It is of course true that we have some choices. But we have less power than the companies that shelf and produce all of that stuff.
Each company has their own marketing department. Public Relations is the science of manipulating desire, developed for over one-hundred years now. And they just have to focus on selling their coffee machines or whatever.
Take just one commodity as an example. A soda. They sometimes put just a little bit of salt in it to (1) mask the sweet flavor, and (2) to make you more thirsty. But you of course don’t notice any salty taste or the fact that it is unreasonably sugary because the salt and the sugar (to a point) cancel each other out. But a reasonably conscientious consumer could read the what’s-in-this-shit label, go on a message board and convince a lot of others (hundreds? thousands?s) to do a boycot campaign until all major producers start to issue “no salty business” labels on their products, so that the somewhat less conscientious consumers can pick the no-salt options without reading the what’s-in-this-crap label.
Now you just repeat the above step for all of the hundreds of items that you have to buy.
Who has time to do that on a big enough scale? No, not just on the scale of getting the bragging right of “I consume X times less than the average person”;[1] we’re talking about actually pressuring companies (with our awesome wallet power[1]) to stop producing whole lines of products.
Each company just has to sell their coffee machines or whatever else. And you just have to do wade through and make sense of the the propaganda given out by dozens/hundreds of companies, for hundreds to thousands of product lines.
[1]: Some fringe “anti-consumption” lifestyle groups does not threaten the bottom-line of any company.
[2]: Speaking of which: one can of course vote with one’s wallet. That is a form of power. But here the issue of how relative that power is painfully obvious: some (most) people have wallets (including savings) consisting of hundreds to thousands of dollars, while some people (and entities) have wallets with hundres of millions of dollars. This is not a one-person-one-vote kind of power!