" A long time ago Lewis Mumford wrote that "in a society that knows no other ideals, spending becomes the chief source of delight; finally it amounts to a social duty." What an outrageous exaggeration that must have seemed to those at whom it was aimed. Yet today you can hardly pick up a business magazine without finding similar statements never intended to be pejorative. As the photographic historian Judith Mara Gutman says, in a book called Buying,, "the whole process of buying ...determines our daily pace, dictates our nightly rhythm...Buying structures our lives. "

― Ralph Caplan , By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons