Spin the burning passion and turn it up, fucker.
Pop Your Collar
Looking around my living room, I see goods. There are a pack of Camels sitting to my left, a Dave Chappelle DVD lying on the floor, and a minature Tony Stewart car sitting on my shelf. A Frank Sinatra record, in which he sings for "Only the Lonely," looks over them, right next to 2pac's eyes overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Due to technology and human advancement, we now have millions of choices which confront us daily. Things we couldn't have even imagined a few years ago are given to us daily. Those little plastic inserts for shirt collars bearing "Express" or "Abercrombie & Fitch" are becoming play toys for my cat. When looking at "The More Factor" and "What's in a Package," it placed my life of consumption in a new perspective. As Americans, we are insistent on acquiring things which we feel define us.
The American mindset has always been to get more. Our ancestors left our respective native homes (if they were even our native homes in the first place) in search of a new place where we could acquire. We wanted freedom. This is one of the main principles that America is founded on. What was the first thing available when coming to America? Besides death, land was plenty. Shames speaks about the frontier in the first section of his article, and he says that people used to build cities for people to eventually move into and lure a railroad (56-8). The equivalent of that today would be buying a lot and erecting a building in order to have someone rent it and sell goods out of it. This goes on along all our streets in the form of malls, bars, and restaurants. A place of business falters and the day after they close, a "for lease" sign pops up in the window. This is America today.
It is in these stores where Hine supports Shames created mindset of American's urge for more. Gas stations went from full-service fillhouses where you could get your car worked on or just a "top off," to becoming self-service mini-grocery stores where you can now buy tampons, milk, sunglasses, and work gloves. The packaging has become sensitized while consumers values have become de-sensitized. The product itself has become more vulgar. One of the highest grossing DVDs of all-time, Dave Chappelle: Season One, features a crack fiend giving a speech to elementary school students and a racial draft. Objects such as this would have been burned in America until about the 70s, but they are treasured pop culture relics from today. This is a reflection of the mindset of the people as we have had trends of an upward progression and are now running out of new. When speaking of the 80s, Shames says the people of the era knew that "the game is winding down" (62). People try to do something that hasn't been done before, and we are confronted with things that may shock us or enlighten us, as is the same with cultures we are still learning about. We look at the new stuff, yearn for the old stuff, get tired of that, and now want something newer than the new stuff that just came out.
Shopping has become a complex event today. Looking for glass cleaner in a supermarket, we have at least ten options available from Windex. Add other brands that are less popular and the store brand, and now the object "glass cleaner" is in a ten-by-ten array begging for the consumer to pick the best one. The packaging draws our attention and we think what it would look like in our home, sitting under our sink. We want more options. Multiply that times each other "object" we go to a store to purchase and WalMart Superstores make sense. I have taken dozens of trips to WalMart to purchase one or two items and left with 30 unnecessary . My friends have done the same thing. Our quest for our necessities gets sidetracked by "Mr. Clean Auto-dry" over here and the bin of DVD and VHS movies for $4.95. We want more, and the packaging lures us in. What else are we left to do than evaluate it and purchase it?
Both articles also articulate differences between the rest of the world and America. Hines questions the fact that Canadians are "willing to drink milk out of flexible plastic pouches that fit into reusable plastic holders, while residents of the United States are believed to be so resistant to the idea that they have not even been given the opportunity" (89). He explains that people in different areas differ, so their packaging must differ. Shames speaks of the use of the word "frontier" and how Americans use it differently than every other country. It is this different outlook on the world which makes us consume differently than every other country. We want more, and we want it pretty.
Fuck 'ya couch. That's my first response paper. Hope it's a doozy. I'm supposed to save it in a couple of formats. Here's to doin' it proper!
Dremas dulces!
Looking around my living room, I see goods. There are a pack of Camels sitting to my left, a Dave Chappelle DVD lying on the floor, and a minature Tony Stewart car sitting on my shelf. A Frank Sinatra record, in which he sings for "Only the Lonely," looks over them, right next to 2pac's eyes overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Due to technology and human advancement, we now have millions of choices which confront us daily. Things we couldn't have even imagined a few years ago are given to us daily. Those little plastic inserts for shirt collars bearing "Express" or "Abercrombie & Fitch" are becoming play toys for my cat. When looking at "The More Factor" and "What's in a Package," it placed my life of consumption in a new perspective. As Americans, we are insistent on acquiring things which we feel define us.
The American mindset has always been to get more. Our ancestors left our respective native homes (if they were even our native homes in the first place) in search of a new place where we could acquire. We wanted freedom. This is one of the main principles that America is founded on. What was the first thing available when coming to America? Besides death, land was plenty. Shames speaks about the frontier in the first section of his article, and he says that people used to build cities for people to eventually move into and lure a railroad (56-8). The equivalent of that today would be buying a lot and erecting a building in order to have someone rent it and sell goods out of it. This goes on along all our streets in the form of malls, bars, and restaurants. A place of business falters and the day after they close, a "for lease" sign pops up in the window. This is America today.
It is in these stores where Hine supports Shames created mindset of American's urge for more. Gas stations went from full-service fillhouses where you could get your car worked on or just a "top off," to becoming self-service mini-grocery stores where you can now buy tampons, milk, sunglasses, and work gloves. The packaging has become sensitized while consumers values have become de-sensitized. The product itself has become more vulgar. One of the highest grossing DVDs of all-time, Dave Chappelle: Season One, features a crack fiend giving a speech to elementary school students and a racial draft. Objects such as this would have been burned in America until about the 70s, but they are treasured pop culture relics from today. This is a reflection of the mindset of the people as we have had trends of an upward progression and are now running out of new. When speaking of the 80s, Shames says the people of the era knew that "the game is winding down" (62). People try to do something that hasn't been done before, and we are confronted with things that may shock us or enlighten us, as is the same with cultures we are still learning about. We look at the new stuff, yearn for the old stuff, get tired of that, and now want something newer than the new stuff that just came out.
Shopping has become a complex event today. Looking for glass cleaner in a supermarket, we have at least ten options available from Windex. Add other brands that are less popular and the store brand, and now the object "glass cleaner" is in a ten-by-ten array begging for the consumer to pick the best one. The packaging draws our attention and we think what it would look like in our home, sitting under our sink. We want more options. Multiply that times each other "object" we go to a store to purchase and WalMart Superstores make sense. I have taken dozens of trips to WalMart to purchase one or two items and left with 30 unnecessary . My friends have done the same thing. Our quest for our necessities gets sidetracked by "Mr. Clean Auto-dry" over here and the bin of DVD and VHS movies for $4.95. We want more, and the packaging lures us in. What else are we left to do than evaluate it and purchase it?
Both articles also articulate differences between the rest of the world and America. Hines questions the fact that Canadians are "willing to drink milk out of flexible plastic pouches that fit into reusable plastic holders, while residents of the United States are believed to be so resistant to the idea that they have not even been given the opportunity" (89). He explains that people in different areas differ, so their packaging must differ. Shames speaks of the use of the word "frontier" and how Americans use it differently than every other country. It is this different outlook on the world which makes us consume differently than every other country. We want more, and we want it pretty.
Fuck 'ya couch. That's my first response paper. Hope it's a doozy. I'm supposed to save it in a couple of formats. Here's to doin' it proper!
Dremas dulces!