Stores and shops got bigger and bigger every year.
The enlargements, expansions, and growth of multi-location chains meant huge tracts of land were converted into malls, multiplexes, and lots where the total size mimicked amusement park proportions. Public spaces had been town squares, green spaces, and community centers. Public spaces became places where shoppers carry out a similar activity, shopping, which becomes their main shared characteristic. Shoppers focus on fulfillment of demand, the apt pairing of an ability to pay for a desired item and the store’s ability to provide the desired item. To participate in the intended purpose of a store, which has the appearance of a public space, a shopper must possess a key resource, money or credit. Public spaces have certain hallmarks, such as: free access, equal use, and shared property. The public ceased to be a group defined as equals with no greater privilege or rights than others. Shopping supplanted forms of activity involving equals in shared spaces with forms of activity that not only entailed differential access, but intentionally structured the activity to produce differential outcomes: shoppers must have money or credit to be a part of the space; shoppers only get as much out of the experience of shopping as they can pay for.
Stores and shops got bigger and bigger every year, which made them more and more assume the character of homes, where privacy and isolation dominate, and where contact with and relations to the outside, i.e. the non-familial, world is weak, relegated to a position of relative unimportance. The rise of internet shopping acted as a counterforce to the growth of stores, but exacerbated the retreat of the public.
As if by design, there is no longer a public. There are only households. There are only workplaces and homes.
