Part IIb:
Commodity Culture: Department Store and Shopping Mall
1.
Case study I : from traditional market to department
store
1.1.
The birth of department store
1.1.1.
In 1852, Aristide Boucicault opened a small retail
store in Paris called Bon Marché.
1.1.2.
There were three novel ideas.
-The markup on each item would be small, but the
volume of goods sold large.
-The prices of goods would be fixed, and plainly
marked.
-Anyone could enter his shop and browse around,
without feeling an obligation.
2.2. Shopping in “Theatre”
2.2.1. Boucicault was the first one to apply fixed
price system to a wide range of merchandises.
2.2.2. Before the French Revolution, it was forbidden
by law for retailers to give out handbills showing a fixed price for their
goods. All prices are subject to
bargaining.
2.2.3. Market was like a theatre where people
interact openly with each other by showing their outraged feeling,
delightedness, declarations of pain and suffering.
2.2.4. Bargaining weaves the buyer and the seller
together socially and not to participate actively is to risk losing money.
2.2.5. Fixed price system: the “theatre” collapsed
and the birth of “passive buyer”
2.3.
Why did Boucicault and his contemporaries start to
use fixed price system?
2.3.1. Encouraging more consumption because
bargaining took time.
2.3.2. Mass production, mass consumption
2.3.3. Labor control of the salesman
2.4.
Urban planning and transport building
2.4.1.
Paris in the 19th century: a city full of
twisted and narrow alleys
2.4.2.
Most people lived in their quartier and
leaving it required an hour and a half.
2.4.3.
The creation of the grands boulevards (Georges
Baron Haussmann)
2.4.4.
Transport: In 1838, horse-drawn buses were
introduced. In 1855 they carried
36 million passengers and the number skyrocketed to 107 million in 1866.
2.5.
Consequences
2.5.1.
Lower markup and fixed price did not save people’s
money and time
2.5.2.
Wandering around: buy more, spend more
2.5.3.
Consumerism: e.g. owning several sets of clothes
2.5.4.
Shopping sites turned into a
spectacle of displaying nouveatés
2.5.5.
Design of shopping center:
glass-plate, display shelf and juxtaposing dissimiliar objects together
2.5.6.
The customers picked up different
commodities to create their own life styles
“A dress in 1750 was not a matter of what you feel;
it was an elaborate, arbitrary marking of where you stood in society, and the
higher you stood in society, the more freedom you had to play with that object,
you r appearance, according to elaborate, impersonal rules. By 1891, owning the right dress, no
matter that it was mass-produced and not very pretty, could make you feel
chaste or sexy, for your clothes “express” you.” (Sennet 1978: 147)
Sennet, Richard. 1978. The Fall of Public Man: on
the Social Psychology of Capitalism. NY: Vintage Books.
2.
Case study II: Shopping mall
2.1. 1922: The first unified shopping mall,
Country Club Plaza, founded by the J.C. Nichols Company, opened near Kansas
City,
1956:
The first enclosed mall opened near Minneapolis, Minn.,
1981:
there developed “megamalls,” such as the West Edmonton Mall
in Alberta, Can., which contained not only more than 800 stores vending
everything from footwear to automobiles.
It works like a city including restaurants, a hotel, an amusement park,
a miniature-golf course, a church, a “water park”, a zoo, a lake and more than
500 kinds of trees.
2.2. Basic Infrastructure
2.2.1.
Automobile
ownership: In the US, this is the major cause leading to the rise of
residential suburbs, outlying shopping center and restructuring of automobile
industry in the 1930s.
2.2.2.
Railway
and mass transit system: In Hong Kong, the number of shopping malls has
increased since the public transport system began to expand in the 1980s.
2.3. Hyper-reality
2.3.1. Highly controlled environment:
Shopping mall is a controlled and enclosed environment controlled by security
guards, close circuit television, air conditioning, lighting system, etc.
2.3.2. Simulated reality excluding the
social realities
2.3.3. Fragmented landscape of symbols
2.4. From Flâneur to shopper
2.4.1.
Flâneur is a social figure wandered
around Paris, such as gazing around the arcades, in the 19th
century.
2.4.2.
Flâneur represents a new experience and
new relations with the urban environment: a sort of relation defined and
perpetuated by gaze or sight and strolling.
2.4.3.
Shopper is a kind of flâneur “captured”
by capitalist consumption
2.5.
Shopping mall as social and physical
engineering
2.5.1.
It excludes those “disenfranchised”
citizens: beggar, hawkers, roadside artists, etc.
2.5.2.
It depends on the successful
elimination of traditional markets or shopping areas and cooperation with other
sectors of business and public institutions, e.g. property developer, property
management companies, architects, urban planners.
2.5.3.
It assumes a way of life: consumerism
2.5.4.
Shopping mall sometimes becomes
unrealistic and infeasible in a highly fragmented local and global
economy.
3. Consumerism
as a series of social apparatus
3.1. Consumerism is not a natural development of economy.
3.2. It is supported by a series of technologies for physical
transformation, social engineering and psychological control.