Lonely hearts, classy dreams, empty wallets.

• Author: Waldman, Amy
• Position: Home shopping networks - Cover Story

After a man died several months ago at the Virginian Retirement Community in Fairfax, his family went to collect his worldly goods. They found more than they bargained for: His home was crammed, floor to ceiling, with possessions they never knew he had. There were kitchen gadgets, costume jewelry, bed linens, and cleansers, all by the dozens.

He had bought it all from the world's most accessible stores: the home shopping networks that came through his television into his living room 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This man, whose name the retirement home withheld for privacy, ordered a package from QVC or Home Shopping Network (HSN), the two leading home shopping channels, almost every day. Some of what came he gave away. Most of it simply piled up, unused.

What had brought him to line his walls with the fruits of home shopping? In a word, companionship. Home shopping hosts didn't just sell to him - they spoke to him. An employee at the Virginian recalls that the man spent a lot of time by himself. He did not make friends easily and he spoke of being lonely. But when he bought, he said he could keep operators chatting to him for half an hour. He had found a way to fill his days and sleepless nights.

He was not alone in his discovery. As the hours cycle past on home shopping channels, the disembodied voices of buyers, calling in to offer "testimonials" on their purchases, float above the sparkling descriptions of cubic zirconium jewelry. Most are female - Dorothy from Daytona, Betty from Fresno, Helen from Mexico City, Indiana. Many of the voices are beginning to crack with age. And their extraordinary enthusiasm for the products - and the hosts, and the show itself - masks something else: a deep, abiding need for human contact. "I live alone," says a woman named Erma who calls in on a Monday morning. "All I've got to do is watch QVC."

To Erma, the man from Virginia, and many others like them, home shopping channels sold more than $3 billion of goods last year. QVC, which stands for Quality Value Control, alone sold $1.4 billion worth of goods in 1994, logging 55 million phone calls. The channel is the world's largest purveyor of gold jewelry. It once sold $1.4 million worth of Kodak products in 70 minutes and $1.9 million of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers paraphernalia in two hours. In a record day, it took $18 million in orders. The second-place Home Shopping Network, or "Club" (as it's known on the air), nearly matches that pace.

That the two channels, and a host of smaller rivals, could do so well runs counter to conventional wisdom, for in an age of ironic, sophisticated advertising, the home shopping pitch seems amateurish. The camera zooms in on an item, which rocks back and forth, back and forth on a pedestal; the hosts, in living-room sets, praise each bauble in a frenzy of superlatives. A clock counts down to whip up a sense of urgency as the number sold mounts on the screen. The suggested retail price hovers above the low, low home shopping price.

Many of the goods - imitation jewelry, collectibles, gadgets, polyester pantsuits - are junk, often selling at more-than-junk prices. And while "convenience" is a favorite home shopping buzzword, the description could not be less apt: It might take hours, even days, of home shopping viewimg to come upon something you need.

Spend some time in front of the television, though, and you sense that while the pitch is predictable, it is anything but amateurish. As low-tech as they are, the home shopping networks understand that the real work of advertising is not to publicize bargains - it is to appeal to deeper needs. They turn their constant, mesmerizing presence and viewer participation into a mock community, a "universe," as QVC calls it, that seems to break the isolation television perpetuates. And even for those who are not lonely, home shopping promises something else: the lives of the rich, the famous, the glamorous - on the cheap, and just a phone call away.

Someplace Very Special

Home shopping is just one more chapter in the evolution of marketing to a consumer culture - a process that began in earnest in the twenties and accelerated with the post-World War II economic expansion that established America's middle class as a potent consumer force. In response, advertisers went to work creating what one General Motors executive called the "organized culture of dissatisfaction" - bringing out new, "better" models each year so previous models seemed inadequate, or offering consumers a choice of, say, 15 shoe colors so one no longer seemed enough.

Advertisers were so successful in unleashing desire that a traditionally frugal nation began to redefine "need" as whatever ads told them they had to have. It was the creation and fufillment of these needs that John Kenneth Galbraith probed in his 1958 classic, The Affluent Society. Ad men, he wrote, "are effective only with those who do not...