This country has a weird obsession with brands and status. Remember my encounter with the Williams-Sonoma clerk and his insistence that ONLY All-Clad is suitable for an induction cooktop?
The same is true with clothes: Take a perfectly nice shirt (usually made by slave labor) stick an advertisement for some designer on it, double the price, and the teenagers and other fashion-insecure types snatch them up by the dozens.
...and don't get me started with the people who think class means a new car with all sorts of tacky accent packages, or a stereo that allows you to share your music with the neighborhood....
The subliminal message that "new=high status" is all over TV, where the characters live in ridiculous homes that regular people can't afford, and are so full of product placements that you can hardly follow the plot. Tacky, overly sentimental reality shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" tell us that instead of regular homes, we need shoddy McMansions full of crap. (Funny how they never follow up on how the unfortunates who are given those houses manage to pay their taxes and utilities on these super-sized houses)
Planned obsolescence and the concept of new models made sense in a society where we were making things - we had to keep the factories humming - but what's the point of it now, when everything comes from some awful third world country?
The same is true with clothes: Take a perfectly nice shirt (usually made by slave labor) stick an advertisement for some designer on it, double the price, and the teenagers and other fashion-insecure types snatch them up by the dozens.
...and don't get me started with the people who think class means a new car with all sorts of tacky accent packages, or a stereo that allows you to share your music with the neighborhood....
The subliminal message that "new=high status" is all over TV, where the characters live in ridiculous homes that regular people can't afford, and are so full of product placements that you can hardly follow the plot. Tacky, overly sentimental reality shows like "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" tell us that instead of regular homes, we need shoddy McMansions full of crap. (Funny how they never follow up on how the unfortunates who are given those houses manage to pay their taxes and utilities on these super-sized houses)
Planned obsolescence and the concept of new models made sense in a society where we were making things - we had to keep the factories humming - but what's the point of it now, when everything comes from some awful third world country?
