Here in the wake of Thanksgiving , there ’s a tremendous selling push by retail merchant who implore us to buy more thing . Frankly , our entire thriftiness count upon people buying stuff they do n’t need . But Americans have a trend to romanticise the Before Times ™ — an era when consumerism was n’t so rampant . This longing for the solar day of older is misguided at best . One need only look at the table games of the nineteenth and 20th centuriesfor evidence .
The commercialization of holiday is in many style a product of the Industrial Revolution . But even as early as the eighties , mass were nostalgic for a time when consumerism was n’t celebrated as the American direction of lifespan . At least in the eighties , there were some people still alive who could still recollect this bizarre time when Christmas was arelatively small holiday .
pic : National Museum of Play
The Smithsonian has a expectant post about looking at American consumerism through the lens of board games . We get wind about the push and pull of shopping , with so many games rewarding buying , while still others romanticize “ simpler ” times , when few trade good were mass produced .
From theSmithsonian :
Shopping board games can be dated back to the [ nineteenth century ] . The Good Old Game of Corner Grocery , patent in 1887 by George S. Parker ( of later Parker Brothers fame ) , was a nostalgic diversion of what shopping had been like before aggregate production , when the bulk of Americans still bribe their goods from small shops or independent wholesalers . Unlike later shopping game , the true adversary in Corner Grocery was uncertainty . At the start of every rhythm , thespian did not know how much money they would have to utilise , or even which goods would be available for leverage .
So , yes , there was a sentence when things like Black Friday or the over - the - top consumerist packaging of holidays like Christmas had n’t yet occur . But it was a sentence that no one alive today can remember . suitably , it ’s in the board games of yesteryear ( a mass - produced consumer product themselves by the late 19th hundred ) that we learn about the history of American consumerism .
you could take more about the history of consumerist gameboard games over at theNational Museum of American History .
panel gamesconsumerism
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