A Renegade History of the United States: The Invention of Shopping

Shopping: The Real American Revolution

If you were a typical American living in the early part of the nineteenth century, you had to plant, tend, harvest, slaughter, and process your own food. You had to make your own clothing, and all of it had to be strictly utilitarian: no decorations, unnecessary colors, or “style.” You worked from before dawn until late at night. Your only source of entertainment was books, and most that were available were moral parables. You spent your entire life within a fifty-mile radius of your home. You believed that leisure was bad. There was no weekend.

By the end of the nineteenth century, you as a typical American bought most of your clothing from stores. You owned clothes whose sole function was to make you attractive. You ate food that had come from all over the country. You drank cold beer and ate ice cream. If you lived in a city, you went shopping at Montgomery Ward, Sears, Roebuck, Macy’s, Abraham & Straus, Jordan Marsh, Filene’s, or Wanamaker’s. If you lived in the country, you shopped from the same stores by mail order. You read dime novels whose sole purpose was to provide you with fun. If you lived in a city, you went to amusement parks, movie theaters, and vaudeville shows. You went dancing. You rode on trains. You worked fewer hours than your parents and many fewer hours than your grandparents. You believed that leisure was good.

Who was responsible for this revolution in everyday American life? Scholars have attributed it to the vast natural resources of the North American land mass; the lack of trade barriers among the states; the building of mass, integrated industries such as railroads, steel, oil, wheat, lumber, and meat; the early development of the modern corporation in the United States; technological advances in production such as rubber vulcanization, the sewing machine, refrigeration, the Bessemer and open-hearth steel processes, the assembly line, and electric light and power; as well as the assistance of the federal government to economic development in the form of protective incorporation laws, land grants, the authorization of stocks and the backing of bonds, protective tariffs to shield American companies from foreign competition, and armed intervention against labor strikes.

And yet not a single consumer good would have been produced if people did not want them or did not allow themselves to seek them. Without desire there would have been no demand. Without demand there would have been no production. What was necessary for the consumer revolution to take place was a radical change in the way Americans thought about desire, pleasure, leisure, and spending. Without renegades, we'd all still be farmers.

The Customer is Queen

Most historians of the “consumer revolution” argue that it came from above, directed from the offices of advertising agencies. The standard story is that advertisers created desires and invented false needs in the minds of consumers. They seized consumers’ minds, established “cultural hegemony,” and were nothing less than the “captains of consciousness,” according to the title of one of the leading histories of the advertising industry.

However, in the eighteenth century, the first mass marketers of consumer goods understood that to be successful meant to treat the “consumer as king”—or, more precisely, as queen. Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley, the first manufacturers of pottery and among the first capitalists to seek broader markets for consumer products, acknowledged to each other that they could not allow their own tastes to determine what they produced. When Wedgwood found that a particular vase which he thought unattractive was widely popular, he did not hesitate to mass produce it. “I do not see any beauty in it but will make something of it,” he told Bentley. To guide their production, Wedgwood and Bentley spent as much time as possible in their London shop, observing what customers purchased and asking them their opinions. According to business historian Regina Lee Blaszczyk, the partners “acknowledged consumer sovereignty and crafted a strategy aimed at meeting demand, rather than shaping it.” They “perfected techniques that registered the nuances of consumer taste and channeled this information into the factory’s design shops.” At first responding only to the preferences of the London elite, Wedgwood and Bentley found that the principle of consumer sovereignty applied to the lower classes as well. Rather than seeking to dictate taste to “the Middling Class of People,” the pair acknowledged that “Their character is established” and would only “buy quantitys” of products that they already knew they liked. By the end of the eighteenth century, this strategy made Wedgwood the best-selling pottery line on both sides of the Atlantic. Similarly, Frederick Hurten Rhead, one of the leading Anglo-American potters of the early twentieth century, learned that only consumers, and not style experts, could “tell the manufacturer what to make.”