Q+A: Point of Purchase

Id Magazine has a quick Q+A with Sharon Zukin about her new book Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. Here's an excerpt:

"Why is shopping such a compelling experience?

We shop not just because we must, but because it speaks to our inner dreams. Shopping has made abundance a novelty and novelty abundant. These are two of the greatest pleasures in a rich society-newness and plenty.

Shopping is creative. We are not simply mindless dupes buying what we see in commercials or craving what our neighbors have. But most of us today don't make things. We are not designers, or artists, or craftspeople, so we create our lives when we go to a store.

Your book shows how shopping has changed over the last century or so, emphasizing the past 25 years. Tell me about the invention of "lifestyle."

Market researchers developed the idea of lifestyle in the 1960s. These researchers saw that the old idea of social class no longer captured the different ways people shop. With so many cultural changes occurring at the time-feminism, civil rights, global youth movements-market researchers tried to come up with new ways to classify consumers.

They adapted the idea of lifestyle from books like David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd, a sociology classic from the early '50s. Lifestyle is determined not only by income, but by education, profession, generation, cultural background, and various behaviors and belief systems. Status has become more important than class, and status is expressed through the objects we buy.

[..]

You describe the store as a social space, where people come to "be with the brand." What about the social space of the Internet?

When we shop online, we are in the physical space of home or work. It is hard to create a branded space and experience on the Web, where technology, navigation, flat images, and sometimes sound are the designer's only resources.

EBay has provided a powerful new paradigm for shopping, however, by transforming shoppers into sellers. This can be transgressive, taking power away from professional sellers, and it can be creative. Selling can be financially beneficial to people who used to only shop. On the other hand, when the shopper becomes a seller, his or her critical distance from consumer society evaporates. People become addicted as both shoppers and sellers."

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