| This dissertation explores how supermarket companies reshaped consumer culture by creating new "lands of desire," to borrow William Leach's phrase, for American grocery shoppers. Like other mass retailers, supermarket operators ran their stores with one goal uppermost in their minds: more profits through high volume sales. From the no-frills bargain centers of the 1930s to the sumptuous outlets of the postwar decade, supermarkets achieved high volume sales by offering consumers lower prices and more merchandise than could be found in other kinds of grocery stores. Yet industry leaders resisted limiting their appeals to price because they believed that their key customers---affluent, middle-class Americans---would consistently visit only those stores that made grocery shopping exciting as well as economical. In the postwar era, increased competition and standardization in both store design and product lines made the need for supermarkets that offered novelty, pleasure and fun even more pressing. Merchants responded by creating supermarkets that promised customers all the delights of a banquet: countless choices, fantasies of the social rewards accrued through fashionable consumption, and, especially, gustatory and erotic thrills. They invented---and constantly reinvented---what retailers termed "food department stores."; The dissertation examines how supermarket companies worked to stir pecuniary desires through new, sensual retailing environments, erotically-themed advertising, and promotions that hyped the possibilities of economic abundance. At the same time, the dissertation looks beyond the grocery aisle to demonstrate how the rise of the supermarket influenced changes in gender roles, sexuality, and the export of American culture abroad. |
