The Consumption Ritual
You’re scrolling. Your thumb stops on a woman with forty-two Stanley cups arranged by color on custom shelving like a shrine. A $45 tumbler, designed to be reusable, purchased forty-two times because hydration became an aesthetic. You keep scrolling.
A cooking creator wraps a five-pound block of cheese in bacon, deep-fries it, takes one bite. The rest goes in the trash. Everyone knows. He knows we know. You keep scrolling.
The phone in your hand like a rosary. The altar of the algorithm. An ad every third video like a tithe.
The Labubu dolls. The Temu hauls. The Shein hauls. Twenty-five items of clothing for $57. Clothes so cheap they’re not meant to survive a washing machine.
Your ring camera blinks. A package on the porch. There’s a smudge on the lens, or maybe it’s raining. You don’t remember ordering anything.
Something is wrong. We can feel it.
In 1955, a retail analyst named Victor Lebow wrote it down:
“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 pace.”
That wasn’t a warning. That was the plan.
After World War II, the entire economy was restructured around a single proposition: your spending is your patriotism. Your purchases are your purpose. The economy doesn’t serve you. You serve it.
And if you ever stop? You’ll hear about it.
“Your New Lunch Habit Is Hurting the Economy.” That was a headline this year in the Wall Street Journal. The crime? Bringing food from home to save money.
Black Friday—the holiest day of the year—shattered records. Americans spent $10.8 billion online in a single day. The holiday season topped $1 trillion for the first time in history.
So which is it? Are we destroying the economy by not spending enough, or saving it by spending more than ever?
That’s the trick. The target moves. However much you spent last year, it wasn’t enough. The answer is always more.
The Weapon
Some people have understood consumption as a moral category—that what you buy implicates you in how it was made.
In 1791, the British Parliament refused to abolish the slave trade. Petitions had been signed. Arguments had been made. The institution held. So abolitionists tried something else.
They called for a boycott of sugar.
Sugar was the oil of its era. The commodity that made empires rich, that sweetened the tea that had become a national ritual, that was produced almost entirely by enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations under conditions of absolute horror.
A pamphlet circulated that year by William Fox made the argument plain: “If we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime. The slave dealer, the slave holder, and the slave driver, are virtually agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity.”
Then the line that landed: “In every pound of sugar used we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.”
By 1792, 400,000 Britons had joined the boycott. Sales of West Indian sugar dropped by a third. Shops began advertising “East India sugar, not made by slaves.” Women led the effort. Sugar was a domestic purchase. Tea was served at home. The kitchen became a site of political action.
The boycott didn’t end slavery by itself. But it made the argument that stuck: Your purchases are not neutral. They implicate you.
Black Americans understood the power of their labor and their dollar perhaps better than anyone. The sugar boycott taught Britain its tea was stained. The Great Migration taught the South whose labor and dollar it depended on—six million people who didn’t ask for better wages, didn’t negotiate, just left. And the South’s response proved it was working.
States passed laws trying to prevent Black people from leaving. Labor agents who recruited workers were arrested. Railroad companies refused to sell tickets. Steel manufacturers wouldn’t cash checks financing the migration. Beatings and intimidation terrorized people into staying. One Atlanta businessman said it plain in 1924: “The prosperity of Georgia depends upon keeping the Negro here.” Not hatred. Need.
Montgomery taught a bus company that 381 days of empty seats could break it. Birmingham taught segregationists they couldn’t afford their principles when Black dollars walked away during Easter shopping season.
Delano taught the grape industry that seventeen million people refusing to buy could force contracts no strike alone could win. Target, 2025: After the company rolled back DEI commitments, a boycott erased $12 billion in market value. The CEO sat down to discuss how to stop the bleeding.
The weapon still works.
Economic withdrawal as political weapon. When you can’t vote, you can still refuse to buy. Or refuse to stay.
The Inversion
Somewhere along the way, we forgot.
After 9/11, President Bush told Americans to go shopping. During the 2008 financial crisis, we were told the problem was that people weren’t buying enough. Every recession became a crisis of “consumer confidence”—as if the economy were a needy god that required our purchases as offerings.
Consumption stopped being a moral category and became a patriotic duty.
Now we get headlines calling it heresy to bring lunch from home. The people who once understood that their purchases could challenge slavery, who bankrupted a bus company by walking to work, who broke segregation by refusing to shop—those people’s great-grandchildren are being told that packing a sandwich is economic sabotage.
We turned spending into performance. The point isn’t the water. It’s being seen with the right vessel.
The Cost
And where does it all go?
Start with your closet. The average American throws away 81 pounds of clothing a year. That’s the weight of an eleven-year-old child. Buried in a landfill. Every year.
Eighty-one pounds times 330 million people. Picture a dump truck tipping into a landfill. By the time you finish this sentence, three more have done the same. One every second. All day. All night. All year.
Open the refrigerator. Sixty million tons of food wasted annually—enough to feed every hungry American four times over. Check the junk drawer. Fifty million tons of e-waste worldwide, most of it shipped to Ghana and Nigeria, where children burn circuit boards to extract copper. Look in the mirror. Microplastics in your blood, your lungs, your brain. In placentas. In breast milk.
This is the Lebow plan, still working. Seventy years later, still working. An economy that asked us to convert buying into ritual, that measured our loyalty in what we could consume and discard, was always going to produce this arithmetic.
But the math doesn’t end at the landfill.
Kantamanto.
Every week, 15 million garments arrive at Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana. The world’s largest secondhand clothing market. They call the clothes “obroni wawu.” Dead white man’s clothes.
A hundred billion garments produced every year. Sixty percent more than fifteen years ago. Kept half as long. This is where they go to die.
A woman has worked a stall there for eleven years, sorting through bales from container ships, gambling on what the rich world tired of this month. She knows by touch which fabrics will sell and which are already falling apart. Forty percent of what arrives can’t be moved. The seams split. The polyester pills. It gets dumped in open landfills, clogs the Korle Lagoon, buries the beaches where fishing communities once made their living.
On New Year’s Day 2025, a fire tore through Kantamanto. Destroyed 60 percent of the market. Displaced 10,000 workers. She lost everything. The air smelled like burned polyester and wet ash for days.
Obroni wawu.
This is the plan working. An economy that told us to seek our satisfactions in what we could burn and discard was always going to end here: in lagoons choked with fabric, in markets that burn, in a woman clawing through ashes of clothes that cost less than the bus ride home.
Graffiti on a white wall went viral last year. Black and red spray paint, six words: “Endless growth is the strategy of cancer cells.”
That’s not economics. That’s biology. Growth that cannot stop. That consumes everything around it. That treats its host as a resource to be depleted.
We call it the economy. We’re told we owe it our loyalty.
But we’re not cells. We can choose. We’ve chosen before.
The Question
Four hundred thousand Britons in 1791 understood that their sugar bowl connected them to a plantation in Jamaica. They set down their spoons. Six million Black Americans understood that their labor and their dollar were the foundation of an economy that despised them—and they boarded trains heading north. They knew what their choices meant. They acted on that knowledge.
The opposite of consumption isn’t poverty. It’s refusal. It’s asking, before the click, who pays for the convenience. Who drowns in the leftovers. Who profits from the distraction.
We’ve set down spoons before. We’ve boarded trains.
The ring camera is blinking. There’s a package on the porch.
NOTES & SOURCES
VICTOR LEBOW (1955)
Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955: https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Lebow.pdf
BUSH POST-9/11 “GO SHOPPING” (2001)
TIME Magazine: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1872229_1872230_1872236,00.html
American Rhetoric (full speech): https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911islamispeace.htm
WSJ LUNCH HEADLINE (April 2025)
Mises Institute reference: https://mises.org/mises-wire/were-approaching-blame-consumer-stage-boom-bust-cycle
WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/business/more-people-are-bringing-lunch-to-work-thats-a-bad-economic-indicator
BLACK FRIDAY 2024 ($11.8B)
Adobe Analytics via CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-consumers-spent-a-record-11-8-billion-online-during-black-friday-sales/
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/black-friday-cyber-monday-shopping-turnout-nrf.html
SUGAR BOYCOTT (1791-1792, 400K participants)
Wikipedia William Fox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Fox_(pamphleteer)
National Museums Scotland: https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/emancipation-and-abolition-the-anti-slavery-movement-in-18th-century-britain
GREAT MIGRATION (1916-1970, 6M people)
Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Migration
History.com: https://www.history.com/articles/great-migration
U.S. Census: https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/
MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT (381 days)
Stanford King Institute: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott
Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/
TARGET DEI BOYCOTT (2025, $12B loss)
Charlotte Post: https://www.thecharlottepost.com/news/2025/03/06/business/target-takes-a-hit-12.4-billion-in-value-lost-after-boycott/
PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/pastor-leading-target-boycott-on-its-impact-and-the-retailers-response
Washington Informer: https://www.washingtoninformer.com/target-diversity-equity-backlash/
KANTAMANTO MARKET
Business of Fashion: https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/global-markets/kantamanto-fire-secondhand-clothing-trade-ghana/
Or Foundation (relief fund): https://donorbox.org/kantamanto-fire-relief-2025/
Stats: 15M garments/week, 30K+ workers, 40% unsellable
GLOBAL GARMENT PRODUCTION (100B annually)
Earth.org: https://earth.org/statistics-about-fast-fashion-waste/
UniformMarket: https://www.uniformmarket.com/statistics/global-apparel-industry-statistics/
CLOTHING WASTE (81 lbs/person, dump truck every second)
FOOD WASTE (60M tons, feeds hungry 4x over)
E-WASTE (50M+ tons, Ghana/Nigeria, children burning circuit boards)
University of Michigan: https://news.umich.edu/the-deadly-trade-off-of-electronic-waste-recycling-in-ghana/
Wikipedia Agbogbloshie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie
MICROPLASTICS (blood, brain, placenta, breast milk)
A good and timely reminder. Thank you. Not sure who was doing all that shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Maybe the billionaires.
Beautifully written (as always). Something I’m sitting with today (reading it a second time) is some discomfort with the way we (myself included as a “sustainable” apparel professional) have embraced the “dead white man’s clothes” as a marketing/guilt-trip…it’s not just the white folx, and most of them aren’t dead. I know that’s partly me feeling called out as a white person, but I worry it does a disservice to the larger goal of reducing consumption, making it another class/race “war” rather than a human/planetary issue.
I have the same misgivings about “save the polar bears” though…screw the polar bears, save ourselves.