Shopping
Item No. 7
“Consuming items and more items all the time serves as a core part of an economic system built to grow through the marketing of goods and services to buy. ”Shopping is the activity of purchasing goods and consumables from stores. A shopping excursion as an activity is a ritual part of the culture of consuming items. Consuming items and more items all the time serves as a core part of an economic system built to grow through the marketing of goods and services to buy. Thus, those living in this system gain status and joy from the activity of shopping. Even just window-gazing, looking at store merchandise, but not buying, can bring joy (in a consumer culture).
While shopping serves the purpose of purchasing goods, in a consumer culture, it also provides an opportunity for a social time with friends or family. For example, a mother and daughter may make a trip to “a mall” on a “shopping spree.” A mall is a large, enclosed complex with a variety of stores, restaurants, and other businesses under one roof, connected by indoor walkways, or an outdoor pedestrian street with shops. Their aim? To buy a lot of things. (See Catalog entry: A Thing.) A group of friends, teenagers, for example, might visit “the mall” as a social activity. (See Catalog entry: Third Spaces). Romantic partners and spouses may make shopping into a social outing, too. At “the mall,” the mother and daughter–or friends–or partners or spouses–may make their way through department stores, and other stores next to each other gazing, perusing and buying. The purchasing of things while shopping enhances the social experience of the mother and daughter–or group of friends. Or romantic partners.
Why is Shopping in The (Death of a) Thing: The Last Catalog? We feature shopping this season as the mall experience — in-person shopping is waning. Online shopping experiences are growing, and many in-person malls are struggling, shuttered, or being repurposed for, among other things? (the storage of things).
Besides, there are also concerns about consumerism and its effects on our lives, including on nature. Such awareness may also dampen the spirit of those who once found joy in the shopping experience, just for the sake of the experience. It seems that the act of shopping as a thing to do may be slowly dying.
What will we do if we’re not shopping? For starters, we might long for a mindless thing to do. We might feel nostalgia for the act of buying. Are our hearts by now wired for consuming? Will we need to re-wire our brains for new kinds of gratification? (See Catalog entry—A Thing.) Without shopping, we will certainly need something else to fill (a lot of) our time. Will we return to something more ancient? Spending time in nature together? Gardening, for example? Consider author Olivia Laing’s reflection on John Milton’s famous poem, Paradise Lost, for a moment:
“Despite its title, Paradise Lost is not exactly nostalgic. The garden serves as a kind of lodestar, an experience of nurture and richness that cannot be dismantled and might in the future be reinstated. Adam and Eve mourn their losses, grieve what won’t continue, but when eviction comes, when the cherubim gather like mist rising from a river, when they are taken by the hand and led to Eden’s gate, they look back, drop a tear, and then turn resolutely round. The final line swells with possibility. ‘The World was all before them.’ Whatever they have suffered, whatever damage has been done, the future lies open ahead.”
See: (A Garden Against Time: In Search of A Common Paradise by Olivia Laing).
Perhaps the future lies open ahead of us, even without shopping.
Other specifications:
What else needs specified in a catalog entry about the death of shopping? Consider the residual effects of not shopping. On average, people apparently spend about $77,000 a year (in the US at least) on buying things. So if we’re not shopping, we’ll need another way to use our money–or we’ll need to create another way of being together economically–(see Lewis Hyde, The Gift or Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World for alteratives) besides finding new ways to spend our time.