How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism
How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism
Andrew Warnes
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
2019 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Warnes, Andrew, author.
Title: How the shopping cart explains global consumerism/Andrew Warnes.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018025164 (print) | LCCN 2018029538 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520968097 (eBook) | ISBN 9780520295285 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520295292 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH : Shopping cartsUnited States. | Consumption (Economics)United States. | ShoppingUnited States. | MerchandisingHistory.
Classification: LCC HC 110. C 6 (ebook) | LCC HC 110. C 6 W 37 2019 (print) | DDC 306.3dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025164
Manufactured in the United States of America
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In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten by people in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefys hand. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only a few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
It is the principle of self-service, at least in the grocery department, which is the sine qua non of the supermarket operation. Self-service had, of course, been tried before the advent of the supermarket but never under such Elysian conditions. Through veritable mountains of food, of every variety and description, among thousands of brand names made familiar to her each day by the seductive advertisements of the national magazines, the housewife wanders at leisure without interference. What could be more ideal?
Max M. Zimmerman, The Supermarket and the Changing Retail Structure (1941)
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
Entrance
This book is about an object that, for many, is fast becoming a thing of the past. Until recently many important voices were calling time on the supermarket cart and associating it with an era of car-based shopping they felt we were leaving behind. At the start of the 2010s these predictions intensified. Market commentators at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere warned the leading supermarkets that they were losing ground to their own online systems, and urged them to pursue an aggressive policy of capacity exit, and close down their big-box superstores on the fringes of suburbia, in order to survive.
Around 2010 and 2011 many thus felt that the supermarket cart, with its stiff wheels and clanging functionality, was about to fall into disuse. Whatever it might once have explained was now becoming irrelevant. People had already started shopping in other ways. Many had become more interested in the ethics, origins, and healthiness of food, and were finding small independent suppliers far better at catering to their new concerns. Others were shopping online whenever they could. Others still, by 2014 and 2015, were fitting their fridges and kitchen cupboards with Amazon Dash buttons ahead of a time when the Internet of Things would deliver to them all their grocery desiresno doubt via an automated dronewith no need for actual, physical stores again. One thing shoppers were not doing was observing what Life s special issue on American plenty in 1955 had hailed as the new weekly ritual of the big supermarket shop. They were no longer planning meals days in advance, or coaxing their children in and out of child seats, or running off for forgotten items just before the checkout. They were no longer leaning into their carts, heaving them like oil tankers around some suburban ocean of aisles and shelves. Until recently most forecasts thus assumed that such carts were about to go the way of the mixtape or the phonecard, another sudden relic of the modernity just passed. They too seemed scheduled to disappear, fading from the vast administered worlds of the last century even as those worlds withered in turn.
These millennial predictions of the carts imminent demise often gained in credibility because they seemed to uphold a future long in the making. The dream of a world without shopping carts is almost as old as the shopping cart itself. Even the Its overfilled and garish cart certainly evoked a life less comfortable than that led by the young mothers whom we meet inside the magazine itself and who float from aisle to aisle, pause between nuts and soups, and gossip amiably with others while in the company of their children. It hinted at the opposite: that the cart was in fact pulling kin in and pushing kith away, bringing parents and children face-to-face, and recasting the big shop as a battle, or protracted negotiation, between them.
Only three years later Changing Times magazine could be found scouring the future for alternatives to these ordinary and reusable carts. Anticipating the barcode technology that the National Association of Food Chains would develop in the late 1960s, its editorial predicted that in another ten years,... punch-card shopping would allow electronic machines [to] select and collect your groceries. Carts would become optional, and any which survived the coming cull would by necessity be motorized and electronic. Toward the end of the century this much-heralded future was beginning to seem closer still. USA Today reported in 1999:
Throughout greater Boston, more and more householdsdouble income, technologically savvy and greatly pressed for timeare going to their computers to buy groceries rather than to supermarkets. Today ShopLink and three other on-line supermarkets are vying for dominance in greater Boston. The battle for the Boston market may soon be repeated in many other metropolitan areas in the USA. By 2003, on-line grocery shopping is expected to reach $10.8 billion, a surge of 116% from $5 billion now. On the face of it, that sum is hardly enough to rattle the $450 billion supermarket industry. But the explosive growth rate, fueled by consumers insatiable yearning for convenience, is already attracting major investors to the on-line grocery business....
Its a time thing, says Meghan Schaney, stay-at-home mom to Nathan, 6, Matthew, 3, and Emilee, 2. Its a chore from trying to get them in the car, to get them through the store and getting through the chaos when I get back and have to put it away. It would be like a 2-hour ordeal. Schaney, 35, is stop No. 5, and Messier drops off $101 of groceries in less than 5 minutes.
