Apocalypse Got You Down? Try Some Retail Therapy!

(This is a continuation of my post about consumer zombies, but I suppose it can be read as a standalone piece if you’re feeling ambitious.)

Unless you’ve been living under a giant polar ice cap for the majority of your life that has only recently started melting, then you’ve visited a shopping mall at some point.  America’s obsession with material things began, in some ways, with the advent of the mall around the 1920s, though it certainly existed before then.  The earliest building resembling the indoor malls that we have today was the Lake View Store in Duluth, Minnesota, built in 1915.  The rise of shopping malls coincided with the rise of suburban communities after World War II, particularly in the United States but also in most of the Western World.  The idea hasn’t changed much since then: all the action takes place indoors, and bigger stores (think Macy’s and Sear’s) act as “anchors” to draw business in for the smaller chain stores.

So it should come as no surprise that shopping malls are irrevocably tied to our consumer culture, and if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know that consumer culture = zombies.  And there’s no better example of how the combination of the three can get the world into a whole lot of trouble than George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead.