a society in which people often buy new goods, especially goods that they do not need, and in which a high value is placed on owning many things
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consumer society | Business English
consumer society
noun [ C ]
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ECONOMICS
a society in which people often buy new goods, and that places a high value on owning things:
In a consumer society, there may be no better measure of how people feel than what they buy.
Warhol's pop art style was intended to make a comment on the consumer society of the 1960s.
(Definition of consumer society from the Cambridge Business English Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)Examples of consumer society
consumer society
He has fun with pensions' advertisements and has useful vignettes of the inequalities of consumer society.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Unexpectedly, architectural autonomy, instead of providing resistance to consumer society, brought about the commodification of architecture.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
But the consumer society boom gave rise to a growing uneasiness typical of the third period which culminated with the crisis of 1974-6.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Thus, ' consumer society ' and the ' work society ' both reinforce and create negative language and images of later life.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Each person is unique, but a consumer society tries to make us the same, like a manufacturer.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
What is new after 1750 is the increasing importance of the process, part of the rise of "consumer society" and the commercialization of leisure.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
She reveals the entrapment of children in a consumer society, which leaves them relatively powerless, and in thrall to the illusion of choice and the orchestration of desire.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
In other words, in a postmodern consumer society, they are vested only in their own improvement as individuals, not in the general well-being of a community.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
It does not even matter whether the discomfort predicated by want is real or concocted by a consumer society that promotes the idea of inadequacy to sell more product.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
It will be interesting, therefore, to see what has changed and what remains unaltered with respect to workings of the stem-family household in a present-day affluent consumer society.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
However, the author does his best to avoid a grand narrative of modernization, especially one that views the eighteenth century as central- the "rise of consumer society" and all that.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
A generation of architects sharing this bleak conclusion distanced themselves from any social pretension and embraced architectural autonomy as a means of resisting consumer society rather than transforming it.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The body in consumer society.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
I stand here as a defender of the consumer society.
From the
Hansard archive
Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0
We live in a consumer society, and that is the answer.
From the
Hansard archive
Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0
See all examples of consumer society
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.