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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Travails of the Flawed Consumer
I’ve liked this phrase, flawed consumer, ever since I came across it... where? Maybe in a book by Juliet Schor, an economist. Anyway, l’etat, Madame Bovary, and now le flawed consumer... c’est moi. The flawed consumer is that freakish American who fails to follow market commands; i.e., she doesn’t buy enough stuff, and/or she fails to buy stuff at a constant rate. The core cause of my particular flawedness consumptionwise is my failure to buy the one essential consumer object: a television. ‘Tis from there that most of the commands issue; and since I haven’t got one, I’m out of the loop. Just as in America the failure to promote oneself, as Gary Trudeau once noted, is considered a sin, so in America the failure to buy things at a level commensurate with, or ideally beyond, your means, is also punishable. I’ve gotten hectoring letters from my bank - “We’ve noticed you’re not using your new gold debit card. Please begin doing so - now!” Today, after I returned home from my regular beginning-of-the-academic year shopping at my local mall, I received my regular beginning-of-the-academic-year phone call from my credit card company: “We’ve detected highly unusual activity on your card! A thief is racing through your local mall using your card before they get caught!” Er - that’s me. I don’t like to shop, you see, and I do it very seldom and very quickly... The American credit business shrugs at suicidal overspending. It’s only when it detects patterns of restraint that it screams bloody murder. |