Book Review: Arthur Asa Berger (2019). Shopper’s Paradise: Retail Stores and American Consumer Culture. Leiden: Brill.

Abstract

Shopper’s Paradise traces the dominant and emergent shopper’s ethos in contemporary American consumption culture by reflecting culturologically on the functional aspects of various retail formats. Undoubtedly we are living in exciting, and at the same highly volatile times. In fact, volatility and liquidity constitute the mantras of contemporary consumption culture that is marked by experimentalism, decreasing loyalty and malleable demand patterns. It is a smooth consumption space, relieved from the rigidities of traditional market segmentation. This space is largely shaped by technological convergence across the purchase and consumption journey, by the progressive virtualization of the real (or, more aptly, the physical) and the reification of the virtual. This hybrid hyperreal space where the contemporary retail landscape is situated has been detrimental for time-hallowed retail formats, such as the mall, while having spawned new retail formats, such as Amazon Go.

Keywords: retail marketing, cultural studies, consumer culture