NEW YORK WHOLESALE

"It has not even started. The buying power of the smart money has moved into gold, but we didn't see the normal consumer buying gold. We have yet to hit the record price from the 1980s," said Mr Geissler.

The Gold to Go machine was unveiled at the Westfield shopping centre, in a rather gloomy corner next to a Barclays cash machine, a fizzy drinks vending machine and the lifts down to the underground car park.

The machine attracted a small crowd of curious shoppers, but in the first 40 minutes only one paying customer.

Mr McCleary said he had followed the gold market for some time, but this was the first time he had invested in any. "I am confident it will hold its value. You've got to be a mad man not to have realised what's happening in the market. People in Egypt are going to the bank, taking out their money and converting it into gold."

The machine follows 17 others around the world, most of them in Germany and Dubai. The company said it had an annual turnover of €36m (£32.6m) from these machines, with the average machine receiving about 500 transactions each month.

Mr Geissler said half the customers were ordinary consumers looking for gifts, pointing out that a 1g piece of gold was more interesting than a bunch of flowers "and would last for 4,000 years longer". The other half were serious investors.

Not everyone in the shopping centre was impressed. Sarah O'Malley said: "I'm not interested. I sold my gold jewellery for money not that long ago." Asked if she thought the company had missed the market, she answered: "Yes, I think they have".

The price of the gold is taken from the world market and updated every 10 minutes, with Gold to Go placing a mark-up to pay for its costs, especially the production costs of very small coins and ingots. Within a few minutes of Mr McCleary making his purchase the price had fallen from £100 to £99 for 2.5g.

Gold to Go, and its bullion supplier Zen Gold, insisted the mark-up was in line with what banks and other retail outlets charge. But ATS Bullion, a long-standing gold shop on The Strand in London, charges £40 for 1g compared with the machine's £47, and £115 for a one-tenth ounce Krugerrand coin, compared with Gold to Go's price of £121.

Sandra Conway, the managing director at ATS, said: "Anything that promotes gold has got to be good, but I think this is mainly going to attract novelty buyers, not serious investors."

The machine takes cash and credit cards, and anyone who wants to buy more than £2,500-worth needs to scan in their passport to satisfy British anti-money laundering rules.

The machine currently stocks a variety of weights of gold, but most worth less than £1,000. It intends to start offering 250g, worth about £8,000, in the next few weeks.

It did at one point cross my mind, clutching my three-for-two Christmas ribbon and Per Una underwear on my way to the wine section, that even with 20 per cent off the price of things, that still left 80 per cent to pay.

No matter; I stayed and queued and saved the grand total of £12.50.

When was it that shopping did become a leisure activity, taking over from family, sport, religion, dogs and loafing around with a book as the way people spend their time? More to the point, why did it?

The author Neil Borman, whose book Bonfire of the Brands documented his flight from brand addiction, has released a spoof film about indiscriminate shopping, The Good Consumer.

The voiceover at the start of it declares: "The good consumer is always buying new products. When he is not buying, he is earning money so that he can fund his consumption, or looking for purchases that he can make in future."

Yes, it's heavy handed. But it doesn't feel like a spoof so much as a sober account of the condition of England, recession or not.

A few weeks ago, the retail sector raised a couple of fingers to the credit crunch with the opening of the Westfield shopping centre: two miles worth of expensive shops in a part of London previously known for its proximity to Wormwood Scrubs prison.

The opening was a riot. Another two multi-billion-pound shopping projects kicked off this year – at Liverpool One and Bristol's Cabot Circus – on top of 10 rather smaller shopping-centre openings elsewhere.

And the retail spread is not stopping any time soon; the Westfield developers will be opening another shopping centre on the same scale in Stratford, East London, in 2012.

The recession has clipped our wings, but we're still buying things – although more and more of it is from Primark and Aldi.

Where does it come from, this almost hormonal drive to go shopping, to buy and own more things? Why do we do it?

Men hate it. Children hate it. The shoppers you see in department stores don't give any discernible sign that they're enjoying themselves – bookshops apart. There's something dead around the eyes.

But families will still take themselves off to Bluewater to spend their day of rest – theirs, if not the assistants'.

And if wandering from WH Smith to Scribblers to Boots to Debenham's makes them look like zombies, a working definition of hell would be the shopping centre Christmas sales.

Women queue up at five in the morning to save 50 quid at the Brent Cross Next sales. Why?

The social psychiatrist Oliver James, in his book, Affluenza, squarely attributed much of the high rates of mental illness in Britain and the US to consumerism.

"The Affluenza virus," he says, "is a set of values which increase our vulnerability to psychological distress: placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions... My explanation... is that the virus promotes Having over Being and the confusion (through advertising) of wants with needs."

It wasn't always thus, you know; shopping isn't part of the human condition.

The other week, I was in Walsingham in Norfolk, famous for its shrine to the Virgin Mary. We pottered around the shops after church and before the pub opened – but, this being Sunday, most shops were shut.

And as we browsed the teddy hospital for reclaimed bears and the children's charity shop and the little retail section at the entrance to the priory – three packs of Christmas cards for a pound! – it dawned on me what was missing.

There weren't any chain stores; all the shops appeared to be independent or at least without identical branches in London, Glasgow and Manchester.

The retail equivalent of the M&S discount day will be tomorrow when the Catholic church holds its Christmas (sorry, Advent) Bazaar and the going price for most things will be around two quid.

But then in Walsingham, there is a life that doesn't revolve around shopping: you've got religion, riding, pubs to go to, walks to go on, Women's Institute meetings to attend. Lots of places were once like that.

Funny; it crossed my mind then that the super-luxe section of shops in Westfield is called The Village. Except that village is a parody of the real one.

Tamasin Doe, the former fashion director of Instyle magazine, pinpoints the start of shopaholicism around 25 years ago, during the Eighties, when shopping malls, which had already been around for a decade, began to spread and become a place for the young to hang out. The malls stimulated the collective shopping gland.

"You began," she said, "to be defined by how you shop, and everything else was depleted by it. Everything was defined by acquisition. Shopping became a way to recreate yourself."

The fashion cycle shortened; built-in redundancy became the essence of it, at least for women. The rise of low-cost production in China meant it became cheaper to buy new manufactured goods than to have the old ones repaired.

In fact, for some durables, such as computers, it wasn't actually possible to fix old models; they had to be replaced.

Politics came into it too, notably the 1994 Sunday Shopping Act, which lifted the curbs on Sabbath trading.

It had conscience clauses to prevent people being forced to work on the day of rest, but if you want to hear a not very nice laugh, ask your department-store manicurist or perfume saleswoman whether she can turn down work on Sunday.

At the same time, we got the cult of celebrity. Obviously, there have been pin-ups for the masses – society beauties and cult actors – for well over a century.

But Hello!-style celebdom, being famous for nothing at all, is a comparatively recent phenomenon.

And what celebrities do is shop and be seen to shop and give their endorsement to products that the rest of us can shop for. It's hard to think of images of Wayne Rooney's wife, Colleen, without armfuls of carrier bags.

The symbol and apex of the trend were the It Bags – big, phenomenally ugly handbags that cost from about £300 to £1,500 and had a life cycle of about six months.

Once Britain took to consumerism, it went all the way. Over the past 20 years, the retail sector absorbed 88 million square feet of new space – the equivalent, for those who think in terms of football pitches, of 1,200 of them.

Obviously, you can't have a shopping habit without paying for it – eventually. Because of the liberalisation of credit over the past couple of decades, personal indebtedness is higher in Britain than anywhere in Europe: consumer debt totals £1.5 trillion.

There was a time when, if you wanted to buy something, you had to save up for it. Ten years ago that was seen as almost risibly quaint. Now it looks like rather a sensible thing to do. The demutualisation of the building societies added to the problem.

Don't think I'm being snooty about all this. I was right in there and the upshot in my case is that I have, oh, six credit cards, which cost more to maintain than the baby.

Plainly, the recession has changed things. But only up to a point. One retail analyst, Verdict, estimates that retail-sector growth will fall to 2.4 per cent in 2008 – but that's after 10 years during which average annual growth was about four per cent.

Of the £228 billion we're likely to spend in the shops this year, an estimated £128 million is classed as non-essential, indulgence spending. Even if there's a fall in spending, it's from a very, very high base.

What's the solution? Well, how about going with the grain of the recession, of making do and mending? How about not shopping on Sundays?

Keeping perfectly good clothes even when the fashion roundabout has moved on? Spending time with the family at home? Saving up to buy things?

At the end of all this, we may come to remember that we're more than the sum of our possessions. And that would be a good thing.