SOC317H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Walmart, Parcel Post, Economic Surplus
Document Summary
Although the main point of shopping is to make purchases for individual use, families and friends do shop together, and age or peer groups meet. And examine each other in shopping spaces: but shopping also poses an implicit conflict. Increasingly under non-local, standardized, corporate control, shopping creates a public sphere in which consumers struggle to create an experience that they, themselves, value. Merchants gradually became a separate occupation from either traders or craftspeople; they kept a fixed stall at the market and, eventually, an indoor shop. After centuries of providing a limited range and number of products, some merchants used the emerging industrial system of mass production and access to bank credit to offer many different kinds of merchandise under one roof. Historically, shoppers have gone out to markets or stores, and come into direct contact with displays of goods to buy, as well as with merchants and other shoppers.
