i buy, therefore i am?

Today's BBC2 programme Addicted to cheap shopping? gave its viewers a worrying statistic: more Americans visit Wal Mart once a week than voted in the last Presidential election.

There's nothing essentially new in people voting with their feet and using their actions or everyday behaviour to speak for them (see the newspapers we buy for example) but what does seem to be genuinely revealing about this statistic is what it says about the mobilisation of the population. If there's something guaranteed to whip us into hysteria, it's cheap goods.

When the new branch of Primark opened on Oxford Street on 5th April this year, such was the clamour for pairs of £8 jeans, that the doors were snapped off their hinges. Ikea stores the world over have been witness to dangerous stampedes, where customers have been hospitalised and even killed as a result.

The lure of cheap consumer goods brings people out in their droves but the democratic process simply doesn't. Is there something political parties on both sides of the pond can learn from the way these brands market themselves that galvanises the population? Or is it the case that we are getting something from shopping that we once did from politics: a sense of identity?

For one interesting analysis of material culture, see Miller's book.

janedoe