Zukin
Point of Purchase




"Shopping isn't just a process of <i>acquiring</i> goods and services—it's a life-long process of <i>learning</i> about them. And the faster these products change, the more we have to keep up with the changes by shopping. What we know about products, their prices, and where to get them provides us with news and conversation when we run out of things to say about work or school, and when political events are too depressing to consider. Shopping also gives us a common frame of reference for checking each other out: look at the way middle-class parents ask where your children go to school, or teenagers ask each other where they bought their jeans. Since we often shop, we always know something about shopping; and when we talk about shopping—in contrast to talking about work or politics—our opinions seem to count. We're not just complaining, although we do plenty of that, too. By talking about our responses to goods, we're explaining the topic that ultimately interests us most: ourselves." (38)



"more than a century of exposure to marketing strategies has encouraged us to be skeptical about the authenticity of aesthetic urges for commodities—especially when we look at other shoppers' urges. We know that any "must-have" item projects our fantasies of a perfect self—often enough, a self that it youthful, cool, and rich—through multiple layers of product design, advertising, and in-store display." (91)




"When we women desire goods because of their sensuous qualities, we tend to think these desires are signs of a personal or even biological flaw. The more sophisticated and self-aware we are, the more we try to distance ourselves from our urges for commodities—or to laugh ironically about them. Deep within our belief in sexual equality lurks a severe mistrust of our aesthetic urges—our <i>unworthy</i> urges for goods. We fear these urges today just as women at the turn of the twentieth century feared that they were prone—as their detractors claimed—to kleptomania. Aesthetic desires for goods are examples of object lust, and therefore they're unclean." (91)

A pinch of sociobiology actually set us free. No biological flaws here, just biological reality. It's the environment that has changed and is flawed, because it is not adapted to human needs.







"Despite the common belief among retailers and marketers that shoppers, especially women shoppers, prefer to shop by brand, many consumers prefer the organization of stock by functional category or occasion..." (94)

The bastards. But probably they know what they're doing. Hansen and Kysar report that grocery stores reorganize stock precisely to keep shoppers in a state of semi-confusion, which causes them to travel further, stay longer, and buy more once they are in the store. The "boutique" layout seems like it could have the same effect in a department store.






--"Before the sixties, being fashionable was a status a woman was born into. ... But in the sixties, being fashionable was transformed from ascription to achievement." (126)

my note says: if so, this betokens other-direction

--concurrently, the "youthquake"/"Youth has become a class" (127)

my note says: youth coming to consciousness (127)=a revolt against the long childhood
put these things together and you have the makings of narcissism







p. 176--the Good Housekeeping Institute: "failing to make its standards public and omitting information about test conditions and prices. Neither did the institute publish comparisons of goods in the same category. These points led Gordon to conclude that the Good Housekeeping Institutre was not an honest broker. His suspicions were soon confirmed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which exposed the Seal of Approval as a fraud. According to the FTC, the institute's testing procedures were either inadequate or nonexistent, and the magazine regularly received kickbacks from manufacturers. Far from being an objective judge, the institute sold use of the seal to any manufacturer who wanted to buy it."






"The sobering fact...is that the whole country has been "overstored" since the 1970s. "Too much selling space is chasing fewer sales," a 1995 article in <i>Business Week</i> pessimistically declared. ... Finding themselves under intense pressure to increase sales and lower costs, many stores—like manufacturers—try to become "lean and mean." They stay in busines by reducing the number of employees, outsourcing to cheaper suppliers, and cutting inventory. But "lean and mean" stores don't enchant us shoppers. ...

"It's not that shopping has got worse, however; it's that years of experience with shopping have raised our expectations. We want the convenience of a corner store and the wide selection of a supermarker, the intimacy of a bespoke tailor and the stylishness of a designer boutique, the magic of Woolworth and the prices of Wal-Mart." (206)