Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada

by Donica Belisle

The experience of walking down a store aisle – replete with displays, salespeople, and infinite choice – is so common we often forget retail has a short history. Retail Nation traces Canada’s transformation into a modern consumer society back to an era – 1890 to 1940 – when department stores such as Eaton’s ruled the shopping scene and promised to strengthen the nation. Department stores emerge as agents of modern nationalism, but the nation they helped to define – white, consumerist, middle-class – was more limited, and contested, than nostalgic portraits of the early department store suggest.

Genres: Canada, Economics, History, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2011

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belisle uses a down-the-middle approach, drawing from theorists and historians like Joy Parr, with her analysis of Canadian retail stores. Indeed, she rejects the Marxist approach that discounts the value of commodity consumption outright and the "opposite" view that consumer's hold complete agency in their relationship to the market. In doing so, she demonstrates how Canada's big retailers (HBC, Eaton's, Simpson's, and Dupuis Freres) built upon and reinforced ideas of citizenship, in this case the consumer citizen, based on exclusionary ideas of race, class, gender, and body. Indeed, stores commodified people's bodies through employment as well as advertising. Women play a large role in this narrative due to the gendered division of labour leaving them as shoppers that these stores catered to - yet, Belisle demonstrates the hostile environment that formed towards some women. the methods of protest they used, and the opportunity department store work provided some "pink-collar" women. The pictures in the book are a massive highlight.

[Don · Rating 1 out of 5]

Neither a narrative nor the demonstration of a thesis, it is hard to understand why this was published in book form. The economic collapse and disappearance of several department store chains that used to constitute a larger fraction of the Canadian economy than is typical in similar countries remains an unexplored mystery. Author Belisle notes this but has nothing to suggest. She offers conclusions, that department stores "perpetuated Anglo-Celtic, male and class privilege in Canada, that exploited wage earners and consumers, that helped to destroy co-operative alternatives to mass merchandising, and that conflated consumerism with Canada's national identity," but offers no reasons why these terrible things happened for more than a century until they stopped.
To illustrate, mail-order purchasing was even more important in Canada than in the USA (because the post office was willing to go to every address, which private parcel companies were not) and the T. Eaton Co. catalogue may have been even more important than was the Sears Roebuck catalogue in the USA. Belisle notes its discontinuation (without citing the exact date) but shows no interest in why the company made this change, let alone whether mail order demand altered. As financial journalists reported at the time, the Eaton family decided at this period to move its money out of retail stores and into television broadcasting. We still do not know whether customer hostility or managerial inattention caused Eaton's later bankruptcy, i.e. the wreck of the largest institution discussed by Belisle. She does not tell us and shows no interest in the topic.

[Meg]

Woo! Picked this up to start reading more Canadian history books and it was fascinating. Most people I know have some special memories about the Sears Christmas catalogue and this book details the beginning of Canada's largest department and mail-order retail stores in English Canada (a little bit about the ones in mnt but not in as much depth) largely Eatons, Simpsons, and the Hudson's Bay Company from 1800s to 1940 ish.

[Teghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The history of department stores in Canada had never been done before, despite them being a very popular and successful business model in Canada. Belisle fills that gap with this excellent research project which tells the narrative of modern commercial Canada alongside the stories of the women who worked in them. A fantastic cultural history that also manages to capture the excited vibe of the eras she is writing about.

(Read for my PhD comps)