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Within two or three decades, consumer cathedrals have compensated and replaced industrial ones, creating widespread and recognizable dislocations in the urban network. In 2017, in the United States the legendary General Motors, with a turnover of 14.5 billion dollars, had 180,000 employees, while the Walmart commercial chain with a turnover of 500 billion had 2.3 million.
In Italy, the FCA has about 29,000 employees, just over half of Italian commercial chains such as Conad or Coop or just over Esselunga. The evolution towards the so-called commercial no-places, squares and small squares of consumption, animated by large commercial companies, in Italy started late, with the nineties, backed by the boom in the eighties of television commercial-advertising channels. It has progressively created both new and articulated business activities and new and additional work paths: moreover, with 90% employment in permanent cases, with acceptable salary (14 monthly salaries), supported by “rising ”Corporate welfare.
Today, we see a phenomenon that has been consummated for some years now and that some scholars have called the advent of a post-industrial society or service company, in which the social function of job creation progressively shifts from large industrial complexes , increasingly digitalised and labor saving, to large complexes of services, including commercial ones, which have become places of the consumer society. The great attention of young people and women looking for a job or a safer and more decent job compared to the thousand jobs, is explained by sociologists with the passage from a dominant work ethic to an aesthetic-hedonistic ethics of consumption in forging identity and memberships. The squares and squares of consumption are preferred by women and young people as consumers, but also as workers. In other words, there is no longer a widespread culture of work with strength comparable to the cultures of consumption that have for years conquered our daily lives. Familiarity with large commercial places also makes it more attractive to work there. So while making maxi-selective contests as is deservedly happening for Esselunga, some northern industrialists are looking for workers without much success at over 1500 euros a month. There is no longer any widespread knowledge of how factory environments are and how they are worked. Complexes like Esselunga are known because they are frequented and also for a wide range of work paths offered.
In the nineties it was thought that the cathedrals of consumption could have been occupational eaters in the commercial sectors (small traders at risk). On the contrary, they have revealed the places of a nascent service economy. The third techno-industrial, IT and Internet revolution, on the one hand, has forced these large commercial complexes to quickly adapt to the network and new digital technologies, on the other it has made them more exposed to the purest form of commercial disintermediation , e-commerce. Amazon, American, seems unstoppable in terms of turnover ($ 233 billion).
Today staying at home is more attractive not only for the chance to watch TV lying on the living room, eating chips and drinking beer, as Charles Bukowski encouraged, but you can take the typical computer or Smartphone posture well described by Baricco in The Game and to quell our consumerism by purchasing products that meet needs, utility and desires online. Be careful, however, that e-commerce should also be understood as a challenge to improvement, rather than a trap for employment in the commercial sector: Amazon already boasts over 637,000 employees. The difference, however, lies in the fact that large commercial complexes are not only places of purchase, but also encounters and socialization in real life. This is a strong point, for now, essential.