ABSTRACT
This chapter is a critical essay underpinned by an idea which is intuitively true: namely, that there are certain goals which can be achieved only as a by-product of aiming for something else. There are plenty of examples in the leisure domain that illustrate this. As is well known to all leisure scholars, we nd happiness when we are absorbed by a meaningful leisure activity – what Csikszentmihalyi (1974) calls a state of ‘ow’. As Pascal Bruckner (2010) suggests (in his highly inuential book Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to be Happy), the nature of happiness is to be an enigma – trying to be happy is a recipe for unhappiness. It is with such an idea in mind that this chapter deals with its subject. In order to get to grips with the signicance of shopping for Leisure Studies, we must understand the pervasive reach of consumerism in the contemporary world, whose stamp is the market-mediated mode of life (Bauman, 1990), and which appears to be the way we live today. In this way the chapter deals with the notion of leisure as consumerism rather than of shopping as a specic leisure activity.
