Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945

Lydia Langer, Ralph Jessen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317007777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of 'Americanization' of retailing. National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. This volume presents a series of case-studies looking at transformations of retailing in several European countries, offering new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences consumerism had on the practices of retailing.

Chapter 1
Consumer Society Revisited: Affluence, Choice and Diversity

Frank Trentmann

Supermarkets and self-service are emblematic of the relentless advance of consumer society after 1945. They stand for individualization, the triumph of liberal markets over republican citizenship, and for the paradox of choice: why more is less.¹ Other chapters in this book provide new perspectives on the supermarket and retailing in the twentieth century. In this chapter I want to rearrange the historical stage on which the supermarket makes its appearance and suggest new ways of framing consumer society. I will do so by following the careers of three core components: affluence, choice and diversity. Ideas about what consumer society was (and is) were shaped in a particular moment of the Cold War, most vividly expressed by J.K. Galbraith in The Affluent Society in 1958.² Visions of material comfort and abundance, however, were not the preserve of market capitalism. All modern mass ideologies promoted them. Freedom of choice similarly gathered support from a range of cultural and political sources that stretched from democratic traditions and pragmatism, to youth culture. Supermarkets are held up as signs of a new monoculture bred by consumer society. Does a broader history bear out this dismal thesis? Placing affluence and choice in a longer, more comparative perspective shows the dangers of telling the story of consumer society as one of post-1945 affluence and rampant individualism. Self-service arises from a richer hinterland of values and practices.

Affluence

No society has typified consumer society more than the United States after 1945. Anthropologists have stressed that affluence is a relative concept and can be found in many earlier societies. Nonetheless, it was post-war America that took ownership of the affluent society, the title of J.K. Galbraith’s bestseller, and that has set the terms of debate since. A progressive and Keynesian, Galbraith had been deputy head of the Office of Price Administration during the Second World War, before moving back to Harvard. Galbraith’s thesis had three core components. The affluent society, he wrote, amounted to a radical break with the past and was the result of a new growth-oriented production machine born by the war. Second, in his famous phrase, it spawned ‘private opulence amidst public squalor’. There was, he argued, a functional tie between the rising wave of private consumer goods and the draught of public services and civic-mindedness: one caused the other. Finally, Galbraith warned, the affluent society was unsustainable, financially, psychologically and environmentally. It was promoting an ‘inherently unstable process of consumer debt creation’. It favoured ‘tenuous wants’ over ‘solid needs’ in a way that left people barren and lost at the same time as they were ‘stockpiling’ consumer goods. And it polluted the environment; although only in a few passages, Galbraith was amongst the first to link the critique of consumer society to a concern for what is now called sustainability.³

Since the publication of The Affluent Society, Galbraith has acquired the aura of a seer or guru for many disenchanted with consumerism, however defined. So it is worth stressing that the purpose of the book was less a scientific description of reality than a political will to change it. It reached its peak in the next decade when Galbraith together with Arthur Schlesinger were campaigning for a more active state. From a point of view of intellectual history, his thesis of an epochal break was as ingenious as it was problematic. Back in the 1890s, Simon Patten, the economist at the University of Pennsylvania, had already claimed the discovery of affluence, as Galbraith surely would have known. In the interwar years, Stuart Chase, a pioneer of consumer research and advocacy, diagnosed a new ‘economy of abundance’ where there was no longer a ‘measurable relation … between work contributed and goods consumed’.⁴ Both Patten and Chase attacked the old gospel of thrift and plain living as no longer suited in a society which produced more than was necessary to meet basic needs. People needed to spend more, not less. The state had to recognize the importance of consumers and their purchasing power, and it had to raise the quality of life through the public provision of leisure, parks, pools and libraries. In real terms, Herbert Hoover did much in the 1920s to advance a material vision of the good life by pushing home ownership and domestic comforts. Galbraith’s critique, therefore, was made possible by the growing acceptance of consumers and the act of spending as a public good. What set Galbraith apart from these earlier visionaries was that, instead of potential symbiosis, he saw inevitable conflict between private consumption and the public good.

The link between affluence and consumption, therefore, preceded the story of sustained high growth of 1948–1973 – das Wirtschaftswunder, il miracolo, les trente glorieuses. The problems with Galbraith’s chronology raise questions about the political realism of those today who have taken Galbraith’s critique further to call for zero growth as the way to stop consumerism and environmental catastrophe.⁵ Material desires, practices and politics were on the rise before high growth set in.

Nor does the historical record offer clear evidence that reducing growth will necessarily boost public welfare. In fact, at the time Galbraith was writing, private consumption and public expenditure were rising together; total government spending went up from 17 per cent to 25 per cent between 1949 and 1958. The simultaneous rise in private spending and public welfare tends to be seen as the distinctive feature of the post-war West European consumption regimes.⁶ In reality, the United States moves in a similar long-term direction, simply at a slightly lower level. Government spending would reach 33 per cent in the early 1980s, largely due to the increase in medical care, social security and local services; the proportion of military spending, by contrast, rapidly declined after 1954.⁷ For Galbraith, the shortcomings in basic municipal and metropolitan services in New York City were typical of the public squalor in a society geared towards private opulence. ‘The schools were old and overcrowded. The parks and playgrounds were insufficient. Streets and empty lots were filthy … Internal transportation was overcrowded, unhealthful, and dirty’.⁸ What Galbraith forgot was that prior to the 1880s few of these public services existed at all. If affluence meant more cars and bigger fridges, it also meant more schools and hospitals. Again, it is too simple to lay the waste problem at the feet of a throw-away society born in the 1950s. Most cities faced a massive waste crisis on the eve of the First World War. The annual refuse of New York City would have been enough to fill three Gizeh pyramids. A lot of trash was dumped straight into the Hudson River. According to one study in 1912, American-born inhabitants of Chicago were already then producing on average 15 per cent more garbage than recent immigrants.⁹

The relation between prudential behaviour and consumer society has been equally contingent. Galbraith’s alarmism about personal debt and recklessness responded to the growth of consumer credit, largely introduced to finance car ownership. In reality, the 1950s–1970s now look like the golden years of saving. In 1958 the private savings rate stood at 10 per cent in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, American private savings were not all that different from those in Western Europe. The real divergence started in the mid 1980s with the collapse of American savings.¹⁰ In other words, it is dangerous to essentialize consumer society and reduce it to one particular mode of human behaviour (selfishness, wastefulness, lack of prudence). High levels of consumption have come with high levels of saving at certain times, with high levels of debt at others. The multiple paths to affluence become clearer the further we are prepared to move away from the United States as the paradigmatic model of consumer society. In Japan in the 1960s and China in the 2000s, consumption has expanded much further than in any decade in Anglo-American history, but alongside gigantic savings rates.

Choice

Galbraith’s Affluent Society has cast a long shadow over the (mainly negative) treatment of consumer society, in public as well as scholarly opinion. It is emblematic of the association of consumer society with a particular place and time – post-war America – and the global export of its way of life. Victoria de Grazia has recently called it the Irresistible Empire.¹¹ Consumer society, in this view, is an American form of imperialism. It is literally a society that came in from the cold. Few would deny the considerable influence of the American standard of living in Cold War Europe. But framing consumer society like this also creates problems.

Most fundamentally, it distracts from the biodiversity of consumer society. We have already noted how the increase in consumption has historically progressed with various degrees of saving/spending, wasting/conserving, more/fewer public services. The upsurge of material desires and habits was never the preserve of the United States. All modern mass ideologies promised their supporters a better life and developed strategies to harness consumption to their particular ends. This included not only the progressive New Deal, but also Nazism and Stalinism, nationalists and imperialists. In the mid 1930s Stalin sought to co-opt material desires and emulation to build a new material civilization. A Soviet House of Fashion opened in Moscow in 1936. As a reward for heroic work efforts, Stakhanovites received gramophones, Boston suits and crepe de Chine dresses. The Red October factory produced over 500 kinds of chocolates and candies. Canteens and dormitories received soap and mirrors to teach workers to pay greater attention to their appearance. The desire for consumer goods, self-fashioning, and personal comfort, it was hoped, would release the productivity necessary to propel socialism forward to victory.¹² The difference with the United States was not the absence of consumer desires but the limited mechanisms for turning them into reality.

Taking the United States as a starting point of histories of consumer society has the unfortunate side effect of locating dynamism here and reducing other societies to somewhat sleepy or static backwaters. Yet few were virgin lands. Transregional and intercontinental trade had created circuits of consumption that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries linked India, East Africa and Europe. Late Ming and early Qing China generated their own culture of fashionability that reached towns and villages. The first mass consumer goods in Britain and Holland were cotton chintzes in the 1680s–1690s, made by Indian artisans, more than two centuries before America rolled out consumer durables by means of industrial scale mass production. The world had many springs of consumption. From a longer historical perspective, American consumer society was just one of many.¹³

In addition to broadening our global and chronological frames, we need to retrieve the multiple strands that made up the particular type of consumer society that came to predominate after 1945. One defining feature was the celebration of individual choice. Most discussions have located this firmly in the triumph of the market and the idea of homo oeconomicus. Neo-liberalism in the 1990s, in this view, appears as the global expansion of a form of governmentality which asks individuals to rule themselves by turning citizens into customers.¹⁴ The supermarket becomes the model for all services from hospitals to universities. Whether the governmentality thesis captures how users and providers actually behave and see each other has been debated.¹⁵ It is equally important to consider the longer-term history which catapulted choice to the centre of public life. Rather than seeing the market as the font of origin, I would argue, we should see it as the beneficiary of a larger shift in socio-political mentalities.

Choice drew energy from three sources in particular. The first was liberal democracy. Unlike republicanism where citizenship was based on land, virtue and political action, liberalism placed the emphasis on the vote and representation. The exercise of citizenship ceased to be that of the property owner who cared for his land, and became closer to that of a shopper who selected from an assortment of options. By 1900, the parallels between the commercial and the political marketplace created new fields of legitimation for those groups seeking political inclusion, especially women excluded from the vote. If they were capable of making the r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The History of Retailing and Consumption General Editor's Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction: Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945
• 1. Consumer Society Revisited: Affluence, Choice and Diversity
• Part I Americanization of Retailing? The Introduction of Self-Service
• Part II New and Old Places of Consumption
• Part III Scientific Knowledge, Technical Innovations and the Retail Trade
• Index