Building a Housewife's Paradise
Building a Housewife's Paradise

Author: Tracey Deutsch

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-05-01

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0807898341

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Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores. Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the "shop floor." From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.

Building a Housewife's Paradise
Building a Housewife's Paradise

Author: Tracey Deutsch

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0807833274

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An examination of the history of food distribution in the United States explores the roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.

The Aisles Have Eyes
The Aisles Have Eyes

Author: Joseph Turow

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0300225075

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The author of Media Today offers “a trenchant, timely, and troubling account of [retailers’] data-mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). By one expert’s prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives’ drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants—including Macy’s, Target, and Walmart—is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations. Eye-opening and timely, Turow’s book is essential reading to understand the future of shopping. “Turow shows shopping today to be an exercise in unwitting self-revelation—and not only online.”—The Wall Street Journal “Thoroughly researched and clearly presented with detailed evidence and fascinating peeks inside the retail industry. Much of this information is startling and even chilling, particularly when Turow shows how retail data-tracking can enable discrimination and societal stratification.”—Publishers Weekly “Revealing . . . Valuable reading for shoppers and retailers alike.”—Kirkus Reviews

Plundering the North
Plundering the North

Author: Kristin Burnett

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2023-10-13

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1772840505

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The manufacturing of a chronic food crisis Food insecurity in the North is one of Canada’s most shameful public health and human rights crises. In Plundering the North, Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay examine the disturbing mechanics behind the origins of this crisis: state and corporate intervention in northern Indigenous foodways. Despite claims to the contrary by governments, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and the contemporary North West Company (NWC), the exorbitant cost of food in the North is neither a naturally occurring phenomenon nor the result of free-market forces. Rather, inflated food prices are the direct result of government policies and corporate monopolies. Using food as a lens to track the institutional presence of the Canadian state in the North, Burnett and Hay chart the social, economic, and political changes that have taken place in northern Ontario since the 1950s. They explore the roles of state food policy and the HBC and NWC in setting up, perpetuating, and profiting from food insecurity while undermining Indigenous food sovereignties and self-determination. Plundering the North provides fresh insight into Canada’s settler colonial project by re-evaluating northern food policy and laying bare the governmental and corporate processes behind the chronic food insecurity experienced by northern Indigenous communities.

Supersizing Urban America
Supersizing Urban America

Author: Chin Jou

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-03-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0226921921

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Supersizing Urban America reveals how the US government has been, and remains, a major contributor to America s obesity epidemic. Government policies, targeted food industry advertising, and other factors helped create and reinforce fast food consumption in America s urban communities. Historian Chin Jou uncovers how predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chains to being deluged. She lays bare the federal policies that helped to subsidize the expansion of the fast food industry in America s cities and explains how fast food companies have deliberately and relentlessly marketed to urban, African-American consumers. These developments are a significant factor in why Americans, especially those in urban, low-income, minority communities, have become disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic."

Buying Into Change
Buying Into Change

Author: Alejandro J. Gómez del Moral

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-05

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1496226305

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2023 Hagley Prize for Best Book in Business History Buying into Change examines how the development of a mass consumer society under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975) inserted Spain into transnational consumer networks and set the stage for Spain's transition to democracy during the late 1970s. This transition is broadly significant to both a Spanish public still struggling to redefine their society after Franco and to scholars who have long debated the origins of Spain's current democracy, yet many aspects of it remain largely unexamined. Buying into Change incorporates mass consumption into our understanding of Spain's democratic transition by tracing the spread and social impact of new foreign-influenced department stores, of imported innovations such as modern mass advertising, and of consumer magazines that promoted foreign products. Initially, these enterprises backed Franco's conservative policies, and the regime in turn encouraged consumption in order to improve its image both domestically and abroad. Spain's new globally oriented commerce ultimately sold retailers and shoppers not just foreign ways of buying and selling but also subversive ideas. Imported 1960s fashions brought along countercultural notions on issues such as gender equality. And as Spaniards consumed more like their foreign neighbors, they increasingly viewed themselves as cosmopolitan and European and identified with liberal political conditions abroad, undermining Francoism's doctrine of national exceptionalism, thus laying the social foundations for democratization and European integration in Franco's wake.

Politics of the Pantry
Politics of the Pantry

Author: Emily E. LB. Twarog

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-09-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0190685611

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The history of women's political involvement has focused heavily on electoral politics, but throughout the twentieth century women engaged in grassroots activism when they found it increasingly challenging to feed their families and balance their household ledgers. Politics of the Pantry examines how working- and middle-class American housewives used their identity as housewives to protest the high cost of food. In doing so, housewives' relationships with the state evolved over the course of the century. Shifting the focus away from the workplace as a site of protest, Emily E. LB. Twarog looks to the homefront as a starting point for protest in the public sphere. With a focus on food consumption rather than production, Twarog looks closely at the ways food--specifically meat--was used by women as a political tool. Engaging in domestic politics, housewives both challenged and embraced the social and economic order as they sought to craft a unique political voice and build a consumer movement focused on the home. The book examines key moments when women used consumer actions to embrace their socially ascribed roles as housewives to demand economic stability for their families and communities. These include the Depression-era meat boycott of 1935, the consumer coalitions of the New Deal, and the wave of consumer protests between 1966 and 1973. Twarog introduces numerous labor and consumer activists and their organizations in both urban and suburban areas--Detroit, greater Chicago, Long Island, and Los Angeles.

The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing
The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing

Author: Jon Stobart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-11-08

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1317199502

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Retail history is a rich, cross-disciplinary field that demonstrates the centrality of retailing to many aspects of human experience, from the provisioning of everyday goods to the shaping of urban environments; from earning a living to the construction of identity. Over the last few decades, interest in the history of retail has increased greatly, spanning centuries, extending to all areas of the globe, and drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives. By offering an up-to-date, comprehensive thematic, spatial and chronological coverage of the history of retailing, this Companion goes beyond traditional narratives that are too simplistic and Euro-centric and offers a vibrant survey of this field. It is divided into four broad sections: 1) Contexts, 2) Spaces and places, 3) People, processes and practices and 4) Geographical variations. Chapters are written in an analytical and synthetic manner, accessible to the general reader as well as challenging for specialists, and with an international perspective. This volume is an important resource to a wide range of readers, including marketing and management specialists, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists and urban planners.

Beyond Piggly Wiggly
Beyond Piggly Wiggly

Author: Lisa C. Tolbert

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0820364444

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Patented in 1917, Piggly Wiggly was by far the most influential self-service store of the early twentieth century. Before 1940 it was the only self-service chain with a national distribution network, but it was neither the first nor the only version. Beyond Piggly Wiggly reveals the importance of Piggly Wiggly in the invention of self-service and goes beyond the history of a single firm to explore the role of small business entrepreneurs who invented the first self-service stores in a grassroots social process. During the 1920s and 1930s a minority of enterprising grocers experimented with a wide variety of (sometimes wacky) design ideas for automating shopping. They created specialized stores designed as enclosed retail systems that went far beyond open display techniques to construct unique physical and psychological advantages for automating salesmanship. Beyond Piggly Wiggly offers the first perspective on the national scale of experimentation and connects the southern Jim Crow origins of self- service to the national history of this mass retailing method. Empirical analysis of store arrangements demonstrates how small stores that have previously been overlooked or undervalued as quaint anomalies were integral to the creation of supermarkets. Ultimately, self-service was more than a business decision; it was a fundamentally new social practice.