Needing the Unnecessary Essay Example

Needing the Unnecessary Essay Example Needing the Unnecessary Essay Needing the Unnecessary Essay The luxury craze is breaking into the lives of people of all socioeconomic groups and beginning to spread around the globe. Nowadays, even the average American can drive a Mercedes Benz, shop at elite retail boutiques and enjoy a massage. What was once considered a luxury item is now considered a staple. For virtually any product out there, there is a designer alternative or luxury upgrades that everyone strives to obtain and outdo their pier, pushing normal standards to those of higher and sometimes ridiculous standards. By looking into any standard English dictionary for the meaning of the word conspicuous, one gets a variety of lexicographic entries including â€Å"eye catching†, and â€Å"prominent;† but the word acquires a significantly different connotation in the context of â€Å"consumption† when it clearly indicated the phenomenon of â€Å"wasteful and lavish consumption expenses to enhance social prestige. Based entirely on observation, more than a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen (1899) proposed that American rich were spending a significant portion of their time and money on unnecessary and unproductive leisure expenditures and coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe the behavior; this linguistic construct has been used so widely that it has entered into popular English lexicon only in this particular sense of the term (Oxford English Dictionary). Luxury spending, over the last several years has been growing four times faster in the United States than anywhere else. Political leaders characterized the increasing desire for luxury items vital to the health of the American economy as a whole. All layers of society are experiencing and participating in the necessary consumption of unnecessary items and services that have become so readily available to everyday consumers. Luxury is everywhere and is almost impossible for us as consumers to avoid. We see luxury in storefronts, advertisements, radio, and much more. We imagine ourselves surrounded by the luxury items we see in hopes of one day if not already possessing those items. We as Humans are consumers by nature, always desiring more. So many products are claiming luxury status today that the credibility of the category itself is strained: for example, Kmart offers cashmere bedspreads, the name â€Å"pashmina† had to be invented to top cashmere. This would not have happened if luxury items were not so accessible to all classes of society. No we are not rational when it comes to spending and consuming the luxury items out there. In fact, we as consumer are more irrational than rational, with most everything purchased being made on impulse. It is important for us to rethink the separation between production and consumption, for they are more alike than separate and occur not at different times and places but simultaneously. That is the underlining question and what James Twitchell has shown us.