- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Columbia University Press; New e. edition (8 Feb 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0231122748
- ISBN-13: 978-0231122740
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.4 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,478,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
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 Vincent --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
Carried Away is in some ways a rare opportunity to go on an intellectual shopping spree, a guided tour of consumerism with a premier cultural critic. Times Literary Supplement [An] intriguing exploration of shoppers and shops from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Kirkus Reviews A virtuoso cultural history of 20th-century shopping... Bowlby's sensitivity to shopping's confusing alliance of exhiliration, zombification, larks and boredom prevents her from resorting to easy generalisation. Independent on Sunday Full of evocative and entertaining material. New Statesman Bowlby has scoured the archives of marketing history to write a lively and thought-provoking study of 20th-century shopping. Financial Times [An] engrossing history of postindustrial consumerism... This deft mixture of sociology, cultural criticism and literary scholarship is an important contribution to feminist and cultural studies. Publishers Weekly
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
It is late in the afternoon and the lines of wide carts loaded up with flatpacks of future furniture stretch back from the row of checkouts. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
It is late in the afternoon and the lines of wide carts loaded up with flatpacks of future furniture stretch back from the row of checkouts. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Bought this book to aid in a University assignment about modern day shopping. It's very well written with no 'jargon' very easy to read and quite humourous. Very informatative discussing the history of the supermarket. The examples discussed are American stores but it can be related to English department stores and food chains.
The author writes about the 'shopper' and the way they are lured into the whole shopping experience. This book was on my daughter's University reading list, although I purchased it for her to use I enjoyed the read too! It made me very aware the tricks stores use to make us spend spend spend!!
The author writes about the 'shopper' and the way they are lured into the whole shopping experience. This book was on my daughter's University reading list, although I purchased it for her to use I enjoyed the read too! It made me very aware the tricks stores use to make us spend spend spend!!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
What Do Shoppers Want?
9 July 2001
Format:Hardcover
The best thing about "Carried Away," is the research Bowlby has done on marketers' changing models of shoppers' consciousness. She deftly shows that these models are empty of any true psychological insight, but instead entirely bound up with the culture and the time and the economic circumstances in which the models were devised. The worst thing is that she spends too much time researching British marketing publications from the 50s and 60s. The US has always been the hot molten center of marketing and retail trends -- a fact which Bowlby readily acknowledges throughout most of the book -- thus the inclusion textual readings from old British marketing journals seems to have everything to do with Bowlby being a professor in England and her original publisher being British, and nothing to do with whether this information is really appropriate.
But this is a relatively minor annyonance in what is really quite a witty, interesting look at the rise of the supermarket and the concomitant creation of new packaging, new advertising, new models of the shopper consciousness. Bowlby is at her best here, giving us an historical perspective of shoppers (mostly women in the early days of supermarket shopping) who,depending on the theorist, are believed to be extremely suggestible given certain conditions, or extremely rational no matter what the conditions. For instance, in the 50s, that era of mass outputs and mass consumption and McCarthyism, some social critics like Vance Parkard posited that advertisers were "hidden persuaders" using sophisticated brainwashing techniques to sell weak-minded women things they did not really need. But in the 60s and 70s, the model of shopper consciousness shifted. Suddenly, the shopper -- still nearly always seen as a woman -- was in charge, "with it," "sophisticated." The rise of the "power brand" in the 80s -- a time during which the appeals of certain brands were apparently so overwhelming that even the sophisticated 70s shopper succumbed -- swung the pendulum back to the weak-minded model. Bowlby neatly lampoons the variations these psycological models have gone through since the rise of the supermarket, but notes that ultimately, this bipolar model is still intact.
I particularly recommend "Carried Away" to marketers, especially young marketers who have never seen the vacillation in the models of shopper consciousness. Take it to the next marketer's conference you attend. It's the perfect antidote to those enlessly dull days spent listening to hour after hour of case studies in which consumers are uniformly described as "sophisticated," or "savvy." Bowlby's light touch and eye for the absurd will help you keep all the tepid, instrumetally tainted "shopper psychology" in perspective.
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