Shopping as an Entertainment Experience
75
properties.
Inexpressive desires, intangible needs, and
unarticulated longings all passed through the money box and
came out as real things, palpable objects you could hold in your
hand (Auster 7).
For so many people living in the west, freedom means having the ability
to shop for a wide array of consumer goods. It has even been remarked that the
Berlin Wall fell, not because of political repression, but because of the desire for
East Germans to have access to the consumer goods of the West (Halberstram).
This can develop into a form of pathology where shopping as an entertainment or
leisure activity means finding oneself in the form of objects. As with Paul
Auster’s mother, Billy Pilgrim’s mother (the fictional protagonist in Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five) is also an individual who “finds herself’ by
shopping. “Like so many Americans she was trying to construct a life that made
sense from things she found in gift shops” (Fussel 127). This merging of
personality to products has been termed “the assembling of the commodity self’
(Ewen 79). According to Aaron Betsky, many individuals find their identities by
“buying bits and pieces of consumer culture” (Betsky 110). Retailers, developers,
and shopkeepers realize what so many consumer critics cannot: that shopping is
no longer just shopping; it has become for many a way of life-or more accurately,
an accepted form of leisure and entertainment. The storeowners and the mall
barons are aware of this. People willingly go to the mall and the mall now
accommodates them. It is now possible to pay a fee and have access to a quasi
country club or members’ lounge. The waves of exhaustion (similar to museuminduced fatigue) are now swept away in a tranquil oasis within the mall, where
one can relax and recharge. These services include babysitting and even Internet
hookups to keep you in touch (Owens W120).
At another extreme is the sense of