Aunt Emma and King Customer Print E-mail
Small Retailers between Community and Consumer Interests in the Twentieth Century

Jan Logemann

The history of modern retailing offers two competing narratives. One story emphasizes the triumph of modern retailers and of consumer choice: From department stores to supermarkets, malls and discounters, new and improved retailers provided ever better prices, comfort and convenience to "King Customer." This market-liberal success story, however, is countered by a more critical and at times somewhat nostalgic narrative that views modern retailing forms primarily as a challenge to established communities and traditional social relationships. From this perspective, the rise of modern shopping centers and the demise of the "Aunt
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A "modern" store front in 1950s West Germany
Emma" store - the corner grocer - is first and foremost a story of lost public spaces and the commercialization of social relations. Both narratives tell important aspects of the story of retailer - community relations, but neither fully grasps its historical complexity.

Jan Logemann's project intends to engage the multi-faceted and often conflicted relationship between retailers, consumers, and communities across the twentieth century in two consumer societies - the United States and Germany - from a comparative angle. Changing landscapes of shopping and retailing were negotiated by retailers and consumer, urban planners and community organizers. Retailers were at times at the forefront of community changes, but at other times caught between the interests of the community and those of individual consumers. In a series of case studies of urban, suburban, and small town communities on both sides of the Atlantic, he will explore both the transnational and local dimensions of this crucial aspect of modern consumer societies. At its core, the project hopes to contribute to a better historical understanding of the role of the modern "consumer citizen" in Germany and America by tracing a variety of ways in which consumers as shoppers were able to (or failed to) reconcile their interests with those of consumers as citizens.