Shopping

Jenny Shaw, Jenny Shaw

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745638621, 9780745638614
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We spend more time shopping than doing anything else, after sleep and work. So why is it not taken more seriously? The answer: we take shopping for granted. Indeed, culture can only 'work' by being taken for granted. This paradox – that what is most familiar, like shopping, is also the hardest to 'see' analytically – provides the starting point for this compelling examination of the many dimensions of the shopping experience.

Shopping enables readers to realize the significance of their shopping memories and milestones, how the rhythm of the day or week revolves as much around shop opening hours as working hours or bus times, and why Mayor Giuliani was right after 9/11 to tell Americans to keep on shopping. From an exciting cultural perspective, Jenny Shaw explores how shopping is viewed, the history behind its 'fall from grace', its part in the common culture, its role in helping us craft new identities, hold on to old ones, adjust to change, and generally 'hold us together' both as individuals and communities.

Students of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, media and business studies interested in culture and the everyday world will be gripped by this engaging and accessible guide to the meaning behind what the ordinary shopper actually does and why shopping remains so popular despite social and cultural changes.

1

Shopping in the Rain

‘Why do we go shopping?’ It seems such a simple question and the most obvious answer, ‘to buy the things we need or want’, equally so. But after a moment’s thought most of us can remember times when we entered shops and did not buy, or even intend to buy. There are many reasons for shopping, or for thinking about shopping, however we choose to do it, yet, if asked to explain ourselves, we can be taken aback. Or, at least I was when, after returning from a walk and talking to a friend about how I had gone into a shop, she asked ‘Why?’, and I replied ‘Because it rained.’ Though true, it seemed an inadequate answer. We could have gone on to discuss whether some intention or motive is needed to explain shopping, or whether because, as a species, we humans are very responsive to our environments, my running for cover in a dress shop in lower Manhattan was only to be expected, but we let the matter drop. The next day, at passport control in the UK, I was asked, ‘Where have you come from today?’, and I answered, ‘New York’. The official then asked, ‘Working, or shopping?’ to which I replied ‘Both’. Then, I asked him, very politely, ‘Would you ask this of a man?’ He did not reply, so I pressed, ‘Would you?’, and then he shook his head. Perhaps I should have let that go too. Only a few hours earlier, the friendly check-in staff at JFK, amused by the number of books on shopping buried among my clothes, as I hauled them out to reduce the weight of the bag, wanted to know why I had those books. Then, after I told them, they wanted to know why was I writing another one?

In his book ‘Why’, Charles Tilly (2006) argues that there are four types of reasons which we give for what we do: ‘conventions’, which are the most culturally acceptable reasons; ‘stories’, which show a clear cause and effect; ‘codes’, which govern action, often legal; and specialist ‘technical accounts’; and that in every instance, when we give, ask for, or consider a reason, we negotiate a relationship. To my friend, I perhaps gave a technical reason; to the official at Heathrow I gave a conventional reason; and at JFK I gave a story. It started, as does this book, with time and space. With Jonathan Gershuny’s (2000) finding that in the rich nations, such as Britain and the United States, shopping is the daily activity on which, after work and sleep, we spend most time, and with Will Hutton’s (2002) revelation that in Britain retail footage had expanded to over five times the European average. A figure possibly much larger now, and one reflected in the fact that shopping regularly tops the list as Britons’ favourite leisure activity. We spend the time we do shopping not because shortages force us to queue for hours on end, or because we are compulsively acquisitive, but because, in addition to shopping being the mundane reality of buying the things we need to live and, more importantly, do not, and cannot, make for ourselves, shopping makes our lives more meaningful because it is both more and less than buying.

As an activity which straddles the boundaries between work and leisure, production and consumption, pleasure and duty, shopping can be hard to pin down. But shopping is more than buying because of the different ways in which it can be done, the different effects which it can have on the shopper, on staff in a shop or a call centre, on other customers, and those for whom the shopping might be done. However, shopping is also less than buying because it often does not result in a purchase, and sometimes was never intended to. A ‘good’ shopping trip can be one where money is ‘saved’ by not buying, just as much as one which does. Even shoplifting, which is a measure of desirability, is shopping, and so is ‘window shopping’, especially at night when the shops are shut. Shopping may be mundane, but it is also both an expression and a reflection of culture, which means that we can learn more about culture by looking at shopping. Of course, this is true, too, of much else and, as shopping is seen by many people as a total waste of time it might seem an odd choice of lens. However, no activity is without meaning, which makes the question more whether we can see the meaning of what we are doing when we go shopping?

We are usually ‘blind’ to our own culture, our ‘way of doing things’, because it is part of us, in much the same way as we cannot hear our own accents, we cannot, unless brought up short, see our own culture which is the collection of values, beliefs and practices which define our society, which help us make sense of our lives and hopes, and which hold us together both as individuals and as a community. It is a huge job, for culture, a national culture, or more specifically a class, gender, age or ethnic culture to achieve all this, and it has be incorporated, or internalized, and taken for granted. Thus any sample of culture which we might choose to use to shed light on the concept, had better have this feature, and shopping does. Those of us lucky enough to live in a rich settled society so take shopping for granted that often we cannot accurately remember the last time we did it, or what we bought. When teaching about these matters, I would sometimes ask students about the last time they went shopping, which on the whole did not spring to mind, and to list all the shops in a street which they thought they knew well, and then walk along it and check. Most found that they had ‘missed’ at least a third of the shops, that there were several which they had never noticed before, and some businesses, for example, the insurance company, nail bar, estate agent, funeral parlour, poodle parlour, barber shop and Indian take-away, which they were unsure if they counted as shops.

Within us and without us

Culture is both inside and outside us, and while we may not notice our own culture we might notice its effects on others, and almost certainly on ourselves when we are in another culture. For Japanese tourists in Paris, the shock at how they were treated by shop assistants there was apparently so acute that every year some have needed treatment for a type of depression known as ‘Paris Syndrome’, and to be repatriated. In contrast to Japan, where ‘the customer is king’, it seemed to the Japanese that in Paris the shop assistants barely looked at them. Yet, for many Britons, what shocks them when shopping in France is being chastised for showing irritation at a slow-moving queue because the assistant is firm in giving full attention to the person they are serving at that moment. Shopping is not the same everywhere because the meanings it carries are not the same everywhere, and there is a sense of shopping as a national flag, an advertisement for perhaps both local and national culture: so tourists, like the Japanese in Paris, flock to local shopping areas to sample it. However, in a globalized world, tourists are often disappointed to discover that the local crafts on sale turn out to have been ‘made in China’. Shopping reflects the global culture every bit as much as it does the local culture. As Alan Ryan (1998) notes, there is a widespread fear that mass culture will destroy culture, in Matthew Arnold’s version of culture as ‘the best’ and what a ‘cultivated person’ will appreciate, and, instead, impose a bland uniformity across the world depicted through the image of its becoming ‘one vast suburb, filled with indistinguishable shopping malls supplying designer jeans and fast food’.

This is not presented as a pretty sight, and I am not endorsing it, but using it to make the point that the globalization of industrialized capitalism has transformed the geography of production and consumption and led to the nations where consumption is concentrated, for example, Britain and the United States, to become increasingly ‘retailized’. As a result, in those nations, it is now easier to find a sign to a mall or shopping centre than to a mine or manufacturing facility, there are more jobs in stores, marketing and advertising than in factories, and more shops are added, almost daily, to museums, hospitals and airports. These are also nations where, to further raise footfall, more cinemas, ice rinks and, in Portugal, even a bull ring, have been added to malls, and where retail ‘parks’ pepper the countryside as much as the cities; and where every other page of even serious newspapers such as The New York Times advertise some special shopping deal, while in their cities it is not falling leaves that mark a changing of the season, but changing displays in shop windows. The city, which has long been the most powerful emblem of modern society, remains so, but it is no longer work in a city which is the template modern experience, but shopping in one. This retailization of culture, and an increasing government expectation that the experience of shopping in the population at large will equip it to cope with all manner of ‘privatizations’, has placed shopping at the centre of ‘the way of life of a whole people’, a definition of culture which, for Raymond Williams (1958), was the only way in which that could be understood.

Retailization is an aspect of the post-industrial society. Period. However to hear some say of shopping that is has become ‘a way of life’ is not to hear it as neutral statement, but a criticism of some person or community who is deemed to be interested in nothing but accumulating mountains of goods and gizmos, at the expense of a much richer personal, political and cultural life, which could be theirs, if only they would give up their pathological, selfish and irresponsible addiction to shopping. This view of shopping as a symbol of all that is wrong with the modern world, and as indistinguishable from ‘consumerism’, is a major obstacle in the attempt to take shopping seriously. But ‘retailization’ is not the same as the ‘consumer culture’ or ‘consumerism’ and this book is not about either of those, or about any of the goods which we buy, or might buy, but about the social and cultural meaning of shopping, as an activity. Retailization may have made or be on the way to making shopping ‘a way of life’, but shopping is not how most of us spend most of our money, unless we are teenagers of moderately well-off parents still living at home. After taxes, most personal expenditure goes on housing, utilities, transport, insurance, health, education, holidays and various services, whether these mean haircuts, dry cleaning, taxis, eating out, or some form of entertainment. What remains to be spent as ‘shopping’, whether in shops or online, is mostly not spent on unnecessary luxuries, unless food, clothes, toiletries, cleaning materials and electrical goods count as such. The point is that everyone, except The Queen, goes shopping, even if they do not all shop in the same shops or have the same amount of money to spend. This makes shopping a mainstay of the common culture, even the global common culture, because it can be, and often is, done without a shared language, and as a mainstay of everyday life. This is where the story must start.

Extraordinary everyday life

When in Britain a campaign called History Matters (2006) was launched to raise awareness of history and the place of everyday life within it, and provide a time capsule for posterity, it started by inviting the whole nation to write a weblog for one day in October. The response was almost overwhelming, though, for many commentators, also deeply disappointing, as it was full of accounts such as, ‘I got up, ate breakfast, and went shopping.’ However this is exactly what posterity needs to know, as do we, and the rest of this book can be read as a deconstruction of that sentence. We need, and take comfort from our habits and routines, even though they can be boring, because they bring meaning into our individual lives by providing stability, structure, and representing normality. Indeed, the words ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ are almost interchangeable, as for many people what they think of as ‘everyday life’ is what they, as ‘ordinary’ people, ‘normally’ do. This is why after 9/11, Mayor Giuliani of New York counselled his fellow American citizens to keep on shopping. At first, this seemed grossly inappropriate, but it made sense because shopping is normalizing, keeps up spirits, and may have helped head off an economic downturn. This is also why after some earthquake or hurricane, a bombing in Kabul or Baghdad, stories about life returning to normal are pictured as people going about their daily lives, shopping. Routine anchors us, and gives us some purchase on the day. Once we have become accustomed, say, to cleaning our teeth twice a day, morning and night, if for some reason we cannot do this, we can feel ‘put out’ for the rest of the day. Getting back into a routine means being able to take things for granted and go about our everyday lives without worrying too much. Similarly, though we often take vacations to get away from routine, including routine shopping, these very routines are often immediately recreated on holiday. Not because we have nothing better to do, but because shopping bridges home and away, and much of the shopping done while on vacation is for presents to take home and give to those who were left behind. It keeps us in touch with normal life, as we are all traders.

Though culture is about drawing distinctions and boundaries it is also profoundly ordinary and, while Raymond Williams (1976) is famous for having nominated culture to be the most complicated word in the English language, he also described it as plain ordinary (Williams, 1958). In my view this is the most useful aspect of culture to keep in mind when thinking about shopping. That said, shopping means many different things to different people, and at different times. Shopping with some money in your pocket, is very different from shopping without, and there is for most people both ‘special’ shopping and ordinary shopping. However even the ordinary can become extraordinary and a shop which, to one person, is totally devoid of all meaning or creative potential, is to another person full of opportunity. In Ann Patchett’s (1998) lyrical novel The Magician’s Assistant, a resident of Nebraska gently explains to her new-found sister-in-law the joys of Wal-Mart, ‘I bring the boys here in the dead of winter when the weather is awful and they are bored, and I come here when I want to be alone. My mother and I come here when we want to talk privately, and Bertie and I come here when we feel like seeing people. I come here when the air conditioner goes out in the summer and I buy popcorn and just walk around. Most of the times I can remember that when Howard and I were actually getting along he’d ask me if I want to go to Wal-Mart with him, and we’d look at stuff we wanted to buy and talk about it – wouldn’t it be nice to have a Cusinart, wouldn’t it be nice to have a sixty-four piece sprocket set. It’s a very romantic place, really.’ This is the point, shopping is not all the same, or always the same.

For many men ‘shopping’ means ‘shopping for clothes’ and in their mind, perhaps, equates to ‘non-essentials’ so that, hand on heart, some men claim that they never ‘go shopping’, though what I suspect this usually means is that they do not like shopping for clothes, so do it as infrequently as possible. To get a sense of how discriminating people are about shopping, invite someone to talk about their shopping, and if they are not immediately alarmed and defensive, they will cagily ask ‘What sort of shopping?’, ‘food shopping’, ‘clothes shopping’, ‘Christmas shopping’, shopping alone, shopping with my partner, with a friend, or with the kids? Even if they settle on a category, say, household or food shopping, further clarification, for example, between ‘weekly’ and ‘top-up’ shopping is likely to be required. Sorting like from unlike, or classifying, is the basis of all culture, and systems of meaning, and recognizing how carefully we distinguish or discriminate different types of shopping is step one in understanding why shopping is important as culture. However, people are not only discerning about shopping, shopping means being discerning and it is because of the scope which shopping offers to make choices that it can be humanizing.

Thomas Hine (2002:19) writes, ‘The local Wal-Mart is the wonder of the world. Never before have so many goods come together from so many places at such low cost. And never before have so many people been able to buy so many things.’ The ‘buyosphere’, Hine’s term for all the different places and ways of buying, in the richer parts of the world, is a fulfilment of an ‘ancient dream of plenty for all’, and has become the ‘chief arena of expression’ and ‘the place where we learn most about who we are, both as a people, and as individuals’. Too much choice, and it can be overwhelming, but even the poorest of us in the rich countries are discerning shoppers, and denying individuals the choices which shopping offers is tantamount, in the modern world, to denying them a right of citizenship. Shopping can be enriching and meaningful, but it can also be boring and oppressive, a feature which, in addition to taking for granted, it shares with the context in which most of it occurs: everyday life.

Poachers and gamekeepers: rules and close shaves

In their book on this topic, titled Escape Attempts, Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor (1976) start by describing everyday life as an ‘open prison’, though they soon turn to the various ‘fantasies’, ‘free areas’ and ‘activity enclaves’ which bring relief to the ‘minddeadening’ aspects of that ‘prison’. Cohen and Taylor do not include shopping as an example of these, though for many women this is exactly what shopping provides: an escape from the family and a bit of time for themselves or to share with a good friend and even, perhaps, recover their more creative side. Another theorist of everyday life, Michel de Certeau (1988), approached the topic through the opportunities which it offers for ‘tactical resistance’, for being subversive, and finding uses for things and places other than that or those for which they were intended, and which he calls ‘poaching’. Many of the uses we make of shops count as ‘poaching’; ‘shoplifting’ is the most obvious example, but we are also poaching when we use shops as somewhere to wait for a friend and yet look purposeful, as a place to sit down in, or shelter from the rain, or to warm up, or as a short cut or, most commonly, for the use of a bathroom. Even more daring, though, is the example given by an ex-IRA man in a radio talk, which included a description of how to ‘lose a tail’. The best method, he claimed, was to find an old-fashioned department store, as their layouts were usually so complex that no one but a local could ever or easily find the exit. He then described how, on one occasion, while living in Birmingham, once he realized that he was being followed, he had leapt on a train to Leeds because there he knew of a store where he could be sure of losing his pursuer. When IKEA opened a store in Red Hook, New York, and provided a free water taxi service to it from Manhattan, it was inevitable that the service would soon be used by more than those planning to shop at IKEA, that is, ‘poached’, and just as inevitable that IKEA would find a way to identify and filter the two groups.

A more ordinary escape offered by shopping might be the switching from one chore to another so, while I might not need, right now, to go and buy toilet paper or catfood, if I choose to do so it is very often because it allows me to escape some other chore, and is satisfying because it gives me a small sense of control over my time. As a break, it punctuates the day and, just as punctuation gives meaning to a string of words by breaking it up, so breaking up the day, which shopping allows, gives meaning to the flow of experience. The shopping break, not only gives structure, pattern and meaning to the day, it does it for the week, the month, and even the year as Christmas shopping comes round once more in October. The tension between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, or ‘social coercion’ and ‘individual freedom’ which accords to individuals a degree of control over the shape of their life, and makes them actors, not puppets, is the problem at the heart of sociology. A problem which is never resolvable, and nor do we want it to be, for we want both structure and agency. We want to be able to assume that buses and trains will run on time, garbage be collected, and schools open when the kids get there. And shops too, so that we can use them on the way back, partly because this gives us more room to manoeuvre, but also because if shops are shut unexpectedly, buses and trains cancelled or late running, it undermines everything else. This tension between the sense of freedom, and of being governed by routine is acted out many times every day, as rules and routines are both observed and flouted in shopping, as in other activities. The sudden remembering of an item which ‘has to be bought’ can be demanding and oppressive, but it can also be liberating, as it is when we spot something we fancy, question whether we can afford it, and then go ahead and buy it anyway.

For philosopher Peter Winch (1958) it was only because human beings are interpretive rule-and-routine following creatures that the systematic study of social behaviour, that is, social science, was ever a possibility. Rules and routines do not determine our behaviour, but they guide it, as is indicated by the phrase ‘as a rule’. We need rules because we need and desire structure, stability and predictability in order to get on with our lives, and so deep is this need, that we quickly invent rules when need be. And when we break a rule, we usually invoke another one to justify that breach. Kate Fox (2004) illustrates this in her account of English life as rule-ridden when she adds to the rule identified by Daniel Miller (1998) of ‘shopping as saving’, which means spending money now in order to spend less later, the rule of ‘apologizing and moaning’, which kicks in after someone has paid the full price for some expensive item. But rather than keep quiet about this, Fox further observes, the English either blame themselves by saying ‘Of course, I shouldn’t have . . .’, or blame the shop, ‘Ridiculous price. . .’. But to this, we might add, with the secret satisfacti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Shopping in the Rain
• 2 From Thrift to Spendthrift: How Buying Turned into Spending
• 3 A la Recherche des Shops Perdus
• 4 Signposts and Shopping Milestones: Too Old for Topshop?
• 5 Shopping: A Rough Guide to Gender
• 6 Putting on a Posh Voice
• 7 Conclusion: Taking it all for Granted
• References
• Index