From "poujadism" to "yellow vests"
France's ambiguous love of local business
Sophie Gherardi
is a journalist and editorial advisor at Philonomist. She was previously the chief editor of Le Monde des Débats (1999-2001), Courrier International (2001-2005) and Le Monde (2005-2008), before joining the financial newspaper La Tribune as deputy managing editor. She won a national journalism award for her coverage of the financial crisis, which she also wrote about in her book Capital Sin. The Story of the Financial Crisis (2009).
Picture: © Elie Axas
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November 16, 2020, Lyon. © Jeff Pachoud/AFP
Shops are the appealing face of capitalism and involve more skill than first meets the eye. But you can still love shops in theory yet continue to order online – an ambivalent relationship surprisingly common in France…
Everyone likes to "go shopping" even if depending on our age or interests, we all go looking for different things. But to really understand what commerce brings to our lives, it takes exceptional circumstances like those caused by the pandemic, which has forced many businesses to shut down; not to mention the questionable criteria of what should count as "essential" and what shouldn't. Wine? Yes. Books? No. Toys? No. DIY materials, yes… Debates are raging across the country, and in the meantime, Amazon is doing better than ever. To the extent that a new fear has now appeared: that of a future where shops exist on the fringes of society.
We've seen this world coming for some time now, with its city centres made up of empty shops covered with graffiti. It's not a pretty sight. The anthropologist Marc Augé helps explain why in his book on "non-places" showing how what he calls "over-modernity" continues to create more "non-places": highways, airports, hotel chains – all anonymous, devoid of history, human connection, or a purpose-related identity… The big supermarket or Amazon warehouse are also "anthropological non-places"; whereas city centres have always been active "anthropological places" which allow people to meet, talk, their identity anchored in the walls of the town hall, monuments to the dead, churches, cafés… and shops.
A complicated affair
Shops appear to be the simplest of things: a window giving onto a street or a road, a small or large space where merchandise is sold to customers who want (or need) it – all of which requires a functioning supply chain, but that can't be rocket science, right? In reality, it's very difficult to make a shop attractive. A field of expertise in its own right, merchandising, first appeared in the 20th century to entice customers who could now access goods directly, freely. Anything that attracts, seduces, or convinces the customer is reflected upon and calculated, from the assortment of products to the way they're displayed, from the shop's interior design to its lighting, from the fragrance in the air to the appearance of the shop assistants, not to forget, of course, pricing and promotions.
'The transition from communism to capitalism was marked by the sudden appearance of fancy shops in high-streets across Eastern Europe'
For seventy-five years, Soviet communism tried to reproduce the Western-style shop, in vain. Yes, they had shop windows, often huge and dirty, they had the hig…
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