3 - Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930-1970: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution Problem

Summary

The evolution of modern systems of distribution is astonishingly understudied, considering that goods load up with meaning as they are moved from producers to purchasers. Here, I want to characterize this evolution from a particular perspective, namely, the changeover in continental Western Europe from what might be called a bourgeois to a Fordist mode of consumption. This transformation started to gather impetus in the 1920s and then met enormous resistance during the mid-1950s. Starting up again on wholly new economic, political, and social premises in the early 1950s, the evolution of mass distribution systems accelerated in the second half of the 1960s. By the early 1970s, Germany and France, as well as several smaller states including Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries, together with areas of north-central Italy, were at home with mass marketing, the supermarket, chain retailing, and the many other techniques and institutions that historians of the subject have characterized as the hallmarks of modern commerce. At least until recently: For the history of modern commerce now has a new endpoint, the so-called post-Fordist distribution systems using computerized communications systems to link segmented markets and vastly more intricate and dense global commodity chains.