RETAIL THERAPY, also known as "therapeutic discourse" or just simply "consumerism," is the idea that happiness can come from buying or possessing nice things. It is both newer and older than many people realize.
The shopping experience is designed to feel good in and of itself; stores are arranged to pique interest – attractive items in sensuous displays, background music meant to encourage the right demographic to linger, enticingly low prices on the aisle end-caps. The packaging for many men's shirts has a slit in it because, while women want to feel the material before they buy it, men, it is thought, will only choose things that are crisp and fresh and new. Such is the state of art of selling.
But where is the joy in looking at things you don't need, and, often, can't even afford? How does shopping fit in to our visions of happiness?
Some psychologists suggest that, if people have enough extra money, they will naturally be drawn to spend it on luxuries. This isn't actually the case, though. When medieval German peasants were given a raise, instead of working harder to earn more money, they cut their hours – they kept their incomes constant but had more time to enjoy at the pub. And there was a strain of thought among the ancient Greeks and Romans suggesting that too much luxury made men effeminate and everyone weak. This suspicion of unnecessary niceties continues all the way up to the American Revolution.[1]
So much for the idea that we've always been consumers waiting for products.
The Dawn of Consumerism
We can find some early indications about where American consumer habits would go, once we developed an economy that could pump out luxuries, in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. A trip to the US in 1831 and 1832 convinced him that Americans tended to look for practical solutions to all their problems, and expected those solutions to be just around the corner:
I accost an American sailor, and I inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a certain number of years.[2]
For centuries, then, Americans in general have expected to find life-improving products on the open market. But the idea that these improvements would lead to happiness didn't become wide-spread until several decades after Tocqueville went home.
It wasn't until the later part of the 19th century that the idea set in that buying things can do more than make us comfortable. In the US, the first companies to make use of ad agencies were, by-and-large, those that sold patent medicines. How do you sell a miracle cure that has no actual medicinal properties? The simplest way, the hucksters found, was to convince people that they suffered from maladies they didn't know they had, then sell medicines to "cure" them.
Where early advertisements tended to tout the qualities of products, marketers soon discovered that it was easier to take a page from the patent medicine trade and promise customers a nebulous sort of lifestyle improvement with the purchase of their products. For a quick comparison, take a look at this ad that Ben Franklin wrote in the late 1700's for a stove he designed:
Fireplaces with small openings cause drafts or cold air to rush in at every crevice, and ‘tis very uncomfortable as well as dangerous to sit against any such crevice.... Women, particularly, from this cause (as they sit much in the house) get colds in the head, rheums, and defluxions which fall into their jaws and gums, and have destroyed early, many a fine set of teeth in these northern colonies. Great and bright fires do also very much contribute to damaging the eyes, dry and shrivel the skin, bring on early the appearance of old age.[3]
The emphasis is almost entirely on practicality, comfort, and on dealing with specific ailments. By the early 1900's, the tone of advertising had changed significantly. Touting the qualities of a product was no longer seen as especially effective; instead, marketers attempted to convince customers that their entire lives would be better – not just specific aspects of it – if they bought certain products. Here is a dark cloud of an ad for Shredded Wheat from 1903:
Mothers, do you not know that children crave natural food until you pervert their taste by the use of unnatural food… Unnatural food develops unnatural and therefore wrong propensities and desires in children.[4]
The ominous and yet strangely vague possibility that mothers were perverting their children through their food choices had to stay vague and ominous unless the company wanted to specify what, exactly, they meant. This reflects a change from the days of Franklin. In advertising, it was no longer enough to resolve problems people knew they had; the goal was now to inform them about problems they didn't.
Historian Rodney Clapp describes the change this way:
…as The Thompson Red Book on Advertising put it more generally in 1901, "Advertising aims to teach people that they have wants, which they did not recognize before, and where such wants can be best supplied." Consequently, one newspaper reader in 1897 said that not so long ago people "skipped [ads] unless some want compelled us to read, while now we read to find out what we really want."[5]
Why Did People Buy?
The idea, historians like Clapp and T. J. Jackson Lears suggest, was to play on a sense of emptiness that was gnawing with increasing fervor on American psyches.
The exact cause of this sense of lack is still under debate. Perhaps, as some suggest, it was a result of the advertisers themselves, insinuating their messages into the tender, receptive brains of the American public. Perhaps it was a response to changes in the work environment that made money, rather than a sense of contribution or pride in expertise and a job well done, the primary reward for labor.
Myself, I'm partial to a third explanation, although I wouldn't discount the first two: changes in American culture made it more difficult to find meaning in life. Until quite recently, just staying alive was a challenge; a big part of American experience involved creating a livable human order out of a hostile and unforgiving wilderness. As time went by, however, more and more people found themselves embedded in a livable human world that was all too ordered, and not necessarily for their benefit. The struggle of human against nature for survival has something grand and epic about it; the struggle of human against human for recognition at the office Christmas party can sometimes seem a little petty.[6]
Consumerism and retail therapy have been enduring themes in Americans' search for happiness, so it shouldn't be a surprise that a number of anti-consumerist responses have arisen over time as well.
These include:
- Back to Nature movements
- The search for the authentic self, and
- Minimalism
Whatever the case, many Americans have become convinced that retail therapy can be a source of happiness and a solution to that empty feeling. People find retail therapy more effective or less, but its impact on American visions of happiness can't be denied.
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Image at top: from Viintage.com, public domain images.
[1] Peter Stearns, 2001. Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire. New York: Routledge.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, book 2 chapter 8
[3] William O'Barr, 2005. "A Brief History of Advertising in America." Advertising and Society Review, Vol. 6(3). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193868#f1
[4] Quoted in T.J. Jackson Lears, “From salvation to self-realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, New York: Pantheon Books, 1-38.
[5] Rodney Clapp, 1996. "Why The Devil Takes Visa: A Christian Response to the Triumph of Consumerism." Christianity Today, Oct. 7, 1996.
[6] There are many variations on this theme. Theodor Adorno developed a theory of commodity fetishism that can be explored here. T. J. Jackson Lears describes a cultural shift away from morality toward personality in this essay.