Quotations on / about shopping

It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.

(Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), U.S. feminist, author, and editor. As quoted in Newsweek, p. 19 (December 18, 1989). On the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, which had occurred in the previous month. Within a year, East and West Berlin were officially rejoined.)
More quotations from: Gloria Steinem

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

(Letty Cottin Pogrebin (b. 1939), U.S. journalist, author. "Down with Sexist Upbringing," published in The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Klagsbrun (1972).)
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The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and prisons,
Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little downtowns.

(Robert Pinsky (b. 1940), U.S. poet. The Figured Wheel (l. 1-2). . . Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds. (2d ed., 1988) W. W. Norton & Company.)
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...I've found out it's fun to go shopping. It's such a feminine thing to do.

(Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), U.S. actor. As quoted in Ms. magazine, p. 41 (August 1972). Raised in very modest circumstances, Monroe had recently gained fame and wealth as a movie actress.)
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Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women's lives. You never saw men milling around in men's departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.

(Mary Barnett Gilson (1877-?), U.S. factory personnel manager, economist, and educator. What's Past is Prologue, ch. 4 (1940). Remembering her youthful days as a salesclerk.)
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The most important fact about our shopping malls, as distinct from the ordinary shopping centers where we go for our groceries, is that we do not need most of what they sell, not even for our pleasure or entertainment, not really even for a sensation of luxury. Little in them is essential to our survival, our work, or our play, and the same is true of the boutiques that multiply on our streets.

(Henry Fairlie (1924-1990), British author. "Avarice," The Seven Deadly Sins Today, New Republic Books (1978).)
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The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.

(Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. repr. In Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (1988). "Consumer Society," La Société de Consommation (1970).)
More quotations from: Jean Baudrillard

While enclosed shopping malls suspended space, time, and weather, Disneyland went one step further and suspended reality. Any geographic, cultural, or mythical location, whether supplied by fictional texts (Tom Sawyer's Island), historical locations (New Orleans Square), or futuristic projections (Space Mountain), could be reconfigured as a setting for entertainment. Shopping malls easily adapted this appropriation of "place" in the creation of a specialized theme environment. In Scottsdale, the Borgata, an open-air shopping mall set down in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks).

(Margaret Crawford (b. 1948), U.S. educator, author. "The World in a Shopping Mall," Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin, Noonday (1992).)
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Anyone having that dual familiarity with prewar small towns and modern shopping malls will ... be repelled by the comparison. A preoccupation with physical facades coupled with a lack of sociological insight is common among the mall's many fans.... Totally unlike Main Street, the shopping mall is populated by strangers. As people circulate about in the constant, monotonous flow of mall pedestrian traffic, their eyes do not cast about for familiar faces, for the chance of seeing one is small. That is not part of what one expects there. The reason is simple. The mall is centrally located to serve the multitudes from a number of outlying developments within its region. There is little acquaintance between these developments and not much more within them. Most of them lack focal points or core settings and, as a result, people are not widely known to one another, even in their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhood is only a minority portion of the mall's clientele.

(Ray Oldenburg, U.S. sociologist, educator. "Main Street," The Great Good Place, Paragon House (1989).)
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Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole micro-circuitry of desire, ideology and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyber-space of ultracapitalism.

(Arthur Kroker (b. 1945), Canadian sociologist, and David Cook (b. 1945), Canadian sociologist. "Panic (Shopping) Malls," Panic Encyclopedia (1989).)
More quotations from: Arthur Kroker