Book Review
'Call of the Mall': Dissecting our worship of consumerism

By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Special to The Seattle Times

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Forget DNA analyses, brain-chemistry breakthroughs and racial profiling. All we really need know to fully understand any American is where she or he shops, and how they behave on these hunt-and-gather expeditions.

At least that's the way it plays in two absorbing new books that ponder the countless choices we face every day and examine American material culture. (That's an egghead term for all the stuff surrounding us at a point in history.)

Paco Underhill's "Call of the Mall" is downright entertaining. This "tall, bald, stuttering research wonk on the cusp of his fifty-third year" is a retail anthropologist, of all things. He studies where, how and why people shop. Underhill spends more time in malls than any teenager you know, and he's a lively guide. He'll make even the worst mall-phobe harbor warm feelings about these hermetically sealed centers of commerce and corn dogs.

Author appearance Paco Underhill will read from "Call of the Mall" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333 or www.thirdplacebooks.com).

Underhill doesn't suggest that mall crawling is as gratifying as a baseball game or a religious service, but he's done the math on this; with suburban sprawl and nearly 1,200 malls in this country, guess where most of the action is?

"The retail arena is still the best place I know for seeing what people wear and eat and look like, how they interact with parents and friends and lovers and kids. If you really want to observe entire middle-class multigenerational American families, you have to go to the mall. It's also not a bad place to shop."

"Call of the Mall" by Paco Underhill Simon & Schuster, $24.95 "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less" by Barry Schwartz Ecco, $23.95

Barry Schwartz takes a more sober view, as befitting a professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College. In "The Paradox of Choice," he doesn't hold back on the bad news: Whether picking out a T-shirt, profession or insurance policy — we're smothered by the number of choices we face.

"As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of the options," writes Schwartz. "But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction — even to clinical depression."

Whoa! How'd we get from cruising the mall for new pink socks to clinical depression? Schwartz's case initially sounds fatuous. Discovering that the average supermarket has 22 different varieties of frozen waffles, while appalling in a world where so many go to bed hungry, hardly seems to be a key to the growing number of people living with depression.

But stick with him: By the time Schwartz is done dividing us into maximizers (who "need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made") and satisfies (the lucky few who can "settle for something that is good enough and not worry that there might be something better") this whole thing starts to sound alarmingly credible.

There clearly is an insidious side to third-guessing every decision we make, from waffles to day care. No wonder we're so tired at the end of the day; turns out it's not the rat race that does it, it's choosing the best route, fastest lane, safest speed, most tuneful radio station and cheapest gas.

These books are good consecutive reads. Underhill sets us up with shopper anecdotes and tales of savvy-retailer tricks. (Ever wonder why your fave high-end cosmetic line offers a semi-annual "gift with purchase" instead of putting that $22 lipstick on sale?) Schwartz piles up his too-close-for-comfort characterizations to prove how rarely we allow ourselves to be satisfied.

Underhill doesn't suggest changes in consumer behavior. He's all-accepting of mall-world reality, right down to the slow walkers the industry parlance disdains as "meanderthals." Schwartz offers a primer for change, and once past the pop-psych headings ("be a chooser, not a picker") you'll find some useful nudges.

It comes down to one author making us laugh at our predictable, neurotic behavior in the marketplace, while another warns us of the costs of such behavior. But they share some important common ground — and surely both would agree, reading these two books is one smart choice.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company