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Regardless of the critique, downshifters help prove that there’s a functional, enjoyable alternative to a fifty-hour-plus workweek, second and third jobs, etc. Overworking didn’t emerge inevitably from the genetic makeup or innate desire of Americans. Instead, the overwork-overspend model was the result of conscious decisions made by our government, business, and even some labor leaders. The good news, as downshifters illustrate on an individual level, is that these decisions can be unmade as well.

Forging a Consumer Class

So once the system to make more Stuff was set in place, the dilemma then became how to sell enough of that Stuff to keep the machine running. When this humongous increase in the capacity to produce consumer goods first occurred, most people had neither the expendable income nor the desire to orient their lives around accumulating ever more Stuff.

Henry Ford, best known for his perfection and standardization of the assembly line, came up with an answer. He knew that his company’s success depended not only on continuing to produce reliable products as quickly and cheaply as possible, but also in helping to create a consumer class, made up of the broader public, that could actually buy the cars. Ford’s theories of mass production have been so influential that they are widely referred to as Fordism, but what many people don’t realize is that the assembly line piece of it is only half of the story. As much as it involved increasing mass production, Fordism was equally concerned with facilitating mass consumption because, as Ford realized, producers can’t keep churning out all this Stuff unless someone is going to buy it.

In 1914, Ford took the unprecedented step of voluntarily doubling his workers’ salaries to five dollars a day (equivalent to just over one hundred dollars a day in 2008 dollars). He also decreased the workday from nine to eight hours. His reward: lower worker turnover, the ability to run three shifts a day instead of two, and greater car sales as the workers themselves joined his customer base. Other companies watching this process soon followed Ford’s lead, and the foundation for mass consumerism was set.53

With Fordism set into motion, people had the means to buy Stuff, but not yet the inclination. Shortly after the end of World War II, retailing analyst Victor Lebow described what was needed to keep the people consuming and factories producing: “Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”54

In order to achieve this vision, industry executives and their minions developed an array of strategies:

transitioning from local stores to ubiquitous shopping malls to the big-boxes and Internet retailers of today, which I described in chapter 3 on distribution;

making it possible for customers to buy now and pay later (plus interest) with the invention and heavy promotion of credit and credit cards;

systematizing and normalizing the concepts of planned and perceived obsolescence (which I describe below);

removing self-reliant and/or community-based ways to fulfill basic needs, as for example with the deliberate destruction of light rail systems by the major car manufacturers;

the intentional merging of identity and status with consumption (i.e., that you are what you buy);

and the crown jewel, advertising.

There are whole books written about each of these tools, so I’m going to review just the two most insidious of them here.

Two Tricks of the Trade

1. Planned Obsolescence

As the production of Stuff ratcheted up, one of the first messages broadcast to consumers was that it was better to have more than one of most things. A second (and then third, fourth, and fifth) bathing suit, when the previous norm for most women had been to make do just fine with one. A second car.