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Amazon.co.uk Review
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
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy Informative Reading....,
By
This review is from: Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (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!!
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What Do Shoppers Want?,
By Panopticonman "panopticonman" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Carried Away: the Invention of Modern Shopping (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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