Today's American society is working more, only to have less leisure time. There seems to be an increasing trend to work an increasing amount of hours. People are not valuing there leisure time like they should. American families are evolving around what Juliet Schor calls, the work and spend cycle. This is an idea of working, not to save money, but only to spend it on material goods. Americans are mass consuming goods at an increasing rate. Many American households consume as much as three to four times as what a European family household might consume. I believe the United States may have a waste management problem that will not be able to be solved. With all this consumption of goods, I would like to think that Americans would put a higher degree of importance on their leisure time. This is not the case; American families seem to be enjoying the television a lot more than any other culture. Is watching television really a form of leisure? People all around the globe work day after day waiting for that two day period of time which is called the weekend. This is when the real ideal of mass consumption takes place. From the ideals of Juliet Schor's "The Overworked American" to Witold Rybczynski's "Waiting for the Weekend" today's families are working longer hours only to mass consume. The mass consumption of goods mostly takes place during a two-day increment, The Weekend.
According to Schor (1992), "Americans report that they only have sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of"(p.1). Americans really need to start putting a higher degree of importance on their leisure time. The rise of capitalism has made many Americans extremely greedy. American families are consuming so many material goods, if productivity doesn't increase, prices will have to fall. The trend of buying goods only to keep up with a status quo (The Jones") will keep Americans producing and consuming at an unprecedented rate.
