One thing to keep in mind about us keeping the big corporations big - at least those in consumer goods - is that the deck is stacked against the consumer. There are herds of psychologists working in marketing that apply every trick in the book and designing new tricks every day to make buying more inviting. This isn't only about subliminal advertising or product placement. It's thousands of techniques built in to every product design, package, color, lighting, even manufacturing in China, not to make you just want one product, but to turn consumption into a way of life.
Consumption at some level is necessary for survival. You can't wear the same clothes from the time you're born till when you die. I did see a change in the US though during the fifteen years I lived abroad. Products overall seem cheaper, but also more cheaply made and people buy more of them. New houses are bigger than they were, there are more TVs in them, there's more furniture in them, but it's cheaper than it used to be. There are tons of cheap, accessible junk to be had around us. Electrically speaking, things have changed too. When I started back in 1988, there were a lot of homes doing fine with a 100A service and many were still fine with a 60A service. Nowadays most new homes in this region have a 320A service or larger. That's a lot of juice for a family of four or five, but it's deemed necessary to make our consumption levels safe.
I think the key to reigning in consumption is teaching people about quality. Quality seems to be one of the things that the marketers have tried the hardest to make a fuzzy concept out of to the point where a lot of folks really can't tell the difference between something that's high quality and something that's not. It seems to me that most people I've met who have quality stuff tend to have less stuff in general. On the other hand, maybe I'm wrong.