At the Galleria Shopping Mall

The labels of the purses in the Galleria symbolize the profound emptiness of American consumer culture. The poet observes that, “Today is the day [Lucinda] stops looking at faces / and starts assessing the labels of the purses” (Lines 13-14). In the end, it is not the purses that Lucinda notices, it is their labels.

Purses are by definition practical things, simple things. They are accommodating satchels able to carry stuff from one place to another. Lucinda, however, all of nine years old, begins to assess not the purses—she is too young really to require a purse for pragmatic reasons—but she is at that age already enamored by the labels. She is drawn not by the quality or by the practicality of the purse but rather by its label. In this, the poet/speaker acknowledges his young niece has already bought into the consumer culture that mistakes value for cost and that judges the value of a thing by the label that it bears.

In this, the labels symbolize everything that is problematic about America’s consumer culture, the lure of expensive labels that do not reflect that actually quality of the product. The infatuation with labels and the willingness to evaluate purchases based on the label indicates a culture too satisfied with the most superficial criteria for evaluating the value of a product.