Essay Database

When I started my research on the arrival of mass marketing and mass distribution in Italy, my aim was to explain the origin of a peculiar phenomenon. Thousands of small shopkeepers were still the only traders in the 1950s, while supermarkets and department stores were already common in Europe and the United States. These small shops were usually run on a family basis, and they did not sell processed food or frozen products. Hence, there …

…because it only affected people's day-to-day lives and not so-called "higher" values or principles. But a new vision of the world had been born, a vision modeled on the American way of life. And, as Richard S. Tedlow noted in New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (Basic Books, 1990), this new vision had a deeper implication: the idea that freedom of choice as consumers was somehow linked to political freedom as citizens.