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Consumption is the visible part of the whole process of current consumption. It is when all of the production is shown to the world, and it is very important to really know who is the public that you are selling and really utilize the right strategies of marketing. Also, when we think about consumption it is really present in consumerism, that is the action of buying too many things that you don't really need. For example, if you have a computer that is starting to get old but a new computer is launched you really start wanting to buy this new computer even if your old one is still working.

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Buying second hand products: opting for second hand products is very useful to reduce consumption, nowadays there are alot of second hand shops with very high quality products.

Mindful consumption: before purchasing a different product ask yourself if you really need it and if it's going to be that useful for your life, because if not you might be affecting the environment.

Shop locally: shopping in local shops is not a way to end consumption but it is a better way of consuming without affecting so much the environment like big brands that use the strategy of fast fashion affects.

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The influencers effect on the perceived obsolescence:  

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The influencers effect on the perceived obsolescence:  

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https://www.tiktok.com/@lauradaniela/video/7318128715429498158

In this video, we have Laura Daniela, a quite famous influencer on tik tok (with 2.8M followers) talking about the act of "disinfluencing" their public. That is because, since she is an influencer and her job is to be an influencer, she receives new products a lot of time from a lot of brands so she can make money through advertisement, propaganda and sponsorship. So she receives those products to use them to receive again, and with that make money. The only problem with that is, when seeing a lot of these influencers talk about the same product and make an advertisement about a new product, people start to put in their minds that they "need" that product, forgetting about all the stuff (that sometimes are even new stuff) that they have. Laura herself said that people who don't work with the internet and social media don't need that, and that they only receive new products because that is the way they make money to survive, saying that it took a while to herself realize that there are people with 30 blushes but in reality she just needs 1, or maybe two to feel more "cool". But as the time passed she understood that those girls who have a lot of make ups, for example, only need to buy new blushes so they can make advertisements, be on trend and be updated about the new released products from that brand.

Other subject she makes clear that disturbed her is the clothes. People are getting scared to use the same clothes. "Do you think maybe that person thinks it's normal to not use the same clothes? Do you think maybe she/he thinks that you wear a cloth one time and then throw it away?". This shows how we think we should have the newest things everytime, buying the trending things that soon will not be trendy anymore and we will throw them away. Laura works with skin care products, so she receives a lot of products to make propaganda, but she knows she doesn't need to buy 50 lipsticks like make up influencers do or have a closet with 10.000 billion different clothes like a fashion influencer does. The thing is "do we need it? Or is it just because it's trendy? Or it's just because that influencer has x numbers of this so I need to have x numbers of this too, even though I'm not an influencer?". Influencers don't often show their product to show how many things they have and how updated they are with the new trends, but to make money.

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Perceived obsolescence is a strategy of mainly big companies of making a product that is  often changed through time or launched different types of this same product but with a different appearance or a new function that drives their consumers to buying this new product even if your old one still works perfectly. Making people buy more without the necessity of buying a new product. This strategy is often used by technology brands and very successful because of the necessity of people, especially teenagers, for always being on trend and always having the newest product launched.

Ex: Iphone, every year the multinational brand Apple launches a new type of Iphone with a different camera or a little difference on its function making their consumers wanting to buy this new iPhone even if they already bought a new one last year, always increasing their prices to make it even more beneficial to them.

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Planned obsolescence is a strategy of companies that design a product that is made to break quickly. This happens because the companies want to keep the people buying the products, even though sometimes they aren't that advanced or don't have a new technology on it. It is very difficult to end this strategy, since a lot of companies are dependent on it and if they don't use this strategy their economy will break. However, it is very important for it to end, since with planned obsolescence we end up buying a lot of things that could be able to last longer, but since it was programmed to last a bit, we end up wasting a lot of materials that were very hard to make, in which a lot of resources from nature were used. Because of  that, is very important on the other hand to find a balance between the countries/companies economy and the nature, since if those companies continue to use planned obsolescence there will be a moment where there isn't going to have enough resources and the products won't be able to be made because of the missing materials.

This strategy started approximately in 1914, when a global organization known as Phoebus Cartel created a plan to increase sales, creating a lamp that only lasted 1000 hours, being one of the first examples of planned obsolescence.

It is also important to differentiate it from perceived obsolescence, since in that one you are the one who wants to change your product/device, no matter if it is working or not. In the planned obsolescence you have no choice of choosing to stay with that device, having to buy another, and spending money on something you didn't want to, different from the perceived obsolescence.

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"Girls Math"- what it is and how it related to consumerism:

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"Girls Math"- what it is and how it related to consumerism:

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"Girl Math" is a trend on tiktok that has become very popular, in which the girls try to justify their spends , that in the end is very good for humor but very unlogic. Even though it's just a trend, "Girl Math" is not a new thing and has been spread all over the world, in a way that people really try to justify their spending with it.

This thinking contains the idea that "cash" ( physical money) isn't a true money, or even valid money, meaning that they can use it as much as they want, that it wouldn't have a real consequence, since "it isn't affecting their current account" and it is not a money that will affect on their financial status, suggesting that their purchased were basically "for free". But girl math has much more. This type of thinking has extended even in platforms of gift card or cashbacks, making people think that this money is a "bonus" or even a money that they won't miss, encouraging even more girls to buy more and more things.

The only problem with that is, since a lot of girls  start to notice that they aren't the only ones who think that way, they start to normalize those actions. However, a finance specialist, Tori Dunlap, says that it is very dangerous to normalize those justifications to those actions, "covering" the financial impulsive and not planned decisions. She affirms that, for example, spending $5 in a coffee everyday could easily affect the personal finances, with that money being accumulated little by little and then without noticing you are spending a lot of money in a coffee that you don't even like it but you just drink it because it is "aesthetic" or "trendy". Another problem that can appear is the stereotype a lot of women receive due to this illogical thinking, with a lot of guys saying that women can't be working in finance or are very bad at taking care of their spendings, etc.

Manisha Thakor, an expert from Harvard, said that it is very important to have a balance between financial health and emotional wealth, suggesting that there a lot of people living in the belief of "never having enough", with their achievement being having certain product or a certain number of products from a company/brand. However, it is very important to understand that there are not only girls that are moved by this impulsive consumption, but also boys. Many people, when practicing the "girl math" method, don't realize that they are trying to justify consumerism, or even to not call what they are doing "consumerism".

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Consumption is connected to the necessity of buying something with an important utility, like food, clothes and medicine. While consumerism is when you feel the need to consume all the time in a exaggerated way, without really needing anything new. What can be easily become a obsession.

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1. As the time passed, we got very used to people going shopping and buying things that they actually don't need, with this action being called consumerism. However, people don't simply just go and buy everything they see, they start buying some products from some store and start buying more frequently from that place. This happens because of the companies that use strategies to attract the right public and to keep them as their loyal client, who will stay buying the products. Some of these strategies are:

Sale:The first strategy from companies that influence people buying is the famous "sale". The sale is a good strategy that influences the consumption, where people end up buying more products than they would usually buy. That is because with the sale, a lot of people think that it is more worth buying a lot of things at a cheaper price than buying later at a higher price.

Management system: it is very common that sometimes a store has data about their catalog clients, so they can create exclusive offers for them,  for example. The management system is a software that allows to obtain different tasks, information and processes that are operated in a company. It is basically an organization system that allows better control of your client's data. It is very important to register your clients data, so you can actually "chat" with people who buy and are interested in your products, influencing them to return and buy products again from your store.  It is also important to establish a good relation with the people who buy your products, so that they can stay tuned to what is happening in the store, new products, etc.

Communication: it is crucial to have good communication in the store. Imagine this situation: there is a good and interesting campaign going on in that store, but when it comes to the paying methods, purchase conditions and  offers, no one knows what is the right thing to do and the right information to pass to the client. With that, it's important to understand that a good communication system not only influences the flow of the sales but also influences the impression the client gets when buying something from that store.If they  have a good experience, they will probably feel pleased when leaving that store, thinking of coming back and even recommending it to their friends. If not, they will probably search for somewhere else to buy similar products, talking about their uncomfortable and stressful experiences to their friends.

Placement of your products: have you ever thought about how long your products are in the same place? The act of changing the products position gives a "news' ' feeling, so that people think that your store is always producing new things and with that everyone starts looking for your clothes in other ways, being something more special and relevant. For instance, Zara is always producing small batches of clothes so every week they can change and can be giving the "news" look.

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There are a lot of consequences of consumerism. One of them is the waste. Because of the excessive consumption, there are a lot of waste, since people buy stuff they don't need. That has a serious impact on the environment, such as water and air pollution. With the new trends coming up, people start to buy trending products and throw away their old goods. However, the way that they are thrown away isn't sustainable, with a lot of clothes, for example, taking a very long time to decompose. The main problem is that it takes approximately 6 months for us to change our whole closet, products and foods, due to trends, but depending on what kind of material our clothes are made from, it can take much time to decompose. For example, while clothes made of cotton may take a few months to decompose, or pure linen can take two weeks to decompose, a cloth made of wool can take 1 to 5 years to decompose. But there are other materials which are worse, like a polyester/nylon/spandex cloth that takes approximately 200 years to decompose. This shows that we are having a lot of natural resources being taken from the Earth very quickly to make clothes that will last on someone's wardrobe for 6 months that will maybe take 200 years to decompose, so the organic materials can finally return to nature to nourish soil. Resources are being taken too quickly if we think about how long it takes them to grow again. according to  https://www.theworldcounts.com, we are overusing the world natural resources with more than 70%. "If everyone on earth lived like the average American we would need 5.2 planets to support us. The number is 3 if everyone lived like the average Japanese and about 3.3 as Europeans."

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When can we say the consumer society started to grow? Well, historians say that the consumer society birth was registered variously from the XVI century until the mid-1900's. But  the answer to that depends on whether we think consumerism is, being defined as the feeling and meaning of buying and using large amounts of things. Is consumerism present in human lives all the time or is it just a trait that each one of us acquire? Of course, a thousand times ago there has always been an elite class where they enjoyed higher consumption habits, buying more things and buying more luxury  goods. There is a story that says that humans were already born that way, with the need of buying and having more good being a human nature, and so because of that, to have a consumer society all that is needed is to have a significant quantity of people who have more money than needed to buy the necessary things to survive.

In the eighteenth century, people who bought more than the necessary weren't considered as people who were becoming consumers. That is because of the power that the religion had back then, with the religious values teaching the acquisition of  materials  limits. Depending on which class you were from, you had to dress differently and had a different house display being dictated by tradition.

Unlike today, where we measure consumerism through our spending, it was very common to emphasize the wastes in the community, like the spending in constructing a new church, opposite from private spendings. The historical consensus is that the consumer society started to grow in mass from the Western Europe during the eighteenth century, and it's no coincidence that it is just the same moment and location that we have the Industrial Revolution growth, even though we can't say that it was the only reason for this growth. The Industrial Revolution was clearly the transformation of production, with things being produced with more quality, more quantity and faster, also transforming consumption, with social and economic changes. "The arrival of consumerism in Western Europe involved truly revolutionary change in the way goods were sold, in the array of goods available and cherished, and in the goals people defined for their daily lives​​​​.​​​​"

With the Industrial Revolution, people started to go to the huge cities and left the rural part of their countries, looking for jobs and opportunities, since machines had substituted them in the agricultural activities. Even though these people were searching for jobs and opportunities, they were also looking for a change of life, where they would define themselves through consumer goods. Shopkeepers started to create window displays, advertisements to attract the public, and other methods so they could sell their products. Plus, with the social classes breaking down, people started to feel free to express themselves, including showing their wealth, which in the past, would be illegal and  an act people wouldn't recommend you to do.

It's important to understand that the consumer society started to grow in the XVIII, but it took a while before it developed completely. At that time, at the beginning of industrialization, it wasn't clear that workers would actually become consumers. British industrialists started to complain that their workers were working until they got the salary they  usually got and then went home. It seemed that leisure was more important for them than increasing their weekly salary, not to mention that this attitude made the production of mass  and consumption of mass be lower, with the economy not being so good.

There were two ways to solve this: the first way was lowering their wage só they would work more hours, putting rigorous discipline, and forcing them to work more. The first textile fabrics were composed of women, teenager and kid workers, since they "could" be paid less than adult men and they had less authority at that time, being easier to control. Às a consequence, the living and working conditions for the first people who worked in a factory were much worse than the living and working conditions of someone before industrialization. However, às the time passed, determined workers, political reformers and groups who worked for a better condition to human beings  started pressuring for better working conditions, wages and hours of work, and with the productivity increment, a  lot of businesses would be able to improve the worker conditions.

Little by little, workers started to see themselves às consumers, and because of that, they started to stop working the hours needed to make a good salary and started working for more hours and harder to earn more money and with that spend more money.

In the  United states, the idea of "worker às a consumer" was already clear in the 1920's, when instead of asking for less work in a week they were asking for an increment on the wages and better working conditions. Other historical events were relevant for the extension of the consumer society, and one of them was the department store invention in England, where we were able to find a large variety of products in the same place: electronics, clothes, decoration, cosmetics, etc. The department store was a huge success, spreading quickly to Europe and the United States. The department store  was like entering a whole complete world, where you could find all you wanted and explore a lot of products inside it. Modern shopping came originally from the USA, in the early XX century. Other creation to support the consumerism was the credit card invention, in which even though some cardholders just use for convenience, paying their spending each months correctly, there are other cardholders who use it às a form of loan, in which they pay slowly a lot of unpaid things, with interest rate on it ("taxa de juros").

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210120-how-the-world-became-consumerist

https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/10/Consumption_and_Consumer_Society.pdf

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“The problem with outsourcing America's trash”

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“The problem with outsourcing America's trash”

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10 billion of plastic has been produced in the whole world since 1950, and 400 million tons of plastic have been produced annually. It's been recorded that lately a lot of plastic has been produced, more than expected. As globalization grew and expanded through the world, the problem a lot of developed countries started to be solved by throwing the problem to less developed countries. The truth is that globalization grew and  together a lot of plastic has been growing with it.  The USA produces approximately 42 million of twins of waste of plastic annually, becoming the world;'s leader exporter of plastic waste.

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https://gitnux.org/consumerism-statistics/

The average American spends $1,497 per month on nonessential items.

An estimated 14% of American consumers shop at convenience stores at least once a day.

Online consumers spend almost 5 hours per week shopping online.

Fast fashion has increased by 21% over the past 3 years.

The average U.S. household has 300,000 items.

The average American consumer spends 60% of their total monthly income.

The average consumer is expected to spend $1,800 annually on e-commerce transactions.

If Earth’s history is compared to a calendar year, modern human life has existed for 37 minutes and we have used one third of Earth’s natural resources in the last 0.2 seconds.

Another consequence is social inequality, because what people consume creates an identity and status in society, people try to fit in, by the things you buy but poorer people have an unequal access to goods.

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"A pesquisa aponta que 76% dos 1.090 entrevistados – homens e mulheres com mais de 16 anos – não praticam o consumo consciente."

"Sessenta e oito por cento dos entrevistados dizem já ter ouvido falar em sustentabilidade, enquanto 61% não sabem o que é um produto sustentável. O repertório das pessoas que entendem o conceito ainda é voltado para o meio ambiente e 11% disseram não saber o que é sustentabilidade."

"Trinta e sete por cento dos entrevistados não se sentem seguros para mudar seus hábitos porque, no fim das contas, não veem preocupação ambiental nem nas empresas, nem nos governos."

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The story of stuff - Where does all the stuff we buy come from and where does it goes when we throw it out?

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The story of stuff - Where does all the stuff we buy come from and where does it goes when we throw it out?

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The stuff we buy passes through a system called "mateiral's economy": from extraction to production, to distribution, to consumption to disposal. However, even though this system generalizes the process of our stuff, it ends up hiding a lot of what happens behind it,  with this system interacting with cultures, societies, environment and economies. Plus, this system ends up bumping into a lot of limits that were put, being a system considered in crisis, since it is a linear system but at the same time there aren't enough resources from the earth, with them being finite.

In this system, we wave people working, with ones being in the extraction process, others in production and so on. But there are people who have more importance and power in that system: the government that is responsible for taking care of their people and trying to guarantee people's needs and security; moving on we have the  corporation, which is a group in which people unite themselves on the basis of interests in common. Lately it's power had grown, and because of that the government's new job is to guarantee those people's need, forgetting about their nation and society.

Extraction: process in which natural resources from earth are taken. The problem with that is because people are extracting a lot of resources without moderation, and won't give time to nature to regenerate their resources and search to extract resources from more and more regions. It can also make it impossible for people to live in certain regions or use certain resources to eat or drink, like water, plants and animals with the mining.  "In the past three decades alone, ⅓ of the planet's natural resources base has been consumed."

75% of the fisheries ar at or beyond it capacity.

80% of the planet's original forest is gone.

We lose 2,000 trees per minute.

Production: where the products are made. The only problem with that is because to produce them, we use lot of toxic chemicals being mixed with the natural resources, making a toxic product. There are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in use in commerce, in which few of them are tested to know how it will impact the health and none were tested to know the synergistic effects to health (how an interaction between two chemicals will increase the effects that only one has already have over nature). We use toxic chemicals to produce toxic products, só if we don't stop it we will continue to live with toxic products around us.

Those toxins accumulate in the food chain and get stuck inside our organisms. Breast milk is nowadays the food at the top if the food chain with the most toxic contaminants, meaning that even the babies, who have just been born, get in touch with the food that has the highest toxic substances just when they born

There are the factory workers who suffer in this production process, in which the majority is young women who use masks to get in contact with toxic substances. But those women don't work there because they want to, but because they have no other option.

Distribution: selling part of the stuff process, in which the seller tries to make more and more people buy a product the quicker they can, spreading the toxins to the population. Here we have strategies of lowering the price and making people continue to buy the products. But how can they lower the price? Well, they don't need to pay the workers a lot, plus, they usually look for places where the environmental legislation isn't very strong. That means that the people who produce the good aren't well paid, and due to the soft legislations, people can be explored and be in contact with toxics without any problem.

Consumption: the "heart"of the process, in which we see that we all turned into consumers and our primary identity now is to be a consumer, buying everything we want at any time. Protecting this stage is the priority of the government and the corporation, so they can keep people addicted to buy more and more. Nowadays, we are important for society on the basis of how much we can shop and how much we contribute to this stage.

99% of those products that we buy (that were made through a very long process) are thrown away within 6 months.

Each person in the U.S is targeted with approximately 3,000 advertisements per day.

"so, 3,000 times a day we are told that our hair is wrong,  skin is wrong, our clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our cars are wrong, we are wrong, but it can all be made right if we just go shopping"

Our happiness is actually declining, since we end up working really hard to watch TV, see some advertisements and go shopping, wasting money and having to work hard again.

Disposal: where all of the products are thrown. Each person in the U.S makes 4. 5 pounds a day. This trash that we throw in is taken and dumped into a landfill, or is burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill, polluting air, land, water  and even changing the climate conditions. That is because, when the garbage is burned, the toxics that were contained in it will either be released in the air, or either will produce new super toxics.

RECYCLING REDUCES THE DAMAGE, BUT IT IS STILL NOT ENOUGH.

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America's Dopamine-Fueled Shopping Addiction

When you buy something, you get dopamine, being satisfied with your purchase, saying "oh god, I've bought something, I had a nice time.", but when buying online, you kinda get a double shot of dopamine: first, because you bought, and second, because it has arrived at your house, being a more fun process;

That has a historical reason  for that, since in the past the people who usually had more stuff were more likely to survive, getting a lot of food for winter, materials for shelter, and clothes so we didn't  get cold. Nowadays we have the same way of thinking, but we buy more stuff só we can "survive".

"in 2017, we spent over 240 billion dollars in jewelry, watches, luggage, books and phones twice as much às in 2002, even though our population only grew by 13% during that time";

"the average american throws away an estimated 81 pounds of clothes and textiles each year, nearly five times more than the 1980";

"we collectively threw away 26 million tons of plastic in 2015, and only 9% got recycled''

How Consumerism Ruins Our Planet and Finances

"the average person is estimated to encounter 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day"”

"average american spends almost $18,000 a years in non essentials";

"60% of millennials  earning over $100,000  say they're living paycheck to paycheck

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A spanish man created a light bulb that lasts up to 100 years

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A spanish man created a light bulb that lasts up to 100 years

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Benito Murros is the president of a movement called No Planned Obsolescences (NPO) which created a lamp that could help end it. Not only light bulbs but many products of our daily life, work for a very short time and could last much longer. Murros wants to develop new business to make products to last longer, that way planned obsolescence can come to an end. The light bulb is one project in which people don't need to change lamps every year, and there are a lot of pros about that lamp. If you turn it off and on several times in a row it won't burn and also it uses 70% less energy than fluorescent lamps. That could change the future of the world.

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https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210120-how-the-world-became-consumerist

https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/10/Consumption_and_Consumer_Society.pdf

https://www.theslowlabel.com/blogs/stories/what-happens-to-our-clothes-at-the-end-of-their-lives#:~:text=A%20T%2DShirt%20made%20from,and%205%20years%20to%20decompose.

https://g1.globo.com/natureza/blog/amelia-gonzalez/post/2018/07/25/pesquisa-mostra-que-76-nao-praticam-consumo-consciente-no-brasil.ghtml

https://gitnux.org/consumerism-statistics/

https://www.theworldcounts.com,

https://pt.linkedin.com/pulse/desmistificando-o-girl-math-uma-vis%C3%A3o-sobre-gastos-e-pessoal-camargo

https://blogdolojista.com.br/5-dicas-de-como-deixar-sua-loja-mais-atrativa/

https://www.tiktok.com/@lauradaniela/video/7318128715429498158

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VTPHADIrEuUX1FRyW07tFQYDWw2kjcdjGXOIY85FOWI/edit

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/us-reliance-china-waste-weak-supply-chain-link-rcna41394

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jaflFHWuVf7rIK22fH20eYseROcmNxOQIF01qiSS2_M/edit