In 1838, the world's first department store grandly opened its doors in Paris. Le Bon Marché invented the all-in-one shopping experience. Customers could buy anything from toy soldiers to a wedding dress without having to haggle over prices or walk the filthy streets. It spawned imitators across the globe and today we live with the consequences.
One is the peculiar fact that for the first time in history, shopping has become a form of leisure. Another is that one-third of Europeans are addicted to shopping, using it as a cure for boredom, misery and lack of self-worth. The problem is that shopping is more likely to boost our credit card company than our own sense of personal fulfillment. Staying in fashion is not a route to the good life, as any badly dressed philosopher will tell you.
The naturalist Henry David Thoreau despised shopping. Just after Le Bon Marché was founded, he built a cabin in the Massachusetts woods with his own hands, at a cost of $28.12. 'The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run', he wrote. In Thoreau's view, the price of our new leather jacket was not written on the tag – it was the three days of labouring time needed to purchase it. Buying a car might cost us three hundred days. We pay not with our wallets but with the precious days of our lives. Even if we love our jobs – which only a minority can honestly claim – is each of our Faustian shopping bargains really worth it?
Roman Krznaric is on the faculty of The School of Life. He blogs at www.outrospection.org. See www.theschooloflife.com .
Image: Benoit Deniaud
What would we do without our propensity to buy stuff which we want to possess? Probably go wild while naked in the country and look for Nature as she is. But once we found her find it no cheaper to buy her goods than it ever was while stepping out in the cold old economic world that shortens life, beats us down and makes us sweat for everything we really need. It’s enough to make us want to go shopping to forget all about it.
Posted by: Quentin Magos | November 10, 2010 at 05:16 PM
Great article. It's not all bad though. Department stores also had an important role to play in women's emancipation from the home and into public space:
"Department stores in their seduction of women created zones such as restaurants, rest rooms and even reading rooms where they could, towards the end of the [19th] century, go unchaperoned or certainly free of men's protection."
Elizabeth Wilson, 'The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women'
Posted by: PazzaArchitect | November 08, 2010 at 10:41 PM