Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture (review)

Those addicted to reruns of Sex and the City understand the fundamental appeal of big city living, where shopping still entails traipsing along sidewalks lined with enticing stores. Heroine Carrie Bradshaw is a thirty-something New York City sex columnist who pines after her boyfriend, Mr. Big. When not writing or pining, she shops. Her closets are full of size two designer outfits and a hundred pairs of $400 shoes. She never wears the same outfit twice. Carrie is the quintessential New York shopper, and as such she could be the subject of Sharon Zukin's Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture.

What do Sex and the City and Point of Purchase have to do with business history? The recent cultural turn within the Business History Conference is shifting the field away from topics like entrepreneurship and institution building toward the fundamental economic activities that underlie the American business system. Regardless of their class, sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, politics, or religion, Americans share an economic culture that in part emphasizes mass consumption. A half century ago, David Potter and Daniel Boorstin acknowledged acquisition as a salient feature of the American character, only to be overrun by scholars seeking to unveil the diverse sociopolitical struggles of workers, women, blacks, and immigrants. In these Marxist scenarios, mass consumption evinced a false consciousness imposed by the ruling class. Recently, some scholars have revitalized and updated the consensus views of Potter and Boorstin, adding nuance, diversity, and sophistication. Students of popular culture such as James Twitchell, Richard Butsch, and Sharon Zukin admit that mass consumption is here to stay, and they seek to understand the phenomenon's underpinnings on its own terms.

A professor at Brooklyn College and the City University Graduate Center, Zukin is a die-hard New Yorker who loves to shop. She is also a sociologist who studies urban spaces in the context of power relations. In earlier books Zukin analyzed urban culture writ large and focused on the experience of loft living. Point of Purchase guides readers through contemporary landscapes of consumption, where Americans continually define and redefine themselves by shopping. Although Zukin focuses on New York City, her points have broader implications for the United States.

In ten fast-paced chapters, Zukin surveys the significance of shopping to American culture, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The book's title captures Zukin's dual points about purchasing. She is concerned to understand the reasons that consumers love to shop and to comprehend the power relations embedded in the acts of buying and selling. Combining oral histories and documentary sources with the historical literature on consumerism, Zukin provides a series of lively, highly readable case studies on shopping. She watches teenagers as apprentice shoppers, follows a discerning thirty-something through Manhattan on a quest for the perfect leather pants, conveys the alienation of a young black man at Tiffany, and examines the male penchant for buying electronic gadgets on the Internet. She also provides excellent chapter-length overviews on mass merchandising from Woolworth to Wal-Mart; the erosion of traditional department stores by lifestyle brand stores like Ralph Lauren; and the phenomenon of "urban entertainment destinations" such as the Disney store. Each chapter stands alone as an informative and invigorating case history. Zukin's subjects include Bonwit Teller, Lord and Taylor, Brooks Brothers, The Gap, Consumer Reports, the Zagat guides, Amazon.com, eBay, and more.

Significantly, Zukin's historical analysis gives equal attention to retailers as different as B. Altman and Woolworth, avoiding the pitfalls of earlier studies that focused on the department store as the primary institution of mass consumption. In reality, department stores were showcases of consumption that promised abundance to many onlookers while delivering it to the middle and upper middle classes. Remember that an earlier Carrie—Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie—longed to own what she saw in Chicago's premier department...