Going Shopping: Consumer Choices and Community Consequences

Abstract

“Shopping is a public concern—and our concern.” So Ann Satterthwaite repeats throughout this polemic against rampant consumption and its destructive impact on America's cities and sprawling suburbs. The we of her statement refers to America's consumer citizens, whom Satterthwaite, an urban planner by trade, positions squarely in her crosshairs. By public, Satterthwaite means of concern to the government and therefore potentially amenable to urban planning solutions—if only planners, citizens, and politicians would stand up to the private sector's utter dominance over real estate development practices and policies. There is no disputing the connection Satterthwaite draws between retailing, consumer practices, and urban development. Drawing on an array of secondary sources from historians, social scientists, journalists, and fiction writers, she convincingly demonstrates the important role consumption has played in forming a nexus of social relations within local communities. Satterthwaite narrates the decline of shopping's communal role as retailing blossomed into a major economic sector controlled by increasingly national and transnational corporations by the mid-twentieth century. The big business of retailing, plus the development of new technologies such as the Internet, has unmoored the act of consumption from its place within local communities and set it loose across an increasingly wide space-time continuum. What was once an act that solidified social bonds around the cracker barrel at the local general store is today an increasingly depersonalized, generic exercise breeding social anomie and frustrating consumer expectations.