Shopping as an Entertainment Experience

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the act of shopping has increasingly involved much more than the simple purchase of goods and services. From its modern manifestation in the arcades and the department store to the overwhelming atmosphere of the mall, the notion of shopping, in its contemporary sense, has come to be an activity of leisure and entertainment that is as important and participated in as going to a movie, having dinner out, or simply strolling in a park (Schor 1: 107). According to a special issue of Consumer Reports, more than a third of those surveyed said that they considered shopping their hobby (Twitchell 245). Shopping is now ranked as a primary leisure activity. This means that people go to the mall just as often, if not more so, than doing anything else. “Going out” is often synonymous with going shopping or going to the mall. Americans, according to The Economist, spend more time in malls than virtually anywhere else after eating, sleeping, working, and watching television (Bryson 217, 218). Shopping, in its modern sense, is intimately linked to the rise of leisure. It was after the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance that leisure and entertainment first became codified. The ability to think above the fundamentals of life and to move beyond mere subsistence came with more stability and a better economy. The creation of shopping as an entertainment experience is a postmodernist phenomenon. It is predicated on the rise of leisure, which in turn, has merged with the unleashing of consumption from its traditional parameters (Sheilds 6). Historically, consumption—or shopping—was heavily regulated as an activity, and the sites and times where consumers engaged in the process of shopping were quite defined (Sheilds 6). For example, until quite recently, one could not shop in Toronto on a Sunday. It is virtually impossible to conceive of the Western world without some reference to shopping. Thomas Hine feels that this is such a pervasive syndrome that he has coined the term “buyosphere” to define this process. What Hine means by the “buyosphere” is that the popularity of shopping and all of its manifestations, encompassing “physical and virtual places” also extends to a unique “state of mind.” Hine suggests that this goes beyond stores and must include everything from websites to fashion magazines (Hine xv). Prior to the 1840s, most people simply bargained for and bought what they needed-if one could not personally produce the object. But, in contrast to simply buying, shopping requires time, thus it may be considered a leisure activity because of its supposedly unhurried nature. Shopping means looking, visualizing, caressing. As Anne Freidberg has recognized, shopping is more about desire than need. She writes, “To shop is to muse in the contemplative mode, an activity that combines diversion, self-gratification, expertise, and physical activity” (Friedberg 57). In the United States, prior to the coming of the department store, people had to depend on dry goods firms and wholesalers to purchase goods (Leach 20). The idea of shopping did not exist until the arrival of the department store. The distinguishing feature here was that entering a shop “entailed an obligation to make a purchase” (Miller 24). Within the department store, potential customers were, historically, encouraged to browse and prompted to take their time and peruse the vast array of goods and services. These stores quickly became, and to a great extent, still are, “places where consumers are an audience to be entertained by commodities, where selling is mingled with amusement, where arousal of free floating desire is as important as immediate purchase of particular items” (Williams 166, 167). By the early decades of the twentieth, century shopping (or buying) had become, thanks to a variety of innovations, much more than simply looking and selecting. Shopping had evolved into a “total experience in which the retailer became a subtle advisor on personal taste” (Harris 184). This was a seminal development for it brought people (women, in particular) into the stores and allowed them the time to peruse, select, sample, and even socialize. Historically, the market was a place of freedom for women, as well as a place where one could catch up on the latest gossip, speak to relatives and neighbors, and share information. Markets were often environments where a variety of entertainments took place: jugglers, fire-eaters, fortune-tellers, and the like. People could not only socialize, but also be entertained and buy something to eat or drink. During the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, shopping was considered a male form of entertainment, in which flirting was synonymous with the process. The female merchant was as much an object of desire for the male as the merchandise (Jones 32). Before fixed prices, which were characteristic of the department store, bargaining proved to be quite an entertaining component of the purchasing ritual. As Richard Sennett has written, “Haggling and its attendant rituals are the most ordinary instances of everyday theater in a city, and of the public man as an actor” (Sennett 142). The notion of theatre is a key trope in the spectacle of shopping. It has been a part of making a purchase for quite some time. Especially before the advent of the fixed price and the unstated obligation to make a purchase in a modern store, the idea of haggling over the price, of bargaining, of dickering, was a significant theatrical part of the purchase. Sennett relates that this process took time and thus the vendor not only discouraged rapid turnover but also got to know his or her customers (Sennett 142). What the founder of the Bon Marche could be said to have done was to invert this theatricality and move towards a form of mass spectacle, removing the intimacy of the theatrical process and placing it more in line with the observable distance of entertainment (Sennett 142-144). Thus, the shopping mall—the modern store—has a long history as an entertainment venue. Retail environments have evolved into major meeting places and significant “social centers” (Harris 64). People came to the department store—and still do—for more than simply the purchase of a good or a service. They met there, had lunch, had a drink, and spent the day. In the 1970s and the 1980s, Bloomingdales marketed itself as the social center for the hip and the young. On Saturday mornings the Lexington Avenue store was packed with trendy singles, as well as celebrities hanging out at the place to be (Traub 116-119). Shopping is now something one can do with their free time, or can fall back on “to do” as a leisure activity. It is accepted as a leisure or entertainment activity, the same as going to a movie or going for a walk. A key determinant in this evolution is the fact that since many parents both work, shopping that can't be done during the confines of the workday has to be done in the evening, or better yet, on the weekend. Shopping—going to the mall, Home Depot, Crate and Barrel, and other stores—has come to be a key entertainment activity on the weekend (Underhill 141, 142). Shopping becomes a very important way for families to engage in leisure time together. As Thomas Hine has observed, the “drive to transform into a form of family entertainment is in fact an attempt to adapt shopping to contemporary living patterns” (Hine 189, 190). Shopping also plays a vital motivation in travel. In the progression from travel to tourism it is important to recognize that some tangible manifestation of this experience had to be documented. The rise of “markers” to indicate travel, such as work of art, a picture, or the ubiquitous T-shirt, serves to remind both those who have traveled and those who haven't that person X was away (Schor 2: 48). In fact, the third often cited reason for travel to New York is to shop (Twitchell 26). This process apparently amuses locals. As Susan Willis relates, people who live in Maine (close to the famous L.L. Bean store which has become a magnet for tourist) spend time watching families arrive and shop at all hours. She terms this “consumer tourism” (Willis 39). People are increasingly traveling to shop, which takes the notion of the souvenir to a whole new level. Unlike the medieval pilgrims who traveled far to visit a shrine and maybe purchase a mirror or a badge with the picture of a saint (Man 62), these tourists are motivated by the reverse. Planeloads of travelers are now whisked in to destinations simply for the purpose of shopping. Both the Mall of America and the West Edmonton Mall (WEM) are supreme points in the constellation of consumer tourism. Since its completion in 1985, the Mall has become a leisure centre for millions of suburbanites and tourists attracted by the world's largest indoor amusement park, the world's largest indoor golf course, the world's largest indoor wave pool, the only landlocked full-size replica of the Santa Maria, a larger fleet of operable submarines than in the Canadian Navy, and nearly 1000 stores and services (Davis 1). The WEM has become the ultimate in the fusing of shopping, entertainment, and leisure by evolving into one of the most popular tourist attractions in Canada. The fusion of shopping with leisure and entertainment and vice versa has another, more recent, history that can be summed up in one word: Disneyfication. This idea suggests that shopping, entertainment, and leisure can be rolled into one concept. The notion of “themes” derives from Disney's emphasis on merchandising in the most friendly and non-threatening of surroundings. Today, it can run the gamut from restaurants like the Hard Rock Café to environments such as Playdium. Participation is encouraged not just by purchasing and consuming, but also by being a part of the total environment (Betsky 135-139). What occurs in this blurring of boundaries—deliberate, in many cases—is the creation of what Guy Julier has termed “retail-tainment sites” (Julier 149). The ultimate extension of this is the entertainment stores or “e-stores,” such as Nike Town or the Warner Brothers Stores. These environments are where people go to spend leisure time, but also to buy products. Like Nike Town in Chicago, Ralph Lauren's store in the Rhinelander Mansion in New York City has become a “must-see” site when visiting Manhattan. As Jeffrey Tractenberg has written, although they were not buying, customers at the Ralph Lauren store “looked happier than many leaving a nearby $7-a-ticket movie theaters. Here admission was free. If nothing else, the entertainment value was outstanding” (Tractenberg 7, 8). When these structures start to become tourist destinations and “must-see” places, such as some large and fancy supermarkets (for example, Wegmans in Rochester, New York), the dialectic is complete. No longer are you simply shopping for food, a basic human requirement, but now you can sample the most exotic foods from all over the world in an environment that rivals the museum. One is now entertained at the supermarket. The same can be said for visiting the toy store. A significant reason for the appeal of these environments is the magical appeal that they offer to people raised on the ethos of consumerism. The magic of Disney is translated, quite readily, to the magic of the Disney store. These developments have been aided by the production of public relations products that reinforce the idea of shopping as a wonderful, acceptable, and almost essential experience. A significant trend in the past few years that accentuates this has been the rise of glossy corporate product magazines that masquerade as information media but that are in reality slick catalogues for various products. Like the ultimate in mass leisure provided by People and In Style, Sony, Benneton and other corporations mix advertising into a sophisticated entertainment formula. … his marketplace in an aura of fascination that turned buying into a special and irresistible occasion. Dazzling and sensuous, the Bon Marche became a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure. One came now less to purchase a particular article than simply to visit, buying into the process because it was part of the excitement, part of the experience that added another dimension to life (Miller 167). The public was captivated by these and came to both and the department store as a place that something By the of the nineteenth century, consumers were coming to the department store to be entertained and as much as to purchase. the department store became a to a Both and on the the department store was of both (Miller 167). 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