Abstract
This article begins with two central ideas – that feelings of rage appear to be on the increase in present modernity and that one of the main sources of rage is directly linked to consumer culture and the retail experience it fosters. Although retail trade allows twenty-first century individuals to spend their money on material goods and experiences which provide structure and a sense of meaning and belonging, what it also causes is ambivalence, insecurity and anxiety. These are formidable feelings that cause irritation, frustration and anger to gradually fester until it accumulates into something violent that distorts the way an individual thinks, acts and treats other people. With these points in mind, what this article provides is a thorough sociological interpretation of twenty-first century retail rage. Veering away from existing interpretations of rage by drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s analysis and image of a one-dimensional society, what this article explores is the idea that retail experiences turn people into individuals who are bound and controlled by a consumer duty. As I contend, based on my unique position as a researcher turned retail worker, it is this administered, one-dimensional kind of lifestyle that cultivates rage. To support my argument and understand more comprehensively how and why retail breeds frustration and anger, I use a selection of narrative episodes to unpack three key sources of consumer rage in the twenty-first century. These sources have been labelled instantaneity, performativity and unfulfillment.
Introduction
The irony of consumer culture is that it tries to induce happiness by assimilating people into order using various tools and strategies such as retail trade, but in doing so it often achieves the opposite. It creates ambivalence, insecurity and anxiety – all of which are prime causes of irritation, frustration and anger (Sassatelli, 2007). It is no surprise, therefore, that the phenomenon of rage has become a common occurrence in the twenty-first century as consumer culture has become the dominant social, cultural and economic system. This is something Sloterdijk (2012) draws attention to in his book Rage and Time where he argues that consumerism is particularly problematic because it causes individuals to develop a somewhat irrational, disconnected and even unintentional impulse to channel anger and fury onto others.
Indeed, evidence of the rising number of rage episodes is not difficult to find in present modernity. From road rage to aggressive notes left on ambulance windscreens, and disabled people being confronted for using accessible parking spaces, we see many indications that twenty-first century consumer societies seem to be heavily contaminated by rage (Burkeman, 2019). Substantiating this idea, some of the most shocking evidence can be linked directly to retail. In 2019 the Union of Shop Distributive and Allied Workers interviewed 6457 retail employees in the UK, and they discovered that the majority regularly encountered rude and aggressive customer behaviour. The study revealed that customers regularly shout when items are out of stock, with some even resorting to spitting when disputes escalate further. The report also revealed that many retail workers have been filmed by customers while being abused, and that thousands of employees have been physically threatened with knives and other sharp instruments.
The most recent evidence to emerge suggests that consumer rage in retail has grown even worse since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest report by USDAW (2020) reveals that nine out of 10 employees experienced verbal abuse in 2020. Lack of stock, queues and COVID measures were found to be the most common triggers of rage. What is perhaps more disturbing is that in some areas of the UK levels of rage have become so great retail staff are now being encouraged to wear body cameras as a way of protecting themselves at work.
It seems, then, that what the Roman poet Virgil said of a mob over two-thousand years ago – that ‘their fury supplies them with arms’ (Anthon, 1843: 305) – still has relevance today. Consumers, retail consumers especially, feel the same degree of anger and frustration as the mob, but by the same token there is a depthlessness to it as they do not necessarily know why they feel the way they do (Sloterdijk, 2012). Yet, this underlying feeling of rage is powerful enough to frequently goad people into taking up arms against one another. Keeping this in mind, what this article sets out to do is further unpack the phenomenon of consumer rage in the twenty-first century from a sociological perspective. As I point out in the next section, a thorough sociological understanding of present-day consumer rage is missing from the wider literature. The article also sets out to provide a fresh perspective by using the author’s experience of working on a shop floor to bridge the gap between two very different worlds (the worlds of a retail worker and an academic). To my knowledge, although retail ethnographies have been conducted and have long provided important findings (Payne, 2018) there are no studies where the researcher has adopted the role of a full-time retail worker as their primary form of employment to investigate consumer rage.
To provide further detail on my position, the article emerged because of circumstance rather than doctoral research or an interest area. Quite simply, when I completed my PhD I was unable to find a full-time job in a university, so I found myself working in a sports retailer while my search continued. It was in this role that I noticed rage always seemed present, especially among customers, and so as time progressed, I wanted to uncover why. This, therefore, is the central aim of the article, to unpack a particular kind of consumer rage in the twenty-first century from a sociological standpoint, but more specifically from a retail worker’s perspective. With this in mind, the kind of consumer rage I set out to unpack in this article might be better referred to as retail rage.
One-dimensionality
The purpose of this section is to offer a different kind of theoretical foundation for understanding rage. What is clear is that scholars exploring consumer rage have tended to shy away from sociological ideas in favour of debates that fall into the field of social psychology or are strictly functionalist. This article, therefore, draws on the work of key sociologists to argue that consumer culture, specifically the retail side of this culture, has a powerful influence on people in the twenty-first century, to the extent that it might be responsible for turning many into angry, one-dimensional individuals. After all, few people are impervious to the seeds of consumer culture and the allure of the retail experience in present modernity. This is an important point Bauman (2007) makes in his book Consuming Life where he argues that most people in the twenty-first century depend on consumer culture, and of course their ability to shop in retail settings, to provide their lives with some sense of structure, meaning and belonging. In many ways, then, this is a very different world to the one described by Thorstein Veblen.
What Veblen (2005 [1899]) illustrates through his concept of conspicuous consumption is that the act of consuming was at one time perceived to be an instrumental and ‘honorific’ activity engaged in by the privileged elite. As he suggests, these were individuals who engaged in non-productive leisure precisely because they could and the rest could not. Consumption was a means of distinguishing oneself from the rest of society, and so the elite were not concerned about the ‘serviceability’ of goods. That is, consumption for a select few was less about survival and working hard to earn a living and more about supplying evidence of wealth, status and power (Veblen, 2005 [1899]). However, the world as Veblen knew and understood it has changed and a ‘new leisure class’ has emerged because everyone has become a conspicuous consumer in the western world of retail (Blackshaw, 2013). Of course, there are some individuals who try to resist the thralls of consumer culture by making connections with other cultures, and there are those who Bauman (2007) refers to as ‘flawed’ consumers (individuals who lack the resources to join in), but for most people any attempt to avoid the temptations on offer is impossible. Instead, many people have no choice but turn to services such as retail to satisfy their needs and desires. In other words, as Blackshaw (2010) puts it, we have all become part of the leisure class in present modernity.
Indeed, these are ideas that were originally developed by the Frankfurt School which included the work of critical scholars such as Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Moving away from traditional Marxist theory, what this group of scholars argued 1 is that technological developments, capitalist values and the rise of mass culture have turned every one of us into consumers who remain silent and passive as the goods of mass-production (i.e. retail goods) are allowed to permeate the consciousness. The Frankfurt School went on to suggest that capitalism not only encourages people to consume but it also shapes the tastes and preferences of everyday people, moulding their consciousness by creating false needs. The Frankfurt School therefore theorised that this influence causes people to become intellectually inert and politically submissive, and it explained why revolution is never successful.
It was Herbert Marcuse who went on to further develop some of the contributions and key ideas of the Frankfurt School. Building on their different viewpoints, Marcuse (1964) formed the idea of the ‘one-dimensional man’ and a ‘one-dimensional society’. What he argues, in a nutshell, is that people are surrendering their freedom and individuality to a system that creates values, hopes, aspirations and sources of trepidation for them. As Marcuse argues, by satisfying false needs – needs that are superimposed upon people – one-dimensional men (and of course women) find happiness. But this is not true happiness according to Marcuse since individuals no longer know what makes them happy, or even what their true needs are, as desires have become heteronomous and administered. This is something Marcuse found deeply disturbing, the very idea that people are becoming so oblivious to the fact their bodies are developing a one-dimensional consumer duty which denies them of the traits of authentic individuality.
Marcuse had good reason to be concerned, for the start of the twenty-first century has not marked the beginning of an era of change, nor provided any sign that a different way of life might be possible. As this article will suggest, instead of relieving thymotic tension (that other word for rage), consumer culture exasperates it with the services it provides such as ‘the retail experience’ (Sloterdijk, 2012). What this article does, therefore, is built on Marcuse’s original ideas about depthlessness being the only kind of freedom we know. Quite simply, my intention is to move beyond the usual criticisms of consumer capitalism which have been rigorously explored by Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School so that I can begin to examine the controlled, one-dimensional lives of retail consumers and how this administered sort of lifestyle cultivates rage. Free from the biases of producing research for the benefit of an organisation or company, this article turns its attention directly to the customer to reveal how consuming behaviour (specifically of retail) in the twenty-first century is something we should not only be aware of but, equally, be concerned about.
Some observations of twenty-first century retail consumers
Instantaneity: I want it all and I want it now
I’m stood by the tills, all self-service now, shouting for the next customer to come forward. Most customers seem oblivious when a till comes available, too busy gazing at their phone screens. I shout again, trying hard this time to hide my growing irritation. A middle-aged guy looks up from his phone, blinking wildly as he wakes from his trance, and he taps the shoulder of a young women in front. He points out there’s a till free. Briefly stirred from her own trance, but still gazing down at her smart device, she quickly moves forward.
The woman reaches the till, sets her basket down onto the floor and continues to look at her phone. I signal for the next customer to come forward, and the next. A few minutes go by and the woman still hasn’t moved. She laughs a bit at something on her screen, but otherwise stays quite still. Her till screen remains untouched, her gaze unaverted. I decide not to interrupt as she seems busy. Besides, the screen’s instructions are clear enough – ‘DROP YOUR ITEMS ONE AT A TIME INTO THE BASKET’ – and she seems to know her way around a screen.
The young woman does eventually look up, but instead of engaging with the screen she turns her head to look at me. Somehow, she seems to know exactly where I am and she calls to me, angrily. ‘Excuse me. What am I supposed to do here then?’ I turn to her and respond. ‘Just drop your items into the basket, one at a time. The machine scans them for you, then click pay’. The woman’s face drops, and her shoulders sink as she forces air to quickly vacate her lungs. Sounding more irritated, she flaps her arms a little and replies. ‘Eh? You’re going to have to show us, I don’t get it. I don’t get on with all this technology crap’.
She glances back down at her phone again, trying hard to force an end to our conversation. Wondering how I could possibly make it any clearer, I drop one of the woman’s items into the basket for her. As I do, I repeat the instructions written on the screen. Sighing again, clearly exasperated now, she turns to me. ‘I don’t like all this bollocks. I like real human beings. Just do it for us, I’m getting chuffing annoyed now’. For an easy life, I decide to scan all the woman’s items. Even this isn’t enough to change her mood though, not when I point out she will have to pay 50p for a plastic carrier bag: ‘Bloody daft, how do you expect me to lug me things to me car?’ I suggest she could wheel the items to the car in the basket, all three of them. The woman responds by kicking the basket towards me and reply furiously, ‘No! I’ll have to carry them!’
To begin unpacking retail rage and the idea of one-dimensionality in the twenty-first century, this section of the article starts by considering the actions of the young woman mentioned in the episode above.
The first thing to note, as Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas (2018) point out, is that there is a growing trend in present modernity whereby certain individuals choose to ignore their immediate company and instead use their smartphones to do other things or communicate with other people. This phenomenon has become known as ‘phubbing’ (Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas, 2018). Several scholars have investigated the antecedents of ‘phubbing’ behaviour and highlighted key determinants such as internet addiction, smartphone addiction, fear of missing out and inadequate self-control (Blachnio and Przepiórka, 2018; Schneider and Hitzfeld, 2019; Turkle, 2017), but what these studies do not attend to is the significance of instantaneity. In other words, what I am suggesting is that there might be more to the act of ‘phubbing’ than first meets the eye, that it is not just about people lacking the ability to develop social skills or about misconceptions regarding which behaviours are socially acceptable. As I will argue in this section, what the young women revealed by ‘phubbing’ me is that immediacy has become a dominant feature of the retail experience, and that lack of immediacy can trigger emotional outbursts of rage when the demand is not properly fulfilled.
To explain this point further, if ‘solid’ modernity was about supressing desires and wishes through what Freud (1920) called the ‘reality principle’, we might say the guiding feature of ‘liquid’ modernity is the ‘pleasure principle’. What this suggests is that the watchword of the retail experience has become instant gratification as people must have what they desire right now without any kind of delay. This is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of consumer culture in general – whatever it offers it manages to take the waiting out of wanting (Bauman, 2003). After all, any time spent waiting is wasted time, time spent labouring rather than indulging. What this means, then, is that things of the world – whether that be retail experiences or human beings – are only willingly engaged with if they are readily available and if they can be quickly dispensed with so they do not get in the way later on (Bauman, 2000).
When things do not go according to plan, however, as was the case with the young woman, smiles disappear and dissatisfaction builds. What quickly follows is a case of rage. To begin to unpack what I mean here, the reader should reflect on the moment the young woman’s mood changed – it was precisely when she realised her instantaneity had been stalled. I would argue that my presence is likely to have caused the change in temperament because in a consumerist sense I was little more than an instrument readily available to push buttons and get the job done, one that would involve much less interaction than an unfamiliar till screen, but I was not doing this. Instead, I was directing traffic and leaving customers to complete their consuming on their own. In other words, in the young woman’s eyes I was failing in my duty to facilitate her instant gratification. The fact of the matter is, the young woman was not looking for inter-human togetherness, she was looking for nothing more than a more efficient machine with fewer demands. Individuals, especially retail consumers, do not want the restrictions that come with notions of community or relationships; they tend to judge things (people included) solely by their usefulness in the here and now and how long it takes to get the job done (Bauman, 2003). As Bauman points out, in ‘liquid’ modernity transient life-politics are what matter and this has caused bonds between human beings to dissolve.
The problem with this precarious way of living, however, is that perceiving the world and its inhabitants as a pool of consumer products causes people to feel insecure and unsure how to act in the company of others (Bauman, 2003). It is the need for instant gratification, therefore, that makes the negotiation of human relations and relationships very difficult; with insufficient time and unwillingness to form strong bonds interactions quickly become awkward and hard to understand, so people end up feeling alone, uncertain and unconfident. As Blackshaw (2005) puts it, as instant gratification has become the norm individuals find themselves increasingly frustrated with anything involving commitment and so they become increasingly insular as they are deprived of alternative experiences.
As it was noted earlier in the article, it was Marcuse (1964) who cautioned us about what can happen when the behaviours, standards and values of society are little more than products of consumer culture. As he argues, people are at risk of becoming one-dimensional. They become self-contained and self-perpetuating as their lives end up lacking a critical dimension that would allow them to transcend pre-existing norms and behaviours (Marcuse, 1964). In other words, Marcuse’s work offers a precursory warning – that consumerism and the ‘ideal’ retail experience it has invented is not just the cause of many social problems such as being unable to integrate and communicate with others, it is something that cannot easily be avoided.
Thinking again about the young woman then, it might be argued that due to consumer culture she (like many other people) has become a one-dimensional and self-absorbed retail customer, and so is unable to locate a basis on which common values are shared. Hence, when her interaction with me did not go the way she wanted or expected, she had no choice but to express herself by exhibiting rage. What the first episode reveals in other words is that the young woman’s awareness that things could be different has been eroded so greatly she has no way of knowing how to respond when she encounters a situation that does not belong to the underlying tendencies and structures of consumer culture and the retail experience. Any other act or response has become unknowable because systems of consumer culture (retail in this instance) do not anticipate their own failures, and they put no systems in place to account for possible breakdowns (Bauman, 2007). This is the inevitable irrationality of rationality, and it shows that turning things into instant ‘experiences’ or ‘quick fixes’ might seem organised and rational from the perspective of companies and institutions, but really it causes widespread disenchantment throughout the rest of the world. Moreover, because there is very little chance of finding relief from these circumstances, it is to be expected that outbursts of anger, frustration and rage will occur more frequently and sporadically in present modernity.
Performativity: ‘the customer is always right’
I call the next customer forward. A man carrying a blue jacket struts towards me. He makes a point of inhaling deeply to increase the size of his chest and I immediately sense something is wrong. There’s a directness to the man, an overconfident manner that signals he’s not happy and wants his problem resolving immediately.
I radio for the manager to come to the tills and an uncomfortable pause follows as we wait in silence. With his chest still puffed up, the man turns to a customer on the next till and nods his head, perhaps to gain his support and approval. To my delight, the customer ignores him. The man turns back to face me and moves his shoulders from side to side as he straightens up the collar of his brand new Berghaus jacket. He then feigns a cough and asks where the managers is.
When the manager arrives, I explain the situation. She immediately apologies and repeats that we’re unable to do anything without a receipt. Annoyed, the man proceeds to argue, and resorts to citing the ‘365-day return policy’. The manager responds calmly and explains that’s part of the loyalty card scheme which functions as a digital receipt, but that it wouldn’t matter if he had one anyway since his jacket is already well out of warranty (it’s from a range last sold two-years ago). The argument then continues for a while longer, but the man starts to run out of retorts. Growing louder with each sentence, he repeats the same line over and over, willing the manager to change her mind: ‘I want a new coat’, to which the manager replies: ‘Sorry, sir. Even with a receipt, that item’s out of warranty’.
Meanwhile, other customers are becoming irritated. The man with the jacket is in their way and they have to squeeze past to exit the shop. It doesn’t take long for the dirty looks and disgruntled murmurings to start. Clearly embarrassed, the man seems to deflate and shrink a little. His face turns a bright shade of crimson as it dawns on him his performance has come to an end. He stammers briefly, before he hurls the jacket at the manager and makes a hasty retreat towards the door.
In sticking with the concept of one-dimensionality to explore and unpack retail rage, I begin this section with the point that playing the role of a consumer is all about exhibiting the right kind of image (Goodlander, 2015). In short, it is about showing you can consume and that you know how to do it properly (Aldridge, 2003). In other words, consuming through retail is a one-dimensional mode of performativity that is not only dedicated to spending but the ‘ideal’ performance of a spender. Before I go on to expand on this idea and link it to the topic of rage, however, it needs to be pointed out that performativity is not the same as a performance. As Blackshaw (2017) suggests, performativity does not involve mimicry or imitation, instead it is sculpted in detail by the imaginations of its creators. Performative bodies are not assigned roles underpinned by rigid social conventions and imagery, they must perform their own truths, so it is the effect of performativity that matters (Butler, 1990). Performativity is about believing truly and sincerely in the way the body is being performed, being immersed in it, and knowing that performative identities inevitably evolve unlike static performances (Butler, 1990).
Of course, things were not always this way. In ‘solid’ modernity the world was simpler as identities had to be performed in the way hierarchy decreed. Social class formed the major secure structure that kept people in their place (Blackshaw, 2010). Instinctively, everyone knew their role, who they were supposed to be, and how they were supposed to act. As Blackshaw argues, fear had a lot to do with keeping this world in order, usually the fear that leaving a ‘happy’ world might result in a life being lived outside the warmness and comfort that is part and parcel of knowing your place. The key to leaving this prescribed security behind is in having confidence that there are countless ways of being an individual can choose from. Once a person realises this, it is possible to stretch the limits of identity and partake in the self-referential process of performativity and make use of creative energies that help to shape it.
And so, it is with newfound confidence that most ‘liquid’ modern retail consumers are compelled to spend time and energy performing themselves, but what is crucial is that enough theatricality is skilfully invested while a role is being played out. As Blackshaw (2017) notes, performances must have symbolic authority to sustain confidence and gain wider public recognition. What people hope is that certain identity features will be singled out and emphasised if a highly theatrical display is staged, and that they will subsequently be noticed by observers. As Goodlander (2015) notes, anyone who is performative aches to be credible, so it is very important they enact an identity that is eye-catching instead of expressing the mundanity of who they really are. What this means, then, is that performativity is about conspicuous consumption and aesthetics, it is about performing the ‘right style’ and keeping up with the constant balancing act of being able to dress, act and communicate in the ‘right way’ (Veblen, 2005 [1899]). Indeed, the man with the blue jacket exhibited these very behaviours as he played out his role as a retail consumer.
Dressed head to toe in new branded clothing with almost all the tags freshly removed, the man was proving his readiness to shop. This is the self-invented uniform of the retail consumer, one of many – Adidas Originals, a Berghaus waterproof jacket, ripped jeans, and a Vans beanie – all new, crisp and immaculately clean. He also attempted to be unusually assertive with his body language as any good retail consumer should be if they believe in a customer-employee power dynamic that favours the customer (Patterson and Baron, 2010). Even the man’s tone and choice of language was part of the performative identity being exhibited as he spoke in a dehumanising way, almost as though he was talking to someone unworthy of real human conversation.
There is, however, a problem living life performatively. The problem is that performative individuals are one-dimensional. They are all about style rather than substance and this means beneath the surface retail consumers lack authenticity and sincerity (Blackshaw, 2017). As Marcuse (1964) argues, there is nothing solid or deep about a consumer; lacking any kind of history they are ephemeral beings who only ever exist in the here and now. To borrow a phrase coined by Blackshaw, they are part of the ‘cult of cool’, and this is a way of being-in-the-world that is ‘defined by that quality of being simultaneously with-it and disengaged, in control but nonchalant, knowing but ironically self-aware, and above all inscrutably undemonstrative’ (2013: 370). What this means is that retail consumers are not guided by any sense of loyalty or pride, they are free to alter their allegiance as and when they choose. That is, they embrace the uncertain and fragmentary politics of ‘neo-tribes’ and this allows them to flit between different identities as they constantly disembed and reembed themselves (Maffesoli, 1996).
Consequently, retail consumers are destined to be lonely, individuals who try to distance themselves from the responsibilities associated with living in a community but who equally crave the warm cosiness of belonging as it is conspicuously missing from their lives (Aldridge, 2003). For retail consumers, the man with the blue jacket included, there is no tangible community that can be relied on for support, there is no meaningful sense of shared identity and this is ‘cool’ because it calls attention to a person’s inimitability, but it is also incredibly isolating. Even when there are other members of a retail consumer neo-tribe present, they have no interest in one another’s welfare, no collective belief they could call their own (Blackshaw, 2010). Working alone, focused one-dimensionally on being a consumer, they cobble things together, and when their improvisation goes wrong they not only suffer from the anxiety of not belonging to the world, from time to time they also experience the burning feeling of thymotic tension.
Another way of putting it is to say that when a retail consumer’s identity begins to disintegrate, few other retail consumers are likely to intervene because what they all loosely share is performativity not a solid community. Indeed, a middle-aged woman and a young student demonstrated this as they exited the shop. Instead of uniting together as one as they passed by, they grumbled indirectly, pointing out that he was ‘holding up the queue’, and that he should ‘get out of the way and allow other people to be served’. In other words, performativity can suddenly cease being ‘cool’ if it loses its watchableness or starts to be noticed for the wrong reasons, and it can quickly become a prime source of anxiety and resentment (Blackshaw, 2013). In an instant, a person can go from having direction, confidence, a sense of belonging, and an identity to experiencing the terrifying problems a flawed consumer might encounter. And so, the greatest challenge facing retail consumers is not how to be recognised as a retail consumer, it is knowing what to do when performativity fails.
As the reader saw, the man with the blue jacket was not very sure how to respond or act when his performance suddenly ended and as a result he lost his sense of self-assurance. As Butler (1990) points out, a person’s performativity only succeeds when it has gathered authority through the repetition of an authoritative set of practices, which means other people are in fact vital if someone is to believe for a time in their performativity with sincerity and authenticity. What this reveals is that the shop manager, myself as the till assistant and other customers were all an essential part of the man’s performativity because performativity is something that is far bigger than any one individual. When those people disappear or fail to play their part, the performative world comes crashing down and the seeds of rage begin to sprout. Embarrassment, insecurity and uncertainty, three conspicuous features of present modernity, all swoop in and act as an anger trigger at the time of the event. This is why the man with the blue jacket ended up getting stuck in a cyclical debate with the shop manager, and why he began to stammer before he erupted into rage. He had nothing more to say because there was nothing more to his one-dimensional performance.
What has been discussed here, then, builds on Marcuse’s (1964) original suggestion that consumer capitalism is only interested in people so long as they are able to skilfully consume. As this section of the article shows, having drawn on the retail experience to illustrate the point, consumer capitalism has created a culture that is about pushing boundaries, setting trends, finding ways of being noticed and promoting the idea that a certain kind of consumer status is essential to human life. However, because twenty-first century performative identities are fluid, fickle and insecure they are highly likely to break down (Bingham, 2020). And when this happens, as it did to the man with the blue jacket, it quickly becomes apparent that consumer culture actually denies people of their dignity and self-worth. As Marcuse (1964) warns, it does not take people seriously, or value or respect them. In other words, pressing individuals to gain status as a retail consumer does nothing more than turn them into one-dimensional beings as their lives become centred around continuously proving who they are until they eventually stumble or trip up. It is no surprise then that the relentless battle to prove oneself as a retail consumer often results in incidents of rage.
Unfulfillment: the satisfaction paradox
For the third time this week, I’m speaking with a well-spoken middle-aged woman. She’s in the process of returning a pair of running shoes because one of the soles has come unstuck.
Feigning empathy, I agree it’s an inconvenience that the woman has had to travel to the shop once again. Normally, I would act with more understanding, but the woman is exchanging her shoes for exactly the same pair again – for the third time! I ask her several times whether she wants to consider choosing a different product, but she insists these are good because people at her running club wear them. In the end, I give up trying to persuade her. Perhaps I would have tried harder to change the woman’s mind if she wasn’t treating the situation as though I’m the one responsible for manufacturing the product.
Trying hard not to shake my head, I radio a colleague from the running department to check that we have more in stock. We do, so I ask them to bring a pair down to me. I explain to the woman that another pair is available and being brought to the tills as we speak. She smiles widely in an unnatural way, and replies with a tone of sarcasm, ‘Good! I can get on with the rest of my day now, can I?’ I smile back and ask if there’s anything else I can do to help. The woman says yes, and hands me a cheap water bottle. ‘One of these, please’.
No sooner is it the next day and the same woman is back. She enters the shop and hollers at me from the front entrance. Customers around the tills all look up, breaking their gazes from their screens. The woman yells again and pushes past two people who are in her way.
As she approaches, she manages to accidently knock over an umbrella display. Although it didn’t seem possible, this fills her with even more fury. She responds by raising her arms and clenching both fists, before releasing an outburst that reminds me of a bellowing sound a vulnerable animal might make in the dead of night. Hysterical now, the woman kicks aside several stray umbrellas before continuing in my direction. Once she’s within earshot, she yells again: ‘This FUCKING bottle is BROKEN!’ She pauses, giving me a moment to process the situation. ‘This is fucking ridiculous! I’ve spent good money on this and it’s a load of crap! Do you enjoy making people’s lives shit? DO YOU?’ I sigh, making little effort this time to hide my own frustration.
Another cause of thymotic tension among retail consumers can be linked to their struggle to find lasting satisfaction and fulfilment in marketised goods and experiences. As Hirschman (2002) points out, what the market offers often ends in disappointment or at best short-lived enjoyment. Therefore, to compensate for consumerism’s failure to deliver, what retail consumers frequently turn their eye to is not the eventual satisfaction of needs and desires but the thrill of the chase and the pleasure that comes from hunting (Bauman, 2007). The trouble with this way of living, however, is that retail consumers are destined to suffer constant ambivalence and recurring feelings of unfulfillment and unhappiness as the final prize they seek is rarely acquired.
To explore this paradox further, it is useful to turn to the work of Lyotard (1994) for he might describe retail consumers as being caught in the thralls of a sublime moment. That is to say, many retail consumers find themselves in a precarious position whereby they are relentlessly bombarded by the promise of intense pleasure alongside equally intense feelings of pain when those pleasures prove to be disappointing. As a way of managing the painful side of the sublime feeling, then, retail consumers become skilled at not always paying full attention to their dissatisfaction and unhappiness (Hirschman, 2002). As Marcuse (1964) would argue, they become effective at thinking one-dimensionally. However, it is not that retail consumers necessarily lack awareness or even that they are good at completely hiding dissatisfaction, they are merely unwilling to contemplate too greatly why they are unhappy because they have lost their appetite for struggle (Marcuse, 1964). What this means is that it is easier for retail consumers to be one-dimensional because it allows them to treat the dissatisfaction all around as if it is a normal feature of life. And so, the ostensible addiction to consuming carries on because there is some joy to be found in the search for satisfaction, and because there is the chance it might develop into something more, but mainly because there seems to be no alternative (Schor, 1996). As Schor puts it, ‘it is the only game in town’ (Schor, 1996: 500).
What is particularly interesting about unhappiness and dissatisfaction is that there is nothing new or novel about either of these feelings just because we have entered the twenty-first century. If we turn our attention to Tibor Scitovsky’s book The Joyless Economy for instance, which was first published forty-five years ago, Georg Simmel’s book The Philosophy of Money which was written even earlier in 1900, and of course Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, all three texts highlight the very same paradox – that as human beings become more capable of consuming they are likely to become progressively more dissatisfied, disappointed and bored with what consumer culture has to offer.
As Scitovsky (1992) points out, people never stop searching for something new to interest them, but consumptive pleasures generally follow a predictable cycle of disenchantment. They begin with a brief enchantment phase where daydreaming and fantasy lead to expenditure and acquisition of goods and experiences; however, this is generally followed by disappointment and the subsequent repetition of the cycle (Scitovsky, 1992). It is not difficult to see why disappointment and dissatisfaction often follows either. As Schor (1996) points out, we only need to think about the things the market (i.e. retailers) produces, from artificial food to polluting chemicals, cheap electrical goods, plastic commodities, excessive packaging and mountains of rubbish that build up year after year, to realise that the failures of consumerism – and of course the retail experience – are enormous. Yet, the culture it fosters must be like this, it must deny people lasting happiness and satisfaction because its very survival depends on it (Davies, 2011). As Simmel (1990) reminds us, content people are less likely to reliably consume if they are already happy, so it is essential they are left wanting more.
Keeping the above discussion in mind, what I want to point out next is that the middle-aged woman is particularly useful for thinking about the satisfaction paradox further as she has been disappointed by what the retail experience has to offer, but as someone who has become one-dimensional she is able to dismiss her dissatisfaction and unhappiness. As the reader observed, the woman’s shoes were faulty. This was not the first time either, this was in fact the second pair of shoes the woman had brought back to the shop for the same reason, so of course she had every right to be unhappy. It was no doubt frustrating that she had been forced to make several trips to the shop. However, when I asked her if she would like to swap them for a different model, she replied by saying she would like the same ones again. Everyone in her running club had a pair, so she was convinced they must be good. When I enquired to find out if other people had experienced any problems, she confirmed that many pairs had been brought back, but also chipped in that they were worth sticking with because this shoe is supposed to improve technique and make you run for longer.
I have no doubt that if Michel Foucault was still around he would have something to say about the implicit madness described above, perhaps something to add to Madness and Civilization. For Marcuse (1964), however, it is the power of one-dimensionality that is responsible for this behaviour, alongside the willingness of retail consumers to be seduced. All it takes, as Scitovsky (1992) points out, is a small promise of stimulation (shoes that make you run faster) together with some sense of comfort (the fact everyone else favours the same pair of shoes) to lure people in. What this reinforces, then, is that one-dimensional thought encourages people to believe something good could happen (Marcuse, 1964). Just as people of the modern era convinced themselves of their faith in religion and industrialisation, retail consumers of ‘liquid’ times convince themselves of their faith in the market, in the things they buy, and although they do not know it, in sticking with this one-dimensional way of thinking. And just as believers of religion were able to ignore God’s failure to shield people against poverty, disease and evil, and believers of industrialisation could ignore their unhealthy working conditions and poor living standards, one-dimensional retail consumers are able to ignore the failures of the market – that it causes addictive and compulsive habits, creates a debt culture, destroys communities and structures of meaning, fuels greed, and is responsible for causing a great deal of unhappiness (RamHormozi, 2019).
What one-dimensional thought does not do, however, is provide any ideas about how to cope with the underlying rage that gradually builds over time. Sloterdijk (2012) refers to this as ‘rage capital’, and when it becomes too intense it bursts open and pollutes the lives of individuals who cannot account for their feelings of suffering and dissatisfaction because they have been too busy being dismissive of them. It is not possible for individuals to focus their ‘rage capital’ into a progressive political project either, a project that might generate more happiness and satisfaction, because they have become fully dependent on what consumer culture and the retail experience has to offer (Sloterdijk, 2012). Instead, individuals are compelled to live with their problems and discontents alone and this causes them to sublimate rage into their own trivial endeavours rather than the bigger problem (Sloterdijk, 2012).
Indeed, the middle-aged woman demonstrated all the above when she returned to the shop for the fourth time. As soon as I caught sight of her, it was obvious something was seriously wrong. She yelled loudly to grab my attention as she stomped towards the tills. Other customers queuing did not seem to matter, she did not seem to notice them as she headed straight for me. Based on our previous conversations, this behaviour seemed uncharacteristic. Although she had been passive aggressive, she was always composed. What the woman was showing on her fourth visit to the shop was an unconscious rage, or at least a rage that had been unconscious until her water bottle proved to be faulty. This was the tipping point, and she was incapable of doing anything productive with the unadulterated fury she was feeling. There was no articulate way of expressing this emotion. After all, becoming furious over a broken bottle is likely to seem ludicrous to most people, including the other customers around us who started to snigger and laugh.
Ultimately, then, the woman’s rage amounted to little more than an embarrassing scene. Her rage was an inarticulate opposition to the reality of the retail experience and one-dimensionality and it did nothing other than reassert the power and dominance of consumer culture. In the end, it was the woman who emerged as a symbol of irrationality, not the marketised mode of living we all willingly submit ourselves to as retail consumers.
Conclusion
This article addresses the point that rage has become a regular feature of present modernity, especially among retail consumers. What is missing from the wider literature, however, is a thorough sociological interpretation of rage, particularly one that uses the important work of members of the Frankfurt School as a starting point to critique retail consumption more effectively. The work of Marcuse (1964) has therefore been used to highlight the problem that consumer capitalism not only represses individuals but that it also manages to maintain people’s complacency with consumer culture. Taking Marcuse’s work as a starting point, and using my position as an employee in the retail sector, the article argues that retail consumers are one-dimensional and that this is a prime cause of rage.
Drawing on three episodes that were taken from my collection of fieldnotes, the article unpacks three underlying causes of retail rage in the twenty-first century – instantaneity, performativity and unfulfillment – all of which can be directly linked to consumer culture and Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensional thinking. Keeping all three themes in mind then, this article closes with three main conclusions.
First, what has been found through my observations and analysis sheds new light on how we might think about consumer culture and the retail experience in the twenty-first century. That is to say, the insights provided here can be used to critique consumer rage more effectively, and they might remind other scholars interested in Consumer Studies and rage why it is important not to overlook the explanatory power of the sociological imagination. The second conclusion points to the idea that retail consumers do ultimately have freedom, perhaps far greater freedom than anyone ever had in the world of ‘solid’ modernity, and they do precisely because consumer culture makes sure of it. However, freedom to consume anything and everything through the retail experience comes with its problems and one of those is that it causes one-dimensionality and subsequent feelings of retail rage. This is no fault of retail consumers of course, they are not to blame for the anger and frustration they feel, or even for their superficiality and depthlessness, because when all is said and done this is the kind of freedom they know and understand best. From the technology we depend on to the things we eat and wear, the world is, unashamedly, all about proving our ability to consume and it is retail that allows us to do just that.
This might seem like a sobering end to the article, but I want to finish off by pointing out that it does not have to be. There is a third conclusion to be made because, as Arendt (1969) has argued, we must bear in mind that rage is not actually caused by suffering and misery, it only occurs when there is reason to believe things could be different but are not. What this means is that if rage is so commonly felt, twenty-first century retail consumers are perhaps less one-dimensional than we might first assume. The fact people feel rage at all indicates they have the potential to be two-dimensional. The phenomenon of retail rage, therefore, may actually serve as an important reminder that consumption can facilitate joy and happiness. What retail consumers need to remind themselves, however, is that they may have to experiment with less convenient and less conventional ways of finding it. In other words, retail rage should not signal the end of hope and aspiration, it should not signal that freedom has been surrendered, it should prompt people to disrupt the monopoly of present modernity by being two-dimensional.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
