Will Americans Rethink Consumerism?

By Ted Anthony — AP National Writer

ROSS TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) — The first thing you see is the enormous boot.

Atop a ridge north of Pittsburgh, towering over customers at the entrance to Ross Park Mall, the giant L.L. Bean boot seems to shout: No buy is too big, no shopping dream too outsized. Come on in. Retail nirvana awaits. "Please do not climb on the boot," says a sign, as if we all might.

Inside, along buffed corridors freshly retooled to ramp up the aura of luxury, storefront signs spin a tale of a culture in conflict. "More choices coming soon," says a store under construction. "Unmounted Diamond Event," trumpets Littman Jewelers.

Yet selected items at Ann Taylor and Morini are 60 percent off. Le Gourmet Chef exhorts everyone to "Buy More $ave More" — a truth and a paradox that distills America into a bumper-sticker slogan. And just past the front door is the place that touts "Great Deals Inside." That would be Citizens Bank.

These are the contradictions that confront 21st-century America. We love to shop, but we need to save. We want it all, and we want it now. No matter whether it's a new pair of $100 jeans on your Visa, 90 days same as cash on that new car, a subprime mortgage. Psychologically, they're of a piece: Buy now, pay later. Shop 'til you drop.

Now we're paying. Now we're dropping. Credit — personal and institutional and national — is overextended into the absurd. Money that didn't exist in the first place is now frighteningly, heartbreakingly real. And the temples of our consumer choice are starting to crumble.

Chrysler and General Motors are wondering aloud if their century-old tanks are empty. Starbucks, home of the $4 venti latte, is laying off thousands and has — et tu, Brute? — launched a cheap brand of instant coffee. Circuit City expired two weeks ago, leaving 567 stores dark and Best Buy as the main place to shop for the 60-inch flat-screen HDTV you can't afford.

This is economic crisis. And in Washington and on Wall Street, they're scrambling to fix it with economic cures — useful ones or misguided ones, depending upon your perspective. But however effective they are, they remain attempts to impose a financial solution upon a dilemma that, in many ways, is cultural and behavioral.

Because in America, we consume. It is what we do, what we have been told to do, what our government usually tells us to do, what we love to do and what we must do. It has built us into a behemoth and undercut us at inopportune moments. Viewed from a distance, it's easy to see us as a nation of economic 5-year-olds, spending our allowance before we get it and demanding more, more, more, then being shocked when the money runs out.

Well, our revels now are ended. And at the edges of any economic recovery that might lie ahead lurks a question that few seem inclined to contemplate: At the dawn of the administration that swore it would bring change to us, can we bring change to ourselves?