" It was a quiet revolution. Most downshifters dressed quite a bit like everyone else and lived in ordinary neighborhoods rather than communes or cabins in the woods. Seattle emerged as the nexus of voluntary simplicity as the growing tech industry-Microsoft's headquarters were there-made the city synonymous with the overworked, conspicuously consuming yuppie, while many other residents were still mixed in a lingering recession. The result was perhaps the most deliberate experiment in stopping shopping in modern times: a whole city in which the rejection of consumerism entered the mainstream.
For nearly a decade, few aspects of daily life in Seattle were left unchanged by its shadow culture....For a few rare years, the consumer lifestyle was uncooled. 'We were sure in the '90s that we were the up-and-coming lifestyle choice,' Vicki Robin, coauthor of the downshifting classic 'Your Money or Your Life' told me....Then the global economy came roaring back to life, Seattle became better known for billionaires than plain living, and downshifting faded. "

― J.B. MacKinnon , The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves