Transformations of Retailing in Europe After 1945

The volume focuses on processes of transformation in the retail business in several European countries mainly during the second half of the 20th Century. After World War II, structures, practices and the culture of retailing in most West European countries went through a period of rapid change. The post-war economic boom, the emergence of a mass consumer society, and the adaptation of innovations which already had been implemented in the USA during the interwar period, revolutionized the world of getting and spending. But the implementation of self-service and the supermarket, the spread of the department store and the mail order business were not only elements of a transatlantic catch up process of "Americanization". National patterns of the retail trade and specific cultures of consumption remained crucial, and long term processes of change, starting in the 1920s or 1930s, also had an impact on the transformation of retailing in post-war Europe. So the specific perspective of this volume firstly results from its comparative point of view on different European "cases", and secondly from simultaneously looking at transatlantic transfer as well as at national peculiarities, at short term change as well as at long term development. Chapters about several European countries offer new insights into the structural preconditions of the emerging mass consumer societies and also into the consequences, consumerism had on the practices of retailing.