bunnyjadwiga

Some terrifying quotes reproduced in
Ellen Lupton and J. Abbot Miller, The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste: A Process of Elimination (NY: Kiosk, 1992)

Goods fall into two classes, those which we use, such as motor cars and safety razors, and those which we use up, such as tooth paste or soda bisquits. Consumer engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use.
-- Ernest Elmo Calkins, 1932, in Roy Sheldon & Egmont Arens, Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1932)

and

...we have learned that the way to break the vicious deadlock of a low standard of living is to spend freely, and even waste creatively.
-- Christine Frederick, 1929 Selling Mrs. Consumer (NY, The Business Course)

The authors suggest these readings on the ideology of consumerism:
Daniel J. Boorstin, "Welcome to the Consumption Community," Fortune 76 (1967): 118-38
Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
T. Jackson Lears, ed. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (NY: Pantheon, 1983)
Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988)