Shopping For Pleasure

"The metaphor of consumerism as a religion, in which commodities become the icons of worship and the rituals of exchanging money for goods become a secular equivalent of holy communion, is simply too glib to be helpful, and too attractive to those whose intentions, whether they be moral or political, are to expose the evils and limitations of bourgeois materialism."
Shopping For Pleasure: Malls, Power, and Resistance - John Fiske

I have to be honest; after reading that sentence, I really had no desire to read any further. I highly dislike when authors construct sentences that are so long and complex that by the time you’ve finished reading it, you have to work to remember what the beginning was about. Although I was able to get through that sentence, the rest of the article wasn’t much of an improvement. He had a way of using a lot of words but actually saying very little. The only passages that I found to be of any interest at all were those regarding the failure rates of new products. It is amazing to me that that quantity of new merchandise does not find a consumer base. 80 % is an astounding figure, and he suggested on as high as 90%.

Aside from that tidbit of information, I really didn’t feel as though I got anything out of what he said. He became too bogged down in metaphors for my taste. Beginning with the "consumerism as a religion" and "congregating within these cathedrals of capitalism" metaphor would have been fine if he had simply carried that one through the work, but instead he goes from that to the ticket example to how teenagers rebel against the ideals of the mall creators with their alcohol disguised in soda cans and their loitering. Any one of those "hooks" would have worked fairly well alone, but together, I felt overwhelmed and really learned very little from this piece.