Production

With the "technological cleverness" of the Industrial Revolution there ensued a  shift from hand-crafted goods to assembly-line mass production, powered by steam engines.  Industrialised countries became more efficent at producing.

In 1913, it took a worker 12.5 hours to make an automobile chassis.  By 1914 it took 1.5 hours.
Garbage and the Green Dot: Challenging a Throwaway Society
Bette K.Fishbein Pg 46

With a huge increase in productivity, industrialised societies faced a choice.  To  keep producing the same volume and work less or to continue to work the same amount and over produce  the volume of items demanded in society.

Henry Ford , best known for his perfection and standardisation of the assembly line came up with the solution.  Ford was aware that his companies success depended on creating a consumer class. and fascilitating mass consumption.

In 1914, Ford took the unprecedented step of voluntarily doubling his workers salaries to $5 a day.  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.  

Shortly after WW2 Victor Lebow described what society needed to keep 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 satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption....We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.”

Victor Lebow

Retailing Analyst

In order to achieve this vision, industry executives developed strategies to facilitae this social and cultural move:

1: Transitioning from local stores to ubiquitious shopping malls to the big-boxes and internet retailers of today.

2: Making it possible for customers to buy now and pay later(plus interest) with the heavy promotion of credit and credit cards.

3: Systematizing and normalising the concepts of planned and perceived obsolescence.

4: Removing self-reliant  and/or community based ways to fulfill basic needs

5: The intentional merging of identity and status with consumption (i.e that you are what you buy).

6: Advertising - Crown jewel.