EU-DIGEST

Labels: Christmas, Commerce, Consumerism

Wal-Mart, Consumerism , Corporate Accountability and the WorkPlace

The success of Wal-Mart is in many ways paradoxical. The world’s biggest corporation -- and one of the most technologically sophisticated -- emerged from the poor, rural backwaters of Arkansas, a state regularly at the bottom of most state achievement rankings. Increasingly global in procurement and sales, it grew from a base that was racially homogenous -- a result of the violent expulsion of African-Americans -- and suspicious of all outsiders. A company that plays on “family values” is based in a region with one of the highest divorce rates in the United States. A region of low-income families adhering to a range of anti-materialist Protestant faiths gives birth to this colossus of consumerism. One of the ways its founder Walton tried to get employees -- and customers -- on his side was through the creation of conservative Christian “corporate populism”.

No doubt Wal-Mart’s conservative Christian corporate populism has played a big part in its success. But Wal-Mart also triumphed because of its cheap products, efficient distribution, mastery of information, anti-unionism and ability to dictate terms to vendors. But would it have become such a powerhouse if inequality had not grown so dramatically or if conservatives had not so demonized government, often with coded racial messages? Wal-Mart’s current reign may not last forever (just look at General Motors).

Labels: Consumerism, US, Wal-Mart

World Finacial Crises: The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America? - by Kurt Andersen

"Don't pretend we didn't see this coming for a long, long time. In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street's great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2007. From the beginning of the '80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%.

Labels: Consumerism, Economic Crises, EU, US

The backlash against bottled water

Consumer market:The backlash against bottled water - by Joannie Chianello

n the early 1990s, Evian had all its bases covered. Several years of trying to build its image around athletic, sweating bodies had paid off on both ends of the celebrity spectrum. Diana, Princess of Wales, drank Evian after working out at her exclusive London club -- and was occasionally photographed dashing from gym to car, bottle in hand. Meanwhile, a pre-family-values Madonna would drink the French water onstage at concerts. Her controversial documentary Truth or Dare provided the kind of publicity a company just can't buy in a scene where Madonna pleasures a bottle of Evian. Not long ago, bottled water was a foreign affectation. Before Perrier made it across the pond in 1976, the industry in North America was negligible. But the French water company brought with it a big marketing budget aimed at urban professionals, and hired Orson Welles, whose velvet tones confided that Perrier's "natural sparkle is more delicate than any made by man." By 1988, Perrier was selling 300 million bottles a year in the U.S., and had been joined in tony restaurants by the likes of Evian and Vittel.

How did something that seemed so innocuous, wholesome even, turn into a guilty pleasure, a symbol of everything that's wrong with consumer society? More than anything, though, the decline in sales is a consequence of widespread economic woes, as the recession spurs the usual rounds of belt-tightening and general rethinking of what is a necessity and what is a luxury. The fact that we're so quick to drop the bottle when times start to get a bit tough probably says more about its true place in our consumption hierarchy than all the arguments over carbon footprints, health benefits and overflowing landfills.

Note EU-Digest: what will be the next consumer product to go? Corn flakes, Cut flowers, or you name it.

Labels: bottled water, Consumerism, EU, US

USA - The consumer party is over - Shoppers find much to dislike about malls

Close your eyes and you could be in any mall, anywhere. At each end is an overstuffed department store with roving fragrance spritzers and makeup artists. In between are children's stores showing pink clothes on the left, blue on the right, interspersed with teen clothing stores where the lighting is dim and the salespeople are rail-thin. Throw in numerous shoe stores. Hungry? Don't fret -- somewhere in this mall are warm cinnamon buns.Today's mall shoppers are underwhelmed by the nation's 1,200 enclosed and open-air lifestyle centers, filled with chain stores designed specifically for success in the mall environment. "People go to the mall and nothing stands out or makes the experience fun or exciting," Hoch adds. "There is no sense of discovery. Nothing catches the eye. It's the same restaurants and the same stores in every mall." Hoch predicts as much as 10 percent of the nation's retail infrastructure could disappear by the time the current recession ends.

Labels: Consumerism, Europe, USA

Consumers Keep Wallets Closed

After years of stellar growth rates of 20 percent and higher, e-commerce sales are poised to increase at a single-digit pace through 2012. Online retail sales growth is declining as the number of Internet buyers approaches saturation. The economic downturn adds additional downward pressure on sales.

eMarketer has lowered its U.S. retail e-commerce sales forecast due to the economic crisis. In 2008, online sales (excluding travel) will total $137 billion, up 7 percent year over year.
This will be the first year of single-digit growth since the U.S. Department of Commerce began estimating retail e-commerce sales in Q4 1999. Greater spending by incumbent online buyers is now the catalyst of e-commerce growth.

Labels: Consumerism, Economy

Does Anybody Else Think Getting You Shopping Again is Crazy Talk? - by by Dave Lindorf

Does Anybody Else Think Getting You Shopping Again is Crazy Talk? - by by Dafe LindorfThe problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services

This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels. First of all, we don’t need all this stuff. Is my life any better if I go from a 18-inch TV screen to a 60-inch TV screen? Is it, for that matter, any better if I go from an old cathode-ray tube to a flat screen digital display, or from no TV to a TV? Is my life any better if I buy a high-performance $50,000 BMW than if I drive a $20,000 Honda Civic, or even a $5000 used Toyota Corolla with extended warranty? Is my life any better if I live with my wife and my teenage son in a 4000-square-foot house than if I live in a 1800-square-foot or a 1200-square-foot house? The answer is no. The benefits, if there are any at all, are minuscule, and usually short-lived.

The good news is that this particular economic downturn in the US may prove to be more than just another turn of the business cycle, but rather, the beginning of the inexorable spiral of decline of the US as a global economic power. The corporations (along with the schools, churches and politicians) that have lured and tricked us all into this mad consumer scramble for more and more useless crap and momentary gratification have driven the country into a debt hole from which it will clearly be impossible to climb out. That may not sound like good news, but viewed from the perspective of the wider world it certainly is—especially if it bankrupts the American military machine, and slows the production of greenhouse gases. It could also be good news if it leads us, the American people, to rethink what our lives are really all about—if it leads us to start thinking of ourselves as part of a society, again, instead of just that incredibly insulting and derogatory term: “consumers.”

Labels: Consumerism, World Economy

The Era of Consumption Is Over - Dying of Consumption - by Stephen Roach

"It's game over for the American consumer. Inflation-adjusted personal consumption expenditures are on track for rare back-to-back quarterly declines in the second half of 2008 at a 3.5 percent average annual rate.There is a deeper, potentially positive, meaning to all this: Consumers are now abandoning the asset-dependent spending and saving strategies they embraced during the bubbles of the past dozen years and moving back to more prudent income-based lifestyles. This is a painful but necessary adjustment. Since the mid-1990s, vigorous growth in American consumption has consistently outstripped sub-par gains in household income. This led to a steady decline in personal saving. As a share of disposable income, the personal saving rate fell from 5.7 percent in early 1995 to nearly zero from 2005 to 2007.

Labels: Consumerism, Economy, USA

Britain - Shop till you drop: Australian developer launches Europe's largest shopping complex in West London

Australia's Westfield Group has opened the biggest shopping centre in Europe, spending euro 2.08 billion (US $ 2.65b) on the project in West London. It is to be proceeded by an even bigger development by Westfield at the 2012 Olympic Site in East London. The timing is unfortunate given the fact that Britain is on the brink of recession and that consumer spending it set to fall in the next 12 months after a decade of solid growth.It is to be proceeded by an even bigger development by Westfield at the 2012 Olympic Site in East London.

Labels: Britain, Consumerism, EU, Retailing

When Virtue Is a Vice - by Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz

Though we all have guilty pleasures, our day-to-day decisions are usually governed by a deep-seated sense that we’d be better off in the long run if we favored work over leisure, necessities over luxuries, and saving money over impulsively spending it. But would we be happier? Our research shows that forgoing indulgences today can feed strong regrets later, and that near-term regrets about self-indulgence dramatically fade with time. These responses are so strong that we were able to influence people’s buying behavior simply by asking them to anticipate their long-term regrets. One of our studies—published in the Journal of Consumer Research—explored the regret felt by college students over their conduct on recent winter breaks and by alumni remembering winter breaks of 40 years ago. Regret about not having spent or traveled more during breaks increased with time, whereas regret about not having worked, studied, or saved money during breaks decreased with time. We saw a similar pattern in a study of how businesspeople perceived past choices between work and pleasure. Over time, those who had indulged felt less and less guilty about their choices, whereas those who had been dutiful experienced a growing sense of having missed out on the pleasures of life.

Labels: Consumerism

Movie - "What would Jesus buy?" Pastor Billy is Revving up Americans to drop their obsession with shopping - by Suzy Jagger

"The Movie - "What would Jesus buy?" is revving up Americans to drop their obsession with shopping. It is about the antics of Bill Talen, a screen-writer who became so concerned about the influence of global corporations such as Walt Disney, Starbucks and Wal-Mart, and America’s obsession with shopping that he created the character of the Reverend, now the subject of a new film by Morgan Spurlock. While Mr Talen’s character is fictional, his message is genuine. The film, "What Would Jesus Buy?", opened in the US last week, and follows the actor, who tries to use the comedic preacher to urge Americans to question why they spend and consider the true cost of their purchases.

While Americans’ obsession with shopping has helped build the US to be the wealthiest country in the world with an economy valued at $13.9 trillion, the other side of the coin is that Americans have run up a combined consumer debt bill of $2.4 trillion. For the first time since the Great Depression, American households have a savings rate on average of zero – they spend all they earn.

Note EU-Digest: Last year, American shoppers spent $456.2 billion in retail holiday sales, accounting for 19.59 percent of industry sales, according to statistics from the National Retail Federation. The federation is predicting that US holiday sales for 2007 will be 4 percent higher than 2006. So, if the federation is correct, holiday sales will be $474.5 billion. The growth could be the lowest increase in shopping activity since 2002, when sales only increased 1.3 percent. Those data conflict with the 22nd annual survey of holiday spending by the American Research Group, in which the average shopper says he is going to spend $859 this year, down 5 percent from the $907 spent last year."

"What would Jesus buy" should also be an excellent movie for Europeans to see. They too, are hard on the way to becoming as addicted to shopping as the Americans. Pastor Billy says in the movie: “We seek satisfaction by shopping, by buying more and more things, and seem to be more and more dissatisfied.” Isn't that the truth - all we have to do is look at how our own children have become excessively consumer oriented by wicked advertising gimmicks, and as a result more prone to crime, drugs, and obeseity "

Labels: Cinema, Consumerism, EU, Jesus, US

Consumer Culture Vs. Civic Values - by Kimberly Palmer

In Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, political theorist and University of Maryland Prof. Benjamin Barber argues that we have shifted from a "work hard" ethic to one that idealizes immediate gratification and selfishness. In the process, he says, we have lost our sense of civic responsibility. He points to high divorce rates, adults who act the way kids do, and the glorification of shopping as Americans' new national pastime. In an E-mail interview, U.S. News asked him why he was so dismayed with consumer culture.

Labels: Consumerism