Corporate Retail and the post modern city

Corporate Retail and the post modern city:

For the most part, urban India is experiencing what is called the Retail Revolution. And it is not only that the Indian corporates have sensed the opportunity for lucrative business in organised retailing, even foreign multinational corporations have staged a backdoor entry into the sector. There is not a single day that goes without the newspaper dailies mentioning a word regarding the corporate retail as every day, several new retail chains are being established, and others, expanded. Apart from other raison d'être, one explanation which I would like to draw attention is the postmodern christening of the city.

City in the modern times which was historically centred round production is now centred around consumption, rather we are in the business of production of consumption. This is the first step towards a post modern city. This is very much evident in the decline of the heavy manufacturing industries with the increase in retail and service sector and at the same time increase in mass unemployment .

While in the post modern city production and consumption of goods are in a decline mode, there is a corresponding increase in the production and consumption of culture. Mark Jane(2006) , describes the post modern urbanity which is characterised by high technology business clusters, out-of-town mega malls, elite ‘gated’ residential neighbourhoods, ghettos, and ‘edge cities’: master-planned ‘suburban’ developments. Style and aesthetics precede over mass production and standardisation. Goods and services are no longer material objects but reflect signs and lifestyles. On one hand we have individualised consumption of the new middle class and on the other hand we have mass unemployment. Post modern times exist differentially in different places. Consumption is the dominating post modern “culture”. The culture of consumption encompasses in everything including meaning, truth, knowledge and identity. Class, gender, ethnicity are blurred and now difficult to define. Unlike the modern city where a particular food, clothing, musical tastes, ways of speaking and other leisure activities were more easily attributable to a certain social group, there is now much more hybridity and juxtaposition. The division is now more in terms of lifestyle rather social class. Sense of belonging is no longer based on kinship but on consumption.

Because of this consumption culture, the signifiers of economic value is entirely divorced with signified’s use value; hence this gives more importance to the “aesthetics” which is nothing but a hallucination of reality (Baudrillard 1993) . He describes postmodernism as a culture of what he describes as ‘simulacrum’. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum is an identical copy without an original – infact, the very distinction between the original and the copy has been destroyed.

This kind of shopping experience which I call as “Shopping of culture” rather than shopping of goods takes place in the malls and similar archetypes and not in the traditional or conventional outlets. Hence the retail “experience” is now shifted from “provisions” to “shopping”. More than a shop it is an event. The emergence of a “coffee culture”, within the malls where multi-tasking is possible where people just do not come to eat but also are seen working on their laptops. This creates a ‘third’ space outside home and work. Mind you this same pattern of consumption called as consumerism had come into heavy criticism for propelling the cause of the global financial crisis in these recent days.

This heavy production and consumption of the culture cannot be brought by the traditional retailers but requires the big corporate retail.