Showing posts with label Crass Consumption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crass Consumption. Show all posts
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed Consumer - ClubOrlov
Does permanent job loss mean that someone is no longer a consumer? In some cases the answer is yes: (But) some people continue to spend as if they still had a job, and the inevitable result is eventual destitution. Once they run out of unemployment benefits, savings and credit, their purchasing ability decreases to the barest minimum provided by food stamps. I don't mean to sound harsh, but this makes them rather uninteresting from a new product marketing perspective.
Friday, February 12, 2010Also see: Closing The Collapse Gap by Dimitry Orlov (@ Energybulletin.net), a point by point comparison of the collapse of the Russian economy compared to what might happen under similar circumstances in the U.S.
Products and Services for the Permanently Unemployed ConsumerDeveloping and marketing products for a shrinking market poses an interesting set of challenges. Even if a company does an outstanding job and is able to steadily grow its market share, these gains are negated if the market itself continually shrinks by an ever larger amount. For instance, a company might have an outstanding electric vehicle design, but it is destined to fall by the wayside during a time when the number of consumers that qualify for a car loan is trending downward, the used car market is glutted by repossessions, and federal, state and municipal governments are unable to upgrade their car fleets because their budgets are far in the red.
Consumer product development caters to individuals who live in houses or condos, have jobs to which they commute by car, and generate a steady stream of disposable income. This is the group to which the business press often refers collectively as 'the consumer': one often reads that the consumer is retrenching, that the consumer's credit is tapped out, that the consumer's disposable income is shrinking and so on. The consumer is not growing.
What is there left to do except design and manufacture fewer and fewer products?
The answer is as simple as it is surprising...
In Full @ ClubOrlov
In full @ Energybulletin.net
Monday, December 14, 2009
Tis' The Season To Ask Ourselves... "What Would Jesus Buy?"
"Join the joyous gritty anti-consumerists Reverend Billy, Savitri D and the 40-voice Life After Shopping Gospel Choir, as they tour the country trying to stop the shopping frenzy.
From Buy Nothing Day in Times Square... to Christmas Day in Disneyland in 30 days.
Produced Morgan Spurlock (Where In The World Is Osama bin-Laden) and directed by Rob Van Alkamade. Created in 2005, before the Great Recession, the film conjures much of the tragedy that has happened since. Amen!"
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Thought for the day: "Who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending?"
{Click the thumbnails for full size images):
The American victory over manifest evil in World War Two was so total that there was no one else left on earth to compete with in making and selling useful articles...
...at least for a while. And it produced a middle class so well-paid that it could express itself in a vast spewage of plastic and leisure across the land.The human race will look back on this society with wonder and nausea for whatever remains of its time on Earth. For at least twenty years, though, this way of life has been running on fumes, inertia, and promissory notes.
The amazing thing is that these life-extension strategies worked, especially the past ten years when there was really nothing left besides a Ponzi structure of interlocked swindles and rackets.
When the time comes when we do look back to understand what went wrong, I think we'll see that the Woodstock generation went off the rails in 1980, with the election of the actor, Ronald Reagan, who really established the idea that a society could benefit hugely just by lying to itself, or simply pretending...
[In Full at Clusterfuck Nation]
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