Needs, Desires and the Experience of Scarcity

Abstract

This article contributes to the new field of post-Soviet consumer culture studies by exploring the meanings of recreational shopping carried by the Estonian notion of s oppamine, adapted from the English word ‘shopping’. It draws on empirical data derived from 71 original interviews with Estonian-speaking consumers. Underlying these respondents’ normative judgements of their own and others’ shopping behaviour is a system of moral concepts in which ‘need’ and ‘restraint’ are continually juxtaposed against ‘desire’,‘pleasure’ and ‘excess’. This opposition, while common to a range of consumer contexts, takes a specific form in the post-Soviet conditions of Estonia, marked by a shift from a collectively experienced absence of consumer goods in general to an individually perceived scarcity - either material, in the form of the money to buy available goods, or symbolic, based on an opinion that the new commodities are insufficiently sophisticated.

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