Shifting Citizen Consumerism

After reading Cohen's essays on the citizenship aspect of consumerism, the new event, "Small Business Saturday" came to mind. The event has a website, and is sponsored by (suspiciously) American Express: http://smallbusinesssaturday.com

The event was heavily publicized on Facebook, but surprisingly received little coverage elsewhere. The lack of publicity could indicate a lack of turnout, which further supports the hypothesis that consumers are becoming more global-minded and detached from their local communities. Nonetheless, here's one I found.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/small-business-saturday-hopes-holiday-shopping-local/story?id=12255389

While Cohen documents the push to buy more goods in general during times of economic recession, it seems the push we're hearing now in this Great Recession is one differentiated on local v. national lines. Large, profitable, corporate chains are now seen as the enemy, where they once were seen as signs of American prosperity. As the two websites argue, though, local businesses are the backbone of American industry, thus making it our civic duty to support them.

If we take what Peck says about the decline in entrepreneurship in Generation Y, however--along with Luce's description of business foreclosures--if these small businesses fail to make their estimated end-of-year profits this year, they may be gone for good. These small, local businesses may fail and then there will be no new effort to replace them. Rather, the nationwide chain businesses, or even only-online stores, will grow to claim an even larger share of national profits in the coming years.

This growing inequality between local and national businesses has the potential to further exacerbate the problems we've already seen from a decline in civic engagement. When citizens fail to perceive themselves as residents of certain neighborhoods--their homes as merely houses (Cohen 219)--but rather as residents of a state or the nation at-large, community bonds are broken. One no longer has a responsibility to one's neighbors, and only relates to the government on a larger scale, potentially making local and state governments obsolete. These isolating effects do not lend themselves well to the collective spirit that is part of our democratic ideal.