BUYER BEWARE! The Business, Politics and Pleasures of Commerce A conference to be held at the University of Wolverhampton on 15-16 September 2004 PROGRAMME ABSTRACTS   The conference is supported by: The Royal Historical Society AND The Economic History Society

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Andrew Alexander, University of Surrey, Simon Phillips, University of Surrey, and Gareth Shaw, University of Exeter, all UK
Consumer reactions to new retail formats: selective adoption of self-service stores and supermarkets in Britain 1950-1970
E-mail: c/o A.Alexander@surrey.ac.uk

This paper focuses on consumer attitudes and behaviours toward the supermarket, and self-service retailing more generally, in post-war Britain (1950-1970). A number of cultural histories of consumption have increased our general understanding of the impact of the supermarket in Britain (see for instance Bowlby, 2000; Humphrey, 1998), but there remain insufficient studies that explore in detail the dynamics of consumer reactions to these retail innovations over time. The current paper considers consumers’ attitudes and behaviours toward the purchase of fresh meat and greengrocery products by self-service methods. Findings from a series of contemporaneous market research surveys and the magazines of local consumer groups are presented to illustrate patterns of shopping behaviour. Explanation for the patterns identified is sought with particular reference to two concepts from the retail management and consumer behaviour literatures. Firstly, ideas relating to the selective adoption of international retail formats by consumers in developing markets. Secondly, the notion of consumers’ perceived risk in store selection.

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Advertising historians too often only consider published advertising in their final form. As with other documents, however, information about how these are produced should be taken into account when assessing their value as sources for knowledge about the past. In the case of PKZ, a Swiss clothes manufacturer and retailer, detailed documents, ranging from advertising concepts to reactions from clients, allow for a critical analysis of the production process of the advertisement. With this material, the different interests of the management, its advertising bureau, and the recipients of the advertising, can be examined. In the interwar period, PKZ was renowned for its well-designed posters, but experimented with new advertising tools to broaden its customer base, from an exclusive upper-class clientele to the everyman. This materialised in several attempts to popularise the brand, with mixed success. The company gradually shifted its attention to the use of spectacular concepts for its catalogue based on using their customer database for targeting, which cut mailing costs. Interestingly, both the manufacturing division and conservative consumers opposed the innovative concepts on several occasions.

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This paper will consider why some West End of London department stores failed during the post World War II period. Derry and Toms, Gamages, Gorringes, Marshall & Snelgrove, Robinson & Cleaver, Swan & Edgar and Whiteleys were some of the household names established in the nineteenth century that did not survive to the end of the twentieth. The mid-twentieth century may be seen as critical moment of transition in the history of consumption and for retailers and department stores in particular. Initially, stores had to deal with a post war situation created by shortages of goods and manpower and restrictive and administratively costly government economic strategies. By the 1960s, new markets were being discovered, and new forms of retailing being developed to attract those markets in competition with traditional retail outlets. This paper, which represents work in progress from the ESRC Cultures of Consumption ‘Shopping Routes’ research project, will consider how the economic circumstances and the iconic status of department stores changed alongside these processes. Focussing on the fate of one or two individual stores, the paper will attempt to explain why some stores and store groups were more successful than others in this new retail landscape.

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The consumer society as we know it grew out of post second world war austerity of the 1940s and 1950s.  Much of the UK and European manufacturing capacity which had been geared to the war effort between 1939 and 1945 had also been damaged by strategic wartime bombing.  Recovery after the cessation of hostilities was slow.  Shortages of skilled labour, energy and raw materials meant that the domestic consumer had to suffer rationing up to the mid 1950s.  Changing the manufacturing base from one geared to wartime needs to one that met the peacetime requirements of domestic consumption posed many difficulties. It was not until the 1960s that the consumer society started to develop with the emergence of the 'designer label', but by the late 1990s over production saw a global marketplace saturated with 'lifestyle products.' This paper analyses the ways in which design has been retailed since the end of the second world war and its influence on consumerism.  Using product examples from the domestic, automotive and fashion areas and high street, mail order and internet outlets, it traces the emergence of the 'designer label' and lifestyle products.'
When presented the paper will use slides and acetates of historic and contemporary material from the mail order sector.

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The aim of the paper is to synthesise thinking on traded goods and commodities with the concept of modernity as applicable to the so-called 'early-modern' period and the eighteenth century, the century that in received historiography is the bridge between the early modern and the modern period.
Modernity will be explored as a concept that defines in the human mind the transition, individually and collectively, from a past existence bound to certain traditions, practices and manifested in a certain range and arrangement of material objects to the future that will see a chance in these certainties.
Thesis: mobile and (re-)movable objects of the kind that usually forms the mainstay of retail trade, are the main object of acquisitions. They form part of the architectural devices at the disposal of most human beings to shape and structure their existence. In this thesis they will be treated as the building bricks to fashion and refashion the material structures (architecture) of the time. The answer and conclusion is in the affirmative.
The paper addresses these issues of interest:

• it addresses the still topical debate about what makes us a consuming animal;
• it addresses the problematic concept of 'modernity', with a view of integrating its underlying belief structures into theories about consumption and exchange;

• to investigate attitudes as reflected in diaries towards new and old
• to extract and compare advertising strategies discernible in the promotional literature

This paper focuses on the nexus between urban planning, architecture and shopping cultures in the post-war period as a part of a wider project which seeks to understand the development of London’s West End as a key location in metropolitan, national and global cultures of fashion consumption. Through analysis of a series of partially realised and unrealised ‘master-plans’ for the West End, the piecemeal rebuilding of shops, and the nature of new shopping cultures, the paper explores modern planning’s disquiet concerning the figure of the consumer in the city.
Attention is paid to attempts to radically rethink, and also regulate, the urban shopping experience in these plans, and to their implicit assumptions about proper forms of consumer behaviour.  In actuality the rebuilding of the West End’s established thoroughfares, such as Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street, was limited and piecemeal. ‘Swinging London’ of the mid-1960s provided alternative opportunities for transformation and reconfiguration, driven by a combination of entrepreneurial activity and new forms of consumer culture. Seen from this perspective, developments such as those in Carnaby Street (notably in the shops and workshops of the entrepreneur John Stephens) and the King’s Road, Chelsea provided a challenge to modern planning’s established models of ordered comprehensive spatial restructuring of shopping streets.  The paper concludes by looking forwards to renewed attempts to ‘master-plan’ the West End in the early twenty-first century.
The work is forms part of the Shopping Routes project based at the London College of Fashion and Royal Holloway, sponsored by the ESRC and AHRB in the Cultures of Consumption programme.

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Horses were the ‘internal combustion engine’ of the pre-mechanized England and, as such, were employed to carry out a wide range of tasks, some frivolous but most of them utilitarian. Hundreds of thousands of people depended upon them for their livelihood and it was important therefore that they could obtain suitable animals and ones that would provide good service. If they bought them from a dealer, however, they risked being palmed off with animals that were neither sound in wind or limb but which looked in good order at the point of sale. Indeed, contemporaries were loud in their condemnation of horse dealers, classing them as rogues and cheats and listing the various ploys they used to disguise defects in their broken-down jades. I have contended elsewhere that horse dealers were no better and no worse than other middlemen of the time but undoubtedly the profession had a long tail and the seamier side of the business is the subject of this paper.

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When studying the design history and consumption there is a tendency to end up specialising in one area. In my case it has been British ceramics - their trade and distribution. However, what one is not so aware of, until pointed out by other historians, is how far some trades were inter-connected. For instance, in the 1850s in Peterhead (north of Aberdeen), a Staffordshire warehouse sold china, earthenware and glass, and on occasion requested rags from hawkers. In places such as Kirkcaldy, Fife, the trade directories of the 1860s list individual dealers as 'China, Stoneware & Rag Merchants'. Why did this relationship exist between clothes and ceramics? How geographically widespread was it to link these trades? When did this tendency start?  Were other goods exchanged for ceramics? These are some of the questions that this paper will address, drawing on Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor of c1850 for background information, and possible explanations.

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Studies of early modern retailing and distribution tend to focus on only part of the process, looking at shops and their customers in isolation from wholesale distribution networks, or the material culture of consumers. Where retailing has been more firmly contextualised this is rarely done within a coherent spatial framework. Existing approaches thus provide limited scope for understanding the geographies of distribution in their full extent, since they examine only part of the supply chain. This paper seeks to address this problem by focusing not on the shopkeeper or his customers, but on the goods themselves. Such an approach allows networks of supply to be traced from the wholesaler to the final consumer, in this case using material from the archives of four Midlands tradesmen. The paper has three relatively limited aims. Firstly to explore whether supply chains varied for different types of commodity, specifically textiles, groceries and books. Any significant differences could suggest that these commodities were marketed to the consumer in different ways. Secondly to trace change over time in the nature and orientation of these distribution networks. Here emphasis will be on the relationship between supply chains and consumption practices. Could changes in consumer attitudes help reshape the distribution network, and conversely did innovations in distribution have an impact on consumption? Thirdly the paper examines the importance of information flows in shaping networks of supply, looking at the various means whereby knowledge might be transmitted along the commodity chain. Particular attention is devoted to three possible conduits for information; advertisements, letters and personal contact.

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Woolworths has had a significant impact on British retailing. It introduced the 'penny, threepenny, and sixpenny bazaar' and the chain store concept to Britain before World War I. The company was one of the first to deal directly with suppliers bypassing wholesalers. The British subsidiary also became one of Britain's first multinational retailers. In the early post-World War II period Woolworths pioneered self-service in variety part of the retail sector. However, from the 1960s the company lost its momentum. It was no longer able to transplant American retailing innovations successfully to Britain. In 1968 Woolworths lost its place as Britain's leading retailer to Marks & Spencer. This paper will analyse why Woolworths was a successful innovator until the 1960s and why it ceased to be afterwards.

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The 1974’s fusion of GB-Entreprises and INNO-BM is of particular significance to the contemporary history of the Belgian retailing. It opened a new chapter in the history of retailing because it represented the symbolic decline of the two oldest department stores l’Innovation and Au Bon Marché.
 The stores had already decided, in 1969, to work together in a new structure INNO-BM but five years later it became necessary to go one step further. The department stores failed to maintain their position as market leaders and INNO-BM decided to link its future with the supermarkets of GB-Entreprises who
had had in the last years an impressive development: increasing turnover, construction of new stores…. It was an interesting marriage between two forms of retailing: the traditional urban department stores and the new suburban supermarkets. GB-INNO-BM became with Delhaize-Le Lion one of the two leaders in
the Belgian retailing sector.
The paper examines the reasons and the consequences of the big fusion. It primarily focuses on the way the heads of the two companies prepared and decided the fusion but it tries also to explain why the fusion was necessary for the two partners. Secondly, the paper presents the consequences of the
fusion on the management of the new company and what it means for the senior executives. Finally it shows that in Belgium the big fusion marks the final victory of the supermarkets on the department stores.

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The book trade, religion and politics were indissolubly linked in Restoration England. As such, the presence of printed court sermons ensured that the chapel royal and the activities therein were highly public and politicised. Just as the early-modern court was the theatre of dynastic activity and monarchical performance, so the king’s religious life was acted out in the chapel royal.
Approximately one-hundred court sermons were published individually in the reign of Charles II, many by royal command, offering insights into a number of facets of court life and Restoration politics. This was a crucial mechanism by which debates concerning Nonconformity, Catholicism, morality and notions of honour were transmitted from the political centre. As such, they constituted one element of the Restoration court’s conscious propaganda campaign which aimed at the rehabilitation of the image of the Stuart dynasty following the civil wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate. The court, whose sexual proclivities and dubious religious allegiance were notorious, was seen to be morally and religiously counselled.
In this sense, booksellers were at the frontier between the Charles II and his subjects. The print trade provided a medium for the discussion of the politics, conflicts and pains of the Stuart Restoration.

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This paper explores the distribution and consumption of used clothing between about 1660 and 1830, focusing specifically on urban areas in northern England. These regions were distant enough from London to flourish independently of the dominance of the large Metropolitan second-hand market and could thus make a particular contribution to the trade in clothing at the base of the retail ladder. By investigating disparate sources such as criminal records, town directories, local newspapers, inventories, letters and diaries, it becomes apparent that dealers in second-hand garments traded in a far more extensive and sophisticated manner than has generally been acknowledged. Wearing apparel was both expensive and sought-after, and its commercial recycling was established in many northern English towns from the seventeenth century. During the period of the long eighteenth century, this trade in second-hand clothing was increasingly regulated and standardised, resulting in a decided gender shift away from informal female dealers towards shop-based male pawnbrokers and clothes brokers.

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This paper examines the development and characteristic of the retailing and distribution system in the argentinean pampas at the turn of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth-century. It analyses the ways in which rural merchants responded and adapted to the problems and opportunities generated by economic and urban growth as well as the impact of branding and advertising on retailers. The period of study covers since the conformation of the merchant sector in a settlement economy until the decline of country general stores (called in Argentina "almacenes de ramos generales") during the 1930s, the very truly crisis years.
The study of rural retailing is an underdeveloped academic area in Argentina, partly because of the scarcity of primary sources and partly because the rural merchants have been relegated to a supporting role. The possibility of working with account books and commercial letters from several cases of retailers as well as periodicals, archives of public notaries and court files have allowed to carry out an empirical study of the retail sector in the Argentinean pampas during the export boom.

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The provincial book trades grew rapidly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much scholarly attention has been focused on developments in provincial printing and publishing, as well as links to the London booksellers. The trade in second-hand books has largely been ignored. Booksellers' advertisements and catalogues, however, imply that this was a core part of the business of many of them. Looking mainly at the north midlands, this paper will offer an overview of the expansion of the bookselling trades in the period.  It will consider the various ways in which readers gained access to books - for example libraries, general retailers and specialist retailers. It will then examine growing
specialisation in the book trades and try to assess the role of the second-hand trade. Questions to be considered include any distinction between "old books" in general and antiquarian books having substantial value; and whether there is any indication of the second-hand trade becoming distinct from the trade in new books.

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The late 1950s and early 1960s witnessed substantial changes to the pattern and modes of retailing in the UK. The growth of self-service stores, supermarkets, and mail order had seemingly put pressure upon small retailers in particular. Many of these traders were explicitly committed to the preservation of the system of resale price maintenance (rpm), which they believed protected their profit margins and allowed them to compete with the burgeoning large multiples. Between 1959 and 1963, however, an explosion in popularity of gift or trading coupons such as Green Shield Stamps threatened to undermine rpm. The supply of stamps was perceived as a method of passing on deferred discounts and unfairly circumventing manufacturers’ price maintenance conditions. In 1964, as shopkeepers’ anxiety about trading stamps spilled over into intense lobbying for their prohibition, the Government unexpectedly announced that it would abolish rpm outright. As small shopkeepers were believed (by politicians at least) to be unusually pro-Conservative, this declaration, coming in an election year, was considered to be especially shocking. It became the catalyst for a substantial rebellion within the Tory Party and had severe consequences for Conservative electoral strategy. This paper uses state, party, and trade association archival records to examine the furore caused by twin issues of gift stamps and rpm in this final year of Conservative rule. It argues that the eventual resolution of the two questions delivered considerable modifications to the structure of the distributive industries in Britain, reinforced the trend towards a value-for-money consumer agenda (causing changes in retail marketing and levels of after-sales service), raised the profile of competition policy, and had a marked effect both on the manner in which the Conservatives fought the 1964 election and upon subsequent development of party economic policy.

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The development of a highly integrated world economy, the development of transnational corporations and the creation of global branding have all added to the impression of a world dominated by uniformity and homogeneity. Indeed, the rise of an anti-capitalist movement on a world scale indicates not only that production, distribution and retailing have become globalised but so to have reactions to it.
Globalisation and branding have become one of the major features within the development of modern retailing. Whether it is McDonald’s in fast-food, GAP or Nike in casual clothing or Walmart/ASDA in food, and increasingly non-food, retailing the growth of the global corporation is understood as one of the defining features of contemporary retailing.
The theories developed to explain these processes revolve around the importance played by competitive pressures, investment in organisational capabilities and managerial expertise, and the creation of sustainable competitive advantage through the implementation of strategic planning by these organisations. As such, therefore, the growth of big business is understood to be the result of market signals to which, more or less, dynamic firms have responded in an entrepreneurial way to new opportunities.
While contemporary retailing in the United States and United Kingdom, at first glance, certainly looks remarkably similar, characterised by concentration and large-scale retailing organisations, the evolution of these characteristics highlights a series of problems for the theories developed to explain this evolution. This paper undertakes of comparative study of the growth of large-scale retailing in the US and UK. The study highlights the rise of department store and mail order retailing, as early forms of large-scale retailing in both countries, and focuses specifically upon chain store (or multiple in the UK terminology) retailing in the US and UK. It highlights the different patterns of development in the transition from small-scale independent retailing to large-scale retailing. In particular the paper highlights the differing environmental conditions under which large-scale multiple retailing organisations emerged and focuses upon the contradictory role played by competition, collusion and government regulation in this growth. The paper concludes by examining the wider issues of competition and power in the development of large-scale retailing. The paper examines, first, the historical development of retailing within the US and UK from 1850s to the 1960s. This is followed by a look at the theories of retail development and in particular an examination of the role played by government in regulating price competition. While the US saw resale price maintenance spread through the introduction of both state and federal ‘fair trade’ legislation the UK experience was one of resale price maintenance becoming contract law until it was made illegal in 1965. The paper concludes with a re-assessment of the explanation of the rise of large-scale retailing organisations in the US and UK.
  I am grateful to the Carnegie Trust for Scottish Universities and the University of Dundee Research Initiatives Fund for financial support in the preparation of this paper and the archivists at the Hagley, Baker and Mitchell Libraries for their assistance. All errors are the responsibility of the author.

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In the study of retailing, historical or current, it is often the case that successful firms form the focus of much deliberation. Yet historical considerations of less successful or ‘failed’ retail firms can provide salient lessons for businesses operating today. Adopting a business historiographical approach, this paper considers a ‘failed’ retail firm, A Goldberg and Sons plc, which, prior to its demise in 1990, had grown from a single Glasgow store in 1908 to a chain of over 100 stores. Drawing on annual reports, interviews with former directors, and the contents of a company archive held at the University of Glasgow, the paper provides evidence of the key factors and decisions that led to the firm’s ‘failure’. It is shown that, despite expanding successfully throughout the 1970s and 1980s, various internal and external pressures, including over-expansion into new retail space and the general economic downturn, effected Goldbergs’ ‘failure’. In conclusion, greater engagement with the historical nuances of unsuccessful retail firms is suggested, in order to generate greater understanding of this key topic.

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The presentation and display of merchandise has always been a significant element of retail trading; particularly its development into the window display from the establishment of a mass market of fixed shops in the nineteenth century.
In the early twentieth century the skills of merchandise handling and visual presentation, became a skilled category of retail work. The opening of Selfridges, London in 1909 and the spectacular windows created by EN Goldsman, Selfridges first display manager, lately of Marshall field, set standards for creativity and attraction, which redefined the significance of the window display to stimulate and create sales.
The focus of this paper is the development of window display activity in the reestablishment of retail trading in Britain in the post-war period of the 1950s. Many factors joined together to create a ‘moment’ where the concept of the window display as an authoritative means of communication to attract, inform, communicate and express ideas, about the products retailers presented, found its niche. Shops strived to meet the demands of consumers starved of fashion and other products by the war, but were limited by environments which were still old and in need of refurbishment. Materials for building were limited, and the window display was the simplest and most economic means of providing continually changing presentations of products and ideas to stimulate and draw in consumers.
As many retailers particularly the chain groups and department stores sought to come to grips with their existing building structures, new and modernised businesses began to experiment with the architecture of modernism and self-service. The ‘theatre’ of display and its vocabulary was developing from limited resources. What was lacking in materials, was made up for in the high standard of ingenuity and creativity, developed by the display artists and display teams of the period. Examples for the paper are drawn from Display Magazine, the trade paper of the display, signwriting and exhibition industries.
This period of creative flowering of imagination and ideas was a direct response to post-war shortages and limited resources, but was a relatively brief period of significance. New shops and new theories of trading began to redefine standards of retail practice, and in the 1960’s this was further compounded by the impact of the ‘youth generation’ with demands for new products and the environments and images with which to present them. Whilst the concept and value of the window display continued to support retail trading, its unique position in the 1950s had been redefined by these events.

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Purchasing furniture second hand has obvious financial benefits and it is usually dismissed as an economic necessity for the poor rather than a legitimate means of acquiring household furnishings by better off consumers. However, such a reaction ignores the range of methods of retailing such goods and the varied quality of the goods themselves. Both point to consumers of all classes being involved in the purchase of second-hand furniture. This paper will outline the retailing methods and their relative status, and then use this as a starting point for exploring whether purchasing 'used' furniture was a satisfactory method of adding style, quality and status to the homes of consumers.

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This paper will examine an aspect of the business of the department store in Paris during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: its concern with acquiring, renting and expanding its property. The buildings themselves prove that the acquisition of a complete city plot was an early ambition for many of the stores, but my research has shown that the achievement of a monumental building required foresight, determination and considerable patience, most taking years to reach their intended size. By describing some of the glimpses of the acquisition process afforded by the surviving evidence, I hope to show some of the difficulties that were involved and overcome, and to convey an understanding of the vital importance that department store owners and managers attached to the acquisition of space within the city. In some cases, the process was relatively straightforward – the Bon Marché, for example, acquiring a readily-available plot at will; in other cases, sensitive issues were involved, as in the case of the Samaritaine, which required the relocation of a school and the absorption of a public street. Finally, I will also briefly consider the problems of renting property, and the negotiation of building regulations – the latter surprisingly significant in the department store’s exploitation of space in Paris. The conclusion that must be drawn is that both the architecture and the commercial success of the department store depended on its ability to purchase and grow, through the strategic negotiation of property.

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The Jewish immigrant community was unable to conduct legitimate retail trade in London before 1830, so many were obliged to set up light manufacturing businesses especially in clothing. These tailoring skills in many cases were already well developed as they had been debarred from other professions in their indigenous countries. Much of these tailoring trades were carried out as ‘sweated labour’ where migrants would work, eat and sleep in the same cramped conditions for up 18 hours per day.  ‘Sweating’ has its origins in the parceling out of work by the employer to the journeyman tailor, who would make the garments commissioned with his family. This ‘sweating’ system has now become the byword for all global manufacturing that takes place in poor working conditions with pay below the minimum wage.
When Isaac Singer built the first commercially successful sewing machine in the late 1850’s this gave birth to small home-worker fashion factories.  Despite the often appalling working environments by 1888 there were over 1,000 tailoring workshops in the East End of London. Tailoring was the main Jewish male occupation in London and other northern cities and after the First World War Sir Montague Burton built up the largest tailoring business in the world. He pioneered new manufacturing techniques and menswear ready-made clothing stores.
Elizabeth Wilson claims in Adorned in Dreams that ‘From among such immigrants to Britain and the United States came many of the innovators and important figures of the twentieth-century clothing Industry.’
This paper charts the history of the poor Jewish immigrant ‘sweaters’ of the 19th century through to the highly successful Burtons’ high street fashion stores.

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'Nearly everybody working class dealt with the Co-op.' So said in interview a Burton upon Trent man. Though Burton was famous for its breweries, this interviewee also said: "When I left school there was only two jobs in the town any good - the railway and the Co-op." The interviewee indeed went to work for the Co-op after leaving school in 1934. The Co-operative Society, then, was well placed to respond to the challenge of shortages and rationing in a world war. In Burton the Co-op was number one retailer in terms of branches, and prized as an employer that gave staff and customers a good deal. Customers enjoyed a dividend ('divvy') on purchases; a daily necessity, bread, was delivered to the door; and the Co-op as a movement and in terms of particular services (such as boot repairing) was in tune with a practical, frugal working-class culture of making things last and making do. However, like all retailers, the Co-op had to overcome labour shortages - boys replacing adult men on the bread delivery rounds, for example. A retailer had to keep customers satisfied in a bureaucratic rationing system,  that meant queues and items running short. It was imperative that staff did not show obvious favouritism to some customers, or carry out frauds. Nor, in peace as in war, could the Co-op take its customers for granted.
Oral history alone can answer intimate questions of work routines, and how staff got on with customers; the reasons (or lack of them) behind shoppers' choices; and how shopping fitted into a householder's routine of making ends meet. Oral history has limits in that after 60 years only the youngest wartime generations are available for interview; and oral history has little to say about business economics, such as the Co-op's economies of scale.

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This paper searches for the various ways in which the advertising profession found itself represented in English fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. Since the turn of the last century, but even more so after World War I, the advertising industry fascinated public imagination as a glamorous industry of want-makers, were people with little technical or professional training but rich suggestive and artistic abilities could make vast sums of money within a short amount of time.
Thus, the advertising agencies as well as the world of advertising in general figured in a number of crime stories by Dorothy L. Sayers ("Murder must advertise") or Agatha Christie, whose middle-class fiends often used advertisements to lure their unknowing victims to dangerous places ("The Mousetrap", "A murder is announced"). In other literary accounts the advertising agency is exposed as the place where the lowest instincts rule and the commoditisation of language and art is masterminded, such as in George Orwell ("Keep the Aspidistra flying") or – though not an Englishman – James Joyce ("Ulysses", where Bloom is an advertising man). The widely shared suspicion of the English cultural elite against advertising and any form of propaganda also showed vibrantly in short-stories by acclaimed writers such as P. G. Wodehouse or J. B. Priestley, whose fierce and politicised anti-Americanism took issues especially with the advertising industry of post-war Britain.
The paper attempts to make an assessment as to how far this fictional literature can be used as sources for a social and cultural history of advertising in early twentieth-century Britain. In this respect, some of the aforementioned stories will be screened for clues which might reveal insights into the everyday life experiences of advertising professionals in the interwar years. But apart from that, these stories and novels must also be interpreted as elaborated verdicts written by people who themselves, like Sayers, had to work in advertising in order to make ends meet. Thus, as much as these stories might tell about the realities of advertising itself, they must also be cautiously read as part of the image strategy of a literary elite, which saw itself in the role of having to preserve "Englishness" and "culture" against marketing and entertainment.

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This paper attempts to look through the department store window in Haussmannized Paris and to explore the historical and gendered modes of consumption represented in Emile Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Au Bonheur des dames (1883) and in a series of still-life paintings produced by Gustave Caillebotte in the early 1880s,  especially Veau à l’étal and Tête de veau et langue de boeuf. This will allow me to argue that the ‘panoramic gaze’ associated with the institutionalised spaces of the new urban regime is an oversimplification.
The new social practice of window-shopping, regarded by many cultural historians as a key activity of the flâneur (Huart, 1841; Benjamin, various), equally became the preserve of the middle-class woman.  An analysis of ‘male’ and ‘female’ modes of visual consumption (using the two Zola texts as paradigms of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Paris, the public and private spheres and gendered ways of looking), depended on a crude Cartesianism, regarded as crucial to modernist subjectivity (Huyssen, 1986).  In particular, the ‘panoramic gaze’ of the all-consuming eye, conventionally coded as male, is dependent on looking through a ‘window’ to the outside, where the frame surrounds and gives meaning / context to the objects contained within it (cf Foucault, 1975). With shop windows, the viewer is always outside looking in on a much tighter, somatic space.  Within the context of the department store, looking for women becomes a libidinal activity.  The shop window, as represented by Caillebotte, does not invite an ocular penetration but celebrates corporeality both in the ‘feminised’ subject-matter of Veau à l’étal and the phallic tongue of the langue de boeuf, and equally in their formal arrangements.

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Networks were central to many aspects of retail distribution in early modern England. We can identify material networks in the flow of goods from producer or merchant to retailer, and from retailer to customer. Transport networks were used to move these goods across space, whilst credit networks served to lubricate exchange and cemented relationships of trust and obligation, and information networks carried intelligence on the latest fashions or designs in letters and pattern books. We can even envisage virtual networks, created through advertising in newspapers and trade cards, and linking the retailer to a wide potential customer base. Less well understood, but no less important, were the personal networks that served to articulate these more overtly commercial linkages. Recent work in business history has sought to understand the nature and importance of these personal networks through a so-called ‘new institutionalist’ perspective. This views networks as important economic structures, intermediate between the market and the firm, vital in establishing and maintaining trust and reputation.
Yet all of these perspectives view networks as social constructions. Little consideration is given to how networks and the interaction that they comprised were shaped by space. This links to a wider neglect of the spatial nature of retailing: that shops were ranged along streets in a particular sequence and that shoppers moved along these streets and between these shops, creating their own retail spaces as they went. Part of the reason for this neglect is that, prior to the nineteenth century, there are few records that give us clear insights into the micro-geography of urban retailing or the spatial composition of retailers’ personal networks.
In this paper, we draw on a unique shop-by-shop listing of the principal retail street in Chester – a county town in north-west England. We use this to reconstruct the micro-geography of retailing in the mid-eighteenth century and as a springboard to investigate the spatiality of the personal networks that enmeshed these retailers. Using nominal record linkage, we investigate the spatial and social patterns of their networks. For example, who did they name as friends or business partners; who did they marry or apprentice, and with whom did they share civic office? Our analysis seeks to explore the extent to which they formed a ‘settled little society of trading people’ and the ways in which they were linked to other retailers elsewhere in the town and the country. Ultimately, we hope to shed some light on the way in which this networking activity not only reflected socio-spatial interaction, but in turn served to cement social and spatial identity as Chester shopkeepers.

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Much work has recently been undertaken on the retailing and consumption of the luxuries and semi-luxuries that helped to define Addisonian notions of polite society. A burgeoning literature has begun to explore the supposedly dark and primitive world of eighteenth-century shopping
to reveal a complex and highly sophisticated set of practices which served to bring together goods and consumers in a range of retail environments. Of second-hand retailers, goods and customers, however, we know relatively little. A number of key studies were conducted in the 1990s, but the interest was not sustained and, more problematically, the coverage was sectorally very uneven. For clothing, we have been well served by the work of Lemire, Styles and others; for furniture, household goods and books, we are often dependent on analyses that appear as part of research following a different agenda; and for many other goods, including carriages, there appears to be a total blank. More importantly, there has been little attempt to consider the economic, social and cultural underpinnings of second-hand consumption in general or to explore common themes in the structure and operation of the varied branches of the second-hand trade. The subject has seemingly been pushed to the academic margins, just as its spaces and practices apparently lay at the geographical and economic margins of the (urban)
economy. This session brings together important new research on the retailing and consumption of a range of second-hand goods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By juxtaposing studies of the buying and selling of used clothing, furniture and books, the aim is: (i) to highlight the commonalities and differences between the structure and operation of these various lines of business; and (ii) to explore the ways in which the motivations to buy, and the socio-cultural meanings of buying, second-hand varied between these goods.

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This paper considers whether ‘leisure’ is a valuable term to be applied to the practice of shopping in the early-modern period. By using letters, travel accounts, city guides and journal articles, the paper examines how shopping was presented, and concludes that shopping itself was not an activity which was perceived socially or culturally as a leisure activity, nor considered as wasteful in itself. It was not labelled as a ‘diversion’ or as a ‘vice’, and novels presented shops as havens of safety for women out on the street. Despite contemporary anxieties about desire, even satirical texts were anxious not to condemn shopping itself and focused their criticism on impolite behaviour in shops and time wasting. Diaries and shopping lists reveal that shopping, while it might have had a pleasurable aspect to it, was most often viewed as a matter of accomplishing a task. The term ‘business’ was often used to encapsulate the activity, and shopping carried with it the sense of productive achievement. These findings challenge the application of the Modernist dichotomy of work and leisure to shopping, and help us to understand better the rise of consumption in the early-modern period in the face of the luxury debate.

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This paper will present findings from a project funded within the ESRC/AHRB 'Cultures of Consumption' research programme.  The work focuses on the functions of an innovatory body founded in 1944 by the British Board of Trade.  The 'Council of Industrial Design' had a wide-ranging brief, supported by a government grant, and much of it aimed at increasing design awareness among British industrialists.  However it also sought to raise design consciousness among the British buying public, partly as a mechanism to ensure a ready market for the products of a revitalised manufacturing sector, but also because it averred a genuine belief in the power of well-designed objects to improve all aspects of everyday life. Retailers and retail spaces played a vital part in the mediation of the Council's message, and this relationship was assiduously cultivated. Through its activities (product approval, labelling, in-store displays, the dissemination of texts), the Council attempted to influence patterns of consumption, but simultaneously offered a measure of consumer education and protection, something that was still a rarity in this period.  Whether the criteria on which products were evaluated were the most helpful to the ordinary shopper, is however questionable.  The paper examines the ambitions and weaknesses of Council strategy.

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Based on primary sources including an account book, photographs, a scrapbook, personal interviews, and family traditions, this paper describes the owners and opeartions of a small bookstore in Chicago from 1938 until 1947. The store's history will be positioned within the larger environment of the Great Depression and World War II, as well as within the more immediate social milieu of its neighbourhood and customers. The investigation will also consider four different lines of merchandise sold by the store: books and magazines, model kits, greeting cards, and film, camera supplies, and photo-finishing. The paper consludes with a brief epilogue and plans for additional research.

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Page modified: January 2005
Author: Laura Ugolini