consumer culture 
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
5/17/2023
Museum Celebrates Sweet Smell of... Failure
The Museum of Failure is a global traveling exhibition that celebrates the signal marketplace flops of capitalism, from the infamous Edsel and New Coke to the obscure, highlighting the vagaries of consumer taste and historical contingency.
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SOURCE: The Nation
12/13/2022
From Hot Yoga to Tae Bo: How American Fitness Trends Went Global
by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
The cultural disaffections of the affluent and emergent globalization made a host of exotic exercise trends big business in the 1970s and afterward.
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SOURCE: New York Times
9/10/2022
Clover Lawns Replacing Grass in Reversal of Suburban Historical Pattern
Clover lawns are trendy on social media. Historian Ted Steinberg says this is a reversal of a half century of industrial marketing and cultural values that have made the grass lawn a suburban goal. Environmentalists hope it continues.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
8/9/2022
Primary Source: Winning World War 1 By Fighting Waste at the Grocery Counter
A trade catalog for a grocery counter that could store bulk goods like beans and eliminate superfluous packaging was pitched as a patriotic way to save materials for the war effort, and speaks to contemporary desires to cut down on packaging waste.
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SOURCE: Hyperallergic
8/1/2022
The Architecture of the Shopping Mall Shaped by Racism, Surveillance
The architects who envisioned early shopping malls as common spaces were overwhelmed by the imperatives of exclusion and surveillance in spaces made safe for mass consumption, argues architecture critic Alexandra Lange.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
2/14/2022
Selling Hope
by Wendy A. Woloson
After a cancer diagnosis, the author still couldn't escape a world of consumerism that relentlessly commodifies even the worst experiences.
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SOURCE: Thirteen
1/21/2022
Jeans: The History of the People's Pants Coming to American Experience
Denim touches the history of American slavery, immigration, industrialization and counterculture. An upcoming "American Experience" feature tells the story.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
12/19/2021
I'm Taking an Eco-Holiday From It All (and So Are My Kids)
by Frida Berrigan
Is there still value in stepping back from the wasteful cycle of individual consumerism when major corporations and the US military are putting astronomical levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
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SOURCE: The Conversation
12/17/2021
The Magnificent History of the Much-Maligned Fruitcake
by Jeffrey Miller
A quip attributed to former “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson has it that “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.”
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/17/2021
He Bombed the Nazis, Outwitted the Soviets and Modernized Christmas
Si Spiegel's survival as a bomber pilot was a tough act to follow, but pioneering the artificial Christmas tree may have topped his martial exploits.
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SOURCE: NPR
11/29/2021
Lizabeth Cohen: Why Americans Buy So Much Stuff
As holiday shopping overlaps with historic supply chain disruptions, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Lizabeth Cohen on the economy's reliance on spending and the culture of consumerism in the U.S.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
11/10/2021
Betty Crocker Turns 100: How Generations of Women Identified with the Fictional Cook
by Elizabeth A. Blake
Betty Crocker has always been a symbol of a feminine ideal; the ways that women interacted with the character are illustrative of changing social values and norms.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/3/2021
The Customer is Always... Insufferable? The History of Today's Beleaguered Service Worker
Writer Amanda Mull checks with historians Susan Strasser and William Leach to explain why American diners, shoppers and passengers seem to be driven to torment servers, clerks and flight attendants.
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SOURCE: New York Times
7/29/2021
Ron Popeil, Inventor and Ubiquitous Infomercial Pitchman, Dies at 86
"Mr. Popeil’s mastery of television marketing, dating to the 1950s but spanning several decades, made him nearly as recognizable onscreen as the TV and movie stars of his era."
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SOURCE: Tropics of Meta
3/12/2021
Neoliberalism with a Stick of Gum: The Meaning of the 1980s Baseball Card Boom
by Jason Tebbe
The baseball card craze of the late 1980s promised Gen X kids a repeat of the collectible windfall like the Boomers enjoyed with their surviving 1950s Topps cards. The reality proved quite different, giving a lens onto economic transformation.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/21/2020
Christmas Dies Hard
The urban bourgeoisie of the 19th century pushed Christmas away from a drunken celebration of leisure and toward a holiday merging piety and consumerism.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/8/2020
America’s Most Hated Garment
Atlantic writer Amanda Mull turns to fashion historians Marley Healy and Valerie Steele to place the growing social acceptance of sweatpants in a pattern of clothing standards changing in response to cultural influences and social conditions.
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SOURCE: LitHub
9/21/2020
The Long Golden Age of Useless, American Crap
by Wendy A. Woloson
Consuming habits encouraged by business and embraced by average Americans make crappy stuff part of the American way of life. While decrying waste, the author argues it's important to recognize that cheap goods allow Americans of modest means to participate in the national lifestyle.
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SOURCE: Perspectives on History
9/2/2020
Looking Out For Each Other
by Leah Valtin-Erwin
The wrenching transitions that East Germans faced in adapting to western commercial culture after reunification offer lessons for the COVID crisis, and a warning that the burdens of managing social change and stress often fall on retail workers.
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SOURCE: USA Today
6/22/2020
Does it Really Matter if Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben get Retired?
Historian Rita Roberts explains how the iconography of black service workers reinforced white supremacist ideology on consumer packaging, while Jason Chambers and Gregory Smithers discuss the relationship of the business community to changing norms about racism.