Professor of Comparative Literature (1957- )
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.
RACHEL BOWLBY
Back to the Shops: The High Street in History and the Future
But above all, buying is a profound pleasure: it is a discovery, almost an invention.
RACHEL BOWLBY
Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism
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.
RACHEL BOWLBY
Carried Away
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.
RACHEL BOWLBY
Carried Away
Supermarket shopping had become a newly dangerous business, not to be undertaken on a whim, still less without a plan.
RACHEL BOWLBY
Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism
And for this indeterminate new kind of shopper, the place of shopping is less clearly defined as well. It's not so much that present-day clicking is like or not like, standing in front of a window or standing in line, as that those other experiences aren't themselves so clearly differentiated in time or space. You can be shopping while on your computer; but you can also be on your computer, or more likely, your phone or your iPad, while you are in the store (I mean the actual one not the virtual one).
RACHEL BOWLBY
Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism