Vintage view: Women and retail

Kya deLongchamps takes a stroll through the intimate history of women and retail.

SHOPPING appeals to our primitive roots as hunger-gatherers and we’ve been going to town for the better part of 300 years.

This being Mother’s Day weekend, you are probably out honouring this ancient instinct, but it was the Georgians who invented shopping, and the unmistakable ‘ecstasy of the purchase’, as writer Erma Bombeck dubbed it.