These lines from Emile Zola's Au Bonhuer Des Dames capture the exact feeling of being caught in the throngs of holiday shoppers all gawking at shop windows
..Denise had the sensation of a machine, operating at high pressure, whose movement had reached the shelves. They were no longer the cold windows of the morning; now they seemed heated and vibrating with inner trepidation. People were watching them, arrested women were crushing themselves in front of the mirrors, a whole brutal crowd of lust. And the fabrics lived, in this passion of the sidewalk: the lace had a quiver, fell and hid the depths of the store, with a disturbing air of mystery; the pieces of cloth themselves, thick and square, breathed, blew a tempting breath; while the overcoats arched more on the mannequins which took on a soul, and the large velvet coat swelled, supple and warm, as if on shoulders of flesh, with the beating of the throat and the quivering of the loins. But the factory heat with which the house burned came mainly from the sales, from the jostling of the counters, which could be felt behind the walls. There was the continuous hum of the machine at work, a crowd of customers, crowded in front of the shelves, stunned under the goods, then thrown at the checkout. And this was settled, organized with mechanical rigor, a whole population of women passing through the force and logic of the gears.
Even today, the shopping district in any iconic city feels exactly as Zola describes. The shop windows are like dragnets sweeping the gawking shoppers in and then through a series of moves that occur within the shop, the "machine" separates them from their money and spits them out on the street with things they most likely do not need and will experience buyer's remorse over. The cycle repeats in many shop windows as they work their way down the street, swimming in the great tide of shoppers like themselves.
I am not a shopper and just about everything that looks beautiful in a shop-window feels extremely over-priced to me. Those are not numbers I am comfortable with so buying is not even a remote option in my case. There are things I might enjoy looking at and there are things that I will actually purchase for personal use - the two are very far apart from each other. Being thrust in a crowd that is intent on real shopping is a very suffocating experience for me and I look for the first opportunity to duck into a side street where there is little if any action. It's where I feel safe from the machine that Zola so eloquently describes.
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