Carried Away: the Invention of Modern Shopping Book

Rachel Bowlby is a professorial shopper. Her previous books have included Shopping with Freud and Just Looking; Carried Away, her latest eagle-eyed foray into the consumerist abyss, acts as something of a catchall. Opening with the spectral image of IKEA shoppers frozen in purgatorial queues when the tills break down, she traces the rise and rise of the supermarket, principally in the United States, Britain and France. From 19th-century arcades via department store grandeur to supermarket ubiquity, Bowlby delves into the bargain bin of antiquated retail manuals to entertainingly illustrate the development of mass retailing alongside the development of popular psychology. They contain achingly purple prose: recommending rest areas, one 1931 stylist advised "This is a good spot, too, for a radio or a canary", and a 1963 article diagnosed that "Somewhere in that head, among the bobbypins, the hairdo, the perfume, and the problems, there is a thing that makes calculations and decisions". The gender assumption was female, or "housewife", synonymously. For the newlywed, going down the aisle had added connotations.Bowlby wisely demonstrates greater restraint, and instead focuses instructively on the "silent salesmen" of shop windows and packaging, the role of the passer-by, market research, cheap books, bar codes, and the darker world of kleptomania and shopping addiction. While shrewdly examining the "food for thought" relationship between literature and the supermarket (Don DeLillo's White Noise still proves supremely prescient), sadly there is no discussion of cinema, and scant consideration is given to the virtual supermarkets of e-commerce, where the screen replaces the aisle, intelligent chips, or the increasing power of "green" shoppers and resurgent local markets. However, if there is still room in her trolley, perhaps that's inevitable. In basing her erudite analysis on period texts rather than semiotic vagaries, Bowlby allows her reader to accompany the Shopper from the jolly cavorting of the early "Big Bear" supermarket prototypes to the cacophonic jungle of modern retail, from passive dummies to the sado-masochistic empowerment of the Consumer, where you have nothing to lose but your change. --David VincentRead More