Behind the Counter

Shop Lives from Market Stall to Supermarket

Pamela Horn

• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781445646985
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Behind the Counter reveals the largely hidden personal stories of shopworkers. Corner shops, 'high-class' grocers, dress shops and department stores are brought to life through letters, records and the workers' own diaries and memoirs.For the most part, shopworkers were expected to work extremely long hours, to be obedient and subservient, and even to 'live in' as if they were domestic servants. Shop life was not easy, even in the twentieth century. Although the trade union movement, the co-operative movement and the concerns of some enlightened employers made life a good deal better for workers, they remain among the lowest paid even today.Their history, spiced with personal anecdotes and everyday humour, provides a fascinating and lively insight into social change and working conditions. It is also a telling portrait of our changing relationship with shopping as it becomes less a service industry than a branch of the entertainment world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 - Outside the Shop: Market Traders and Travelling Salesmen
• 2 - Setting up Shop
• 3 - Co-operative Stores and Multiple Retailers Before 1914
• 4 - From Draper’s Shop to Department Store 1820–1914
• 5 - Lawbreaking and Labour Relations
• 6 - Leisure Pursuits and Communal Activities
• 7 - The First World War and Its Aftermath
• 8 - From the Second World War to the ‘Swinging Sixties’
• Notes
• Bibliography