ABSTRACT
Shopping finds its place within this context, and it has moved a long way from the purchase of essentials: it has become part of the leisure industry, and the commodities we buy are agents of pleasure and identity. The act of going shopping is not simple, but a combination of a number of apparently different activities. In an industrial, market-oriented society, buying is the essential correlative of producing, and leisure is the necessary opposite of work. Those shops with low-priced goods that appeal to everyone, such as newsagents, card shops or chemists, are the most ‘democratic’ shops. Class and money differences are understated in shopping centres, for fairly obvious reasons: there is little point in excluding buyers from the market place. Shopping may seem to be a modern pastime, connected with materialism and consumerism but with little else.
