ancient cities

710 Shopping
develop cultural capital by knowing what these
stores and districts offer, and they talk to their
friends about what they saw at Bloomingdale’s or
on Madison Avenue, for example. By the same
token, low-price and discount stores mark lowerclass
districts, including districts that are mainly
used by working-class shoppers from ethnic minorities.
In this way shopping informally confirms
social class and racial distinctions; by providing a
public space that low-income men and women find
comfortable, low-price shopping streets also provide
social capital. For individuals, these effects are
not entirely predictable. When shoppers enter an
exclusive store whose prices they cannot afford or
where they are visibly out of place by how they
look or dress, they may feel as though they are
transgressing social boundaries—with good emotional
effect, if they are treated well, or with devastating
effect, if they are treated rudely by the sales
clerks and harassed by security guards. Shopping
places the burden of social norm enforcement on
individuals apparently acting alone, yet it also creates
zones of informal segregation and exclusion.
Although people often shop alone, many are
accompanied by friends and family. Shopping thus
offers an opportunity for a social excursion—more
so, if time and money are not a problem. Teenagers,
the elderly, and anyone who doesn’t have much
spending money often congregate on shopping streets,
where passersby and shop displays present an everchanging
panorama. By the 1960s, widespread automobile
ownership in the United States created a more
mobile public and reduced the appeal of such a streetcorner
society. But until television, computers, and air
conditioning increased the desire to stay indoors,
shopping streets provided a great means of urban
entertainment. Shopping remains a popular way to be
“in public”: The more people shop, the more important
shopping is as a public sphere.
But shopping doesn’t require much social interaction.
In supermarkets and department stores, in
contrast to street and farmers’ markets, shoppers
rarely speak to each other. They experience copresence
rather than interdependence. Social integration
in a neighborhood, however, often reflects frequent
interaction between shopkeepers and residents;
Jane Jacobs praised the “ballet of the street”
for this interdependence. Yet bonding between
shoppers and storekeepers, or between shoppers
and clerks, is more typical of smaller communities
than of big cities, and of regional cultures that
maintain personal traditions. The disappearance
of personal ties between shoppers and merchants
also reflects the gradual elimination of small, individually
owned stores and their replacement by
large, national and transnational chains.
Spaces and Forms of Distribution
Like other forms of organization, the distribution
of consumer goods has expanded in both scope
and scale while coming under more centralized
control. These changes make shopping both more
pervasive and more formal, and expand the visibility
of shopping in city streets. Although the earliest
markets in history were held outdoors, they moved
into permanent structures or stores when trading
became more complex and merchants held a sizable
inventory.
In modern times, London was the first city to
develop a large-scale, full-time, cosmopolitan shopping
center. Indoor stores with shop windows
became common there around 1600, although the
extensive use of large sheets of plate glass did not
follow until the late nineteenth century. Fixed prices
replaced bargaining in stores in England and the
United States during the 1870s, with the rise of the
department store and the five-and-ten-cent store
(“five and dime”). These new kinds of stores capitalized
on industrialization that made mass-
produced consumer goods available at steadily
lower prices, and on the completion of national
railroad lines that reached all regions of the country.
Department stores and five and dimes offered more
variety than the country or general stores where
rural residents shopped. Yet after the postal service
established Rural Free Delivery, farm dwellers also
shopped in mail order catalogs sent from Chicago
by Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Through
both stores and catalogs, shopping spread city culture—at
least, a modern consumer culture that
developed first in cities—to a national population.
Department stores were a force of modernity.
They offered a safe public space for middle-class
women, who had not been allowed to circulate
freely, unaccompanied by men, outside their
homes. Within decades, they also offered women
many jobs. At the same time, department stores
offered so many attractive products to buy, in such
a stimulating, stunningly decorated décor, that
men complained that women spent too much
time and money shopping. To lure shoppers, the