At the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way...Show moreAt the end of the nineteenth century, department stores formed a new type of shops with new selling methods, lavish shop design and an innovative business model. Literary naturalism provided a way of understanding these changes in society and consumption. Based on Herbert Spencer’s concept of the survival of the fittest, characters in novels by authors such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser are fiercely competing individuals who are determined to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Their behaviour is often described in terms of brutal nature, uncontrollable temperaments, and animal instincts. This comparison of human beings to animals - which in the case of naturalism is not merely metaphorical - is also at the core of what retail theory nowadays labels as impulse buying, a type of shopping behaviour without overt rational consideration and deliberation. According to retailers, lavish shop design was expected to provoke this new type of shopping behaviour, and, around the turn of the twentieth century, the naturalist novel tended to describe and explain this combination of manipulation and shopping behaviour.Show less
