SHOPPING:

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

Jenny Shaw. Polity, 2010

 

Contents

 

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

 

'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

 

Ch. 1. Shopping in the Rain

 

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: 'convenнtions', 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 activнity 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 posнsibly 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 acquisiнtive, 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, shopнping 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 accuнrately 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 busiнnesses, 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 wideнspread 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 supplyнing 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 industrialнized capitalism has transformed the geography of production and consumption and led to the nations where consumption is conнcentrated, 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, marketнing 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 indisнtinguishable 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, toiнletries, 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 everyнday 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 repreнsenting 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 shopнping. 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 worнrying 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 ordiнnary (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 ordiнnary 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 1 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 Ч 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 differнent 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 'buyo-sphere', 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 overнwhelming, 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 meanнingful, 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 'mind-deadening' 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 unexнpectedly, 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 satisfaction, nonetheless, of having introduced the price into the conversation.

A structure made of rules, or routines, is always provisional and the 'right' of the individual to duck a rule, or change their routine, is treasured every bit as much as the fact that rules are mostly followed. Many times every day we have to decide whether to do something 'properly' or cut a corner, a decision to follow or flout a rule, which illustrates how the everyday world is a moving interface between the order of the society and the pragmatism of the individual. The rules of shopping, such as which side of the counter to queue, are not codified like the rules of the road (except for laws forbidding the sale of alcohol and cigarettes to the under age, sometimes posted inside a shop), so we cannot google them, yet keeping them is something we absorb and follow without realнizing it. Other shopping rules we make for ourselves: for example the order in which we go round the supermarket, how we pack our bags at the checkout, and whether or not we tie the handles of the plastic bags together to ensure that items do not fall out in the boot of the car (do women do this, or is it just men?). These are rules to which we may become so deeply attached that we often resent and reject offers of help from others, unless they agree to follow them too and pack the bags our way.

Many of the rules structuring everyday life, such as facing the person you are talking to or keeping 'the right distance' from another person, are what Thomas Scheff (1984) called 'residual rules', ones which only come to light when broken. Though what is the 'right distance' varies according to context and culture as when standing close to another person in a crowded shop is acceptнable because it is unavoidable, it is not acceptable when that shop is not crowded. A shop queue is a rule, the making of a line, and it is one which, if broken, will reliably provoke a sharp reprimand from another shopper who will show irritation, and publicly shame the 'offender' by indicating to other shoppers that an attempt to queue-jump had just been averted. Rule-making and rule-breaking are the weft and warp of everyday life and the tension between daily life as a round of routine and obligation, brightened by the occasional liberating escape from it, gives the characteristic texture of everyday life. A routine is somewhat different to a rule, because it is more social, and because it more often involves other people, generally people we know, and as our routines affect theirs, so do their routines affect us. Sometimes we 'save' a bit of shopping for when we happen to be near a particular shop, district or person, or as something to do with them. Shopping for or on behalf of others can be burdensome, especially when it means catering for 'fussy eaters', but it is also an everyday opportunity to show that you keep a loved one in mind, know their food likes and dislikes and, as Daniel Miller (1998) observes, perhaps buy them a 'treat'. Even if we are not shopping for other people, or using it to show that we care, shopping is rich in opportunities for the brief encounter which can lift the day, such as some of the long-term light-hearted relationships which we develop with some shopkeepers.

 

What's real? What isn't?

 

For many years the domain of the everyday world was perceived as lacking any structure, or boundary, any set of institutions, or form of regulation, uniquely its own, and was thus seen as impossible to theorize. Then the social constructionist approach of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) dented this view and began to change the way structure was thought about, while feminist scholarship on women's lives brought to light the 'missing institutions', and most obviously the 'home'. The social constructionist approach revealed how the social world was 'made real', or solid and reliable, by individuals proceeding on the assumption that it was, and by investing confidence in social institutions. Confidence, however, is a fragile subjective state, and the substance of social institutions lasts only so long as the confiнdence, however 'solidified' and 'objectified' those institutions had become while individuals believed in them. But once confidence falters so does the institution, as was dramatically shown by the 2008 financial meltdown when banks around the world stopped lending to each other and global economic growth shrank back to the level of just after the 1939-45 World War. Though first described as a 'crisis of the banks' it was soon redefined as a 'crisis of confidence and consumption' and the rescue remedy proposed was that we should all to step up our shopping. However, the tax cuts intended to keep the tills ringing, and aimed at the poor who were thought more likely to spend any extra money which came their way than the rich, who would just save it, did not work as the poor, too, held on to their purses.

Not all institutions or structures are like banks and rest on solidнity, or the hope of solidity, and some are essentially flexible, with the market being, perhaps, the paramount example. Architects build flexibility into buildings to that they can withstand shocks and with Bruno Latour's (2005) call for sociologists to 'rethink the social', to 'flatten' their view of society, 'stay close to the ground', and trace the connections and associations which are made as indiнviduals scurry around, the idea of the solid structure as the only model has begun to wane in sociology too. Latour's emphasis on structure as a trail seems almost made for shopping as something which starts in the head as an idea or a plan, a routine, a need, a want or a list, and does not end at the till, for the purchases have to be taken home, shown, discussed and put away, or hurriedly and secretly hidden, or even eaten before arrival. If shopping is an endless trail, it is a self generating one, as it is very common to find that, on returning home from a major shopping expedition, someнthing has been forgotten, so another list must start. A basic tool for dealing with everyday life, a shopping list, is a structure at the back of the mind for many of us much of the day, and can lead to the condition which one woman described as 'feeling a list coming on', particularly in the middle of the night (Shaw, 1998).

The greater convenience which the longer trading hours of today have afforded most of us has made shopping even more central to everyday life, not simply because we do more of it, but because as shopping has become more flexible it has become embedded by being more 'combinable'. Shopping is the task most often included in 'multi-tasking', and is, perhaps, 'doubled up' most often with childcare, but with a laptop on the kitchen table, shopping is increasingly also done online between mouthfuls. Just before Christmas 2009 research by the money-saving website VoucherCodes reported that seventy per cent of employees spent time secretly shopping for Christmas gifts instead of working.

Flexible, interstitial and opportunistic, shopping constantly moves in and out of focus, and just as we pop in and out of shops, so shopнping pops in and out of our heads as we remember to get more light bulbs, or presents for the children to take to a birthday party. Now more a spur-of-the-moment activity than a planned one, shopping is 'squeezed in' on the way to work, or way home, between dropнping the kids off for swimming and fetching them again, or simply in the lunch hour. Sometimes life is still 'fitted around' shopping, as on a Saturday morning or Thursday evening, but shopping is more 'fitted in' than 'fitted around' and this changes its meaning. When trading hours were quite restricted, and it is worth rememнbering that only a generation ago shops closed for a half day mid week and all day Sunday, this increased a sense of the social order as 'out there', fixed and imposed.

 

Heroes and villains

 

Nowadays, though individuals are just as overworked and harнassed, despite greater flexibility in working times and trading hours, the individual may feel a greater sense of choice and control in their life from something as simple as the freedom to change your mind about when to shop. The importance of time to eveнryday life is well recognized and Rita Felski (2002), among others (Rybczynski, 1991; Zerubavel, 1989), stresses that everyday life is effectively based on it. Shopping gave a temporal pattern and meaning to everyday life when opening hours were shorter, and it continues to now that they are longer. However the picture has also become more complex. Shopping is not as 'in your face' as it was in the era when billboards blighted city streets, though those billboards have been electronically re-established in our sitting rooms. Though, barring cyberspace, fully 24/7 shopping is still not universal, the use of shopping as a cultural currency has spread, been promoted and fetishized, not least by government in order to establish legitimacy for its privatization programmes, as if, for example, a lifetime of buying white goods and food were sufficient training when it came time for shoppers to find and fund a home for their elderly and ailing relatives, or, for that matter, to decide which water, gas or electricity supplier to go with. Our experience of shopping may actually not be that 'transferable' when it comes to buying a house or life insurance, but it serves us well as a popular currency. Read the headline 'Labour's plan for John Lewis public services', which will not make any sense to anyone who is not familiar with Britain, but for one who is, they will know that John Lewis is a chain of department stores which is distinctive in having an organizational structure in which staff are also shareholders and share in the profits.

We use our knowledge of shops to understand the world, to place people, and to invigorate our speech, so if we describe someone as 'shopping around' this is understood to mean 'not very serious', or if we talk of a 'one stop shop', this will be understood as bringing services together. Metaphor, George Lakoffand Robin Johnson (1980) explain, is what 'we live by' and by mapping one area of experience onto another we make new meaning. Though we may talk less today about being 'shortchanged', or 'left on the shelf, of something being done 'under the counter' or of 'shopнping' someone, perhaps at the 'cop shop', new meaning is made when we talk of being 'shopped out' or off the 'top shelf. Most metaphors linked to shopping are negative, though where tradiнtionally the shopkeeper was the villain, as regulation on retail has tightened, people no longer need feel that they must be on their guard for sharp practice. One result of shopkeepers cleaning up their act is that the focus in shopping wordplay has turned to the shopper, increasingly pathologized and patronized as a 'shopaholic' or 'retail junkie' ever on the trail of'retail therapy'. Indeed, it is the retailized society as a whole which is pathologized, with the idea that we live to shop. Which in the rich nations, we do. But this is because to live we have to shop, as most of us are citydwellers.

 

From Walden to Wal-Mart

 

With over half of the world's population now living in cities, self sufficiency, or a return to the 'stone-age economics' of barter is not an option, and built-in obsolescence and technical advance have largely removed the possibility of repairing more goods. Judith Levine (2006) tried 'not shopping' for a year and, holed up in Vermont well away from the temptations of New York, wrote a book about her experiment. At the end of that year Levine cherнished the more spacious feel which her Vermont lifestyle gave her, and claimed to feel more secure; but even in Vermont she went on thinking about shopping and though she did not actually shop herself, her friends did so on her behalf. The moral issues which had seemed so clear at the start of the year were much less so by the end, and when Levine published her book she was roundly censured for political insensitivity on the grounds that 'not shopнping' was not a choice open to the majority. Still, Levine's tale is important for helping to puncture the lazy assumption that the spread of shopping is pandering to 'shopaholicism'. It is not 'shopнping addicts' who patronize the petrol station or supermarket at two in the morning but, as Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) points out, cleaners, drivers and waiters picking up essentials before grabbing a few hours' sleep. We learn from mistakes and Levine's mistake was to think that one part could be excised from the whole of which it was a part. While an interesting personal experiment, it could not be scaled up, and retail, with the whole economy, would go to the wall if we all stopped shopping, or even if just those men who claim never to shop lived up to their word. There is much to criticize about the economic system, capitalism, of which most shopping is a part, but to scapegoat shopping, make it the patsy of that system, is not enlightening.

Almost all of us who live in one of the richer nations buy and own far more than we need, not just to live, but to live comfortнably, and many of us are uncomfortable about this. Not because having anything above the barest necessities is inherently immoral, but because the uneven distribution of the world's resources is unfair, and we know it. The sweated labour, much of it children's, making cheap clothes in one country, which are bought and thrown away after two wearings in another, before being packed off as aid or charity to a third country where, on market stalls, they undermine the livelihoods of local tailors, are clearly tragic (Klein, 2000). However, so long as most of the goods sold in the malls are largely made on the other side of the world, there is no escaping the fact that when shoppers rein in their shopping the consequences are felt not only in their homes but also in, say, the Vietnamese embroidery villages. Early in 2009, a friend visiting from Bangladesh asked how the recession was impacting in Britain, and was relieved when told that because the garment-making industries in her part of the world were focused at the cheaper end of the market, orders had not, so far, been cancelled. The rich countries do not wholly escape damage either. The relentнless pressure to borrow more money, the hectoring 'last chance' sales and the shoals of junk mail, have made debt a painful way of life for many people, while the furtive targeting of children by corporations keen to capitalize on junior 'pester power' is immoral (Seiter,1996; Schor, 2004; Barber, 2007).

However the critique spun around shopping is often both conнfused and confusing as shoppers, shops, and the goods they sell, all come under attack at different times, with supermarkets especially criticized for their labour relations, treatment of suppliers, and effects on local communities and independent shops. Supermarkets have also been heavily criticized for many of their marketing stratнegies, such as the 'Bogof, the 'Buy one, get one free' offer which promotes both obesity and food waste, for hoarding land in hand for future sites, and for generally damaging the environment with plastics, pollution and over use of land-fill all the way down the supply chain (Gabriel and Lang, 1995; Simms, 2007; Blythman 2004). However, though supermarkets are the heavyweights, and have a huge share of the market, they are not the whole of shopнping, and we probably use the corner shops as often, though do not spend as much time or money in them. We develop relationships with shops, often personalizing them, by referring possessively to my' butcher or 'our' supermarket, as well as relationships with people in them. Such relationships may be fleeting, but getting a tip from another customer in the supermarket about adding a pinch of ginger to meatballs or, as one friend does, practising her Hindi when she buys her daily newspaper, while not deep, can lift the spirit, and the day.

 

Negotiating a relationship: vegetables for two

 

I started this introduction with Charles Tilly's enquiry into the sorts of answers which we give to the question 'Why', and his claim that whatever reason we may give, what we are also in fact doing is negotiating a relationship. This has led me to think about what relationships I might be negotiating in writing this book, and three possibilities spring to mind. First, of course, there is a relationship with the reader, a student or colleague, but also with experienced shoppers who will test every claim I make in this book against their own experience; which I hope they will, but also hope that they will come to see shopping in a different light, and be interested in how other people experience, and do, it. Then, there is the imaginary relationship with the critics who use the word 'shopping' when they mean 'consumerism', and write off shopping as if it were all about hopping on planes to New York to buy clothes. Finally, there is a relationship with myself or, as one wise friend, suggested, my mother.

At first, I was taken aback at this suggestion, though, like most daughters, I did a lot of shopping with my mother and, in due course, did a fair bit with my daughter, though she will, at the same age, have done more with her friends. Shopping is done as a way of negotiating relationships and it strikes me that today we do more shopping with the generations on each side of us than we do paid work with them, which is important for the reproduction of culture. However, the key point about shopping and my relationнship with my mother is that she was a tailor, and with her I spent many hours in the London's West End, sometimes window shopнping, of an evening, with our noses pressed to the windows, not because we felt poor and excluded, but to discuss the finer detail of the garments in them, and sometimes in the stores, usually the fabric department. This has left me with a sense that an hour or two spent looking around the shops can be as informative, enrichнing and relaxing, and even indistinguishable from an hour or two spent going around some art galleries.

The personal world is, of course, also political, and feminism has helped form my views about shopping, as it has for many of my generation. However, much was done by second-wave feminists to expose what women's lives were really about; in particular, by drawing attention to the drudgery of housework, which includes shopping. But because of the all-powerful stereotype of shopнping as women buying clothes and shoes for themselves, and the complicated relationship which second-wave feminists had with issues of appearance, they gave shopping a wide berth, leaving it to 'post-feminism' to reclaim shopping as a rightful pleasure. Hedonism is part of shopping and Colin Campbell (1987) cogently argued that it was every bit as important as any technological innovation in the first consumer revolution. However, due largely to the Puritan legacy, the West is very conflicted about pleasure, which is perhaps why Jonathan Gershuny (2000), who made the discovery about the scale of the time spent shopping, also found, when comparing diaries with questionnaires, that we systematically underestimate that time by at least half as much again. People who were asked about how much time it took them to shop just for food, estimated five to fifteen minutes, though they actually averнaged sixty-three minutes, and those who estimated thirty to sixty minutes, averaged sixty-six minutes. Self respect might require us to shave our estimates for an activity widely thought of as a waste of time, and it might be thought that we always underestimate the time we take; but, of all the daily tasks measured, shopping stood out for this discrepancy. Yet, whether we love or hate it, think of ourselves as good or bad at it, we all take much the same amount of time shopping, which is why it is a mainstay of everyday life and our culture.

To get away from the negative and stereotypic view of shopнping as 'rubbish', irresponsible and self indulgent, we have to take a longer view. Chapter 2, though not a history of shopping, attempts this by focusing on the history of the household and its evolution as a moral entity. The structural conditions which destroyed the household as a productive unit also transformed the meanings ░f production and consumption, and brought about a profound misunderstanding about their relationship too. If, at the collective level, culture, as in myth and history, is the repository of experience, at the personal level this is done by memory. We are lost without our memory, as we neither know who we are or where we are. Memories of shops and shopping are strikingly common as memories of childhood. Making then memorable are their associaнtions with parents and the narrative shape of a shopping expedition which eases the telling of it. Telling anything shares an experience and something shared is usually something understood. Chapter 3 on shopping memories explores the how and why shopping is remembered, and how shopping memories help hold 'hold us together'. Shopping changes as we move through the life course, in relation to what we buy, when and where and, at critical points, shopping marks both personal and age-related milestones. Shops serve, informally, as schools, and drawing on the concept of 'situнated action' Chapter 4 explores how new skills are practised or consolidated in shops, new boundaries tested, perhaps with a spot of adolescent shoplifting, and new identities are rehearsed or perнformed. A new wife or partner feels affirmed in her new identity by buying vegetables for two, a mundane event, but a shopping milestone and one which gives personal meaning and allows the woman to take her place in the culture.

If shops and shopping play a role in socialization they also play a role in reproducing culture. The key point about the 'situated action' approach is that the setting is as important as the person in it and Chapter 5 takes this further by exploring the part played by shops in facilitating the performance of gender, which they do because they are among the most gendered institutions encounнtered in the course of everyday life: by noting the gender of the shop we re-affirm our own. It is sometimes taxing for those not brought up speaking a language which is gendered to realize just how far the category of gender can extend beyond the human individual to shops and goods, and the scope for 'doing' gender which shopping as an activity offers. To be social beings we need to 'fit in', 'know our place' and have an idea of how other people work: stereotypes are the 'rough guides' which we use for this purpose sometimes by 'playing up' to those stereotypes, and someнtimes by disavowing them. However, stereotypes or rough guides are also what we use to 'do' class, whether that is by putting on a 'posh voice' when we go shopping, or by feeling superior in the supermarket when we see what other people have in their shopнping baskets. The shops which help hold us together are also where different classes are most likely to rub shoulders, and thus where class is done by looking and by being looked at by other people.

In writing this book I have, of course, drawn on my own expeнriences of shopping. However, I have also had the opportunity to draw on the observations and experiences of shopping as written about by the contributors to the Mass Observation Archive, and talked about from the people my colleague Janice Winship and I interviewed when we were researching what, at the time, we called the 'cultural success' of the British chain store, Marks and Spencer. In the midst of this project, the store suffered a major change of fortune, a hiatus, or period of troubles, from which a full recovery has yet to come and, in due course, this changed the focus of our project. As originally envisaged that project could not be completed, but it has, nevertheless, significantly shaped my thinking about shopping and explains why more references to that store than might be expected appear in this book.

The Mass Observation Archive is a British research organization which collects and archives first-hand accounts of everyday life and reactions to events of the day from a panel of volunteer writers. In the pantheon of research methodologies it is one of the 'peculiariнties' of the English, and for accounts of how it operates, and how it has evolved, see Tom Jeffery (1999) and Dorothy Sheridan (1993; 1996). The strength of the material is the rich, discursive personal writing which is made possible by the relationship the writers have with the Archive, and is much drawn upon by social historians, sociologists, anthropologists and journalists.

I have also drawn on, and quoted, a number of writers of fiction and memoir whose descriptions of shops and shopping I have found particularly insightful. With this emphasis on the personal, the book is clearly not a meta-analysis of research on shopping, and is also distinctly British focused. Still, this does not materially affect the argument. If shopping can help us to hang on to ourselves, by serving as a container of memory, or shops serve as classrooms and a measure of personal history, they will do so not only in the British Isles. Similarly, if shopping helps us grow up and grow old, this will happen wherever we live. There may be more of a British bias in the discussion of class, because, arguably, there is more need in Britain for symbols to 'mediate' class divisions, because of their depth in British life, but class divisions are not absent from other nations, and certainly not in the United States. Taking the arguнment beyond the shores of Britain to the richer parts of Europe or the United States, shows how the long spell of economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century has led countries with a similar level of development to converge around a common lifeнstyle, and for that lifestyle to be based on retailization. Thus, except for the faces of people in the streets, shopping in Seoul today is, and looks, pretty much like shopping in Zurich and Chatanooga.