Boo! That’s the sound of $12 Shein corsets, chemically-produced pumpkin-scented candles and fake plastic gourds your mom stacks on your dining table sneaking up on you.
English teacher Mrs. Kate Evans always keeps her classroom in season. Currently, her room is decked out in orange and black sparkly streamers with bat and pumpkin decals. Her large calendar hanging on the wall has pumpkins and witch hats marking birthdays and special events.
“We have 30 mums at our house. I always buy new fall clothes,” Evans said. “Fall is my season, I think we have 20 pumpkins.”
For some, romanticizing the most ravishing time of the year is part of what makes it so great. Buying into fall-mania products is a big part of this.
But do you really need a pumpkin-shaped Kendra Scott necklace to enjoy autumn? Through clever marketing and social media strongholds, we are losing sight of how to appreciate seasons the right way, and simultaneously falling into a harmful cycle of overconsumption.
Christmas or seasonal creep refers to efforts by retailers to introduce holiday or season-specific items well before that event or time period takes place. This is to build consumer excitement and extend the buying period, hoping for more profit.
A 2024 CBS report notes that Walmart had begun releasing its “Top Toys List” for Christmas shoppers on September 9. Hefty Trashbrags came out with a pumpkin spice scented trashbag on September 27, 2022. Marketing director of Hefty Waste Brian Lutz notes that since then, the product has launched earlier and earlier every year. In 2024, the scented bags were advertised to consumers in mid-August.
Early buying can take away from the full enjoyment of seasons. We can’t start thinking of the months of the year as buying periods, or before we know it, all 365 days will have passed us by. We need to stay in the moment, stop and watch the leaves change.
“Right now, at the dollar store, I even noticed they have a lot of winter and Christmas decorations out, and it’s not even Halloween yet,” Ms. Gianna Harris, marketing and business teacher said. “Some consumers would get really excited, but then some consumers are like, We don’t even get to enjoy Halloween or Thanksgiving before we even jump all the way to our winter holidays.”
Psychology teacher Amanda Lawson emphasizes the mere-exposure effect. People evaluate a stimulus more positively after repeated exposure to that stimulus. If people see something throughout their daily lives enough, they are generally influenced into liking or desiring that thing. Studies conducted at the Rissho and Tsukuba Universities in Japan investigate the mere exposure effect’s role in advertising.
“The mere exposure to things like pumpkins, things like flannels and jackets, that is all done purposefully, seasonally, because that’s what the company knows that you will buy,” Lawson said. “The more you market that, the more people see it, the more exposed they are to it, the more likely they are to buy it.”
In order to avoid overconsumption during fall, it’s important to limit your exposure to those specific products. While this is almost impossible to do with the accessibility of social media, It’s vital to try to remove yourself from online shopping culture and avoid influencers who advertise micro-trends through brand deals.
“The greatest thing that happened to the advertising budgets of large corporations was the influencer,” Lawson said.
Marketers also play on the very real emotional and mental changes people undergo during changing seasons.
“SAD [Seasonal affective disorder] is a real thing. People have depression symptoms in different months, so marketing things to people to make them feel better when it’s no longer warm out and starting to get cold is big,” Lawson said. “Instead of focusing on the negative of it getting cold, it’s like, oh no, we’re not getting cold, we’re getting cozy.”
When experiencing very natural symptoms of seasonal depression, it’s important to identify coping mechanisms that don’t include excessive shopping-that only makes it worse.
“Depression is not going to go away because you bought cool jeans,” Lawson said. The more you consume, the more you collect, a lot of times, becomes anxiety inducing for people, now they have more clutter to deal with.”
FOMO (fear of missing out)/limited edition marketing makes big bucks during seasonal buying periods. Marketers can attract consumers by basically threatening that a desirable product will go away if they don’t act quickly to get their hands on it. In the age of social media and microtrends, people develop a fear of missing out on the next latest thing, and marketers take advantage of that.
“When they start pumpkin spice in August, you do feel like it ruins the limited edition because it’s starting so early,” Harris said. “But marketers will do that to push you to go and buy it, because if you know that it’s going to go away, you’re more likely to get it.”
Everyone should be able to enjoy the seasons in their own way, but we must acknowledge that overconsumption isn’t good for you or the environment.
It’s vital to explore alternative ways to have fun during fall, going to your local farmers market, painting the leaves or baking fall treats with family and friends are just a few examples. Shopping has its place but before each purchase, sit down and ponder, is this really going to make my life better?
“It’s like, ‘Oh, I need an orange mug. I don’t have one!’ I have a million mugs,” Evans said.
Each opinion represented in The Panther Press is the view and voice of the writer. Opinions, as the selection and curation of content by the editors, do not represent the views of the entire Panther Press staff, the adviser, the school, or the administration.
