Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Designed to appeal to “shopaholics, pop culture aficionados, and
armchair historians,” this book traces the history of shopping, from
the evolution of trade and currency in ancient times to the emergence of
shoppertainment (“all-in-one mega-complexes”) predicted by some
futurists.

Topics covered in between include the Crystal Palace exhibition of
1851, kid and teen consumerism, department stores, Muzak, catalogue and
TV home shopping, infomercials, cybershopping, discount retailers,
couponing, factory outlets, auctions, pawnbrokers, media depictions of
shopping, shopping game shows, celebrity branding, male shoppers, and
the ambivalent relationship between feminism and shopping. Less
predictable is a “personal shopping for prisoners” section that
profiles Adrienne Smalls, an entrepreneur/ex-prisoner who has been
dubbed the “L.L. Bean of the New York Prison System.”

Klaffke, a pop culture journalist and self-confessed shopping addict,
does not dwell on the unsavoury aspects of capitalism. She relegates
anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters to a sidebar and devotes a scant 12
pages to “The Dark Side of Shopping,” a chapter that provides
perfunctory discussions of shoplifting, compulsive shopping, and
shopping bulimia. Her book is definitely not for readers in sympathy
with the quotation she borrows from American travel writer Bill Bryson:
“We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.”

Even shopaholics will be dismayed by Spree’s uninspired prose and
cluttered design. Supplementary material appears in the margins in
running sidebars that compete awkwardly with the main text for the
reader’s attention. Many of the book’s black-and-white photographs
are too small and grainy to make an impression, and the crude
black-and-white illustrations add little to the overall presentation.
Included in the backmatter is an extensive bibliography and a list of
shopping-related websites that would have been more useful had it been
annotated.