| Sumario: | Online shopping among the young in India has attracted much attention from scholars but the carnivals of sales shopping in cyberspace have been relatively less explored. This article addresses this gap, focusing on the phenomenon of how incentivised cost reductions during online sales motivate the urban young in Kolkata to thrift in their very prudent agentic avatars. Based on qualitative data obtained from focus group interviews of 39 undergraduate students from different fractions of the middle classes, this article examines a continuum of often contesting and overlapping frugalities from old to new. The study indicates a displacement of traditional morals of constrictive consumption idealised in the sense of old frugality and the efflorescence of a cohort of young shoppers who subvert morally convened scripts in intentionally feigning their thrifting on discounted goods online as "little moments of affordable extravagance." However, the making of extravagant thrifters online, this article concludes, does not in any way disrupt perceptions of class distances among the urban young. Rather, these get reiterated when differently disposed shoppers use their own class stance in interpreting new frugalities.
|
|---|