What the Retail Apocalypse Says About City Life
I enjoy shopping (almost) as much as the next Asian. However, it might seem that shopping is not a thing anymore.
This last week, a prominent news thread in Australia concerned what many are calling a “retail apocalypse”, where a slew of major retailers - from clothing to cosmetics, electronics to chickens - are either closing their brick and mortar stores or going into voluntary administration. Some of these were Australian icons in retail, with one having been in business for almost 170 years.
In virtually all of these stories, a common denominator emerged: the rise of online shopping.
At a crassly mathematical level, it is easy to see why. Without the overheads that come with a physical store, online stores are able to pass savings onto customers that physical counterparts cannot. However, in an article out in The New Daily, cheaper prices alone do not fully explain the demise of the brick and mortar store.
A line in the article made a mention that on top of lower prices, the increased number of retailers for the same product has also eroded something else, which is the loyalty of customers. The increase in the number of providers (certainly in this country) has normalised short term commercial relationships, with “no contracts” often attached with many offers from electricity to phones, insurance and investment plans.
However, the erosion of loyalty in the commercial world has also seeped into other spheres of human relations as well. Indeed, as Jerve Juvin noted in The Coming of the Body, the erosion in these other spheres of human relations have outpaced the commercial. In one striking example, Juvin noted that statistically, a person is more loyal to a bank account than to a spouse.
This dissolution of loyalty in terrestrial relationships is but one dimension of what Pope Francis called in Evangelii Gaudium a “crisis of solidarity”.
What I want to suggest is that there is a link between this dissolving of loyalty that lies behind the demise in bricks and mortar retail, the turn to virtuality, and our coverage of the lonely city this past month. Far from being unrelated phenomena, they are linked by a common backdrop, which is their postmodern urban environs.
One implicit theme in our coverage of the city is that the urban infrastructure is not neutral. The city brings to our vision an image of the ideal life to its citizens. As Graham Ward observed in his Cities of God, cities form citizens to aspire to certain things. More importantly, they also provide a judgement on things as they are in light of those ideals.
One of those things that Ward looks at in his book are human relations. In the postmodern city, Ward says, human relations have become more contractualised and, consequently, more fluid. We see more vitality in the manifold potential relations that can be established than in the actual relations that we are actually in. But with fluidity, Ward argues, we also see a shift in the default site for these relations, away from the physical into the virtual. Ward observed that in projecting a certain set of ideals onto its citizens, the postmodern city presents a utopia.
As the name itself suggests, however, a utopia is a “no place”, with no real analogy existing in actual human life. It is no accident then, Ward argues, that human life would shift its centre of gravity to the “no place” of cyberspace, mediated through our screens.
It is this preferential option for the virtual in the postmodern city that is accelerating the erosion of loyalty that we are seeing here on earth. In every neon sign is an exhortation not to come in, but to check out - away from the geographical to the digital.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
