For some, shopping is an art; for others, it's a sport. It can be a vice and it can be a cause. Some love it. Some hate it. Rarely is someone indifferent.

The thing about shopping is that you never know exactly what you are going to find. A shopping experience can be filled with joyous surprises or unexpected pitfalls. No matter how hard you try, you cannot plan every detail of a shopping trip, and you never know exactly how it will end up.

Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It’s just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it’s also an affirmation of faith in their country, its prosperity and limitless bounty. They have shops the way that lesser countries have statues.

Three things to remember about shopping are location, location, location.

Shopping involves more than just economic considerations like the relationship between material quality and price. There are social, ethical, and political issues embedded in shopping decisions as well. Yet most of us do not give a lot of conscious thought to what can be called the politics of a product.

Shopping is often unwittingly used as a technique to bring the self into sharper focus. It is fueled by the belief that the perfect shirt, belt, shoes or sofa will finally supply the answer to who the shopper is and will increase her worth ... Most women are not aware of this latent meaning of shopping, and as a result, they shop unconsciously. This leads to further confusion without getting them the result they are seeking, which is not about the shoes, the shirt or the paint color per se, but about their identities.

Shopping figures as the antithesis of property in this sense, in that it represents a pure mobility of selves and objects. One moment you are this, have this; the next you move on. In this slide from the compulsory to the compulsive, there are no duties, no continuities, no consequences and no history, only a succession of shopping instants.

Is there more to life than shopping?

On your deathbed, will you wish you’d spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?