whispaws
Shop Til You Drop
There was time when shopping meant making the purchases necessary for the continued existence or well-being of the family. It was a chore, an unwelcome task that had to be done whether you wanted to or not, and like most such family chores it fell to the women. They went to bakery and bought bread, to the butcher and bought meat, to the greengrocer and bought vegetables, to the crockery for glassware, and to the candle-maker and the tea merchant and the miller and and and. Shopping was a time-consuming affair, and tiring.
Then in the middle of the 19th century Western society began to create very large stores in which they gathered together goods and merchandise from a wide variety of vendors. Those goods were loosely arranged in sections of the store, which were called ‘departments’ after the French term departement, referring to an administrative grouping of people by location. The stores, naturally, became known as department stores.
By bundling all these goods and services in one location, shopping became less onerous. Department stores soon began to stock luxury goods that had been available primarily to the upper classes. Women could not only make their required purchases–and make them more quickly–they suddenly had time to wander through the various departments and just look. Looking became wanting, and gradually the notion of shopping shifted from a necessity to a potential source of entertainment.
Historically, when a woman’s chore had the potential to be fun, men moved in and declared it an art that only men could excel in. We’ve seen it in cooking, in dress-making, in pottery, in gardening. We haven’t seen that in shopping. Women have convinced men that shopping is still a chore. Very clever of them.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
