Being a Consumer

"Consider the Lobster." Not just the crustacean. Perhaps today he is the teenager working in some far-away sweatshop on the shirt you are going to buy in a few months (with money your parents will give you), so his little sister won't go hungry. He's your age, but money is money. Or maybe today the lobster is a $3,000 coat in the back room of Bloomingdale's, which was 60 minks not too long ago. A sad sacrifice, but it had to be made.

Of course, the boy's situation is most likely a side-effect of his country's malfunctioning economy. Though we bring him money, it's barely enough to keep him coming to work every day (hence the foreign sweatshop, and not a domestic producer, though there's a fine line between minimizing costs and being greedy). But this also means that our country is so rich off of our consumerism that it has stations posted all around the world, always making more, more, more. That also isn't necessarily bad, but for the selfish, sometimes ridiculous way in which we go about taking advantage of it all. In fact, it's not at all inconceivable to imagine that, right now, someone a few cities away is foregoing an important payment to buy an expensive designer purse. Being a consumer in America could be compared to smoking two packs a day, whereas a buyer elsewhere could be said to try a cigarette only once in awhile. That teenager certainly doesn't have the money or time to go to a shopping mall.

No matter your beliefs, it should be clear that American consumers are strictly self-serving; this, in turn, harms anyone and anything that does not own a checkbook, like David Foster-Wallace's lobster, killed to "achieve maximum freshness," or the mink, who just seems to be "less morally important than [a] human being" (Foster-Wallace 679). Everything is done to serve whoever has the fattest wallet. The idea is, if I pay money, I get what I want. The more it costs (me or the animal), the more I will want it, and the less I will worry about the ethics of the transaction. And here's something more to think about: we literally regard people based on how much they spend on us.