Consumer behaviour and the life-course: shopper reactions to self service grocery shops and supermarkets in England c.1947-1975

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordThe paper examines the development of self-service grocery shopping from a consumer perspective. Using qualitative data constructed through a nationwide biographical survey and oral histories, it is possible to go beyond contemporary market surveys which give insufficient attention to shopping as a socially and culturally embedded practice. The paper uses the conceptual framework of the life-course, to demonstrate how grocery shopping is a complex activity, in which the retail encounter is shaped by the specific interconnection of different retail formats with consumer characteristics and situational influences. Consumer reactions to retail modernization must be understood in relation to the development of consumer practices at points of transition and stability within the life-course. These practices are accessed by examining retrospective consumer narratives about food shopping

The Social and Industrial Dynamics of Retailing an Evolutionary Reconstruction

This paper reconstructs the long-term development of retailing, including industrial, economic and social antecedents and consequences. Among other things, it includes innovation in the form of the emergence and diffusion of successive novel types of shop (including self-service), relations between large and small firms in innovation and diffusion, change of demand conditions, institutional change concerning the opening time of shops, increase of scale and concentration, and social effects. For the analysis of the process and costs of retailing, use is made of queuing theory rather than customary production functions. The reconstruction is conducted in evolutionary terms of selection, variety generation and transmission. Scripts with nodes for component activities are used in analogy to chromosomes composed of genes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of evolutionary economics, and offers suggestions for its development.