Deregulation started early in the United States. In 1961, thirty-four states banned Sunday trading. By 1985, the number was down to twenty-two. Discount stores asserted that ‘blue laws’ supporting the Christian Sabbath were a violation of the First Amendment, which prohibits any law respecting an establishment of religion. A string of court cases subjected Sunday-closing laws to a ‘rational basis test’: what was the sense of allowing the sale of camera film but not of cameras? California, Florida and many states in the West and Midwest were in the vanguard and lifted their ‘blue laws’ altogether, aside from the sale of alcohol. Other states kept specific restrictions on the books. New Jersey, which did away with Sunday closing in 1978, continued to outlaw bingo, barbers and beauty parlours.113 Canada began its deregulation in 1985. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret Sunday opening as an Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal crusade. In Europe, the first to move was social-democratic Sweden in 1971, followed by Belgium and Spain. Margaret Thatcher, the priestess of neo-liberalism, suffered a memorable defeat when she tried to liberate British shops in 1986.
In England and Wales, the situation was messy. The prohibition of Sunday trading after the Second World War was shot through with eccentric loopholes. Corner stores were allowed to sell gin and takeaway food but not dried milk or fish and chips. At their local newsagent, customers could buy porn but not a bible. The 1986 plan was to create a clean slate. Instead it split public opinion and, interestingly, retailers.114 In one corner were the challengers – the Shopping Hours Reform Council – a group of retailers, producers and consumer advocates. In the opposite corner stood the Keep Sunday Special Campaign, an alliance of trade unionists and bishops, but with notable support from C&A, a fashion chain, Iceland, a supermarket, and the co-operative societies. Each side claimed their position fostered family and wealth. For the latter, open Sundays threatened to kill ‘quality time’ for family lunches, worship and recreation. For the liberators, Sunday jobs would give women independence. A Conservative MP quoted one of his constituents, who was a ‘Sunday only worker’ in Bristol:
I work on Sundays, because I want the best for my children . . . They have a lot more extras and holidays, clothes and outings . . . When I leave the house on Sunday mornings I leave happy in the knowledge that my husband will be caring for them and that they will all enjoy some ‘quality time’ together. I also get a well needed break from the children and household . . . I look forward to my own independent time.115
Liberators claimed that deregulation would both set families free and generate wealth and employment. The opposing side cited Marks and Spencer, the quintessential British shop, which opposed Sunday trading because it would merely spread six days’ business over seven days. The liberators lost. With a twist of historical irony, the same Iron Lady who crushed the mighty unions and deregulated the City failed to crack open shop doors on Sunday. Victory had to wait until 1994.
Is it possible to discern any pattern in the uneven landscape of Sunday trading? Affluence alone is clearly not enough. After all, Germany is wealthier than Britain, France richer than Finland. Religion is a contributing factor, but not in a direct sense of religious attendance. In the United States, Sunday shopping advanced in spite of a religious revival, whereas church-going has declined across Europe; in Thatcher’s Britain, merely 10 per cent went to church regularly. Rather, religion has acted as a bulwark in societies where it occupies a central place in the political landscape thanks to strong Christian Democratic parties. In Germany, Sunday opening was a political anathema until 1999, when department stores in Berlin openly called on shoppers to join in demonstrations of civil disobedience and purchase goods speciously labelled ‘tourist items’. Such pressure from retailers faced a far tougher political environment than elsewhere. Wolfgang Schäuble, the former leader of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), denounced shopping on a Sunday as a ‘threat to Judeo-Christian civilization’.116 Reform stopped at longer Saturday opening hours.
The decisive factor can be found in the changing structure of the economy in combination with the role of women in the workforce. Sunday opening in Britain came on the heels of a shift from industry to services, which gave the retail sector and unions with shop assistants among their members greater weight than in Germany or France. In Britain, the shop workers’ union (USDAW) switched from opposing to supporting partial deregulation in order to defend jobs. Retail was at the vanguard of part-time work and its workforce was disproportionately female. Since it is women who do most of the shopping, the more women entered the workforce, the stronger became the case for flexible shopping. It is difficult to work and shop at the same time. Significantly, the societies which have been at the forefront of Sunday opening (Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom) are also those with the highest female labour participation in Europe.117
What difference did Sunday opening make to the rhythm of the day and to consumption more generally? Both camps liked to exaggerate their case. Sunday was never a pure, non-commercial idyll, not even during the prohibitive post-war era. In England and Wales, restrictions applied to department stores and bigger shops, not to smaller corner stores. The law stopped people from buying big-ticket items, not from shopping on Sunday as such. In addition, flouting of legislation was as widespread as opportunities to shop were limited. In Cardiff, people did 3 per cent of their weekly shopping trips on a Sunday in the early 1980s. Almost half their food and grocery purchases were illegal, covering the entire range of prohibited articles from canned fruit to frozen meals.118 Sundays are a good example of how changes in leisure spill over into shopping. In Britain, the craze for gardening and home improvement in the 1980s added extra pressure on shop opening hours: garden centres and DIY stores decided to open on Sundays. On the eve of the 1994 law, an estimated 40 per cent of English shops already traded on Sundays. A ringing cash till more than compensated for a fine.
Longer hours have made the weekend once more the major shopping event that it had been in the age of the Sunday market two centuries and more ago. In Britain, Saturday and Sunday are the busiest days of trading. Ten per cent of shoppers do their main shopping on a Sunday. Longer shop hours mean lower unit costs and less congestion on the roads. According to one estimate, these translated into savings of £1.4 billion, or £64 per household, in 2001. The story elsewhere has been more muted. In Sweden, longer shop hours reduced prices by a tiny 0.3 per cent. The Australian Productivity Commission doubted whether flexible hours had brought consumers any net benefit. Nor has recreational shopping spilled over effortlessly from Saturday to Sunday. For most Swedes, Sunday is for buying groceries.119
More significant has been the impact on work patterns. We have noted how increased female labour participation added pressure to make shopping more flexible, but, in turn, Sunday shopping also reinforced the trend towards greater part-time work, especially for lone mothers. In the Netherlands, shops since 1996 have been allowed to stay open until 10 p.m. during the week and during Sunday afternoons. Since then, time-use data shows that the Dutch shop more but also work more on Sundays and in the evenings, especially women and single men; significantly, Dutch men with a partner shopped more, but worked less.120 These patterns are a far cry from the London Sunday with which this section started. For most working-class housewives then, Sundays meant one round of cooking, tidying up and washing up after another. ‘It’s the hardest day of the week,’ a forty-year old taxi driver’s wife observed in 1949.121 For many of their husbands, Sundays was the time for a long nap. Sunday opening did not bring to an end centuries of gender inequality. But it did throw open the family home, dispersed its members and by doing so lifted some of the collective burden off women’s shoulders.
For a good century, roughly from the 1860s to the 1960s, authorities and societies in the developed world entered into an ingenious compact with regard to time. More and more of people’s lives was given over to material goods and desires. Cities became billboards for consumer goods, and governments started to compete a
bout how best to raise the standard of living. Yet, in exchange, Sunday was fenced off as a no-go zone for consumption. Since the 1960s, this compact has been broken. Several affluent societies have already torn it up; in others, its future is precarious. Today, it may look laughable for authorities to try to legislate the quality of a day, but this was a widely shared rationale just a few generations ago. A century’s work has been undone in little over two decades.
The spread of the internet since the 1990s has given shopping an altogether new virtual dimension, where the opening hours of a physical shop lose their relevance. In continental Europe, historic towns with small shops in pedestrianized centres are currently reviewing their past opposition to Sunday openings: if the real shops are closed, why bother to visit these cobbled arcades, if one can enter a virtual shop on a tablet? The advance of internet shopping, though, should not be exaggerated. Prophecies of the death of old retail have so far not come true. In Europe and the United States, where internet and mobile devices are now ubiquitous, the majority of people still do most of their shopping in physical stores rather than on the internet. In Europe, the biggest online shoppers are Britons, who in 2014 spent £1,071 or almost 15 per cent of all retail sales online; in Italy and Poland, it was not even 3 per cent. Internet shopping has made the greatest strides with clothes and travel; 21 per cent of European internet users had made a purchase online in 2008; in 2012, it had risen to 32 per cent. A quarter purchased books. But for many other products and services, the internet remains marginal. Not even one in ten Europeans bought food on the internet in 2012, although in Britain one in five had done so. Furniture and other heavy items are rarely purchased with a click. In Switzerland, the world leader in mobile use (85 per cent), smartphones added 1 million mobile shopping sites in 2013–14. Across the Alps in Italy, by contrast, more than two thirds did not shop on line at all.122
One of the main reasons for the resilience of the conventional shop is that most people do not simply want to buy goods: they want to touch and try them. Another, ironically, is that most feel the internet is too slow: they want to get a product immediately; ease of return, trust and lower price are additional, yet smaller factors. E-commerce and smart phones have wrought a revolution in retail as we knew it, but, as ongoing Swiss research shows, the outcome has been unexpected hybrids rather than the extinction of the physical by the virtual shop. There are some exclusively online shops, especially for holidays and music, but in many other branches the movement has been towards symbiosis between the old and the new, with physical retailers starting their own webshops and online shops opening showrooms and real sale points.123
The abolition of the day of rest was the culmination of the leisure revolution. This revolution, as so many others, failed to deliver what it had promised. The material gains in leisure time in the twentieth century proved more limited and uneven than reformers and visionaries had imagined. A major reason for this was that the early utopia of leisure reflected a narrow view of work, that of the wage-earning male worker. Idyllic pictures of idle Sundays and family roasts which gave coalminers and bank clerks their well-deserved day of rest and recreation tended to forget the enormous amount of female work that made these possible. Free time remains fractured by generation, class and gender. The young and the old have gained the most. Leisure in middle age, by contrast, has been constrained by the growth in women’s paid work and men’s rising commitment to housework. Since the 1960s, the real revolution has happened elsewhere: the quality of leisure time has been transformed and polarized. In hours and minutes, the leisure gap between the sexes might have narrowed, but women are less likely to enjoy theirs in one, sustained piece. Women’s leisure remains a patchwork. The democratization of leisure, finally, has had the unintended consequence of triggering new inequalities of time. Once the doors to idle leisure opened for the common man, leisurely consumption lost its distinction for the privileged few. Since then, the educated classes have thrown their energies into a new activity-packed leisure regime. This hyper-activism has had a paradoxical consequence for consumption, although not the one that critics of affluence predicted. Success means buying more and doing more. The old divide between those who had leisure and those who did not has been replaced by a new one based on how much people do in their leisure time. ‘Time poverty’ is the price paid for the privilege of being able to combine flexibility and action.
11
From the Cradle to the Grave
Consumption shapes identities. How we dress and eat, where we shop, whether we drive an SUV or an electric car, go to the opera or a football match, all these practices announce who we are and who we’d like others to think we are. Consuming marks our place in the social order and it helps us understand how that order comes about and how it is reproduced. Class and gender identities have loomed especially large, and we have encountered them at various points in these pages, from middle-class ideals of material comfort and anxieties about the female shopaholic in the past to the role of leisure and taste for social status in the present. There is one additional set of identities that now deserves our sustained attention: age. Arguably, it was here that the last hundred years witnessed a historically unprecedented change. This story has been told as the rise of the teenager – a term that first began to circulate in the 1940s. If we cannot ignore them, we should, however, not allow them to crowd out everyone else. Youth is not the only generation. The teenager was merely one species in a larger evolution that gathered pace in the twentieth century, producing ever more finely graded age-specific groups defined by their appearance, possessions and lifestyle. The first to take shape was the child consumer. By the century’s end, this group had been joined by elderly ‘golden agers’. The image and reality of old age was transformed by the aspiration and ability to consume. Arguably, it was for this generation, more than for any other, that consumption was truly revolutionary.
THE CHILD CONSUMER
Few topics ring as many alarm bells in the rich world today as that of children under siege by a commercial juggernaut of adverts, brands and corporations. Here is a short list of dangers plucked from the large number of books and reports by concerned writers and advocates. Three-year-olds today can recognize McDonald’s golden arches before they can recall their own surname. By the age of ten, British children command a knowledge of 350 brands but can name only twenty birds. Mattel created an interactive doll, Diva Starz, which introduced six- to eleven-year-olds to retail therapy, telling them, ‘I’m in a bad mood. Let’s go shopping.’ In Nottingham, England, an eight-year-old girl was bombarded with pre-approved credit-card offers. In the United States, pupils are subject to in-school advertising and branded give-aways. Girl Scouts no longer just learn to build a campfire but can also earn a ‘fashion adventure’ badge for a trip to the mall and a visit to a pre-teen clothing store. On both sides of the Pond, seven- to eleven-year-olds are working for market researchers, telling them which toys are cool. In 1994, Jean-Paul Guerlain launched a citrus- and mint-scented children’s perfume. Other fashion labels followed with baby sprays and eau de toilette. Girls who have not even entered elementary school wear shirts decorated with Playboy bunnies. As with Victorian anxieties about female shoppers, sex and shopping are feared to go hand in hand. Children are being ‘stalked’ and ‘groomed for profit’. Alongside obesity, bulimia and suicide, activists have diagnosed a plague of social marketing diseases. For some writers, childhood today is ‘toxic’. Others have pronounced its ‘death’.1
The fever pitch of these anxieties is matched by the money at stake. Never before in history have children controlled so much spending power. In Britain, those under nineteen years of age spent £12 billion in 2008 – almost £1 billion went towards snacks, sweets and soft drinks. Once the money their parents spend on them is added, this figure rises to an estimated £99 billion a year. In the United States, the market influenced by kids is said to be worth $670 billion, and more than $15 billion is spent on advertising and marketing to children.2
In short, little angels are big spenders, and it is this clash between ideal and reality that lies behind the moral panic and unease.
To be sure, there are many aspects which deserve concern and demand action. This is a matter for campaigners, politicians and regulators. What history can do is something else, but no less useful. It can guard against a lazy nostalgia for a golden age where children were once pure and innocent, untouched by the market. And it can explain how we got to where we are. Just like the dollars and pounds spent on direct marketing, so contemporary ideas of childhood are the product of change over time. What we need to understand, then, is how childhood became so mixed up with choice and spending in the first place. This is a longer history, in which educators, parents, doctors and politicians played as decisive a role as corporations; children were not entirely passive in this process either.
As late as the 1970s, historians treated childhood as the invention of bourgeois modernity. It was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they argued, that brutality and emotional distance gave way to a more affectionate, child-oriented and permissive culture. More recent historians have thrown cold water on the thesis of a sentimental bourgeois revolution.3 There is plenty of evidence of love and grief, play and toys in earlier centuries, in West and East. Nonetheless, what is new and marks 1900 as a turning point is that childhood gained its own special place in the marketplace. Children had always consumed, but now they started being treated as customers in their own right, with their own age-specific needs, fashions and, soon, spending money.
Empire of Things Page 63
