Consumerism is sometimes used in reference to the anthropological and biological phenomena of people purchasing goods and consuming materials in excess of their basic needs, which would make it recognizable in any society including ancient civilizations (e.g. Ancient Egypt, Babylon and Ancient Rome). However, the concept of consumerism is typically used to refer to the historically specific set of relations of production and exchange that emerge from the particular social, political, cultural and technological context of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism with more visible roots in the social transformations of 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe.
The consumer society emerged in the late seventeenth century and intensified throughout the eighteenth century. While some[who?] claim that change was propelled by the growing middle-class who embraced new ideas about luxury consumption and the growing importance of fashion as an arbiter for purchasing rather than necessity, many critics[who?] argue that consumerism was a political and economic necessity for the reproduction of capitalist competition for markets and profits, while others point to the increasing political strength of international working class organizations during a rapid increase in technological productivity and decline in necessary scarcity as a catalyst to develop a consumer culture based on therapeutic entertainments, home ownership and debt. The more positive, middle-class view argues that this revolution encompassed the growth in construction of vast country estates specifically designed to cater for comfort and the increased availability of luxury goods aimed at a growing market. This included sugar, tobacco, tea and coffee; these were increasingly grown on vast plantations in the Caribbean as demand steadily rose. In particular, sugar consumption in Britain[8] during the course of the 18th century increased by a factor of 20.

Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, developed consumerism in his book Consumer Society: Myths and Structure in 1998. Although consumerism means different things to different people, including the social movement to balance interests between the consumer and the seller, this paper assumes that consumerism is the myth of the consumer culture. Consumerism is an acceptance of consumption as a way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. In a consumer society, an individual’s identity is tied to what he or she consumes. People end up buying more than they need for basic subsistence and end up being concerned for their self-interest rather than mutual, communal or ecological interest. whatever maximizes individual happiness is best with happiness equated to accumulation of goods and use of services. Consumption was a “systematic act of the manipulation of signs” (Baudrillard, 22) that signified social status through difference.
Aristotle and Marx spoke of commodities having use-value and exchange-value. Baudrillard maintained commodities have the status of “sign” value as well. He challenged the need-objects-satisfaction theory, asserted that it was merely an astonishing repetition of the saying: “I buy it because I need it”. To him, “the world of objects and of needs would thus be a world of general hysteria” (Baudrillard, 68), and therefore, in the consumer society, we did not consume because of its use value, but for its sign value. What’s more, his “sign value” was arbitrary. That was to say, the sign value of the commodity had nothing to do with its real function in daily life, but was determined by social or orectic logic (Baudrillard, 67). When we bought something in a consumer society, we were not only consuming the commodities, but the “code” under which commodities fell and the messages embedded in acts of consumption (Baudrillard, 71). Consumerism is “economically manifested in the chronic purchasing of goods and service, with little attention to their true need, durability, products of origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and disposal” (1997, web citation).
Because consumerism sets persons against themselves in an endless quest for the attainment of material things, few people give thought to whether their consumption habits produce class inequality, alienation, or repressive power. They are concerned with the “stuff of life” rather than with “quality of life”, least of all the quality of life of those producing the goods and services they consume. A consumer society is one in which discretionary consumption has become a mass phenomenon, not just the province of the rich or even the middle class. Consumption in a consumer society leads to materialism, defined as a culture where material interests are not made subservient to other social goals (Fredman, 1993). During claims that people living in a consumer culture attempt to satisfy social, emotional, and spiritual needs with material things (1992).
According to consumerism, in modern society what we consume is not commodity itself but the cultural meaning it carries. When commodities, such as a set of furniture, are exhibited in department stores the commodities represent more than their use value and they have constituted “spectacle” which represents some kind of lifestyle or culture sign. Merchants keep beautifying “sign”, which is beyond the use value of commodity and create more beautiful “spectacles” to guide people to consume. Consumption is no longer a process of labor and transcendence, but the process of absorbing and being absorbed by the sign. Consumers are never confronted with their own images, neither do they see what they produce and what they really need. They merely internalize the signs that they buy (Baudrillard, 225). In other words, man in the consumer society is a simulacrum of those around him; he has no existence in and of himself, no deep “self” to return to. He is depthless, empty, all surface appearance. Stripped of symbolism and expression, he acts only as a controlled consumer, responding to a market of signs. That is really sad for them.