Quotes from RACHEL BOWLBY

Shopping figures as the antithesis of property in this sense, in that it represents a pure mobility of selves and objects. One moment you are this, have this; the next you move on. In this slide from the compulsory to the compulsive, there are no duties, no continuities, no consequences and no history, only a succession of shopping instants.

Supermarket shopping had become a newly dangerous business, not to be undertaken on a whim, still less without a plan.

But above all, buying is a profound pleasure: it is a discovery, almost an invention.

Flower-shopping is a ladylike occupation that does not involve getting your hands dirty; it is about supplying the house with beauty, not scrubbing it clean.

If you take away the presence of the salesman from the process of buying, you change the nature of shopping out of all recognition because you remove the element of interaction between two people.

For the moment when fashion is fashion, it has no past and no future. The 'latest' fashion, la dernière mode, is also the 'last': for

If you take away the presence of the salesman from the process of buying, you change the nature of shopping out of all recognition because you remove the element of interaction between two people. Such

But the alternative to the living salesman was not, in the end, the machine; it was self-service.

Shopping would be a relationship between the customer and the goods, with nothing and no one mediating between them.

Self-service' puts all classes on the same shopping level, doing the work for themselves; the