Skip to main content
University of California Press

How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

by Andrew Warnes (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $24.95 / £21.00
Publication Date: Jan 2019
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9780520968097
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.25
Illustrations: 13 bw illustrations
Recommend to your Library (PDF)(opens in new window)Rights and Permissions

About the Book

Picture a familiar scene: long lines of shoppers waiting to check out at the grocery store, carts filled to the brim with the week’s food. While many might wonder what is in each cart, Andrew Warnes implores us to consider the symbolism of the cart itself. In his inventive new book, Warnes examines how the everyday shopping cart is connected to a complex web of food production and consumption that has spread from the United States throughout the world. Today, shopping carts represent choice and autonomy for consumers, a recognizable American way of life that has become a global phenomenon. This succinct and and accessible book provides an excellent overview of consumerism and the globalization of American culture.

About the Author

Andrew Warnes is a Reader in American Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of American Tantalus: Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture and Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food, among other books.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Entrance

1. Inside Views
2. Aristocratic Baskets
3. In the Supermarket
4. The Late Cart
5. Carts Unchained

Exit
Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Warnes shows us how globalization, mechanized farming, refrigeration, and mass consumerism affect the way world consumers shop for food in supermarkets and how the global industrial food system encourages consumers to overeat."
— Gastronomica
“This book proposes to explain global consumerism by using a surprisingly modest object as its focus: the shopping cart. In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism the seemingly simple, inanimate shopping cart takes on a networked liveliness far more vibrant and ominous than expected. Warnes’s study allows readers to see the many dimensions of these things and how they train us as consumers.”—Christopher Schaberg, author of The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth

"In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism, Andrew Warnes offers an understanding of consumerism—both in the United States and around the world—as a consequence of the invention, in the 1930s, of that humble yet ubiquitous device, the shopping cart. By focusing on the history of the shopping cart, Warnes returns us to the importance of material underpinnings even for abstract and diffuse social conditions. An outstanding book."—Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition