I'd like to buy the world a coke: Consumptionscapes of the “less affluent world”

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The impact of globalization on the consumption patterns of the Less Affluent World are examined, drawing on examples of consumer culture contact with the More Affluent World. We find that rising consumer expectations and desires are fueled by global mass media, tourism, immigration, the export of popular culture, and the marketing activities of transnational firms. Yet rather than democratized consumption, these global consumption influences are more apt to produce social inequality, class polarizations, consumer frustrations, stress, materialism, and threats to health and the environment. Alternative reactions that reject globalization or temper its effects include return to roots, resistance, local appropriation of goods and their meanings, and especially creolization. Although there is a power imbalance that favors the greater influence of affluent Western cultures, the processes of change are not unidirectional and the consequences are not simple adoption of new Western values. Local consumptionscapes become a nexus of numerous, often contradictory, old, new and modified forces that shape unique consumption meanings and insure that the consumption patterns of the Less Affluent World will not result in Western consumer culture writ globally.In 1990 the $15 million World of Coca Cola museum opened in the ubiquitous bottler's corporate headquarters city, Atlanta, Georgia. It immediately began to draw a million visitors a year. The theme of this polished and well-presented museum is symbolized by the twelve and a half ton Janus-faced Coca Cola logotypes ("Coke"/"Coca Cola") rotating inside the hollow globe that dominates the facade of the museum. The globe announces that Coke pervades the world and is its axis as well as its gyroscopic source of equilibrium. Inside, this theme is further developed in such a way as to make clear that Coke is a magical elixir that has brought its particular salvation to even the most exotic and remote cultures of the Less Affluent World. Visitors see numerous foreign advertisements for Coke as well as photographs situating Coke aboard camels in Egypt, bicycles in Indonesia, and long-tailed hang yao boats in Thailand. One of the focal spectacles in the museum is an eight and a half by fifteen foot highdefinition television depicting the 1991 creation of the "Hilltop

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