Science & Tech Quote by Judith Krantz

Shopping, in Judith Krantz's telling, is less a guilty pleasure than a full-contact sport: tiring, time-consuming, and only partly improved by the supposedly frictionless conveniences of catalogs and the Internet. The line works because it punctures the fantasy that consumption is effortless. Even browsing, the most noncommittal form of desire, is framed as labor - "hard work", "not easy on the feet" - a bodily reckoning in a realm marketed as pure indulgence.

Krantz, a novelist famous for glossy worlds where status is tactile and aspiration has a brand name, builds her real point around the insistence on touch. "I like to touch and try on" isn't quaint technophobia; it's an argument about verification. In a culture that sells us images, she privileges texture, weight, fit - the intimate evidence that separates the real object from the promise of it. Catalogs and early Internet shopping reduce the body to a click, turning desire into a two-dimensional transaction. Krantz pushes back: she wants the negotiation between self and object, the mirror test, the small ritual of claiming.

The subtext is also class-coded. To "browse to your heart's content" presumes leisure, access, and enough disposable income that looking is an activity, not torture. Yet she admits the cost of that leisure: the physical strain, the time sink, the performance of taste. Shopping here becomes a metaphor for modern choice itself: endless options, marketed as freedom, experienced as fatigue - and still, she chooses the messy, sensory version because it feels like agency.