Poison politics: a contentious history of consumer protection against dangerous household chemicals in the United States.

The history of consumer protection against household poisons presents a key case study of the uniquely American struggle to balance public health and safety with the interests of business. By the late 19th century, package designs, warning labels, and state statutes had formed an uneven patchwork of protective mechanisms against accidental poisonings. As household chemicals proliferated in the early 20th century, physicians concerned with childhood poisonings pressured the federal government to enact legislation mandating warning labels on packaging for these substances. Manufacturers of household chemicals agreed to labeling requirements for caustic poisons but resisted broader regulation. Accidental poisonings of children continued to increase until the enactment of broad labeling and packaging legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. This history suggests that voluntary agreements between government agencies and manufacturers are inadequate to protect consumers against household poisonings and that, in the United States, protective household chemical regulation proceeds in a reactive rather than a precautionary manner.

Sensing design and workmanship: the haptic skills of shoppers in eighteenth-century London.

This article explores how eighteenth-century shoppers understood the material world around them. It argues that retail experiences exposed shoppers to different objects, which subsequently shaped their understanding of this world. This article builds on recent research that highlights the importance of shop environments and browsing in consumer choice. More particularly, it differentiates itself by examining the practice of handling goods in shops and arguing that sensory interaction with multiple goods was one of the key means by which shoppers comprehended concepts of design and workmanship. In doing so, it affirms the importance of sensory research to design history. The article focuses on consumer purchases of ceramic objects and examines a variety of sources to demonstrate the role of haptic skills in this act. It shows how different literary sources described browsing for goods in gendered and satirical terms and then contrasts these readings against visual evidence to illustrate how handling goods was also represented as a positive act. It reads browsing as a valued practice requiring competence, patience and haptic skills. Through an examination of diary sources, letters and objects this article asks what information shoppers gained from touching various objects. It concludes by demonstrating how repetitive handling in search of quality meant that shoppers acquired their own conception of what constituted workmanship and design.

Competition and product quality in the supermarket industry.

This article analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. Consumer Price Index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing more intense competition have fewer shortfalls. Competition from Walmart­the most significant shock to industry market structure in half a century­decreased shortfalls among large chains by about a third. The risk that customers will switch stores appears to provide competitors with a strong incentive to invest in product quality.

Power to the people: working-class demand for household power in 1930s Britain.

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility­gas­was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution effects between fuel types­as alternative fuels constituted the only local competition. Using newly-rediscovered returns from a major national household expenditure survey, we employ geographically-determined instrumental variables, more commonly used in the industrial organization literature, to show that gas provided a significant competitor, tempering electricity prices, while electricity demand was also responsive to marketing initiatives.

Local practice and global data: loyalty cards, social practices, and consumer surveillance.

Monitoring of consumers has become the most widespread mode of surveillance today. Being a multi-billion dollar business, the collected data are traded globally without much concern by the consumers themselves. Loyalty cards are an element with which such data are collected. Analyzing the role of loyalty cards in everyday practices such as shopping, I discuss how new modes of surveillance evolve and work and why they eventually make communication about data protection a difficult matter. Further, I will propose an alternative approach to the study of surveillance. This approach is concerned with local practices, focusing on subjective narratives in order to view surveillance as an integral part of culturally or socially manifested contexts and actions and not to view surveillance as something alien to society and human interaction. This will open up other possibilities to study modes of subjectivity or how individuals situate themselves within society.

Working women households and time-saving consumption: empirical evidence from Kerala.

This article explores the impact of labour force participation of Indian women on the consumption expenditure of their households. Field survey data were collected from working-wife and non-working wife households in Kerala, the state in India with the highest labour market participation of women in the organised sector. Differences in time-saving consumption expenditures of working and non-working wife households and different variables influencing consumption expenditures were researched. The study shows that among the variables which positively affect the time-saving consumption expenditure of the households, non-economic factors influence the time-saving consumption expenditure of the working-wife households more prominently than in non-working wife households.

Crazy for bargains: inventing the irrational female shopper in modernizing English Canada.

Between the 1890s and 1930s, anglophone politicians, journalists, novelists, and other commentators living in western, central, and eastern Canada drew upon established connections among greed, luxury, hysteria, and femininity to describe women who went shopping as irrational. Their motivations for doing so included their desires to assuage feelings of guilt about increased abundance; articulate anger caused by spousal conflicts over money; assert the legitimacy of male authority; and assign blame for the decline of small communities' sustainability, the degradation of labour standards, and the erosion of independent shopkeeping. By calling upon stock stereotypes of femininity, and by repositioning them to fit the current capitalist moment, English-Canadian commentators constructed disempowering representations of women to alleviate their anxieties about what they perceived as the ills of modernization.

The carbon-consuming home: residential markets and energy transitions.

Home heating and lighting markets have played crucial and underappreciated roles in driving energy transitions. When historians have studied the adoption of fossil fuels, they have often privileged industrial actors, markets, and technologies. My analysis of the factors that stimulated the adoption of anthracite coal and petroleum during the nineteenth century reveals that homes shaped how, when, and why Americans began to use fossil fuel energy. Moreover, a brief survey of other fossil fuel transitions shows that heating and lighting markets have been critical drivers in other times and places. Reassessing the historical patterns of energy transitions offers a revised understanding of the past for historians and suggests a new set of options for policymakers seeking to encourage the use of renewable energy in the future.

"This immense expense of art": George Eliot and John Ruskin on consumption and the limits of sympathy.

This essay attempts to better our understanding of George Eliot's conservatism by examining a body of ideas about consumption and moral obligation that she and John Ruskin share. I use a discussion of consumer ethics to explore the moral logic of their conservatism by examining the role of the aesthetic within it. Economic consumption and the aesthetic are subjects inextricably connected, not just because the discourses of political economy and aesthetics have a shared origin in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also because the discourse of aesthetics has long served to legitimize select modes and acts of consumption. By marking out a limit where one may reasonably cease to sympathize and instead devote energy (and money) to personal gratification, the treatment of consumption in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) offers an important articulation of moral thought. Eliot suggests that aesthetic pleasure can make consumption morally defensible, but she also anticipates Pierre Bourdieu's critique of the aesthetic: her novel represents both the display of cultural capital and the exercise of the aesthetic disposition as ways of maintaining social and economic hierarchies. She thus at once critiques and participates in the system within which the aesthetic functions to preserve social and political stasis. Using John Ruskin's economic writings to expose Middlemarch as a novel of consumer ethics, this essay examines Eliot's representation of personal economic consumption as an emergent mode of social and political agency that might operate productively within that stasis.

A "theatre of rule?" Domestic service in aristocratic households under the Third Republic.

E. P. Thompson developed the notion of "cultural hegemony" to analyse the power of the ruling class over the working class in eighteenth-century England. This article examines the aristocracy's endeavour to maintain its cultural hegemony in the France of the Third Republic. Drawing on the private archives of noble families, it documents servants' roles in supporting the "conspicuous consumption" of their employers, the hierarchy and wages of male and female servants and the language and gestures used in employer-servant interaction. It then looks at working-class responses to nobles' hegemonic ritual of hunting and concludes with discussion of the post-war socio-economic climate in which the distinctive features of domestic service in aristocratic households were gradually abandoned.