Why is it so hard to stop shopping ?— Part 2: Shopping as a civic duty
The appeal of neoliberal capitalism is that any company is allowed to fight for the consumer’s attention and dollars. As a result, consumers have ‘limitless’ choice of what to buy, when and how much. Except when the economy is in distress and the government thinks it is time to get those consumer dollars out of the pocket.
There are many examples when country leaders encouraged their citizens to ‘go shopping’ and buy more than they would / want / need to help the economy. One of the most known is President Bush after the 9/11 attack, urging people to head to Disney land and enjoy life as it should be, but there are many others: Michael Noonan (Minister of Finance, Ireland, encouraged consumers to shop their way out of the economic gloom in 2011, Peter Altmeier thinks saving local shops in Germany by spending money there in the time of Covid-19 is a national, ney even patriotic duty.
Of course spending the money locally is important. Jan Teague the president of Retail Association in the US explained in a written statement in 2009:
“Christmas sales tax revenue will be very important to local communities this year. When you hear that state revenues will be down, that also means that local government revenue is down. It’s more important than ever that consumers boost their communities this year by shopping locally. Local services are largely funded with the sales tax.” — Source
In other words, if you don’t spend your consumer dollars in the local grocery store, that gaping pothole is your fault. Never mind that you already pay tax to fund public services.
Another thing to consider here is the rather big difference between spending your money in an international chain’s closeby location where the products are imported from dozens of other countries or supporting small local businesses that produce, procure and employ locally. Spending locally and spending locally might sound the same, but has completely different impacts on local communities.
And who can blame the citizens for dedicating their dollars to save their country and local community? Of course everybody wants to live in a flourishing, stable environment, so when they are called to do their civic duty to shop, why wouldn’t they. This relieves the feeling of guilt about buying stuff they don’t need, indeed they are proud to buy excessively because they are helping the economy. Who is going to explain to them that at the same time they are killing the planet?
While these government induced splurges might help the economy to get back on track, we have to think about where that track leads. Increasing consumption on a finite planet eventually leads to using up all the resources we have and suffering the consequences of all the destruction and pollution we created.
Shopping posed as a patriotic duty blurs the line between citizen and consumer and communicates the message: you are a good citizen if you are a good consumer. This puts one in a difficult situation when it comes to saying no to shopping.
Thus my question is this: Does the government have the right to put their citizens in the position where they have to choose between “being a good citizen” and “living a sustainable life”? I don’t think so.
The presented information here might be oversimplified and not nuanced enough, but the bottom line is this: Instead of encouraging excessive consumerism, governments should work on developing an alternative economic system that is not based on exploitation, intensive resource use and infinite growth so good citizens can decide without any moral conflict when they want to buy what and how much.
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Thank you for reading, I hope you found this article valuable. As always, I’m happy to expand my knowledge regarding this issue, so if you would recommend any resource I should read, please leave it in the comments.
