History:

The Origin of the Consumer [Rifkin 1995]

    The term "consumption" has both English and French roots. 
In its original  form, to consume meant to destroy, to pillage, 
to subdue, to exhaust. It  is a word steeped in violence and 
until the present century had only  negative connotations. 
As late as the 1920s the word was still being used to refer 
to the most deadly disease of the day- tuberculosis. Today 
the  average American is consuming twice as much as he or 
she did at the end of World War II.[Schor 1991] The metamorphosis 
of consumption from vice to virtue is one  of the most 
important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth  
century.
    Even earlier, the Greeks who for centuries served as a model
for the western world, had no word for work. To quote Aristotle:
"we are unleisurely in order to have leisure." Unleisurely is the word 
the Greeks used for both extrordinary and ordinary work. The Greeks
only has the negative form of the word, a-scolia. In his Politics he 
talks of leisure as the focus of human activity, in a mater of fact
way. [Pieper 65]
    The mass-consumption phenomenon did not occur 
spontaneously, nor was it the inevitable by-product of an 
insatiable human nature. Quite the contrary. Economists at 
the turn of the century noted that most working people 
were content to earn just enough income to provide for their 
basic  needs and a few luxuries, after which they preferred 
increased leisure time over additional work hours and extra 
income. According to economists  of the day like Stanley 
Trevor and John Bates Clark, as people's income  and 
affluence increase, a diminishing utility of returns sets in, 
making  each increment in wealth less desirable. The fact 
that people preferred  to trade additional hours of work for 
additional hours of leisure time  became a critical concern 
and a bane to businessmen whose inventories of  goods 
were quickly piling up.
    With an increasing number of workers being displaced 
by new laborsaving technologies and with production 
soaring, the business community desperately searched for 
new ways to reorient the psychology of existing  wage 
earners, to draw then into what Edward Cowdrick, an 
industrial relations consultant of the time, called "the new 
economic gospel of  consumption."[Cowdrick 1927]
    Converting Americans from a psychology of thrift into 
one of spendthrift proved a daunting task. The Protestant 
work ethic, which had so dominated the American frontier 
ethos, was deeply ingrained. Parsimony and savings were 
cornerstones of the American way of life, part of the early 
Yankee tradition that had served as a guidepost for 
generations of Americans as well as an anchor for newly 
arrived immigrants determined to make a better life for 
their children's generation. For most Americans, the virtue 
of self-sacrifice continued to hold sway over the lure of 
immediate gratification in the marketplace. The American 
business community set out to radically change the 
psychology that had built the nation--to turn American 
workers from investors in the future to spenders in the 
present. Early on, business leaders realized that in order to 
make people "want"  things they had never previously 
desired, they had to create "the  dissatisfied consumer." 
Charles Kettering of General Motors was among the first to 
preach the new gospel of consumption. GM had already 
begun to  introduce annual model changes in its automobiles 
and launched a vigorous  advertising campaign designed to 
make consumers discontent with the car  they already 
owned. "The key to economic prosperity," said Kettering, "  is 
the organized creation of dissatisfaction." The economist 
John Kenneth  Galbraith put it more to "create the wants it 
seeks to satisfy."[Kettering 1984]