Als die Kassen lesen lernten: Eine Technik-und Unternehmensgeschichte des Schweizer Einzelhandels 1950–1975 by Katja Girschik (review)

Katja Girschik offers a business and technology history of the Swiss retail trade that focuses on computerized “checkout counter technologies” between 1970 and 1975. Charmingly titled When Cash Registers Learned How to Read and based on her dissertation for the University of Zurich, Girschik won the 2009 Prize for Business History from the German Society for Business History. The author builds her more general arguments on a case study of the retailer and supermarket chain Migros, a pioneer of technology-supported cash register systems in Switzerland.

Migros was founded in Zurich in 1925 by Gottlieb Duttweiler, based on the idea of selling basic foodstuffs at low prices from trucks that toured the country. When this strategy met with resistance by competitors because it threatened intermediate trade, Migros began to create its own product lines and established stores in the form of cooperatives. In the 1940s, Duttweiler transformed his entire business from a privately owned company into regional cooperatives headed by the Federation of Migros Cooperatives. In addition to supermarkets, Migros also expanded its offerings to include travel agencies, filling stations, language schools, and banking and insurance services, creating a broad portfolio of business activities that centered on the much-celebrated Migros ethic, “Put people first.” To this day, Migros proudly celebrates its unique business model and beliefs, for example, by refusing to sell alcoholic beverages and cigarettes in its flagship stores.

Significantly, Girschik does not fall into the trap of reproducing company rhetoric. Nor does she lose sight of the exceptionality of the Migros model. Innovatively, she puts the cash register front and center in her study, showing convincingly that modern debates about rationalization and self-scanning at the checkout point have a longer history. Because most scholarship on checkout technologies—such as cash registries, bar codes, and digital scanner registries—focuses on the United States, Girschik’s book is a welcome, even critical addition to the work by James W. Cortada and others.

Technical innovation is only part of the story, however. Conceptualizing business as an arena of social interactions and micropolitics, the author analyzes the social and organizational changes that the introduction of computers necessitated. By working with day-to-day sources from the company’s archives, she offers an insightful bottom-up analysis of what computerization meant for customers, employees, and management.

The book is structured in three parts. The first deals with Migros’ introduction of self-service supermarkets in Switzerland in 1948. Girschik shows the success of this model, but also the related problems. For example, the growing number of products made available in Migros stores threatened the cost model and created organization and control issues. Most importantly, while customers could move freely throughout the stores, the checkout counters became a bottleneck, limiting the amount of customers served per time unit. The second part of the study addresses how Migros dealt with this problem. Regional cooperatives first introduced calculating machines in the early 1950s to speed up the shopping process, and since the 1960s, computers were used for management and inventory control. Girschik shows how these developments went hand in hand with the rise of a new type of manager heavily influenced by scientific management developments in the United States, which Migros managers observed closely in their frequent travels.

The third and most exciting part of the study takes the vision of a computerized supermarket and asks how it was implemented. Since the late 1960s, Migros worked in cooperation with Zellweger Uster AG, a mechanical engineering company with aspirations for computer technology products, on an “automatic point of sale system.” This was a scanning system that simultaneously gave the price of a product and kept track of its sales, thus generating data that could be subsequently used for order and production management. The first machines of this kind were tested in the early 1970s. Despite some initial...