Shopping channelled

I used to regularly travel on business with a friend who would always take the opportunity to watch a shopping channel when we stayed in a hotel with cable or satellite TV (this was in the days when most British TVs only received the five channels).

He was in awe of the skill on display, and rightly so. As Megan McCardle explains:

A QVC host receives six months of training, and when you watch a broadcast close up, you can understand why. QVC hosts are not just preternaturally peppy people who can talk about anything–although they are that. They must master the details of dozens of products, and talk about them while monitoring a split screen that shows both the current shot and the next one. They must deal with a steady stream of spokespeople and customer call-ins. Oh, and they have to convince you that you want to buy a product you can’t touch or see up close.

But my friend saw more in it than this albeit impressive set of skills. It was the evangelical message that used to fascinate him. These people weren’t selling mere things, they were selling nothing less than personal transformation.

Here’s the example from McCardle’s piece. It’s impressive, even exemplary: the hosts are selling a perfume called Philosophy, which seems perfectly, vacuously representative of the whole experience. The gullible being sold the intangible to achieve the ineffable. One dab and you can be whatever you want to be, and profoundly so.

I remember once coming across an ambitious (and perhaps eccentric) book called The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. It sought to adapt Weber and in car-crash conceptual summary it reckoned Romanticism was secularised Pietism, and Consumerism was a democratised Romanticism.

In other, more numerous words, Pietism, a strand in seventeenth-century Protestantism, encouraged emotionally-driven introspection in the search to make yourself worthy of salvation.

What you felt about yourself and what sort of person you chose to be was an important indicator of whether you would go to heaven. In a more secularly-minded age, the Romantics adopted this approach, engaging in a similar project of self-realisation but with the production of some glorious, self-justifying art as the goal. Democratic ideas then made it everyone’s ambition to express themselves; to be individuals in their own right, as it were – but not necessarily in the service of religion or art.

And shopping provides a wonderfully convenient way to express the real, transcendent and rather wonderful you. And nowhere more completely than with our as-seen-on-TV Philosophy perfume: after all, you can choose from Amazing Grace, Eternal Grace, Pure Grace, Baby Grace and Inner Grace. There just has to be a Grace to suit you and your specialness. But if not, don’t be deterred: you can always fall back on Unconditional Love fragrance spray.

That the urge to shop has religious roots sometimes looks quite likely.

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6 thoughts on “Shopping channelled

  1. Nige
    August 26, 2010 at 13:23

    There should be a men’s fragrance in that range – Young Mr Grace.

  2. Worm
    August 26, 2010 at 14:30

    I’d like to smell like W.G Grace.

  3. Nige
    August 26, 2010 at 14:48

    Linseed oil mostly, I imagine…

  4. Brit
    August 26, 2010 at 14:51

    Gracie Fields – for the outdoorsy northern girl.

  5. Brit
    August 26, 2010 at 14:52

    Comment text is a bit faint for comfortable reading, isn’t it? I’ll add it to the list.

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