Shopping

Shopping can be understood as a very public manifestation of global capitalism and modern consumer culture. If consumption is to be understood broadly as the selection, purchase, use, maintenance and disposal of goods and services, shopping can be understood as a distinctive form in which the focus is on pleasure, leisure, and choice. Shopping emerges in a monetary economy in which the institutions and spaces exist for truly global systems of production and distribution to intersect with the individual consumer. Although shopping is synonymous with the high levels of consumption in modern societies, it is a mistake to think of it simply as consumption for the masses. Rather, it is more useful to think of shopping in terms of the high levels of individual consumption that stem from the apparent insatiability of individual needs and wants. Academic interest in shopping can be traced back to Walter Benjamin's account of the Parisian shopping arcades of the 19th century, and consequent engagement has tended to conceive of it in terms of the spectacle, with a particular focus on archetypical sites such as shopping malls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a popular view of shopping is one of it being a trivial and frivolous activity through which money is spent frivolously and (self) indulgently in the pursuit of hedonistic desires. Furthermore, in this framing, shopping serves to abstract individual consumers from the world around them such that they cannot engage critically with consumer culture or global capitalism. Compelling as this view is, it is problematic insofar as it obscures the disagreement that exists between those who have turned their attention to this rather extraordinary type of shopping and empirical evidence that demonstrates how the majority of shopping that people do is far more mundane, routine, and ordinary.

There is a strong tradition of theorizing shopping in terms of industrial capitalism's ability to manipulate individual consumers to serve its own ends. For a start, Karl Marx discussed how the fetishization of commodities served to conceal the exploitative relations of their production, such that individuals could be pacified and distracted by the acquisition of goods instead of questioning their working conditions. Similarly, it has been suggested that shopping is geared toward the pursuit of “false” needs and that these are created—under the aegis of wants and desires—to persuade people to purchase things that they do not really need. The idea here is that shopping never really manages to deliver the satisfaction that it promises, leaving the individual feeling hollow and empty with only the promise of yet more shopping to fill the void. Finally, it has been argued that the choices we appear to have while shopping are merely an illusion, insofar as products only differ to the extent that they are targeted at different categories of shopper. For example, from a functional point of view, there is very little difference between a sports car and a small hatchback, and yet they are differentiated by any number of symbolic characteristics that reflect existing social hierarchies. Through shopping (and displays of taste), we reproduce these hierarchies and service the interests of the dominant social groups.

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