“Making people buy and eat differently”: lessons from the modernisation of small independent grocery stores in the early twentieth century

Franck Cochoy

Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies, 2019, vol. 99, issue 01

Abstract: Food studies teach us much about foods and eaters, but despite their impressive coverage and richness, they pay little attention to what occurs between the two: they tend to neglect the many market professionals and “market-things” that act as a bridge between food products and consumers. This paper proposes to fill the gap by examining how the transformation of the grocery business and related techniques contributed to reshaping the food industry’s strategies, the content of foods and the identity of eaters. This investigation was conducted by studying the trade magazine Progressive Grocer over the period 1922–1959. It shows how the journal promoted a new art of “making people buy and eat”. Grocers were invited to modify their practices, hence the eaters’ experience, by implementing two different strategies: a movement of “betterment” of their previous service know-how and then a more radical movement of “replacement” of this know-how by the new “self-service” arrangement. By following these two movements, we understand how grocery professionals and techniques made us buy and eat, but made us do so differently, to the extent that the grocery business and related devices changed foods as well as consumers’ identities.

Keywords: Consumer/Household Economics; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Marketing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/290188/files/C ... yAndEatDifferent.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:frrfes:290188

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.290188

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Studies from Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().