The Importance of Place in Grocery Shopping

1009 Words3 Pages

While female responsibilities for family meal remain ubiquitous norm in fact requires, as DeVault (1989) points out, an invisible work of coordination: commercial underpaid domestic work (Glazer 1993). Mass retailers made a shift from the small stores to large supermarkets and restructured how women should act inside the stores (Deutsch 1999: 143). During postwar times consumption was an expansion of citizenship. At the beginning of the XX century people in The United States recognizes grocery shopping as labor, and activity that is time consuming, intense and was full of negotiations over price and quality (Deutsch 2012). The increasing dominance of the capitalist labor process, especially after World War II, new divisions of labor through the work transfer (Glazer, 1993) that obscured the connection between capital production and daily life. In doing so, also obscured women’s work helped by the infrastructure of customary expectation of family, conceptual inadequacy of considering domestic labor private, schemes from chains stores for force consumption and state programs
While United States experienced high economic growth and a considerable economic boom, grocery shopping was not considered work anymore, although still take a considerable amount of time. During this time Supermarkets stores were portrayed as the symbol of the success of American model but in an apolitical form, numbing the minds of consumers as social actors but emphasizing their individuality by advertising the attractiveness of freedom of choice.
During 1930-1931 grocery chains dealt with failing prices and profits, the stores start to pay more attention to women. In example Deutsch (1999) states that Kroger, National Tea Company and A&P began to develop d...

... middle of paper ...

...Glazer, N. Y. (1993). Women's paid and unpaid labor: The work transfer in health care and retailing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Herrmann, A. (2002). Shopping for identities: gender and consumer culture. Feminist studies: FS, 28(3), 539.
Hinrichs, C. C. (2000). Embeddedness and local food systems: notes on two types of direct agricultural market. Journal of rural studies, 16(3), 295-303.
Humphery, K. (1998). Shelf life: supermarkets and the changing cultures of consumption. Cambridge University Press.
Koch, S. L. (2013). A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Koch, S. L., & Sprague, J. (2014). Economic Sociology vs. Real Life: The Case of Grocery Shopping. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 73(1), 237-263.
Veblen, T. (2005). The theory of the leisure class; an economic study of institutions. Aakar Books.

Open Document