Shelf Life
Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption

This 1998 critique of the supermarket in twentieth-century Australia includes history, cultural studies and oral history.

Kim Humphery (Author)

9780521623162, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 July 1998

282 pages, 13 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.59 kg

Supermarkets, in all their everyday mundanity, embody something of the enormous complexity of living and consuming in late twentieth century western societies. Shelf Life, first published in 1998, explores the supermarket as a retail space and as an arena of everyday consumption in Australia. It historically situates and critically discusses the everyday food products we buy, the retail environments in which we do so, the attitudes of the retailers who construct such environments, and the diverse ways in which all of us undertake and think about supermarket shopping. Yet this book is more than narrative history. It engages with broader issues of the nature of Australian modernity, the globalisation of retail forms, the connection between consumption and self-autonomy, and the highly gendered nature of retailing and shopping. It interrogates also the work of cultural critics, and questions recent attempts to grasp what it means to consume and to be a 'consumer'.

Introduction
Part I. Emergent Cultures: 1. The discovery of the consumer
2. Really modern retailing
Part II. New Worlds: 3. Engineering the shop
4. She likes to look
5. Tomorrow's shop today
6. Living the transformation
Part III. Familiar Places: 7. Magic futures
8. Strangers in paradise
9. Theory without footnotes
10. Towards the exit.

Subject Areas: Consumerism [JFFT]