Consumer Society In The Nineteenth Century

Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, contemporary UK society has been steadily changing. Where once we tended to define ourselves by our employment and the status in society that position may have given us, we now define ourselves much more by the goods we buy and choose to surround ourselves with (Hinchcliffe 2009).What we wear, the house we live in, the food we choose to buy and the experiences we create for ourselves all are thought to say more about us personally and as a society and have led to the creation of the term ‘consumer society’(Hinchliffe 2009).The rise in disposable income and the ability to acquire easy credit has enabled the vast majority of the UK population to buy goods more readily than at any time ever before
Goods are made increasingly cheaply and in quantity to allow for low selling prices and are not necessarily built to last. The cost of repair can be more than replacing the item itself with very few specialist repair services being offered on the high street nowadays. Ever changing fashions and trends altering every season can lead to everything from shoes to furniture being thrown away and replaced in order for one to stay ‘in trend’ in our modern consumer society (Brown
In 2008, the waste generated more quickly than could be disposed of, was said to be 40% greater than the earth’s available yearly resources (Brown 2009). The earth’s resources and its capacity for absorbing the waste we generate has become environmentally unsustainable. Disposing and recycling of rubbish is now huge international business and although there is great economic value in this for the companies involved the need to find ways to sustain the environment is also a major factor in this process (Brown 2009). Transporting rubbish around the world where it is recycled more cheaply and remanufactured into a usable commodity to be shipped back, highlights the new value of some of our rubbish. Waste plastics, paper, card and glass are now just some of the products collected, recycled and sold for profit. Previously they may have been simply landfilled at not only monetary cost, so of ‘negative value’, but as we are now discovering, great cost to our planet (Brown