How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

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. "Warnes shows us how globalization, mechanized farming, refrigeration, and mass consumerism affect the way world consumers shop for food in supermarkets and how the global industrial food system encourages consumers to overeat." ― Gastronomica &;This book proposes to explain global consumerism by using a surprisingly modest object as its focus: the shopping cart. In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism the seemingly simple, inanimate shopping cart takes on a networked liveliness far more vibrant and ominous than expected. Warnes&;s study allows readers to see the many dimensions of these things and how they train us as consumers.&;&;Christopher Schaberg, author of The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth "In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism , Andrew Warnes offers an understanding of consumerism&;both in the United States and around the world&;as a consequence of the invention, in the 1930s, of that humble yet ubiquitous device, the shopping cart. By focusing on the history of the shopping cart, Warnes returns us to the importance of material underpinnings even for abstract and diffuse social conditions. An outstanding book."&;Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition “This book proposes to explain global consumerism by using a surprisingly modest object as its focus: the shopping cart. In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism the seemingly simple, inanimate shopping cart takes on a networked liveliness far more vibrant and ominous than expected. Warnes’s study allows readers to see the many dimensions of these things and how they train us as consumers.”—Christopher Schaberg, author of The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth "In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism , Andrew Warnes offers an understanding of consumerism—both in the United States and around the world—as a consequence of the invention, in the 1930s, of that humble yet ubiquitous device, the shopping cart. By focusing on the history of the shopping cart, Warnes returns us to the importance of material underpinnings even for abstract and diffuse social conditions. An outstanding book."—Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition Andrew Warnes is a Reader in American Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of American Tantalus: Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture and Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America ’ s First Food, among other books. How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism By Andrew Warnes UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-29529-2 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, CHAPTER 1 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. 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 fo