“May I help you find suspenders to match the piano? A tie to go with your tea? Some Mozart for your handbag? If the modern art of selling depends upon creating associations, today’s sales mavericks owe a lot to the history of the department store, the original lifestyle marketers. In the early decades of the 20th century, if you were a person of moderate means and wanted to hear a piano recital, watch a film, sip tea, get a manicure, visit a travel bureau, or sign the kids up for bicycle lessons, the place to go was a downtown department store. Urbanization and rising wages created conditions for the retail giants to thrive, but their fundamental success hinged on an essential insight that still rings true today: Shopping was an excuse to have an experience. Today, Americans shop for necessities, shop for status, shop to socialize, shop to escape, shop to people-watch, shop to educate, and shop as therapy. But it was not always a foregone conclusion that a nation of hardscrabble pioneers would become a nation of shopaholics.”

 

– Christina Larson, Washington Monthly

 

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The World is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
 
The world is too much with us; late and soon,  
    Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:  
    Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
    The winds that will be howling at all hours  
    And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers, 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. — Great God! I’d rather be  
    A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, —
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,  
    Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;  
    Or hear old Triton blow his wreath