Motivations
When I began my project examining the emergence of supermarkets, I was driven by my longstanding interest in the history of capitalism and the history of women and gender. I wanted to make consumer culture material, embed it in structures and institutions and politics rather than the abstract and often immaterial descriptors often attached to it. I also wanted to focus on women’s consumption as labor—labor that mattered structurally—during a period (1919-1968) when women are conventionally seen as relatively apolitical. This all came from frustration with the way that gender so often got ignored in discussions of political economy, and the ways that political economy and structures were ignored in feminist scholarship and discussions of gender (this was, I should point out, a long time ago).
Original Expectations
My expectations were in some ways rewarded. I did very quickly discover the links between the rough-and-tumble world of profits, price competition, and political economy and the performance of (and claims on) gender normativity. It was clear that the everyday work of grocery shopping was a way of participating in, upholding, and also resisting larger racial, ethnic, religious—and economic– systems.

Modes of engagement –
The project was archivally based and largely ethnographic. Of course I hoped that it would speak to larger and contemporary debates, but I don’t know that one could call it publically engaged by design. In the course of finishing it I was increasingly asked to speak publically about grocery stores. Also, over time, I grew more interested in the opportunities for and possibilities of historical scholarship that spoke to contemporary issues. Indeed, it is precisely that that has driven my interest in new projects on contemporary food provisioning and on the politics of high-end, gourmet eating in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Unforeseen implications or ramifications of the project.
The largest unforeseen implication of my first project is that I was able to articulate to contemporary food issues; so much current debate and discussion is about remaking food systems that I find it useful to remind participants that we don’t actually fully understand the variables that shaped it in the first place, nor the politics that undergird it—but we do know that the current structure isn’t inevitable or natural.
Also, I had not expected to see the state as explicitly present in stores, and as crucial to the creation of large, top-down supermarkets, as I found it to be. This really spoke to me about the possibilities of large policy in shaping consumption.

Finally, I was surprised by the false starts and fragility of chain stores and large supermarkets. Many went bust, backed off of strategies that seemed sure-fire bets, or struggled to meet new requirements of the state.
We think of mass retail and supermarkets—for better or for worse—as reflecting human nature and demand. What I found was stores that reflected the contingencies of the moment—the laws, social systems, or financial pressures that businesses were negotiating. What people actually wanted was something else entirely.