George Ritzer, and Todd Stillman 2001 The Modern Las Vegas Casino-Hotel: The

M@n@gement, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2001, 83-99

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Paradigmatic New Means of Consumption

in mind and they may have a sense of the means they intend to

employ as well. However, once they enter a means of consumption

they encounter an array of means and ends that serve the interests

of those who control the means of consumption more than their own

interests. While the consumer may be searching for a particular loca-

tion, the setting may be designed to force the consumer to pass other

locations deemed more desirable (or profitable) by those who control

the means of consumption. The blue jeans are usually located along

the back wall of the Gap, so customers need to navigate the entire

store to reach them. While the consumer may have as an end the

purchase of a particular commodity, those in control of the means of

consumption encourage the purchase of as many things as possible.

Formally rational systems can also be defined as McDonaldized sys-

tems. Such systems are characterized by their efficiency, predictabil-

ity, calculability and replacement of human with non-human technolo-

gy. These characteristics serve to make McDonaldized means of con-

sumption highly effective “selling machines”. To put it another way,

they are highly effective at controlling large numbers of consumers.

All rationalized systems suffer from a range of irrationalities of ratio-

nality, but the most notable for our purposes is disenchantment. Prior

to becoming formally rationalized, the means of consumption were

more likely to have had magical elements that provided a great deal

of meaning. Magical elements might include the simple fact that a

consumer formed a meaningful, but not necessarily rational, attach-

ment to a particular means of consumption like a local bakery with a

“perfect” chocolate éclair reminiscent of a youthful trip to Paris. While

it is in the interests of cathedrals of consumption to McDonaldize, this

inevitably leads to the disenchantment of those settings. That local

bakery may be able to increase profits if it produces twice as many

éclairs and opens a chain of shops, but the special quality that attract-

ed our hypothetical consumer is likely to be diminished in the process

because of a decline in the quality of the product or the disenchant-

ment of the setting as it is copied again and again. Consumers are not

drawn, at least for very long, to rationalized settings that lack enchant-

ment, especially for non-routine consumption. A warehouse-like out-

let store, for example, may incorporate all the elements of

McDonaldization but none of it will make consumers want to shop in

a dimly-lit, cavernous space. Although price competition and

economies of scale help warehouse stores succeed, other rational-

ized means of consumption look for ways to become more attractive

to consumers.

Weber’s work offers little guidance to our effort to understand the

methods used to enhance the attraction and enchantment of ratio-

nalized means of consumption because he focused on the ways in

which enchantment was being extracted progressively (without

hope for reversal) from modern societies. The more recent contri-

bution of Campbell (1987), however, provides a basis for under-

standing how consumer settings might become reenchanted. In his

research on the Protestant Ethic, Weber focused on the fact that the

early Calvinists sought to root out emotion and enchantment from

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M@n@gement, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2001, 83-99

Special Issue: Deconstructing Las Vegas

88

George Ritzer and Todd Stillman

their lives. Campbell found that later Calvinists reversed course to

some degree and began allowing space for emotions and enchant-

ment in their lives. While the early Calvinists looked for “signs of

economic success,” the later Calvinists shifted their attention to “evi-

dence of good taste.” Good taste, in turn, was tied to beauty and

goodness. People who sought beauty and goodness, who sought

pleasure, came to be thought of as possessing good character.

Pleasure-seeking was tied to being in fashion and the consumption

of luxury goods. In this way, the ethic and the lifestyle of the later

Calvinists gave birth to the “spirit of modern consumerism.” The

defining characteristic of this spirit, self-illusory hedonism, contrasts

sharply with the asceticism of the early Calvinists. Under the spell of

self-illusory hedonism, actors constantly seek pleasure. Yet the

object of their desire—the luxury object at the top of their list—

always fails to gratify. Rather than abandon their faith in pleasure,

people became involved in an insatiable cycle of desire with the

belief that the next object could and would be more gratifying than

the previous one. In short, Campbell described an enchanted indi-

vidual world characterized by illusions, daydreams and fantasies

about consumer objects

1

.

Campbell (1987) succeeded in re-injecting a notion of enchantment

into Weberian theory. However, the enchantment of concern to

Campbell exists at the level of the individual, while our concern is

the enchantment of rationalized structures. Williams’s (1982) work

on French expositions and department stores is of great help here.

Williams views French department stores as highly enchanted

“dream worlds.” As she sees it, these dream worlds employ

enchantment, glamour and romance to seduce consumers into

spending their money. However, these settings were also highly

rationalized. This point is made by Miller (1981) in his study of the

Paris department store, Bon Marché. Miller describes a number of

Bon Marché’s rationalized elements including the division into sep-

arate departments, and the use of files, statistics, sliding chutes,

conveyor belts and escalators. Thus, the early French department

store, like today’s new means of consumption, was both rationalized

and enchanted.

Even when the two co-exist, rationalization is the more powerful force

and it tends to marginalize, routinize, or drive out enchantment. For

this reason, the cathedrals of consumption are in constant need of re-

enchantment. This brings us to postmodern social theory where the

idea of re-enchantment is of great importance. For example, accord-

ing to Bauman (1993: 33), «postmodernity brings ‘re-enchantment’ of

the world after the protracted (...) modern struggle to disenchant it.»

To take a specific example, Baudrillard (1983/1990: 51) privileges

seduction as a type of enchantment and its «play and power of illu-

sion» over the complete clarity and visibility (disenchantment) of the

modern world. Thus, re-enchantment occurs throughout the post-

modern world, including the cathedrals of consumption where re-

enchantment lures and controls consumers. However, it is important

to bear in mind that rationalization continually poses a threat to efforts

1. Campbell's self-illusory hedonism sug-

gests that consumers who fantasize are ful-

filling a social psychological need to esca-

pe from the constraints of work, family,

and society into the more perfect world of

the imagination. It is worth noting that

such an account is only one of several

plausible social psychological models of

consumer behavior. Because this essay

examines the settings in which consump-

tion takes place rather than the motivations

of consumers themselves, we have skirted

the complicating factors of social psycho-

logy. We hope it will be sufficient to sim-

ply suggest the type of effect that the fan-

tastic settings may have on consumers

while taking greater care to describe the

techniques of enchantment employed in

the cathedrals of consumption. A more

definitive analysis of the social psychology

of gamblers and casino patrons is beyond

the scope of this essay.

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