How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

Andrew Warnes

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780520295285
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520968097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Picture a familiar scene: long lines of shoppers waiting to check out at the grocery store, carts filled to the brim with the week's food. While many might wonder what is in each cart, Andrew Warnes implores us to consider the symbolism of the cart itself. In his inventive new book, Warnes examines how the everyday shopping cart is connected to a complex web of food production and consumption that has spread from the United States throughout the world. Today, shopping carts represent choice and autonomy for consumers, a recognizable American way of life that has become a global phenomenon. This succinct and and accessible book provides an excellent overview of consumerism and the globalization of American culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Inside Views

The invention of the supermarket cart is on one level basic: a simple story of how modern factories took a prehistoric technology and recast it in steel, producing horizontal rows of simple machines which gave shoppers free rein in the new self-service grocery stores of twentieth-century American life. Alterations in store design over the course of the 1910s and 1920s increasingly allowed customers to shop for themselves, inviting them to pick up branded bottles, boxes, cans, and jars which they would previously have asked for at the counter. As self-service thus “revolutionized the grocery industry,” customers needed something large enough to carry all their self-selected items around in—and shopkeepers, fearing a reported rise in shoplifting, needed to ensure that whatever this “thing” was, they could still see into it.¹ At first, as we will see, many food stores responded to these two needs by providing their customers with trays and open baskets. Little by little, however, after the rise of mass car ownership over the 1920s, they began to realize that such modest receptacles were insufficient. Middle-class Americans were now beginning to drive anywhere and everywhere they could—and as their cars came to feature integrated storage compartments, this increasingly included shopping for all the food they needed. As “Car Country quickly became the nation’s signature landscape,” in the words of Christopher W. Wells, so self-service grocery stores gradually began to consider an in-store response, namely, how to enlarge the transparent cavities that they handed to customers while ensuring they did not become too heavy to carry around.² Cars, sprouting trunks, at length meant that baskets sprouted castors, creating an obvious mechanical expedient—a cart—that for the first time allowed customers to fill their trunks and indeed their kitchen cupboards and fridges with enough food to last a week. Unpowered wheels, a simple mechanical advantage known to Neolithic humankind, helped American shoppers to choose their own personal share of the stunning plenitude which other, far more sophisticated networks of agroindustrial production and distribution had deposited in their local grocery store.

The sheer simplicity of these circumstances explains why supermarket carts remain unsung. For many, as I say, these boxes on wheels often do seem lacking in innovation, so much a child of necessity that to speak of them being invented always risks aggrandizing their development. In what follows I will make a case against such skepticism. Later, when I focus on the prototypes which Sylvan N. Goldman, Fred W. Young, and Orla E. Watson developed during the 1930s, I aim to emphasize the ingenuity, the ergonomics or fidelity to human scale, and the long-lasting influence of their work so as to show that these men were nothing if not inventors. But I also accept some of the skepticism that has surrounded their designs, and I do so on the grounds that their somewhat independent inventions were a little late to arrive, adding wheels to baskets and thus “completing” self-service culture decades after its initial emergence. The reasons for the delays in the cart’s arrival, as we will see, are as interesting as those behind its eventual invention.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century it became clear that many of the traditional operations of main-street shopping were a source of dissatisfaction for customers and proprietors alike. Novels from a range of different traditions in this period begin to present the old business of ordering your daily needs over a succession of shop counters as a process full of awkward scrutiny and often painful social mediation. All sorts of late-Victorian creatures slope away from these counters in a state of distress, shamed by the exposure of their domestic vices, their need for credit, their hunger, or their inability to afford goods to match the respectability of their speech, manners, or dress. Shopkeepers everywhere thus acquire something of the piercing authority Gustav Flaubert laid bare in his portrait of Artemise Homais, the pompous chemist of Madame Bovary (1856). Later novels of urban or industrial life echo the proprietorial power that Homais displays as he clings to the apothecarial scales on his counter—scales Flaubert likens to those above Yonville’s court building—and watches over provincial life like “the goldfinch in the wicker cage above his head.”³ In the old Whitby remembered in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1860), for example, the staff of a grocery store all but control their customers, providing them with a “primitive bank,” extending or withholding credit, and enthusiastically telling them what they can and cannot afford.⁴ It is in American novels, however, from about 1890 onward, that these shopkeepers and their clerks, with their classificatory glances and knowing questions, most often find themselves in competition with new, less interpersonal modes of urban shopping.⁵ Questions fired over old Victorian counters can still probe and discomfort in the work of Theodore Dreiser, for example. Clerks, in control of money, can talk about it in a way that lets them see through formal dress or demure speech to “reveal” the low station of a given hero. Particularly in Sister Carrie (1900), however, these inquisitorial shopworkers are also being superseded by the alternatives they shape, the department stores that take a step back from their shoppers, leave them to their own devices, and let them stroll among commodities whose prices are fixed and apparent for all to see. Upon walking into The Fair—a particularly “handsome, bustling, successful affair” in downtown Chicago—Caroline Meeber soon forgets she is looking for work. Instead she becomes lost in her newfound capacity to

pass along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase. She was a work seeker, an outcast without employment, one whom the average employee could tell at a glance was poor and in need of a situation.⁶

Many have agreed that this is an encounter of some note. In Rachel Bowlby’s classic study Just Looking (1985), for example, Carrie’s passionate longing for the items in front of her becomes leading literary proof of a new “division” between the “access to view and access to possession” which Bowlby discerns in the plateglass windows and other commodity displays of late-Victorian life.⁷ It seems worth noting, however, that whereas Just Looking thus fits the passage into an argument about how that metropolitan scene transformed “merchandise into a spectacle,” focusing on what Anne Friedberg has called “the indirect desire to possess and incorporate through the eye,” the passage itself steps beyond this visual paradigm.⁸ Glass, the “transparent substance” and “barrier” at the heart of Bowlby’s history, in fact vanishes from this moment of Sister Carrie, overtaken by a flurry of tactile formulations.⁹ Could not help feeling, all touched her, she felt keenly: Dreiser’s language dovetails a great deal more with newspaper reports of the period, echoing their interest in the department store’s policy of leaving even expensive stock “lying out invitingly on a counter or showcase” or some other surface in easy reach of clientele.¹⁰ “Each individuated object” on sale here might gain a new and “sensuous appeal,” as Bill Brown has suggested.¹¹ But it is important to emphasize that they do so because Dreiser’s hero, unlike her immediate Victorian predecessors, can now move among them, even discreetly touching some in the manner of one who has stepped through the window and entered the display itself.

All the while Dreiser remains wary of the “democratization of luxury” and other “puffery” by which the department stores of the period often promoted their offerings to customers.¹² “Beauty” may well “speak . . . for itself” here, to paraphrase the title of a later chapter in his novel.¹³ But what it says is not exactly liberating. The articulate “beauty” of each “valuable” instead reaches deep inside, drawing out of customers a commodity desire that leaves them indifferent to those around them. Rich women “brush . . . past” Carrie “in utter disregard of her presence,” allowing their own spending power to “enlist” them “in the materials which the store contained.”¹⁴ Sister Carrie treats the department store as a new kind of space, full of atomizing passions, where interhuman relations cede ground to a new communion between shoppers and the objects of their desire.¹⁵

Desire mesmerizes Carrie too. As a modernizing process here pushes staff to the edge of the store, requiring them to stand back and second-guess a relationship between the consumer and the consumer item that now takes center stage, she is left all but alone to explore these luxury goods for herself. In consequence she gets a taste of what Richard Longstreth has called the “unencumbered” and “nondirectional” mobility which would henceforth characterize American and Americanized shopping, and as she does so she struggles to believe that “patrons” here “may go anywhere in any sequence as often as they choose.”¹⁶ Her doubts, however, do not dissuade her from availing herself of these new freedoms. Glances from the “shopgirls” lurking behind the luxury displays do still cause her unease. Dreiser shows that the new organization of commercial space has actually allowed them more scope to stare and assess her “true” status. But he also implies that any disapproval which might now emanate from them can only confirm, can only echo a message Carrie has heard first from the goods themselves. The valuables themselves, overpriced and still a little frightening to touch, have already told her that they are “not . . . in the range of her purchase.”

There is no need for Dreiser to add “yet” to his phrase. The scene itself makes clear that the clerkly sneers and refusals which had once unmasked social impostors, exposing low birth or the stain of poverty, no longer carry the force of a permanent judgment. Carrie instead discovers, in the daunting price of each “valuable,” not an eternal prohibition but a negotiable barrier, a challenge which seems only for the time being to prevent her from possessing goods already in her reach. Being so close to the goods, it seems, helps her imagine a way out of her present status as an “outcast,” and to experience the “sensuous” encounters of a future version of herself that can actually possess or “own” such surrounding items. Close at hand, she thus experiences these “things” not as forbidden objects from an untouchable sphere, but as grabbable items which swoop near and spin off, arcing toward and then away from her, teasing her in a series of elliptical orbits. And as they thus tantalize her, inviting and refusing forms of touch redolent of ownership itself, they offer Carrie an object lesson in the “perpetual desire[s]” which Walter Benn Michaels has suggested form the basis for a new economy in the novel.¹⁷ They recast price as a barrier between her and her desire; they broaden their appeal to her beyond the visual realm; and then they rehearse possession itself, allowing her to brush against them as if they were already hers. The goods in the department store indeed say a lot; but what they tell Carrie above all is how to shop in the new century.

CHAPTER TWO

Aristocratic Baskets

It is no surprise that in the decades that followed Sister Carrie’s publication, the direct encounters with consumer goods at times available in fin de siècle department stores began to spread into other shops and services. The tentative steps such stores had taken toward the coming world of self-service made a great deal of commercial sense. It allowed them, in the words of the slogans that the Alpha Beta stores circulated in 1910s Los Angeles, to “Pile the goods high,” “sell them cheap,” and “Let the buyer do the work.”¹ Opening up their shop displays to customers also allowed them to look ahead to the more “haptic” or multisensory encounters with commodities that would become a commonplace of shopping over the following decades. In the process, as Longstreth comments, they gave a glimpse into an approaching world where those with money could choose “without feeling obliged to buy, without feeling pressure to select quickly, without feeling embarrassed about ignorance of details or about rummaging through an assortment of goods, and without having to wait for service.”² And as Sister Carrie in effect adds, opening stores up for customers also allowed those who did not have such disposable income to imagine their way into future or alternative identities which did, bringing into their multisensory orbits, too, luxury items once forbidden or out of reach. It is no coincidence that forms of personal credit were at the time undergoing significant reorganization and expansion, becoming far less local or ad hoc and far more a source of profit to a modernizing banking sector. As “instalment credit and legalized personal loans” became available for the first time, the prospect of a direct sensory encounter with consumer goods ensured that the fall in sales some feared would result from the move toward self-service never came to pass.³ Sensual proximity to desirable items would in time prove more than a match for any upselling or other acts of persuasion that could be carried out by the shop clerks associated with the previous commercial formation.

Most US store owners in the 1910s and 1920s found the optimized psychological capacities of self-service a lot less tangible than all the new efficiencies it offered. Some contemporary retailers replaced counters or installed open shelves or otherwise followed the trend toward self-service because they wa...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Entrance
• 1. Inside Views
• 2. Aristocratic Baskets
• 3. In the Supermarket
• 4. The Late Cart
• 5. Carts Unchained
• Exit
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index