Point of Purchase

Abstract

Point of Purchase Sharon Zukin. New York: New York University Press, 2005. It's easy to condemn shopping and the glut that results, but it's much more difficult to understand the whole process. Zukin, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, has written a delightful and insightful book that attempts to explain it. The more we shop, the more we want to go shopping. It has become a way of life on the cutting edge of contemporary American culture. We live in a landscape of consumption-department stores, mail order catalogs, discount chains, Internet sites, endless TV ads, and lures that help us to redefine and reinvent ourselves. Our landscapes of consumption have also become our landscape of power and of desire. We shop, therefore we are. If shopping has become to many inescapable, why does it also seem unsatisfying? Has it become not only a habit, but also a hidden addiction? Do we have a compulsive physiological need to shop? Are we living in a Consumer's Republic? Another word comes to mind: obsession. Webster's Dictionary defines it as a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an idea or feeling. Might the shopping obsession be part of a larger cultural tendency or obsession to go faster, ever faster, work more and buy more? In the words of an old hymn, Work for the Night Is Coming? Shop until you drop? To cope with this, manufacturers and advertisers turn out more and more of everything. The new problems become glut and obsolescence. For centuries, almost everything was scarce - food, water, medicine, transportation, for example. Then came the Industrial Revolution, when there were massive surpluses; stories attached themselves to consumer goods - soup, thread, patent medicine, and canned meat, for example. How to market the surplus? Tell a story. There is a hammer pounding an anvil in your brain. Make it pound away if you want to sell something, anything. Do you think all of this doesn't apply to churches, colleges, and museums? If so, you are wrong. They have become outposts of Madison Avenue. Now we have Values, America's Best Hospitals, College Sports Programs, Mutual Funds, ad infinitum. There is a real and inescapable cause for the cultural speed-up. Something that has never been true before is obvious to many of us today: most things that we see, buy, wear, and use are shorter lived than we are. If it works, it's obsolete. Obsolescence is not only accepted, it is enforced. Out of date is out of step and out of luck. All of this can occur in the twinkling of an eye. How then to survive? We purchase, plunder, and pay. …