I have a four-page essay due Monday, which I've barely started. Yes, I should've started it earlier. Yes, I'm regretting it now. I'm beginning to realize how difficult it's going to be, to stretch my response out to four gosh dang pages.

Here's the prompt:

The authors quote conservative economist Wilhelm Ropke: "The curse of commercialization is that it results in the standards of the market spreading into regions which it should remain beyond supply and demand" (Chapter 19). Explain what this means and why it is a problem. Develop example(s) in detail.

It's in response to the book Affluenza which focuses on commercialization and capitalism, and how they're beginning to rule American life.

My main example is going to be Christmas, but I don't know how I could stretch that out into four pages. Happy to hear some other ideas for possibly related example(s).

I am NOT looking for someone to write this essay for me. I'm mostly looking for people to bounce ideas back and forth with, because I'm really struggling with this prompt.

Christmas sounds like a good idea. Could you maybe expand it to the commercialization of all holidays? Halloween, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day / Father's Day, Valentines...etc.

There's always somthing to buy into at some point during the year.

I don't know to what extent you would potentially just be repeating the same stuff, but it might give you a few more examples.

As a Brit one of the things that always weirds me out when I come to the US is the commercialization of healthcare. Adverts for medication? Perhaps it's getting too political but I think the commercialization of healthcare is scary stuff. Healthcare is a human right, and yet companies and businesses are making poor health / good health into profit. But I've never done any type of business course so I may be way off the mark here.

The commercialization of holidays as a whole is a great idea. Which ones might I do? I was thinking that doing three would be my best bet. So Christmas as one, Valentines as another, since I could write about how it should be about love rather than money...

And yes, the commercialization of healthcare here in the U.S. is utterly insane! I'd love to touch on that, but I feel like it should be its own essay entirely, haha.

Thanksgiving would be a good example. First it was stores opening early Friday morning for Black Friday. Then people started lining up in the middle of the night. Then some stores pushed opening back to Thursday night. And of course there's also Cyber Monday and the shitstorm that always goes down with Amazon.

May also be good to mention how Christmas displays in stores go up before Halloween now.

and re: Valentine's, I personally think that it's a dumb holiday in general - we shouldn't need a specific day to show people that we love them. It's more of a commercialized "hey men, buy your SOs overpriced shitty box candy and overpriced flowers day! oh and don't forget to spend $10 on this card"

Have you ever read about the creator of Mother's Day? She has a lot of feelings about its abuse. Maybe it could play into your prompt.