It would not do to just truck the crates of pledges to a landfill, adding to the trash disposal problem and conspicuously consuming scarce resources.

Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) showed that the wealthy conspicuously consumed their riches to display their success to others.

There are usually a few tables of big-spenders, too, conspicuously consuming fancy dishes like shark's fin soup.

Grade school and high school kids, those who are swept up by the sneakers commercials, might begin to appreciate that there is another thing to conspicuously consume: a thoughtful idea.

There's enough vivid description of Mexico's newly rich and infamous, and of the poor scrambling to survive in their slums, to fill several less conspicuously consuming novels.

Where the third floor had been a hot, dark blur, the fourth was a place to lounge and consume conspicuously.

The stock exchange is there, as are Shanghai's new millionaires, conspicuously consuming in the festival of boutiques and department stores along Nanjing Road.

In it he analyzed the motivation in capitalism to conspicuously consume their riches as a way of demonstrating success.

Personal vanity and the taste for consuming conspicuously will always link within the human breast.

I grew up resolving to eschew bargains, to consume conspicuously; to feed my dogs free-range steak, to change my car when the ashtrays were full.