ABSTRACT
A number of social scientists have described leisure shopping itself as a type of tourism (Cox, Cox and Anderson 2005; Falk and Campbell 1997). In his analysis of the shopping mall, Goss (1999: 47) uses the notion of a trip as a metaphor to describe key aspects of a visit to the mall: “The brilliant combined effect of nostalgia, spatial and temporal displacement through transport, and fetishization of commodities, is to contrive the experience of The Mall literally and fi guratively as a shopping ‘trip’, a bodily and imaginary journey to distant places and past times that is undertaken in states of reverie and distraction, and for which the purchase stands as souvenir”. Lehtonen and Maenpaa (1997) are more direct, describing key features of modern shopping settings, such as the combination of refreshment, retail and entertainment, the use of themes, the celebration of the senses and the building of a safe enclave, and noting that these are very similar to the features of many tourist destinations.
