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Popular Culture Review
don’t own but look forward to buying (Schor 2: 70). This says much about the
place of shopping in contemporary culture.
Many people find it invigorating to go shopping, similar to viewing an
uplifting movie or walking in the park. It is no secret to most people that
shopping is often cited as a great stress buster, and that purchasing goods or
services is a way to get oneself out of a funk. For many, shopping brings about
sensations that run the gamut from arousal to perceived freedom and fantasy
fulfillment. According to James B. Twitchell, this is in fact why the early
shopping emporiums were linked to dreams and called “places of enchantment.”
Twitched feels that one moves into escape mode when one enters a mad. The
mad has become an environment that can stimulate the shopper in many ways. It
can entice and excite, or it can calm and soothe. Citing Ira Zepp, Twitched
suggests that the familiar use of fountains and flowing water pacify and soothe the
tired shoppers, rejuvenating them when they are fatigued and refreshing them for
more shopping (Twitched 243, 244).
Some people experience a kind of giddy euphoria upon entering a certain
shop or upon coming into the mad. They are enamored with the products on
display and for sale in way that everyday life doesn’t inspire (Twitched 244).
Individuals who study shoppers are the first to both recognize and admit that
shopping fulfills some very key psychological mechanisms for many people. For
many people, especially for women, shopping is “a transforming experience, a
method of becoming a newer, perhaps even slightly improved person” (Underhill
116, 117). Once individuals (again, women) were made to realize (or were
convinced) that it was okay to buy, a new kind of association was created. The
first department stores served a key function for the ideology of consumption by
teaching women that not only was it okay to spend money but also that the
“buying of goods and services” was not simply a good thing. Even more vital
here, it was a way to enhance both “psychic well-being and social standing”
(Benson 3). For many people, shopping extends wed beyond the bounds of
normal activity and comes to stand for a multitude of experiences. Paul Auster
describes his mother’s equating of shopping with “self expression”:
My father was tight; my mother was extravagant. She spent; he
didn’t. The memory of poverty had not loosened its hold on his
spirit, and even though his circumstances had changed, he could
never quite bring himself to believe it. She, on the other hand,
took great pleasure in those circumstances. She enjoyed the
rituals of consumerism, and like so many Americans before her
and since, she cultivated shopping as a means of selfexpression, at times raising it to the level of an art form. To
enter a store was to engage in an alchemical process that
imbued the cash register with magical, transformative