. The workplace has changed markedly over the last 5 years, in the last 20 years, work has become harder to come by with recessions and cutbacks.
The DWP has to change to, the model is a dinosaur that is out of date. And an expensive dinosaur too. It needs to address 'tomorrow', when jobs won't be there and we will be back to home crafting as happened before the industrial revolution.
But this scenario would allow us when Basic Income Guarantee comes in, to better ourselves.
Until such times, we are on the treadmill of consumerism.
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