Product Description

‘Stabbing at battle of Ikea’ Sun ‘Most expensive house has £390m price tag’ Daily Telegraph ‘Financier runs up £36,000 bar bill’ Independent Diamond-encrusted phones, waiting lists for handbags, 7-star hotels – in the summer of 2007, the UK economy finally reached its giddy peak. But it wasn’t just celebrities and bankers wanting to spend, spend, spend. Whipping out our cheap credit cards, the whole nation developed one obsessive, unsustainable habit: shopping. Now the cash has dried up and we’ve consumed our way to financial disaster. But were rich times really happy times? And if shopping got us in to this mess, should we really be encouraged to shop our way out of it? With finances in flux, now is our chance to break this all-consuming cycle. Offering everyday ways to start kicking the habit, Neal Lawson shows us how to put the basket down for good, and why we’ll be happier for it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54193 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Neal Lawson is a political commentator. In between time spent shopping and thinking about shopping he writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman and often appears on the radio and television. He was formerly an adviser to Gordon Brown and before that was a trade union researcher. He is chair of the fast-growing pressure group Compass and managing editor of the policy journal Renewal. In 2001 he co-edited The Progress Century (Palgrave).

Customer Reviews

Start by not buying this book!
I haven't finished this yet but my blood is boiling and it doesn't look like the book is going to get any better in the next few pages so I'll capture my thoughts for you the unsuspecting consumer. Before anyone accuses me of being a climate change/corporate greed denier my credentials are that I am a card carrying member of the tree huggers. I have been veggie for nearly 20 years, cycle, meditate, do yoga, don't fly for pleasure, work in biodiversity assessment and am generally "left leaning".

There are four main sections to the book. What went wrong? Why it happened? The Consequences. What are the alternatives?

Unless you are completely stupid you would be able to write those four sections yourself with a modicum of knowledge of modern history and by looking out the window. I was holding out of the alternatives section to save the book but it doesn't look like it will.

The ethical shopping section just pushed me over the edge with mind numbing contradictions.

Ethical shopping "was pioneered by the likes of the late Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop". In my mind and to anyone with eyes The Body Shop is a champion of exactly what Lawson has been ranting against for 176 pages. There is a Body Shop on every high street. Indeed it has gone global - they are everywhere! They sell precisely the things no one needs - cosmetics! There is no sense of irony here because Body Shop is badged "ethical" and so, in Lawson's book, that isn't consumerism.

Then we have "I won't go near Starbucks or McDonald's..." I am a veggie and so I don't go near McDonald's either but I can go in Starbucks and drink a Fairtrade coffee sold me in a china cup that is then washed up and re-used by the owner of the shop. Unlike the Body Shop a few doors down where I can buy useless, over hyped cosmetics in a plastic container I can no longer take back to the shop and have re-filled.

Starbucks evil but Body Shop "Ethical"! They are both driving needless consumption. I suspect this is because Lawson hasn't thought it through very well and there is the rub. The reason for buying a book like this is that you hope the author is not only going to parrot the obvious but also add some original thought to the debate. Lawson clearly has not. He doesn't offer either an unbiased critical assessment or original ideas.

Don't even get me started on his total acceptance of the organic movement (nee Organic branding of goods) without any critical analysis whatsoever...

Cut down on your consumerism by not buying this book.

As a turbo-consumer, you can't afford not to read this
You knew that there was something wrong with the UK which is why you go to France and Italy for your holidays. It isn't just the sun, is it ? All Consuming puts the finger on what that malaise is. The clogged roads, the faceless and samey high streets, the complete lack of interest in political parties, the privatisation of everything, the commercialisation of education - all the manifestations of the consumer society are pointed out and explained.

Having also read Robert Frank's Luxury Fever and Oliver James' Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist, there is nothing here that is completely new. As the author himself says, can you have original thoughts ? But that is not the point. What Lawson has done is to write a short, hugely readable book that precisely encapsulates the problem and confronts us with our own behaviour. This is a book that should make you feel deeply uncomfortable, as weaning yourself off any addiction, from cigarettes to television, always is. But it is the most important book I have read in a long while. I hope it goes on to be read by hundreds of thousands of people and that the ideas within it will finally wake up our bland, complacent political parties, and also the electorate.

Having lived abroad for 25 years and only recently come back to the UK, I can see just how sick life in Britain has become, but I don't get the impression that most of the population are really aware, somnambulist consumers that they are. It doesn't have to be like this and Lawson is an inspirational guide, all the more so as he comes across as a completely normal person, rather than a sandal-wearing, bearded vegan, though for all I know, he may be all those things.

The book is well-researched with frightening statistics to point out just how far we have become addicted to shopping. 70 million credit cards in the UK, a mere couple of million in Germany. Would you believe it?

If you read one book this year, make it this one and then lend it to your friends.

Turbo-capitalism, a personal and political indictment
I read this book in a day and found it totally absorbing. In its criticism of consumerist culture, it covers similar ground to Oliver James's "Affluenza" Richard Layard's, "Happiness" and Richard Wilkinson's work on inequality. In its discussion of personal solutions it refers to the "Idleness" project of Tom Hodgkinson. In the discussion of political solutions Neal Lawson reveals himself as the democratic collectivist Chair of Compass, the Labour based but Greenish leaning pressure group. You don't have to agree with all his recommendations to enjoy the book. Having read it, it's difficult to disagree with his contention that the solution to our current economic, environmental and existential problems will involve embracing "less" rather than "more".