Page 162 - The Disneyization of Society

CONTROL AND SURVEILLANCE

Consumer resistance

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In a sense, consumer resistance is an odd notion in this connection because to a
very large extent Disneyization is underpinned by a philosophy of the customer
is king, so customers have a lot to gain from many aspects of Disneyization.
Therefore, it is not obvious what their resistance might be against, although it
could be that they sometimes rail against the sense of being manipulated by malls
and other Disneyized forms into spending more time and money than they had
originally intended. Nonetheless, it is occasionally found and the shopping mall
again provides some useful pointers to its existence.
Because security staff frequently target groups of teenagers for surveillance,
young people visiting malls have responded by tactics to make them appear
legitimate. At West Edmonton Mall in the 1980s, young people had to avoid
clothing that might have attracted the unwanted interest of security guards who
were an ingredient of the Mall’s strategy of ensuring that only those who are
fully able to participate in consumption – basically the middle class and the
wealthier working-class strata – were present so that they were not distracted by
concerns about personal safety or otherwise made to feel uneasy. 80 Accordingly,
clothing that might have led to eviction had to be substituted with more
conservative garb. At Mall of America, Goss writes that in spite of the trans-
parent operation of surveillance, he witnessed the ‘problems of unchaperoned
teenagers, disrupting tenants and shoppers and being disrespectful to security
guards’. 81
In addition, Shields observes that loitering is discouraged in the West
Edmonton Mall so that young people, as well as others who might otherwise be
a focus for security, must always appear as though they are about to buy and so
need to be on the move. 82 This kind of slow-moving idling away of time is not
restricted to teenagers seeking to avoid the watchful eye of security personnel.
Visiting the mall to while away time, often with little intention of buying any-
thing, is a not uncommon activity to which several commentators on malls have
drawn attention 83 and is itself indicative of resistance to the aspirations of malls
and their designers. Moreover, the fact that it is possible to distinguish several dis-
tinct categories of shopper in malls strongly implies that shoppers are capable of
putting malls to a variety of uses and therefore to resist, at least to some degree,
the designers’ ploys. A study of mall visitors distinguished four types of shopper –
mall enthusiasts, traditionalists, grazers and minimalists – on a declining scale of
participation in mall activities, in particular shopping. The grazers, for example,
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tended to browse but are susceptible to impulse buying. This classification
of types of mall visitor implies that some groups succeed in resisting the malls’
attempts to seduce them to buy. These various indications of resistance imply that
control and surveillance in consumption venues like malls are rarely total in
their effects.