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By Root 1102 0

there was the invention of a product, be it casual wear or ready-made picture frames, and then the proliferation of it in quantity and variety, fed by advertising, and by production. Then there were inventions of new products dependent on the first, then wider marketing, more production, and on and on. Even department stores weren’t big enough for us. In suburbia, department stores clumped together in malls, surrounded by single-note stores, all under one roof: comfortable in summer heat or winter cold. In the new indoor malls, as well as on traditional Main Streets and on great urban Broadways, shopping has grown into something truly unprecedented. The wealth of average people; the rise of advertising from almost nothing; and the massive amount of goods produced—all this is new to our moment in history.

In the first half of the twentieth century there was a lot of wide-eyed response to all the buying and all the products. In Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, the heroine, Udine, is a shopper. Her husband, Ralph, sees her bargaining as derived “not…from any effort to restrain her expenses, but only to prolong and intensify the pleasure of spending.”3 Going to the shops is a controlled and contained way to have a social experience that suits our momentary desires. There are flea markets and antique stores where haggling is still an expected part of the game, but for the most part Americans have rejected that kind of shopping. Even car dealerships, one of the last bastions of the haggle, now offer the inability to manipulate the price (by you or them) as a major attraction. The last situations in which you can always expect to bargain are those where we make the only two normal purchases more expensive than cars: expert labor and real estate. The interactions that American shoppers prefer seem to be more friendly than antagonistic or wily. Some people go shopping looking forward to anonymous snippets of conversation; some go to demonstrate and share information about electronics, collectables, or fashion; some go for a comparatively personal, neighborly chat. A mob scene is not just about the advertised attraction: people also show up to be in the crowd. Some of us would never go to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, but of course, a lot of us would. We may claim, with tautological certainty, that people go to places where there are crowds.

It also seems worth noting that neurological and psychological researchers have found a connection between the kind of new experiences that shopping provides and short-term dopamine surges in the brain. Researcher Michael Bardo, for instance, found that if you force lab rats to have a novel experience by putting them in a strange new cage, they will experience stress. But if you just make new cages available, most rats will choose novelty, and as they explore the new cage, they will experience surges of dopamine.4 Shopping allows the exploration of new spaces and new product displays and seems to produce the same surges of dopamine. Neuroscientist David Lewis is a researcher for a London advertising consultant firm, Neuroco, and studies people’s brain scans as they shop. (The shoppers wear a device.)5 Companies want to know what makes people buy or not buy, and if they know what part of the brain lights up when people make purchasing decisions, they might be able to backtrack and figure out how to light up that part of the brain. For our interest here, it is most important just to find that (judging from these machines we have built here at the start of the twenty-first century) shopping experiences light up the brain a lot. As Lewis put it, “Shopping is enormously rewarding to us.”6 It looks like dopamine helps us to stop ruminating and take action. As a shopper hunts for an item, finds it, and makes the purchase, levels of dopamine flowing between nerve cells in the brain rise appreciably. The studies also show that once the product is purchased, chemical balances return to normal fast, so if you are shopping just to get the dopamine high, you probably experience