Clean Rage

There was a cool posting yesterday at Miss Model Behavior on how she was victimized in her apartment building's laundry room. Thanks to the company's clever "laundry cards," she was required to pay $24 for a $2.75 wash.

Clean Rage

Today I’d like to quickly discuss an American travesty. An issue more directly influential in our daily lives than Palin or Obama or NYC’s theoretically fabulous ‘fashion week:’

Laundry cards.

I posted a comment in response...

You hit the nail on the head! This is the model of the typical consumer ripoff, which isn't limited to laundry rooms by any means. It's everywhere, and it exists as long as there is a captive market or where gullible consumers are willing to pay the price. (Name something in the consumer world that ISN'T a ripoff.) It's snake oil sales in a modern guise, and the only remedy is "Buyer Beware!" If you suffer enough pain in the process, you'll go to another laundry.

Christopher Lasch Quotes

Found some pithy quotes on consumerism from Christopher Lasch, the guy who wrote about narcissism in American society. Here's the link:

BrainyQuote: Christopher Lasch

Here are the best quotes:

"A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions."

"It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media."

"Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success."

"The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction."

"The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction."

"Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society."

"In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs."