The world as we know it can be encapsulated within the experience of retail, on either side of the cash register (or, more commonly these days, the card reader). It is a fundamental building block of capitalist life, the place, both physical and virtual, where people enact a sliver of their decision-making capacity.

These decisions perform multiple functions beyond the acquisition of a product. They signal to others a person’s preferences—some might be more inclined to call it their “taste”—and confer a sense of control. What one has to buy to live, what is sought after but unaffordable, and what’s within reach but probably frivolous and wasteful. There are gradations here, especially for the destitute and the desperate, where buying necessities like food and clothing, however cheap, however poorly made, is not a matter of high-minded cultivation, but a brutal, often humiliating reality of struggling to navigate an unjust society where plentiful resources are hoarded, where the price of those resources are subject to the whims of the market.

I’m forced to think in these sorts of unwieldy, materialist terms on a weekly basis at a retail job where the primary commodity we sell, books, is fast becoming a luxury item. As prices have gone up due to inflation and tariffs (items that involve color printing like art and photography books or graphic novels tend to be manufactured abroad), more and more customers have endeavored to become discerning consumers. These people, understandably, want their money to be spent on things that will give them pleasure (beyond the dopamine hit of simply buying something), but also status, however minor or fleeting. The book-as-object is a major point of fascination for booksellers who witness how much waste the publishing industry generates year to year: advanced copies that never get read and are thrown out, remaindered books that don’t get pulped, tons of plastic packaging in which books are sealed and delivered. All for “limited edition” copies that are not rare or even unique-looking, but present a pleasingly neat picture for Instagram.

I’ve never worked in a retail landscape that wasn’t in some sense influenced by the ways in which social media has altered the average consumer’s brain. Capitalism is in part driven by mimetic thrall, a desire for and covetousness of another’s aesthetic presentation. Whether in pursuit of physical objects or a certain mood, generating a feeling of lack in a consumer is a way of generating revenue through jealousy and insecurity. It instills a greed that doesn’t feel like greed, but nonetheless activates the same selfish impulses. This inner void, or really the illusion of one, manifests in increasingly virtual terms, in an amorphous but palpable itch for an ineffable something that someone else has, and the feeling that one might buy their way into respectability and status...