Upon walking into Macy’s from State Street, one is immediately bombarded with an overload of senses. The historical architecture clashes with the discombobulation of marketing signage and products in every multitude of color and design. None of the packaging relates to one another. Each competes for your attention. Hip hop music blares from overhead, and you are immediately swathed in a disharmonious arrangement of perfume fragrances. This experience seems lightyears away from the building’s first incarnation as Marshall Fields, a stately and elegant place to do your shopping. Back then a shopper was greeted and waited upon at every stage, instead of inundated with products competing for attention.
We currently live in a consumer society in which we satisfy our needs and desires by consuming commodities and services.1 Consumption has become a mode of entertainment — people wile away the hours in malls and outlet stores hunting for something that they do not know exists yet.2 Products and their packaging send subliminal messages through colors, graphics, logos, etc. to convince us we need a product.3
The scene unfolding before you in Macy’s upon entering takes your eyes, ears, and nose in every other direction. It is a wonder consumers are able to make any purchasing decisions at all without giving up completely and buying nothing. Perhaps Macy’s wants to overwhelm the consumer. Through overstimulation, they think the consumer will loose their physical orientation in the store and be forced to consume ad nauseam till they find their way back out. Envision a lost person shopping their way out of the labyrinth that Macy’s has become — grabbing a pair of jeans from the denim section, a men’s tie as the enter menswear, a bottle of perfume from a cosmetics counter until at last they reach a door leading outside and away. As this consumer leaves, the trance is lifted and they suddenly become aware of the dozen shopping bags they now carry. The social researcher Rob Shields claimed, “that this loss of orientation has taken all control from us and we drift around more or less passively in the shopping centre.”4 However, according to Lars Svendsen this argument does not hold up in reality. He said, “surveys of people’s ability to orientate themselves and their consumer behaviour, where more traditional shopping centres have been compared with more ‘postmodern’ ones, indicate that people do not seem to have much trouble finding their bearings.”5 Macy’s, formerly Marshall Fields, has been transformed from a traditional shopping center — the stately department store — to something of a postmodern market experience, where products run the gamut from expensive and well made to cheap and celebrity endorsed in a disorganized setting with few clerks to assist the shopper. But Svendsen argues that this does not encourage shoppers to consume nor disorient them into a state of passivity. He said consumers “tended rather to try and find their bearings — and did so quite quickly. Nor did they seem to be stimulated to consume more than usual, shopping in accordance with their usual preferences.”6 If Svendsen’s position is true, the Macy’s experience will not fool consumers into buying more than they intend to and that their ability to find their way out of the consumable maze will nullify impulse purchases.
However, for a first-time Macy’s shopper, I can see how getting lost in that store could easily happen with its multitude of floors, departments, and limited availability of salespeople. And for the tourist, who has not entered the store with a specific product purchasing goal in mind, finding themselves in a section of the store they would not have deliberately sought out could create a temptation effect. It must be acknowledged that a good portion of Macy’s shoppers are out-of-town or out-of-state tourists, who come to the store because of the building’s historic reputation. They come to see what all the fuss is about and are in a state of mind to consume for entertainment purposes. A good deal of the rest of Macy’s shoppers are likely there for entertainment excursions as well. The sociologist Zygunt Bauman appropriately wrote, “Not being bored — ever — is the norm of the consumers’ life.”7 It seems to reason that these consumers are not there to window shop but to actively consume, and, with entertainment as the objective, are open to suggestion from the glittering and swimming pool of consumable products.
Interestingly, Macy’s profits are up for their fourth-quarter sales, which include the last three months ending January 30. Women’s Wear Daily announced that Macy’s earned $466 million compared to a year ago when they had a $4.77 billion loss.8 As the retail sector ever so slowly shakes out of the current recession, it will be worth noting what stores like Macy’s choose to do with their stores. Could a return to elegance and consumer assistance be on the horizon to combat the bad business practices that sunk them in the past few years? Or will over saturation of product options, no congruent theme, and lack of on-hand salespeople become par for the course?
1. Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006), 111.
2. Svendsen, Fashion, 113.
3. “In the Vernacular,” Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603, 16 February 2010.
4. Svendsen, Fashion, 117.
5. Svendsen, Fashion, 117.
6. Svendsen, Fashion, 117.
7. Svendsen, Fashion, 113.
8. Vicki M. Young, “Sears, Target, Macy’s Profits Rise,” Women’s Wear Daily, 23 February 2009, Business section. Online edition.
