Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (review)

Department stores in Canada, such as Eaton's, Simpson's, and the Hudson's Bay Company, experienced remarkable growth and financial success between 1890 and 1940. Donica Belisle's Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada adds a valuable perspective to scholarship on retail history and consumption in Canada. Belisle takes a nuanced approach to consumerism that neither assumes all consumers are dupes nor unreservedly celebrates the empowering nature of consumption. This well-researched and articulate book addresses two main themes: the role of department stores as agents of modernization in Canada and Canadians' ambivalent relationship with these stores.

Belisle argues that department stores helped to create a 'national community of consumer citizens' (54) by promoting the idea that retail consumerism was an essential feature of Canadian life. She further claims that, as self-proclaimed national icons, the department stores represented a modern nation that was white, Christian, and English-speaking. The author's insightful examination of the assumptions about gender and race that underscored department stores' conception of the nation and its citizens persists throughout the book and provides Retail Nation with an overall coherence and unifying analytical framework. A content analysis that Belisle conducts of advertisements for department stores between 1890 and 1940 is a particularly strong example of her attention to the dynamics of race and gender that informed Canadian department stores' discourses about the nation. She argues that in these advertisements only white people were conceptualized as consumers; Aboriginal peoples were depicted as pre-modern, and people of African and Asian descent were portrayed as labourers.

Belisle relies on a large archive of primary sources, including oral histories, letters, training manuals, and trade publications, to provide the reader with insight into Canadians' ambivalent relationship with department stores. On the one hand, these stores offered (primarily female) consumers a convenient way to shop, affordable products, an opportunity to experience adventure, and a social space in which to spend time. Department stores also provided workers with a safe, economically stable, and supportive working environment. On the other hand, female shoppers were often treated in a condescending manner; the working environment in department stores was informed by a paternalistic and anti-union philosophy; and anti-department store activists argued that these stores took money away from local communities.

Belisle's analysis of labour conditions, however, does not examine the differences between department stores' positions on issues such as workers' rights to unionize, campaigns for wage increases, and the opportunity for women to obtain positions above entry-level sales work. A consideration of these differences would have added complexity to Belisle's compelling research on workers' experiences within department stores. For example, although the Hudson's Bay Company was strongly disinclined to pay its workers overtime, it is unclear whether other department stores went to great lengths to avoid this expense. In addition, some discussion of the differences between retail culture in French- and English-speaking Canada would have been a welcome addition to the book, which tends to focus primarily on English-speaking consumer culture in Canada.

Belisle's work on the commodification of workers presents a thought-provoking perspective on the exploitation of workers within department stores. The author argues that department stores regulated and monitored retail workers' affect and appearance by requiring them to dress in a professional and understated manner and prohibiting them from engaging in activity such as gossiping in front of clients. This argument resonates with contemporary theories on labour, such as Lazzarato's theory of immaterial labour and Hochschild's work on affective labour. Unfortunately, Belisle does not contextualize her argument within a larger theoretical framework. (Belisle briefly mentions Hochschild but does not make the connection between Hochschild's arguments and her own conclusions.) Belisle's intriguing contention that retail workers were exploited because department stores obtained services from workers that exceeded their wage might have been strengthened if she had considered it in light of these theories.

Belisle...