Shopping for $500, Alex.

I have to say that the whole metaphor set up by Fiske in his writing “Shopping for Pleasure” is not at all foreign to me. I actually had to endure discussions about it in middle school and high school religion classes, teaching us about the evils of consumerism and about how abstinence from overindulgence was key to our livelihood. But aside from the obvious layer of the message, which has already been ingrained in me by so many theology courses, the other ideas that the reading uses to set up this metaphor is actually very interesting. Who’d have thought that the term “mall rat” could prove to be so correct in terms of people who spend their time in malls?

Fiske spends his entire passage talking about the research from a man by the name of Pressdee, who apparently has a Doctoral degree in shopping, and about all of the observations and conclusions that this man reached in his studies. I want to start off by saying that I thought the tone of this passage, much like that of “Sidewalks…” is very dry and boring, catering to informative ends without necessarily entertaining the reader. Anyway, the whole message he is trying to convey is that those who window shop, or the “mall rats” as we like to call them, cause anxiety and fear on the part of the storekeepers in the mall. In reality, most of these people are simply deceiving these figures of authority simply because they come in numbers.

One of the points that Fiske explains is that in fact none of these people are actually any different from the people who come in the middle of the day, it is simply that they come in much greater numbers. This causes the people who spend their time in the mall to be more anxious at peak hours; Fiske even alludes to stories where security guards check the drinks that people are holding to make sure that they have not been spiked with alcohol. One of the other points brought up this article that really perplexed me were the actual statistics on people who buys things in a mall. I‘ve always known that there are people hanging around doing nothing, but I didn’t expect the numbers to be that high.