Consumerism takes advantage of changes in society and it “seduces into accepting the deeply unsettling condition of postmodernity” (Smith, 1999: 50). Consumers “can buy short term comfort in the market place” (ibid). Through advertisements people are trained to think that the solution for dissatisfaction is the fulfillment of their wishful fantasies. People’s needs, which can be related to discipline and rationality, are replaced by the consumer society with “unnecessary things such as satisfying superfluous needs, artificially created in order to keep consumer demand high” (ibid: 86), which can be related to irrationality, hidden wishes or Freud’s pleasure principle. In other words, the consumers’ identity is defined by the acquisition of a variety of goods and services. Shopping in a consumer society is experienced as “a way of defining yourself, of saying who you are” (ibid: 56). When people choose an object instead of another they create their identity and “keep the capitalist system going” (ibid: 107). Consumption took the place of work, as “need” was replaced by “wish”. If “modernity allocated to work the main responsibility for giving people their identity, their social bond and their social function”, in a “postmodern habitat you are what you buy” (ibid: 157). The “contradiction”/secret of the consumer society is that the consumers’ irrationalities become tools of rational domination and control. To explain this process Bauman speaks about the fact that the “consumer society has achieved a previously unimaginable feat: it reconciled the reality and pleasure principles by putting, so to speak, the thief in charge of the treasure” (Bauman, 2001: 16). To explain this strategy it is worth mentioning George Ritzer’s “McDonaldization” process which refers to “an increase in efficiency, predictability and control” (Ritzer, 1998: 3) in the functioning systems of society. The model is taken from the American chain of McDonald’s fast food restaurants and their organizing principles. This process is connected with rationalization, which is the replacement of values, traditions, emotions with thoughts and actions which appear to be more rational. The rationalization process can be related to Max Weber’s concept of “iron cage” which refers to the amount of constraints that a materialistic society imposes on individuals and they accept all these constraints in order to receive the false happiness of possession and consumption. Because for the consumers “freedom is about the choice between greater and lesser satisfactions and rationality is about choosing the first rather than the second” (Smith, 1999: 107), they become the prisoners of consumption and they are manipulated to accept their “roles as happy consumers” (ibid: 30) through advertisements which greet you from “the moment you can blink at a television screen” (ibid: 157).
In his book The McDonaldization Thesis. Explorations and Extensions, George Ritzer comments upon the irrationalities involved in the “McDonaldization” of society. This process cannot be stopped “as long as there are material interests that push it and stand to benefit from its expansion” (Ritzer, 1998: 6). Ritzer relates McDonaldization to the “compulsion to act in a functionally rational matter” (ibid: 23) and underlines the fact that in “a McDonaldized society the majority of workers are accustomed to being told what to do and begin to lose the ability to interpret situations for themselves” (ibid: 24). The irrationalities of “McDonaldization” have to do with the customers, but also with the workers. Beside the customers, “the McDonaldization of the larger society has, in turn, served to further rationalize the work world” (ibid: 60). The term employed to describe this situation is “McJobs”. These jobs “lead to a variety of irrationalities, especially the dehumanization of work” (ibid) because the tasks required are predictable and the workers need only to perform them as quickly as possible. Another reason is the fact that technology is employed to control all the actions and the people who work become robot-like because of the continuous repetition of the tasks. The employees of this kind of systems do not have possibility to maintain a real conversation, because they deal with “scripted interaction” (ibid: 63).
Another irrationality connected to “McDonaldized systems” is the fact that the consumers do most of the time work that is not paid. The explanation comes from the fact that when you go in a fast food restaurant you automatically take a platter and you go to say what you want to eat. After that you take your platter you look for a table. Using Karl Mannheim’s term, Ritzer connects customers with the process of “self-observation” which is explained as “self-transformation” (Ritzer, 1998: 27). The individuals “have transformed themselves so that they are pliable participants in these systems” (ibid: 28) and the worst thing is that they permit this to happen, “they give up their individuality” (ibid), they accept the products and the tasks they have to do in order to receive the commodities. In other words, “McDonaldization has brought the customer into the labor process: the customer is the laborer” (ibid: 65). A person that spent most of his life in this kind of system cannot realize what is really happening: he/she is trained every day to accept “an enchanted iron cage” from which “there is no escape, and worse, even any interest in escaping” (ibid: 67). The replacement of labor with consumption cannot be observed by people who have no other standards in their lives.
To sustain the existence of the mentioned irrationalities, Ritzer refers to the replacement of “need” by “wishes” and he employs Karl Mannheim’s term of “substantial irrationality”: “McDonaldized systems seek to manipulate the needs, desires and impulses, the substantial irrationality of customers, in order to get them to become devoted, if not habitual, consumers of their products and services” (ibid: 30). For the institutions of society whose organizing principles are based on rationality, discipline is very important and that is why one can say that they follow the model of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, described by Michael Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975). In the Panopticon, as well as in a McDonaldized society, “rigorous discipline is imposed to make people follow the detailed rules imposed by those with power over them” (Smith, 1999: 29). The efficiency, predictability and control in this type of society are used to “hypnotize” the people through “the delights of consumerism” (ibid: 29). “The rationality of consumer society is built on the irrationality of its individualized actors” (Bauman, 2001: 17).
In the postmodern consumer society, the “McDonaldization” process is still present in its organizing principles, but for the people who are trained to become “active participants” Bauman mentions a new kind of mechanism: “the Synopticon”. “Unlike the Panopticon, where the few watched the many, in the Synopticon the many watch the few” (Smith, 1999: 153). The consumers in the “Synopticon” watch the few models provided by television, cinema, magazines and they are seduced by them. The consumer society controls people’s desires and it provides for them “patterns of existence” (ibid). One of the inventions of consumerism that enable the consumer society to make use of the people’s irrationalities is “the new means of consumption” and the process of “McDonaldization” has an important role in their “growth and spread” (Ritzer, 1998: 184).