I have just realized that I have proposed no less than three different courses that deal in one way or another with the history and theory of consumption at the college at which I teach! With a little luck, next year I will be busy teaching and writing (and learning!) about consumption in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of links with readers (if I have any--hey, everybody, check this out!)--

 First is Lee Eisenberg's article at the Daily Beast on haggling. A must for those who like to think about cultures of shopping. I love his wife's reports on her expedition. 

 Interestingly, I was at my local Goodwill store this noontime, absolutely cleaning up for a total of less than $50. This haul: new navy blue jersey knit pants from LLBean--perfect for my days when I work from home; new J Crew navy soft-as-can-be crew neck  sweatshirt; practically new blue and green stripe Lands End cotton crew neck sweater; 2 pair used and in great soft-as-can-be condition Lee khakis--hidden stretchy waist--thank heaven; and a pink fake Kate Spade wicker handbag--but who cares because it's for my six year old niece anyway! But the related point here was this: the woman checking me out seemed to want to head off at the pass any haggling I might do, apologizing for charging me $9.99 for the new items as she rang them in one by one. I wanted to say: are you kidding me???!!!!! First of all, let's recall how cheap these are at $9.99. Second, I never haggle at Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, or the VNA Thriftique, or the St. David's Thrift Shop...or anywhere I buy second hand clothes, because all of them are charities, and I consider these worthy causes in and of themselves, apart from the great buys I find. Nevertheless, the fact that she brought up that the price was firm suggests to me that people are trying to haggle with them on a regular basis--so what Eisenberg points to on the high end is also going on (more than I realized) on the low end.

 Eisenberg also has a blog called Shoptimism that I wanted to highlight as well. I noticed one of his posts uses the following quote from Dorothy Canfield Fisher: “Buying is not a creative occupation; nor is caring for superfluous possessions productive effort.”  — Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The American Family in a World at War. 

As much as I love Fisher (Understood Betsy, anyone?) I really hope he contests Fisher's statement in his book. Fisher had a hand in the creation of the Book of the Month Club (read about it here in Janice Radway's A Feeling For Books), and she had a bit of an upper-middle-class didactic meddling thing going. Scholars of the 60s and 70s looked upon advertising and consumption as the masses being manipulated by the elites (think Marx's religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses-type dynamic), but that attitude has been contested by a new generation of scholars who explore the creativity and pleasure of consumption, especially in relation to forming identity and community--and who would deny us as humans some pleasure in life...?

Looks like Eisenberg's book will be interesting. I enjoyed Judith Levine's Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, and will have to add this one to the list as well.