4 - Large-Scale Retailing, Mass-Market Strategies and the Blurring of Class Demarcations in Interwar Britain

Summary

Introduction

Since the War and particularly during the last ten years there has been a revolution in the chief factors governing retail trade. The balance of spending power has moved swiftly from one class to another, improved social services and increased wages have brought millions of people into the orbit of the retailer's influence whose standard of living was formerly so low that except for foodstuffs they were of little importance … ‘Fashion’ is now the keynote of appeal and knows no barriers either of class, age, or sex. Mass production of many fashion articles at extremely moderate prices has been developed to meet the ever-widening market for these goods and new forms of distribution to handle them.

Francesca's later work focused on how consumer goods with fashion and status connotations were made available to progressively wider sections of the population; the resulting impacts on class differentials in lifestyles and consumption patterns; and the mediation of these processes between producers, retailers and consumers. This chapter explores these themes in the context of the expansion of mass retailers in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s.

The above quotation by Frank Chitham (a director of Harrods) sums up the profound changes in the relationship between the leaders of the retail trade and the mass of the British people over the quarter century after 1914. On the eve of the First World War working-class families had remained sharply segregated from the rest of society, not only in their work and housing, but in their access to such mundane ‘public’ spaces as shops and places of refreshment. This segregation was sometimes overt, such as the intimidating presence of the floor-walker at the entrance to the department store – one of whose principal tasks was to keep out ‘undesirables’. More commonly it was invisible, but no less effective, operating through such subtle screening mechanisms as the need to negotiate any purchase with the sales clerk and without being able to physically view all goods stocked, or knowing their prices. Even the outward appearance of a ‘middle class’ emporium was usually enough to signal which sections of society were, and were not, welcome.