Cover Story
Buying into consumerism
by Jane Clifton
Why New Zealanders find satisfaction in spending their leisure hours shopping.
Is our shopping mania healthy? Author/philosopher Alain de Botton has warned, in his bestseller Status Anxiety, about the ultimate emptiness of consumerism – how it’s a temporary fix that does not accumulate into happiness, and can often accrue as anxiety.
But before we flagellate ourselves too much about our favourite national hobby, it’s worth considering that we are hard-wired to shop. Or at least to acquire, hoard, collect, be on the lookout for stuff. Our bodies, still configured largely to hunter-gatherer Stone Age conditions, are doing what comes naturally.
Auckland University marketing lecturer Mike Lee says this tendency has only shown itself in consumerism since the Industrial Revolution, but it has always been there. “What we used to do is grow and make things for ourselves. If you needed a new implement, you had to make it. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it.”
Lee says that there was an inherent satisfaction in this. People had a clear motivation for everything they acquired: survival and comfort. But then we decided that it would be more efficient to specialise, so that if you were good at making tools you made tools and sold them to others, but, say, bought your bread from a baker. This made the act of producing things rather less inherently satisfying. We were not baking bread for our families. We were baking it for money. Money itself was not a good payoff for this, so we began to exchange it for things that might bring us satisfaction.
So there’s a degree to which this is all about lack of job satisfaction. The further we move beyond subsistence, the greater our drive to “buy in” that satisfaction.
A flick through the history books shows that we are not the original zombie-like shoppers. We fixate on designer labels, computer games and plasma TVs. But in 1800s Europe far more elaborate pains were taken to acquire exotic plants, fabrics and food items. Explorers were sponsored to risk their lives finding new “fixes”. The only anthropological difference is that we have containerised and refrigerated shipping, so our exotic fixes lack a certain romance and glamour.
But what of the allure of the shopping mall? How have these same-the-world-over collections of chain stores, food outlets and supermarkets moved from being simply utilities to societal magnets?
Lee says that you have to reel back through the centuries and consider the original town centre. Typically, you had a church, a green area where people liked to congregate and a main street. Then came shops. In our time, however, the real estate in town centres became extremely expensive, and retailers and developers conceived of the mall. Locating a collection of shops some distance from the CBD, where land was cheap and plentiful, became a good economic alternative. By the 70s in New Zealand, most families had cars.
Being meticulously planned, malls lacked the idiosyncratic nature of town centres, which had grown up higgledy-piggledy. Malls had a pretty standard range of shops, all in comfortable walking distance from one another, all under cover, and with ample free parking.
But over time, Lee says, we have lost something: town centres have become depleted and less viable, and malls, though approximating the old town centre, are not true “community” centres.
There are now attempts to make malls more community-like. Botany Town Centre in Auckland’s eastern suburbs, for instance, is laid out more like an old-fashioned main street, with individually styled shops rather than the homogenous mall-style shops.
Overseas, there are experiments with building residential accommodation on to malls. Lee says that in time, if not already, churches will locate themselves in malls, at least in the US. “There are already banking facilities, health and fitness facilities, child-care facilities.”
As well, there may be life in the old town centres yet. Any Wellingtonian will attest to the weekend swarm to old-fashioned main street shops in Newtown and Petone. Here are buildings of great age and character, and shops of quite eccentric range.
The ultimate “destination” shopping experience for many Wellingtonians, however, is the Wairarapa. The lure of wineries and warmer weather has been augmented by cafés, antiques shops, homewares and clothes boutiques. People have been known to come back from a stop-off in Greytown with everything from a kitten to a block of land.
The other anti-mall shopping trend here is the farmers’ market. A recent report by Massey University senior management lecturer Dr Alan Cameron, who specialises in studying small business, said although farmers’ markets were a worldwide trend, their growth here has been striking: a doubling in five years. Some of the country’s 26 markets started out of growers’ frustration at the low margins they got from supermarkets, but their viability has been assured by shoppers’ enjoyment of getting cheaper, fresher produce, and in a jollier setting than a Muzaked supermarket aisle. In districts already noted for wine and food, farmers’ markets have also proved regional profit multipliers.
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