Working-class Consumers Research Articles

‘The poor man’s overdraft’: a longer history of Australian retail credit

Most histories of Australian cultural life pin the start of consumer credit’s popularity to the 1950s and the heady days of the early long boom. This article reveals the longer history of consumer credit in Australia. Middle-class Australians have long made use of forms of credit provided by retailers such as monthly accounts to supplement their incomes, take advantage of special offers, deal with unexpected expenses, or indulge impulsive desires. Those with more limited and less regular incomes, working-class families unable to secure credit from banks or department stores, also became enmeshed in credit culture, but through a different route. An early form of retail credit – the cash-order system – played a crucial role in preparing working-class consumers for the postwar boom in credit culture. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cash-order system provided a bridge between older forms of working-class retail credit such as the tick and the slate, and modern forms such as the department store budget accounts that would become widely available after the Second World War.

A tool to help the honest poor: itinerant trading in great-Britain through the lens of late-Victorian legislation (1860–1900s)

ABSTRACT The last third of the nineteenth century was a turning point in terms of legislation surrounding itinerant trading in Britain. Liberal governments sought to adapt to what they perceived as the decline of peddling and encourage its transformation into a makeshift activity for humble labourers. This shift took place during the chancellorship and primeministership of William Gladstone. It reflected the popularity of self-help and the desire to improve the lot of the labouring poor in the late-nineteenth century. Encouraging peddling appeared to be an adequate tool to help poor labourers and subsidise working-class consumers, as itinerant traders supplied them with cheap goods. The period was thus marked by debates about the relevance of taxing hawkers: the Pedlars Act 1871 and Hawkers Act 1888 lowered the price of their certificates. Reformers and police constables, however, were also concerned by the ‘decline’ of peddling. They advocated for stricter control of the sellers, often likened pedlars to vagrants, and their salesmanship. The ‘self-help’ objective of the national legislation was furthermore debated and contested by local authorities, to which more powers were devolved in the late-nineteenth century. In some municipalities, it was mitigated by legislation related to urban planning, street cleanliness or shopkeepers’ interests.

From ‘Immoral’ Users to ‘Sunbed Addicts’: The Media–Medical Pathologising of Working-class Consumers and Young Women in Late Twentieth-century England

SummaryDrawing on the changing representations of sunbed consumers within everyday entertainment media and national newspapers from the late 1980s to early 1990s, this article will demonstrate how sunbed use was framed, at first, as an ‘immoral’ working-class activity, and later as a growing addictive threat to white adolescent women. Medical experts had finally confirmed that sunbeds increased the risk of developing skin cancer, and the media had taken this ‘public health’ matter into their own hands. As this occurred during a backlash against Thatcherism, their anti-sunbed coverage became entangled with moralised concerns about class, women and consumerism. These sunbed warnings stigmatised both ‘yuppies’ and young women who exercised their new economic freedoms. Unravelling these complex political, economic and social tensions will also show how historians can use fictional and ‘low-brow’ media sources (from television soaps, cartoons and the Daily Mail) to further develop the history of public health approaches.

Review: Talking White Trash: Mediated Representations and Lived Experiences of White Working-class People, by Dunn, Tasha R.

Review: <i>Talking White Trash: Mediated Representations and Lived Experiences of White Working-class People</i>, by Dunn, Tasha R.

The Chav Youth Subculture and Its Representation in Academia as Anomalous Phenomenon

The Chav Youth Subculture and Its Representation in Academia as Anomalous Phenomenon

Consumer Culture in Guatemala City during the ‘Season of Luis Mazzantini’, 1905: The Political Economy of Working-Class Consumption

AbstractIn 1905, world-renowned bullfighter Luis Mazzantini arrived in Guatemala City for a number of corridas. Despite the excitement of the urban elite, the matador's fights were poorly attended by the working class due to high ticket prices. This article uses the ‘Mazzantini Season’ as a case study of working-class consumer culture in Guatemala City to trace shifts in Guatemalan political economy through the 1890s and early 1900s, analysing the constraints on popular consumerism such as price inflation, currency deflation, food shortages and other factors affecting working-class urban Guatemalans. It also demonstrates the manner in which responses by the state and coffee planters to economic crises to protect elite interests fundamentally undermined the ability of working-class residents of Guatemala City to participate in consumer culture.

Eat the street

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Female street vendors were a common sight in cities worldwide in the first half of the 19th century. Fields of history like women’s history have dealt with the role of these street vendors in European cities. In recent decades, female street vendors have also been studied by a number of Brazilian scholars, who have shed light on urban slavery, domestic slavery and other forms of unfree labor. These studies commonly focus on community building among urban slaves and the formation of a West African diaspora. All around the globe female street vendors were (and still are) not merely passive victims of marginalization, but capable actors, who created a gendered niche of economic opportunity, through the capitalization of their cooking and vending skills. The popularity of female hawkers was closely connected to their being women.&#x0D; Until now, few studies explore the food stalls in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the 19th century as special places of consumption within a global perspective. Street food gave rise to a working-class consumer culture. This study aims to focus on the social, material and imaginary aspects of these vending places. What role did they play within the consumer culture of Rio de Janeiro? What food did they provide? What was the communication between vendors and customers like? These questions are especially interesting to ask against the background of Rio de Janeiro’s intensive sociocultural transformation in the years between 1830 and 1860, after the official prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade.&#x0D; Places of food consumption such as the Paris-style restaurant (representative of luxury dining) and taverns (representative of more commonplace, popular restaurants) saw a great increase in the first half of the 19th century.&#x0D; Analyzing food stands as places of food consumption offers the possibility to break up the narrative of the male centered public sphere and show that women especially played a crucial role in providing 19th century cities with food. Daily newspapers, contemporary descriptions by foreign visitors and social novels demonstrate in an excellent manner the contemporary discourse of eating out, the dishes that were served, who consumed these dishes and female vendors in a global perspective.&#x0D; The paper argues that eating out was not only a necessity for some, but also a form of entertainment comparable to professional theater plays. Food stands were places were gender roles, prejudices against foreign food and sexual honor were negotiated. Since cooking is one of the most time-consuming types of labor in history the paper combines food history with labor history and demonstrates public eating as a special form of entertainment.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls’ Leisure between the Wars by Katherine Milcoy

<i>When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls’ Leisure between the Wars</i> by Katherine Milcoy

Communists, Commissars, and Consumers: The Politics of Food on the Chilean Road to Socialism

Abstract This article examines the politics of food during Chile's Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970–73). Organized around the rise and fall of the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (Price and Supply Committees, JAPs), a state-backed network of collectively managed stores and ad hoc food distribution sites, the article explores how the UP revolution expanded long-standing practices of community-led price monitoring and food distribution to make the promise of economic democracy more concrete for urban, working-class consumers. As the JAPs' power grew, however, such efforts became a political lightning rod, unifying Chile's domestic opposition around the claim that the state's presence in the food economy—rather than its absence—created scarcity and needlessly politicized domestic life. Ultimately, the article contends that the consumer marketplace was a key arena for competing conceptualizations of democracy and the state in early 1970s Chile, anticipating the centrality of consumption to the neoliberal counterrevolution that the country experienced in the post-UP era.

Working-Class Consumer Behavior in “Marvellous Melbourne” and Buenos Aires, The “Paris of South America”

Recent work in Melbourne, including the papers in this volume, has shed new light on the archaeology of this major nineteenth-century urban center. But how does Melbourne compare to other important contemporary cities, particularly those outside the British Empire? This paper compares “Marvellous Melbourne” against the “Paris of South America,” Buenos Aires, with a focus on exploring consumer behavior and transnational trade. Two case studies are considered, Casselden Place (Melbourne) and La Casa Pena (Buenos Aires) and while some differences are encountered, the overall similarity in results points to the interconnectedness of the world during the period under study.

Impact of Awareness Creation Program on Food Safety Management System in Institutional Catering

How do we emphasize the importance of food safety in food handling where the ingredients may be from a standard source but the people and kitchen may not be appropriate or trained for safe food handling? Commercial catering is one of the most flourishing food business globally and in India, it is largely an unorganized sector. There are hotels, restaurants, food stalls, street vendors and institutional catering in schools, colleges, factories, offices, hospitals, marriage halls, and other spaces where large part of population works and/or congregates. The food is either cooked inside the set up or is transported from an external kitchen. The commercial catering is for urban working class consumers who depend on food cooked at these kitchens. The changing work and lifestyle patterns of this demographic, eating out population has almost become a necessity leading to a cultural revolution in eating patterns. Most urban workers consume at least 1 meal per day out of home. Under such circumstances, it is of utmost importance that commercial food establishments serve safe and hygienic food to the consumers.

The forgotten working-class consumer

The forgotten working-class consumer

Stratification and segmentation: Social class in consumer behavior

Comparing working-class and middle-class consumers, Carey and Markus (2016, this issue) highlight the ways that social class determines consumer behavior through a set of mutually supportive culture cycles. We use their framework to re-examine several core assumptions in marketing and consumer behavior, assumptions that may fit middle-class consumers better than they do working-class consumers. Revisiting previous findings with an emphasis on social class allows us to offer an agenda for future research regarding advertising and consumer persuasion, material versus experiential purchases, conspicuous and compensatory consumption, and market segmentation.

The US Union Label: the Allure of Consumer Solidarity, and a Minefield of Challenges

8 | International Union Rights | 23/4 FOCUS | CERTIFICATION AND LABELLING The US Union Label: the Allure of Consumer Solidarity, and a Minefield of Challenges The union label has a long history unique to the US labour movement, full of creative expressions of working-class solidarity from both rank-and-file shoppers and from unions looking for ways to marshal potential consumer energies. But the label has always been rife with pitfalls, into which unions have all too often plunged. Its birth is tainted: the union label was born in San Francisco in the 1870s, when racist cigar workers placed a literally white label on their cigars to indicate that their product was made by white, not Chinese workers--who they sought to push out of the industry (and the country) altogether. That ‘white’ label quickly morphed into the ‘union’ label, which spread rapidly as a tactic during the great creative uprising of US labour in the 1880s, sparked by both the Knights of Labor and the American Federation Labor. Boycotts, cooperatives, and union labels all proliferated, as complex webs of classconscious shopping opportunities wove together working-class communities. By 1908, when the AFL’s more conservative model of craft unionism had triumphed over the Knights’ more inclusive vision, 68 of its national-level affiliated unions boasted union labels. The union label thrived in economic sectors where working-class consumers bought products or services. It was especially effective in industries in which union men purchased low-priced goods in front of their union brothers, such as beer or the quintessential union-labelled product, the cigar, bought in bars. It didn’t work in steel, on the docks, or in other sectors that did not involve working-class consumers, so its usage was always structurally limited to a subset of the labour movement. Union label promotion also included the union shop card, which butchers, retail clerks, barbers, and others placed in storefront windows to indicate that the workers inside were unionised. Cards, in turn, shaded over into the union button, which workers such as musicians and those in the building trades wore to indicate that they had paid up their quarterly union dues. Union members were then exhorted to watch for those buttons, such as making sure that the conductor was displaying his or her union button before entering a streetcar. Almost all trades appended to their printed materials the ubiquitous, tiny logo of the International Typographers’ Union label, known as the ‘union bug’, which indicated that they had been produced in a unionised shop. As a tactic, the label always inherently contained institutionalised support for employers. In its very purpose, it advertised an employer to be good - in contrast to the boycott, which marked an employer as bad. The US labour movement most forcefully promoted the union label during the 1920s, when the AFL emphasised labour-management cooperation and reached a nadir of conservatism, exclusionary craft unionism, and lack of interest in organising the unorganised. In 1925 the AFL launched a national campaign promoting local branches of a new body called the Trade Union Promotional League, which had little success. Racism, moreover, continued to besmirch local label campaigns. The Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ summarised its union button on the cover of the national magazine, for example, with ‘Skilled Wellpaid Bartenders and Culinary Workers Wear Them. Chinks, Japs, and Incompetent Labor Don’t’. Nonetheless, the union label has always dangled a tantalising potential for mobilising working-class people’s purchasing power on behalf of fellowworkers ’ struggles. In practice, unions have had problems getting union members and their families to shop union. Even at the height of the label’s popularity in the early twentieth century union leaders complained that they were having a hard time getting members to look for the union label and card. It turned out everyone wanted other unionists to buy their own label, but didn’t seek out the labels of others; usually because union goods and services were more expensive, less convenient, or simply less preferable for a wide range of reasons. The label also ran aground on the shoals of jurisdiction: while the inclusive and militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) advocated a universal union...

The influence of social class on the perceptions of country of origin

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study, conducted in Thailand, which examined the working class and middle class consumers’ evaluation and purchase intentions of high equity versus low equity Thai fashion labels of sophisticated and standard apparel, outsourced for production to three Asian countries of varying manufacturing competence. Design/methodology/approach – Data from a field survey was analysed through a 2×2×3 factorial design and the influence of a particular factor over the others in specific scenarios was observed. Findings – Consumers from both social classes are inclined to be partial to a specific quality dimension of their national brands made abroad. When considering purchase of reputed brands of standard products, working class consumers are particularly concerned about the item's country‐of‐origin (COO). On the other hand, middle class consumers’ apprehensions of multi‐featured products’ COO run across both high and low equity brands. Research limitations/implications – Common methods bias may have occurred in this study as a result of respondents in the self‐report survey wanting to avoid cognitive dissonance, trying to correlate their responses with their answers to previous questions. Practical implications – Consumers belonging to a particular social segment in the brands’ home country can be encouraged to buy their national brands produced abroad on the promise that these products will deliver their favoured quality features. Originality/value – The research results are presented in the form of a consumer typology based on the dimensions of perceived quality, and explain the effect of the interaction of country's competence, brand equity and product purchase involvement on middle class and working class consumers’ evaluation and purchase intention of brands outsourced for production abroad.

Los orígenes del espectador de clase obrera en el deporte: Lancashire, Inglaterra, 1870-1914

This article examines the development of working-class commercial spectator sport in the English county of Lancashire, especially the areas where the cotton industry dominated in the south and east, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that the growing popularity of professional Association football, coupled with similar developments in other sports, made this pioneer industrial area the location of a new kind of sporting culture, as part of the wider development of a working-class consumer society, and that this has global implications.

Working-Class Consumer Credit During the Belle Époque: Invention, Innovation, or Reconfiguration?

During the Belle Époque, widespread access to credit for the working classes led to the establishment of an economy of mass consumption. This phenomenon, however, represented more than a simple shift in scale, completely transforming the social order of the credit system, from economic identification to the authorization process. This article examines various aspects of the credit relationship through two documented cases: the credit organization created by the Parisian department store Dufayel for the working classes and reforms introduced by the January 12, 1895 law regarding workers’ garnishment. The transformation of the credit system resulted in the joint emergence of new forms of mediation and distantiation in addition to new arenas in which debt figured—whether in commerce, court or the workplace.

Co-operation and the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar England

Economic historians have recently taught us a great deal about the ‘new consumerism’ in interwar Britain. However, the story has largely been told from the supply side and the Co-operative movement that played a key role in the lives of millions of working-class consumers has tended to be marginalised. This article brings the movement and the consumer centre stage. First, the uneven and vulnerable situation of the Co-op as a business is outlined. The next section briefly sketches economic and political attacks on the movement that made it more difficult to respond effectively to the challenges it faced. The major part of the article discusses oral evidence from ordinary co-operative members, which helps illuminate the contradictory pressures faced by consumers in this period.

Governing transitions: Cases and insights from two periods in the history of the UK gas industry

The paper aims to inform historically the analyses of future sociotechnical transition pathways in the electricity sector, particularly those developed by the Transition Pathways to a Low Carbon Economy project. It also aims to inform the theoretical approach to transitions by focusing on key decisions at ‘branching points’ that led to transitions in the UK gas energy services regime, which occurred under different governance patterns. The first historical case study covers the market-led transformation of the manufactured gas regime from 1877 to 1914, which developed the end-uses of gas beyond lighting to include cooking, and extended access to working class consumers. The second case study covers the period from 1948 to 1977, historically reconstructing the transition from town gas to natural gas. This state-led and coordinated conversion to natural gas was preceded by a period of destabilisation of the manufactured gas regime, the co-existence of several niche technologies and the hybridisation of the key actors and technological infrastructures of the incumbent regime. Comparing the cases provides insights for future energy service transitions by addressing the significance of power, trust and networking in the decision making processes involved in the governance of energy transitions.

How Choice Fueled Panic: Philadelphians, Consumption, and the Panic of 1837

This essay examines the role of working-class consumers in public debates over the public regulation of food and fuel markets in Philadelphia in the years leading up to the Panic of 1837. As price spikes in these necessities inflamed the cries for state authorities to insure fair prices for these goods and to put an end to the growing scale and scope of free market capitalism, these pleas went unfulfilled. Instead, urban residents saw many of the longstanding measures designed to protect less affluent Americans from devastating price swings—regulated marketplaces for meat, traditional fuel markets, and the bread assize, for example—had eroded as policymakers offered a vision of a free market economy that pushed aside longstanding assumptions about the role of public officials in the marketplace itself.