SHOPPING IS WORK:  AN INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY  
OF GROCERY SHOPPING 
BY
C2009
Shelley L. Koch 
Submitted to the graduate degree program in Sociology and the 
Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas 
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy. 
      ________________________________ 
      Chairperson 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
    Date Defended________________________________ 
ii
The Dissertation Committee for Shelley L. Koch certifies 
that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: 
SHOPPING IS WORK:  AN INSTITUTIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY  
OF GROCERY SHOPPING 
Committee: 
      ________________________________ 
        Chairperson 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
      ________________________________ 
     Date approved:_________________________ 
iii
Table of Contents 
1.  Introduction      1 
2.  The Work of Shopping     16   
3.  Individual Responsibility for Nutrition   43 
4.  The Efficient Housewife     75   
5.  Retail Organization     101 
6.  Conclusion       135 
Appendix and Tables      147 
Bibliography       152 
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
"An infant born through the new 'test tube' technology or womb implant, or a child 
raised in an institution are considered 'products.' Those who bring the foetus to term 
in the laboratory or who care for the child in the orphanage or juvenile facility are 
seen as workers. They are economically active. But a mother, daily engaged unpaid in 
these activities, is 'just a housewife.'" 
-Marilyn Waring, UNPAC website
 Grocery shopping, especially when my kids were young, was an on-going 
weekly or even twice a week activity.  To get ready to shop I would look to see how 
much we had in the checkbook and what we had on the shelves, sometimes make a 
list (but often lose it in the process) and try to mentally plan what meals I could make 
for the next couple days.  I would then load the kids up in their car seats, make sure 
they were fed and diapers changed and head off to the supermarket.  Trudging around 
with my cart and my kids, shopping was the least fun of my household activities, 
leaving me exhausted both mentally and physically.  It sure felt like a lot of work. 
 Marxist and socialist feminists in the 1970?s and 1980?s agreed that grocery 
shopping and other unpaid activities like cooking, cleaning, and even volunteering 
should be considered work (Secombe 1973; Oakley 1976, Hartmann 1979; Molyneux 
1979).  They defined this activity as reproductive labor, non-wage work that was 
outside the market but necessary to reproduce the next generation of people.
Although women were not making clothes or growing food as they once did before 
industry took over the production of these products (Strasser 1982; Swartz Cowen 
1982), women were now buying goods and services and the work of purchasing these 
products and integrating them into the household was part of the housewife?s job 
2
(Hartmann 1981; Kessler-Harris 1982; Oakley 1974; Vanek 1980).  Women as 
consumption agents became a bridge between the public sphere of retail capital and 
the private sphere of the household.  Luxton (1980) recognized that the work of 
consumption activities such as grocery shopping involves ?juggling household 
income, commodity prices, household needs and various preferences of family 
members (170).?   
 Sociologists have researched grocery shopping as one aspect of the work of 
feeding the family.  British sociologists Murcott (1982) and Charles and Kerr (1996) 
studied the work women did in feeding their households and Marjorie DeVault?s 
(1991) classic Feeding the Family showed how women use food work to produce 
family life and in the process cemented their subordination in the family.  However, 
these researchers did not specifically focus on the economic dimensions of shopping.  
Anthropologist Daniel Miller (1995, 1998) researched grocery shopping as an act of 
consumption and concluded that the consumer drives the political economy with her 
choices.  Recently academics in cultural studies situate the grocery store and 
shopping as a prime example of the changes in the political economy in the last 50 
years (Humphry 1998; Dixon, 2001).   Nona Glazer (1993) was one of the few 
sociologists who have researched grocery shopping as economic labor, concluding 
that the grocery store added to women?s unpaid labor in the shift to self-service. 
 Although today women make up nearly half of the labor force (U.S. 
Department of Labor 2007), they are still working the ?second shift? (Hochschild 
1989) at home. Current research suggests that although women have decreased the 
3
number of hours they work in the home, they still perform at least two-thirds of the 
household labor (Bianchi et al.2000; Gershuny 2000; Gershuny, Godwin, and Jones 
1994).  Men are picking up more of the household labor, especially child care but 
their work has not compensated for women?s decline nor reached parity with 
women?s time.  Hook (2006) studied the distribution of household labor in 20 
countries between 1965 and 2003; in no country were men performing more than 37 
percent of all housework. 
  Jacobs and Gerson (2001) found that changes in household work are a 
reflection of changes in family composition, and especially growth of dual earner 
couples.  Men?s work commitments have remained stable and their domestic 
involvement has not increased sufficiently to offset women?s rising work 
commitment.  ?Thus, single parents and parents in dual-earner couples face not only a 
shortage of time but also increasing expectations during that limited time, both on the 
job and at home (Jacobs and Gerson 2001: 61).  They argue that the stalled revolution 
has left men shouldering less than an equal share at home.  Orrange, Finebaugh and 
Heck (2001) also found that wives in dual-earner households remain the managers of 
the households.
 But should consumption activities such as grocery shopping only be 
conceptualized as reproductive labor?  When I buy food to feed my family, I am also 
performing labor that closes the production-consumption loop.  Farmers have grown 
food that they sell to manufacturers, who use this food to produce products that they 
sell to retailers, who then sell it to me.  At each stage money is exchanged for 
4
products; the food industry as a whole, which includes agricultural production, 
processing, distribution, as well as retailing, accounts for between 10-13 % of the 
total gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States (Boland and Schmaker 
2005). According to the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey, households spent an 
average of $6,133 on food purchases in 2007, $3,465 of this for food they will use in 
the household (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008).  This represents 12.5 percent of the 
average total household expenditure, or $750 billion annually.
 In 2003, household consumption accounted for roughly 60 percent of the 
gross domestic product (GDP) and consumer spending is considered the main 
employment generator (Heilbroner and Thurow 1994; Tossi 2002). However, 
economists state quite pointedly that ?...the essential characteristic of consumer 
spending as a whole is its dependable, predictable, passive nature (italics 
theirs)?.consumption spending?the broad flow of household expenditure that buys 
up two thirds of GNP?is not a driving force in our economy, but a driven one
(Heibroner and Thurow 1994).  Even though consumer spending is essential for a 
healthy economy, economists do not include the work of purchasing consumer 
products in statistics such as the GDP because consumers are not paid to perform this 
service, thus rendering this work as ?passive?.
 Is my grocery shopping labor productive or is it merely a labor of love?  The 
bigger issue is who gets to decide what counts as economic labor.  Feminists have 
detailed the efforts made in 19
th
 and 20
th
 century social thought to separate the private 
household from the public market (Cott 1977; Boydston 1990; Folbre 1991; Sprague 
5
1997).  This dichotomy between the public and the private spheres, between 
production and consumption, between paid and unpaid labor, permeates how we 
conceptualize both the larger economy as well as individual economic activity.  
Economists view the work that individuals do in households for people they have 
intimate relationships with as altruistic with little regard for self-interest, whereas 
market behavior is based on narrow self-interest and conducted with little interaction 
and no outside influences (England 2003; Nelson 1993).  And of course market labor 
counts more than household labor: market labor is somehow more productive (c.f. 
Waring 1999 for the exclusion of women?s unpaid labor in national accounting) as 
well as a subject worthy of academic research. 
 It would seem logical grocery shopping would fall under the purview of 
economic sociology, a sub-discipline that purports to ?socialize? this narrow 
conception of the economic and economic action as merely individual self-interest by 
situating the economy in its social context.  In the introduction to The Handbook of 
Economic Sociology, the ?textbook? for the discipline, Smelser and Swedberg define 
economic sociology as ?the application of frames of reference, variables and 
explanatory models of sociology to that complex of activities which is concerned with 
the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of scarce goods and services
(Smelser and Swedberg 2005: 7 italics in original).?  Scholars in this tradition have 
investigated how economic action is both facilitated and constrained by social 
relationships in networks, social groups and institutions. 
6
 However, Zelizer (2002) argues that economic sociology has accepted the 
explanatory priority set by the field of economics, which focuses its explanations on 
individual choice within constraint as well as maintains the boundaries between 
market and non-market labor, between production and consumption. Although 
consumption is considered part of the economic cycle, and the question what is and 
what isn?t work ?is one of the central questions of economic sociology (Abbott 
2005:308)?, gender and consumption are ignored or considered epiphenomenal for 
economic sociologists (Milkman and Townsely 1994, England and Folbre 2005, see 
Zelizer 2002 for full discussion).
  Zelizer (2002, 2005a, 2005b) maintains that economic sociologists generally 
fall into two separate camps, either ?hostile worlds? (separate spheres)? or ?nothing-
but? paradigms.  In the ?hostile worlds? paradigm, economic activity takes place in 
the public sphere while the private sphere involves intimate relationships; 
intermingling between the two creates disorder and contamination.  The ?nothing-
but? paradigm designates that economic activity and personal relationships are 
?nothing but normal economic activity, nothing but a form of cultural expression, or 
nothing but an exercise of power (Zelizer 2005b).? While the nothing-but scholars do 
point out that economic activity, power, and culture all play a significant role in 
economic activity, this reductionism does not cover the range and variation of 
relationships.  Zelizer (2005b: 44-45) pushes for an alternative conception of the 
economic that expands the definition of work, recognizes that economic decisions 
involve multiple social relationships, looks at the actual content of transactions and 
7
locates cultural content within economic relationships rather than as external to these 
social ties. 
  Grocery Shopping as Economic Activity 
How can we incorporate the work of grocery shopping back into the 
economy? One alternative approach consistent with Zelizer?s recommendations 
would be to conceptualize shopper?s labor as work, and to begin our inquiry into the 
economic relationships from the standpoint of these workers. Dorothy Smith (1987, 
1990, 2005) offers an innovative methodological approach in institutional 
ethnography, an approach that trains our lens on the actual work being done in our 
everyday/everynight lives. Instead of reifying or creating a ?virtual reality? out of 
concepts such as ?the economy?, Smith argues we must ground our inquiry in the 
actual activities of actual people (Smith 2005).  
Smith broadly defines work as ?anything done by people that takes time and 
effort, that they mean to do, that is done under definite conditions and with whatever 
means and tools, and that they have to think about it (Smith 2005: 152).?  This 
?generous? conception of work allows researchers to take seriously the activities of 
daily living as well as to learn from people?s experiences what they actually do, how 
their work is organized and how they feel about it (Smith 2005:155). 
Starting with the work of people on the ground, we have a unique opportunity 
to view the economy in action. Combining an ethnomethodological approach that 
views the social as the concerting of people?s activities with Marx?s concept of social 
relations as the coordinating of people?s activities from multiple sites not necessarily 
8
by people known to each other, Smith argues that to understand how our social world 
is put together we must begin our investigation in the actual work people do in their 
everyday/everynight lives and use that information to discover the social relations 
that shape our local experiences (Smith 1987, 1990). 
Increasingly, this work is organized by abstract and objectified relations of 
ruling through the use of texts (Smith 1987, 1999, 2005).  Smith?s conception of text 
includes ?the association of words or images with some definite material form that is 
capable of replication (2005: 166).?  The material form of texts include print, film, 
television, audio, electronic media, all of which have the ability to be replicated in 
exact form in many different places.  Institutions use these texts to coordinate and 
standardize the work of many people in many different locales; thus, texts 
?coordinate the work done by different people not only in that setting but in other 
settings so that the work done in one place is coordinated with that done elsewhere 
and at other times (166).? 
Texts transmit discourses that constrain or organize what people can say, think 
or do.  Smith borrows from Foucault?s understanding of discourse as ?conventionally 
regulated practices of using language that formulate and recognize objects of 
knowledge in distinctive ways (Smith 224) to define discourses as the local practices 
of translocally organized social relations (Griffin and Smith 2005).  ? But Smith also 
stresses that discourses not only regulate and control, they also provide means of 
action (Griffin and Smith 2005).  People participate in discourse and their 
participation reproduces the social relations of production.  Discourses are not 
9
determinate: people can chose to ignore these discourses in their actions and thoughts, 
but they are still ultimately socially accountable for the knowledge transmitted.
For example, Luken and Vaughn (2006) interviewed women in depth about 
their mothering practices in relation to ?the Standard American Home?, a discourse 
that linked proper childrearing practices and home environments with the marketplace 
for housing, household goods, and services.  Organizations in the early 20
th
 century 
such as the Children?s Bureau, the Own Your Own Home campaign and the Better 
Homes in America movement produced a textual discourse that shaped women?s 
expectations about their housing choices, including prescriptions such as giving each 
child a separate room, decorating rooms differently according to age and gender, and 
owning a home instead of renting.  In-depth interviews with women whose 
experiences spanned this time illustrate how their housing practices were directed 
toward the discourse.  Even when they rejected or chose other alternatives to the 
Standard American Home discourse, their narratives were structured by this discourse 
(Luken and Vaughn 2006: 327). Thus, these women were aware of the discourse and 
were ultimately accountable for their action or non-action.
Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that maps these social 
relations and makes visible the work of people in institutions who manage, 
coordinate, and control our local settings.   The researcher begins with the standpoint 
of the people whose experiences provide the starting point of the investigation and 
seeks to identify some of the institutional processes that shape this experience (Smith 
2006).  Institutions are not conceptualized as particular types of organizations but 
10
rather are meant to instruct the researcher to coordinated and intersecting work 
processes that take place in multiple sites (DeVault and McCoy 2007).   When 
looking at health care as an institution, for example, researchers find not just a 
specific organization but a vast network of work processes and courses of actions at 
different sites of action, including hospitals, homes, doctor?s offices, elementary 
schools, medical schools, nursing homes, pharmacies, media, advertising agencies, 
insurance agencies, and government departments (Diamond, cited in DeVault and 
McCoy 2007: 17). Institutions are thus ?functional complexes? (Smith 2006). 
The goal of Institutional Ethnography (IE) is to explain the process by which 
our lives are put together by the work of people in these extra-local sites in ways that 
we cannot know, which points to relations beyond the local lived experience but 
which begins in the everyday work of people.  IE employs a two-stage logic to 
ethnographically describe and map everyday life as coordinated by relations beyond 
the individual.  The first stage involves interviewing individuals about their everyday 
work, the actual activities they engage in and what it means to them.   
Methodology
For the first step in the institutional ethnography process I interviewed 20 
grocery shoppers who shop at three different retail settings, two suburban and one 
rural, about the work involved in grocery shopping.  These informants do not 
constitute a sample in the traditional sense, but rather an entry point to a common set 
of organizational processes (DeVault and McCoy 2007) and were used to open a 
window into how people participate in an institutional order and thus how this order 
11
could be investigated (Griffith and Smith 2005). I chose different retail sites to 
account for different organizational settings: for example, one suburban store is 
independently owned, the other is part of a regional chain of stores, and the rural store 
is independently owned but part of a retail cooperative.  I hypothesized that different 
retail configurations may have different approaches to organizing shopping work 
based on the level of corporate involvement but will conclude that the process of 
grocery shopping is standardized across different organizational settings. 
In order to ethnographically describe the work of shopping, I interviewed 
shoppers who performed at least 50 percent of the grocery shopping and had minor 
children in the household.  After obtaining permission from the Institutional Review 
Board (IRB), I used a snowball method to locate shoppers who fit these criteria, and 
did expand the sample to include one single individual as well as two retired 
shoppers, all who had no children in the household as a contrast.  I was not attempting 
to produce a representative sample.  The goal of talking with people is to start in their 
work and find an entry to map the social relations that organize this work.  Smith 
(personal communication, 2005) advised me to tap into a reasonable range of 
variation in the forms of grocery store participation that would orient my ?gaze? to 
those extra-local forms of organization that shape this work.   
It became clear, however, that shopping for other individuals, including 
spouses and especially children, significantly increased the level of physical work and 
administration of grocery shopping.  All shoppers were women, except for one man.  
I attempted to use the snowball technique to identify male shoppers who fit the 
12
criteria, but could not locate fathers who performed most of the shopping work 
independent of their spouses.  The shoppers in my study, for example, acknowledged 
that their husbands did perform some of the shopping but often with a pre-made list 
or if they were asked to ?pick up some milk? on their way home from work.  
All shoppers in my study were white.  This was not an intentional oversight 
but a product of the larger demographic of the areas involved.  The rural area is 
almost 95% white, while minorities comprise only 15% of the population of the 
suburban areas (2000 US Census).  My informants were evenly divided between the 
rural and suburban areas.  Eleven shoppers worked full-time, three worked part-time, 
four identified as stay-home moms, and two were retired.  Eight informants (forty 
percent of the total) had household incomes below $45,000, two informants (ten 
percent) had incomes above $100,000, and the remaining ten (fifty percent) fell 
between $45,000 and $90,000.  Thus, many of these shoppers fall into the working 
and lower middle classes and provide a good entry point to understand the 
experiences of mainstream America. 
The demographics of the shoppers are listed in Table A.  The interview was 
semi-structured (see Table B for interview schedule) and usually lasted between an 
hour and an hour and a half.  I asked shoppers about grocery shopping in general and 
allowed the shopper to guide me through their work routine.   I transcribed these 
interviews and analyzed them for common themes as well as processes that shape 
what shoppers say they do.  All names used in this paper are pseudonyms.  
13
As the retail store is also one of the shoppers? work sites, I also interviewed 
six store managers about their work, attended industry trade shows, and conducted 
participant observations at the retail sites.  Of these six, I interviewed three managers 
at their stores about various aspects of their work, including store organization, price 
setting, and the best consumer practices.  I also interviewed three section managers 
while I attended a Food Show, which included over 120 vendors showing thousands 
of new products to store owners and managers, including Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, 
and Con-Agra. I also interviewed one corporate sales manager at the corporate 
headquarters.
In order to understand how texts and discourses created at extra-local 
locations coordinate this work of shopping, I then analyzed the texts that shoppers 
and managers consider relevant to their work.  These texts included women?s 
magazines (More, Good Housekeeping, Real Simple), morning and evening news 
shows (The Today Show, Good Morning America), diet programs (i.e., Weight 
Watchers), government publications (i.e., United States Department of Agriculture, 
Health and Human Services), advertising texts and retail trade publications 
(Progressive Grocer and Supermarket News).
In analyzing these texts, I searched More, Good Housekeeping, Simple Living 
and Weight Watchers for articles related to shopping and nutrition published in the 
last four years.  Articles specifically on grocery shopping were only written 
sporadically, but health and nutrition were topics in nearly every issue.  In these cases 
I looked for articles that had some connection to products that one should buy for 
14
individual or household health.  Large multi-media corporations own and publish 
many related publications and thus much of this content was standardized.  For 
example, the Meredith Corporation, which publishes More Magazine, also owns 
Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, Fitness, Parents, 
Country Home, and Midwest Living.  The Hearst Corporation owns Good
Housekeeping as well as Cosmo, Country Living, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, 
Redbook, and Seventeen.  Time owns Real Simple and Cooking Light, Health, 
MyRecipes.com, Sunset, and All You.
Managers indicate that they read trade industry publications, especially 
Progressive Grocer and Supermarket News, general marketing newsletters printed by 
organizations such as the Food Marketing Institute, specific corporate newsletters, 
food and beverage magazines as well as business newspapers such as The Wall Street 
Journal.  I analyzed these publications for articles on consumers and consumer 
management. 
The chapters that follow are meant to be read as a map of the social 
organization of grocery shopping.  In chapter two I build up an account of the work of 
shopping from the experiences of the shoppers themselves, including what they do, 
what they know and where they get their information about shopping.  In chapters 
three and four I discuss two discourses that shape their work, the efficiency and the 
nutrition discourses.  In chapter five I turn to the managers? work and discuss two 
discourses that orient their work vis-?-vis the grocery shopper.  All of these 
discourses ask the shopper to think and act differently, and direct us to significant 
15
contradictions in these discourses as well as suggest the need for a broader 
understanding of the economic, as I present in the conclusion.
16
Chapter 2: The Work of Shopping 
 When I asked my shoppers how they felt about grocery shopping, I got one of 
three responses.  More than half expressed some interest in shopping; it got them out 
of the house, they saw people they knew, or they enjoyed the act of choosing 
products.  Karen Calhoun told me  
I like to shop.  I don?t mind shopping.  Since I?m not working it?s more 
pleasant. I?m not in as big a hurry. And doing it during the day, the stores are 
more laid back than in any of the stores than after 4:00 and everybody?s off 
work and its rush, rush, rush. 
Mary Wirth said ?I very much enjoy grocery shopping.  It puts me in a different place 
mentally and for me I see it as relaxing and I see it as an opportunity to get out of the 
house.?
 Some decidedly did not like grocery shopping: 
I don?t like grocery shopping.  We are always in a hurry.  For a grocery store 
trip if I can get in and out in 15 minutes I?m really happy.  And I don?t like to 
go to stores where I don?t know where things are, if they are rearranging the 
store because I don?t have time and so I?ll get annoyed with a particular store 
if they rearrange too much (Jessica Pierce) 
But almost all of the shoppers I talked with echoed this sentiment in some way: ? It?s 
[grocery shopping] just something I have to do (Jackie Engle).? 
 Although more men are doing some of the housework, including grocery 
shopping (Coltrane 1998), industry analysts conclude that grocery shopping is still 
women?s work, with 65-80 percent of all grocery shopping for households done by 
women (Dixon 1999; Progressive Grocer, June 1, 2005).  In this chapter I explore the 
17
work of grocery shopping as the shoppers understand and experience it, and from 
their descriptions I show how we can begin to map the social organization that 
coordinates this work. 
 In order to grasp the distinctiveness of the contemporary work of shopping, it 
is useful to put this work in an historical context. Until the mid-1850s, food 
procurement depended on the geographical region.  For those in rural areas nearly 
self-sufficient farms were the norm; food grown at home was bartered or traded for 
coffee, tea, sugar and salt at the general store.  At the same time, many households on 
the East coast depended on the public marketplace as their primary retail food source 
(Mayo 1993). Women shopped open-air stalls in the center of town; eventually these 
gave way to enclosed public market houses, such as the Northern Liberty Market in 
Washington, D.C. built in 1870 measuring 130 feet by 320 feet and 75 feet high 
where shoppers could find butchers, fishmongers, baked goods and produce.   
These public marketplaces were located in urban centers and relied on local 
patterns of trade.  Household shoppers, mainly women, would have shopped everyday 
as the markets were located within walking distance from their residence.  Thus food 
was fresh and locally produced but somewhat limited in choices such as fruits and 
vegetables as they were easily perishable. Culinary culture was based on food 
availability, tradition and ethnic patterns. Personal relationships were made with 
vendors, who were either producers (farmers and fishermen) or processors (butchers 
and bakers) (Strasser 1982).
18
 The distinction between rich and poor, urban and rural actually determined 
what level of labor was necessary for provisioning the family.  For more affluent 
urban women, procuring food and provisioning involved shopping first at the public 
markets for a wider variety of food choices and a greater level of nutrition as well as 
hiring domestic labor for cooking.  The working-class urban family still produced a 
significant amount of their food: pigs, chickens and goats and still lived in Manhattan 
in the 1860?s and gardens still flourished in industrializing cities (Strasser 1982).
Fresh produce was scarce and nutritional deficiencies plagued these neighborhoods; 
most families subsisted on bread, potatoes, crackers, salt pork and blood pudding 
(Cowan 1982).  The possibility did exist however, for working class and poor 
shoppers to buy unsold fruit and vegetables at lower prices later in the afternoon 
(Zukin 2004). 
 Rural households were mainly self-sufficient and produced most of the food 
they would eat.  These families ate monotonous diets which were dependent on the 
staples of their region.  The limitation of seasons, ineffective storage and the lack of a 
cash economy limited what can be grown and eaten.  These households, however, 
could forage from the land for wild greens and berries but mainly ate bread, butter, 
coffee and bacon, the standard fare of many rural dwellers (Strasser 1982).   
Either on the rural farm or in the urban market, all food raised or bought had 
to be prepared: the fish bought had to be de-scaled, the chicken killed and plucked, 
oatmeal had to be soaked overnight (Strasser 1982).  The work involved in food 
shopping and preparing was never-ending and labor-intensive, especially before the 
19
advent of electrification and refrigeration. However, food provisioners had an 
intimate relationship with the foods they were preparing, and had an immediate 
knowledge of food.  Provisioning did not involve making choices about what to eat or 
whether it was ?good?: getting enough food was a main concern.  Shopping also 
involved relationships: between shoppers and producers, and between shoppers and 
the larger community. 
Small locally-owned grocery stores existed in addition to public markets, 
usually as general stores that sold non-perishables such as tea, sugar, and sweets.  In 
both the market and the general store there existed distinctions between upper classes 
who were allowed to shop first at the market and were able to afford the general store 
products, and the working classes and poor who were left to shop at the end of the 
market time and who received not only inferior foods but also suffered from 
nutritional deficiencies (Mayo 1993).
The grocery store developed as people started moving outside urban cores and 
as smaller towns were able to receive a steady supply of goods (Mayo 1993).  The 
independent mom-and-pop store, the quintessential food retail outlet prior to WWII, 
were small stores with limited inventory whose survival was predicated on a loyal 
base of shoppers, personalized attention and service and high mark-up (Humphry 
1998).  In the rural town in my study, six small grocery stories once served a 
population of 1,000 people in the late 1930s.  Grocery shopping itself was a relatively 
uncomplicated process.   Charles O?Donnell Sr., the son of the founder of one of the 
six grocery stores ran a store roughly 700 square feet that provided staples like bread, 
20
bulk flour and beans and an assortment of brand-named canned goods.  What was 
shopping like for the consumer?  ?They didn?t do anything but stand there and pay for 
it.?  Charles elaborates: 
Shoppers didn?t have any grocery buggies to put them in.  They would bring 
the list of what they wanted and they would tell you and you would fill their 
order and put it on the counter right there and they paid for it and boxed it up. 
If they had more than they could carry we would carry it out for them but 
usually they would carry their own groceries out. Behind the counter there 
was tall shelving with canned goods on it and you had a grabber and you 
could take any can off that you wanted. And some of them had a rolling ladder 
that you could crawl up the ladder and get it off, you know.  But they put the 
order up and they would pay for it right there and take it out.  They would 
wait while you got their order ready. 
Family labor made this and the other grocery stores in town viable.  Charles?
father worked with his wife and two children for many years, eventually hiring one 
extra employee later on.  When Charles Sr. took over the store in the 50?s, he worked 
with his wife and children in the same manner.  The hours were long: set hours from 
8-6 and then several hours of inventory after closing.  He remembers being somewhat 
irritated when his customers would leave their grocery order with him on Saturday 
nights and come back, sometimes as late as midnight, after they had gone to the 
theater down the street.  
 When asked what the main differences were between then and now, he recalls 
that the store owners knew each customer personally as well as their children?s names 
and what family they came from.  People tended to shop in the same store because 
they had credit at the store, and many farm families would pay once a year.  The labor 
of shopping was not only mostly done by the family who worked the store but was 
21
also integrated into the life of the community.  Much of the food sold was locally or 
regionally produced, arriving usually by train or later truck from Topeka. 
Scholars have noted that tensions existed in this type of organization between 
customers and owners, especially in urban areas with greater diversity (Deutsch 
2002).  In some stores prices were not marked on the items so bargaining and 
haggling was common.  Some owners charged more for their richer customers but 
also had difficulty collecting from some of them (Greer 1986).   Ethnic tensions arose 
in larger cities as African-Americans and immigrants faced discrimination in white-
owned grocery stores.  Women as well found their purchases controlled and 
scrutinized by male shop clerks and owners and ?every transaction meant implicit and 
explicit statements of women?s fitness as wives, mothers, shoppers and homemakers 
(Deutsch 2002: 157).?  Deutsch (2002) argues these racialized and gendered 
relationships contributed to the rise of chains stores, especially in larger urban areas. 
Although women have always been responsible for feeding the household, the 
work itself has changed drastically in the last century. Technological changes such as 
household electrification, central water and heat, and new appliances had one of the 
most significant impacts on household labor: while these technologies did not 
decrease the overall amount of work that was required, they did change the nature of 
the work (Cowan 1983).  Food preparation previously was labor intensive and took 
many hours of the day; women would have performed this arduous labor on a daily 
basis as storage and refrigeration were not well developed until the turn of the century 
(Strasser 1982).We tend to forget that even in 1940, one in three households had to 
22
carry their water inside in buckets, only half of all households had refrigerators, and 
one third of households were still cooking with wood and coal (Cowan 1983).
However, those in the middle classes before the WWI did have more human 
help than housewives do today.  A majority of households had some domestic help, if 
not a full time maid than at least some help with laundry and cleaning, as well as 
services such as food delivery (Cowan 1983).   As more women went to work in 
factories and fewer immigrants were allowed into the US, the decline in domestic 
help meant that the housewife was expected to perform most household labor herself.
Appliances proliferated after 1945 such that housewives would be washing clothes in 
machines, cooking on stoves, and refrigerating leftovers.  Scholars conclude that 
labor-saving devices did not save any time for women in the household, as they lost 
the help not only of domestic servants but also men and children who were at work or 
at school and whose labor was replaced by the dishwasher or washing machine 
(Cowan 1983; Vanek 1979).
These changes in technology and household labor changed the way shopping 
was done.  The refrigerator, for instance, meant that housewives could buy in smaller 
quantities than the volume shopping that was done previously (Cowan 1983).  The 
personal automobile replaced the delivery car of the grocery store.  Many stores 
delivered food as a service to their customers, but as stores moved further into the 
suburbs and as customers were expected to shop for themselves, delivery ceased to be 
part of the store?s service.  Expectations for more elaborate meals were raised as the 
23
amount of manual labor involved in cooking decreased and the variety of foodstuffs 
available increased (Cowan 1983).
Mass distribution and mass production also changed the way American 
housewives cooked.  Prior to mass production, food was bought unprepared into the 
household requiring, processing and cooking.  Mass distribution included the rail 
system and mass production included the factory, which produced breakfast cereals 
and canned fruits and vegetables as early as the 1880s. Theses changes in distribution 
and production transformed the heavy manual labor of household work where women 
made food and engaged in productive activities; housekeeping was less labor-
intensive and new household appliances and public utilities made some of the jobs in 
the house easier (Glazer 1993).  Much of household labor shifted to consumption and 
the housewife to a new status of ?consumer?.  
Grocery shopping until roughly the 1960s consisted of the housewife buying 
commodities in a supermarket, using prepackaged food but otherwise cooking meals 
at home.  Self-service, arguably the most significant feature of the retail grocery store, 
flourished in this environment where the work of shopping was one aspect of 
women?s household labor.  Thus, while women?s work of provisioning became 
physically easier, it became less visible as work.  Consumption assumed the status of 
?housework?, the invisible labor women performed which was necessary to the 
operation of the economic system but not included in the accounting of economic 
activity. 
24
One of the most significant changes of the last thirty years for women?s 
unpaid household labor is the number of women engaging in waged labor.  According 
to the US Department of Labor, women comprised 46% of the total U.S. labor force 
in 2002 and are projected to account for 47% of the labor force in 2016.  A record 68 
million women were employed in the U.S.--75% of employed women worked on full-
time jobs, while 25% worked on a part-time basis (US Department of Labor 2007)   
In 1950, only about a third of women over the age of 16 were in the labor force (U.S.
Department of Labor 2000).  Women are now engaging in the ?second shift? 
(Hochschild 1989), working full or part-time in the labor market as well as 
performing unpaid household activities.  While it is unclear whether the changes in 
the production, distribution and retail of food (producing more processed food for 
example) allowed women to work outside the home (Wells 1998), or whether 
working women demanded changes in food, including processing and ?fast food? 
(Goodman and Redclift 1991), women?s wage labor has significantly impacted not 
only the food system but also how the work of shopping is done.    
Work of Shopping 
 While women are working at historically high levels, they are still performing 
much of the household labor.  Although DeVault (1991) and Dixon (1999) include a 
discussion of shopping as part of the work of feeding the family, their discussion did 
not look specifically at work as economic production. DeVault (1991) describes 
grocery shopping as a continual process of adapting and adjusting.  She found that 
grocery shopping is more than a simple matter of buying a few things that one needs, 
25
because ?needs? grow out of a routine that develops over time.   This is not to say that 
every shopping event is the same, but that what is bought at the store is a matter of 
how the household needs have developed. This routine is based on what family 
members like to eat or must eat, family schedules, and household financial 
constraints; in other words ?decisions are linked to the resources and characteristics 
of particular households and features of the market (DeVault 1991: 71).?   Although 
every family has their own routine and every shopper negotiates the work somewhat 
differently, there are many similarities in how women ?do? grocery shopping in 
general.
 Most of the shoppers I interviewed discussed their work of shopping in a 
chronological fashion, describing the preparation work first which included meal-
planning and list-making.  Next came the trip to the store, and then usually the after-
store work of bringing in groceries and putting them away.  I will discuss how they 
describe their work and suggest we can begin our inquiry into the social organization 
of this activity. 
Planning:
 Shoppers do not go into the store and just pick food out randomly; the 
shopping trip is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the work involved in feeding 
families.  Food provisioning generally involves a planning phase, which includes 
making meal plans, knowing what meals and foods the household members will/can 
eat, and scheduling meals and shopping trips around the household members.  
26
Shoppers engage in different levels of planning; for some planning for the shopping 
trip may be as elaborate as sitting down on Sunday night to plan out the week?s menu, 
or it may be as hasty as jotting a few items down on a sticky note to get that night 
after work.  For the shoppers in my study, those with more time or those who need to 
save money usually spend more time planning their shopping trip.  Jane Smith, a part-
time city worker with six kids, regularly makes meal menus.  She says: 
I let the kids pick once a week, they get to pick their own dinner menu and the 
only rule is no macaroni and cheese and no hot dogs.  I usually buy the things 
they pick for the week.  I make a week menu or otherwise I go ?what am I 
gonna cook?? and I don?t have the things I need to cook and we don?t eat or 
we order pizza and we can?t afford to eat out.  So we try to make a menu and 
stick to that menu (Jane Smith). 
Many shoppers begin their planning by consulting the grocery advertisement: 
The path is from the Wednesday supplement that comes out with the ads, then 
I make my list, and then I make my menu and then I go to the grocery store 
and then I buy this stuff and I even like taking I home and putting it in my 
refrigerator.  And then the meal production so the cooking, you know it is 
really time consuming (Kay Worthington). 
I got the pen, the paper, and the latest grocery ad because I went shopping this 
morning.  I usually make a list for at least a couple days worth of meals 
(Karen Calhoun). 
We get the ads on Wednesday and I make a list of what is on sale and I really 
plan it around kind of what?s on sale, if it?s stuff we like, that sounds crazy but 
I?m pretty thrifty. Or we attempt to do that.  A lot of times we just wing it 
though, it gets to be dinner time and we?re like ?aghhh? .  I mean honestly 
we?re like ?what are we going to have?? (Jackie Engle) 
27
Jackie also tries to include other members of the family in making the list with 
limited success:  
I have trained my two oldest, meaning my husband and first born daughter, to 
write down things we run out of.  Now if we run out of salt they are not going 
to tell me but if it?s something they like or their cereal they will write it down. 
[Do you have a specific list?] Well we just have a piece of paper we throw 
over by the phone and they just write it on there.  But who?s fault is it when 
they run out? Mom.  Because I was supposed to know that they were going to 
get diarrhea and we were out of Imodium?   Who knows, it?s just like ?how is 
this my fault?  It would probably do me good to occasionally just wig out and 
go ?this isn?t my problem?.   
Planning may even occur at the moment of shopping in store but there is some 
underlying knowledge of what is available at home, what everyone will eat, based on 
past experience: 
I kind of get into a rut of making the same things over and over.  So I get to 
the store and decide what we are going to have based sometimes what?s on 
sale and we have a deep freeze so sometimes if meat and things like that are 
on sale then I buy more of that kind of thing then go by what is in the deep 
freeze.  [Do you make an inventory?] No, I just kind of remember (Lisa 
Corbin).
Stacey Ostrander had just switched from part-time work to full-time employment at 
the time we talked.  This shift has changed the way she plans for shopping: 
I spend more time organizing because I go to the store less. I will do a big 
shop on the weekend and I used to avoid it on the weekend because everybody 
else was already there and then I would do it in the afternoons.  Now, I plan 
what I am fixing for the week so I know what I need to stock up on and then if 
I run back into the store it is once, maybe twice.  So I actually go to the 
grocery store less but I have more planning because I sit there and plan out the 
meals more. 
28
Working mothers in my study have different planning issues.  Rather than 
spend time planning for the week, the meal menu or item list is done at work or in the 
store or is perhaps solved by eating out. I usually began the interviews by asking 
shoppers to  remember the last time they went to the grocery store as a prompt.  One 
working mother pulled out her palm pilot and was trying to recall the last time she 
went shopping based on the ?other events in my life at that moment in time? and then 
elaborated:  
Shopping is not on the schedule so it just happens when it happens so I have 
to put it in terms of what else happens that day?.Let?s see, it was after work, 
I just had to figure out which day after work.  Because I don?t schedule it, it 
happens when I think that maybe there are some things that need to happen at 
home.  So it?s not like I plan a menu and go and grab things, its more like ?is 
there something at home? No, probably not? so I probably ought to get 
something that could possibly turn into a meal that evening.  [do you plan for 
several meals?] I would probably try to plan for a couple of meals but it 
sometimes it?s a daily, just go to the store grab for something that evening.  
I?m there a lot, probably more than if I would plan a menu and carry through 
but I don?t do that (Jessica Pierce). 
Another working mom on her last shopping trip: 
I had a list, a little sticky note with just a couple of things.  Just a couple 
things I wanted: some baked chicken already made because I knew I wouldn?t 
have time to cook tonight and toilet paper.   That?s really typical.  I usually 
have about 5 things unless I?m planning for some weekend or something.  But 
yea, I usually don?t buy many things at one time.  I also don?t do a lot of 
cooking.  I encourage the kids to go to breakfast at school and lunch so really 
I only have to plan one meal (April Malloy).   
I used to be a meal planner.  I used to have a weekly menu written out so 
everybody could look and know what we were having every day and it was all 
written out and I would shop for that menu  when I was in Topeka all of the 
time.  And I would say in the last two years since my job in Topeka changed 
last year and it was just a different type of position, in the last couple years, I 
29
have gotten away from that planning and shopping once a week. [Because of 
the change in your job?]  I think so.  I think part of it, especially this year, is 
the hours I put in.  I am putting in so much time, through most of the winter I 
wouldn?t even leave work until 6.  So it was just kind of like, I?d go home, 
you know it was like, what do I have on hand?  What can I quick stop and 
get? I wasn?t near as organized about it (Mary Wirth). 
Colin Moore, who shops jointly with his wife, stated that they try to plan, but 
when both of their schedules are too busy they just make routine dishes, which makes 
planning much easier: 
We used to plan out the whole week or at least plan we are going to make six 
meals this week and get stuff for that.  And then sometimes though we kind of 
have a set list of meals so you can go to the store and know what to get. I 
usually open the cabinet, open the fridge, see what?s there or not there, and 
then go to the store to fill in the missing spots. 
 Although few people could give me an exact dollar amount they spent on 
groceries (three-fourths of the respondents said they spent $100 a week on food 
regardless of the number of people in the household), shoppers believed that by 
planning the shopping trip they would be saving money at the grocery store.   I will 
discuss this issue of planning in order to save money or time in a subsequent chapter 
as an example of an institutional discourse and show how institutions use this textual 
discourse to shape how shoppers think about and perform their work. 
But even for the provisioners who don?t spend much time on meal planning, 
managing schedules and taking into account when people will be able to eat and when 
they can get to the store is a significant task.  The mom who has meal planning down 
to one meal still has to plan around her kids? schedules and when they will be in the 
car:
30
When they have ball practice in Topeka maybe I?ll fix some sandwiches for 
them to eat on the road up there and then when I come back I?m going to have 
a salad or something like that.  And Reggie can fend for himself or when I get 
back he?ll eat whatever I make him, you know at 8:00 or 9:00.  Last night was 
pizza because we had tumbling in Topeka and I brought home a pizza, left it 
there in the frig for Reg to eat whenever he did, which was when he came 
back in around 10:00 from working outside and the girls had a pizza on the 
way up to Topeka.  (April Malloy).
Planning around family schedules becomes quite tricky for all mothers as the 
kids get older and more involved in activities.   Stacey Ostrander does her ?big? 
shopping on Saturday but goes once a week to pick up items like milk, bananas or 
orange juice.  She has to work around her child?s schedule: 
I usually stop at [the supermarket] Thursday afternoons because Gerilyn has a 
? hour piano lesson, and I drop her off at the piano less and I have 30 minutes 
and I?ve got to be back after those 30 minutes to pick her up so it can?t be a 
long trip.  And you can?t get caught in a long line.  It has to be efficient, it has 
to be a short trip and it has to be very specific things that I need and I have to 
know which things they are.  That?s usually when I do it because it works out 
the best.  G is so tired, when she gets done with everything it will be 5:15, 
5:20 and she?s been at school since 8:00.  She is ready to come home--she 
isn?t ready to do a grocery shopping trip on the way home from work.   
 Even for one mother who is staying at home, taking care of her elderly 
mother and three teenage daughters and husband is enough to keep her busy all day: 
I usually make dinner about 1:00 in the afternoon because then I have 
grandma to feed and Jackie will come home next and she?ll eat then Sydney 
will come home next and she?ll eat and then Doug comes home at 7 or 8 at 
night and then he eats.  Nobody eats together, we all eat in shifts (Karen 
Calhoun).
   
31
Household Needs 
When doing the planning, provisioners must keep in mind the food needs and 
desires of members of household.  While studies from the 1980?s and 1990?s found 
that food providers often deferred to their husband?s wants and needs (Murcott 1983; 
Charles and Kerr 1986), recent studies find that now children?s needs are just as 
salient.  Dixon argues that ?children are as potent a boundary setter for what food 
comes into the house as is deference to men (Dixon, 1999: 63).?   But altogether food 
provisioners are constantly juggling what other members of the household need. 
One mother in the study tries to add a little variety to the usual list of meals 
but will jettison meals that the kids don?t like (even though she and her husband liked 
it):   
I just tried a new recipe last night.  It wasn?t very good.  Jerry liked it, the kids 
hated it.  It was an enchilada casserole.  Jerry and I thought it was really good 
but the kids were like ?mom, this is gross.?  So I don?t think I?ll make it again 
(Jane Smith).  
They can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if they don?t like dinner and
that works great for the younger two but Laurey hates peanut butter so it?s a 
real issue for her if she doesn?t like it.  Because if you don?t have ham or 
something to make a sandwich or something like that it?s harder for her to find 
alternatives (Jackie Engle) 
I have to have choices at every meal which is probably why I shop daily too. 
Evan has a bit of a regurgitation issue. At will.  And if today he wants 
broccoli, he?ll eat broccoli but if he wanted green beans and I served broccoli, 
he can regurgitate his whole meal in about one second.  Because that?s not 
what he wanted?. So partially you have to shop daily to get his choices 
(Jessica Pierce). 
32
Tim doesn?t like casserole type-things, he doesn?t like things that are out of 
the ordinary.  Ronnie will eat anything.  So there are lots of night if I just say 
I?m making this then Tim will have to make a choice and he is really willing 
to try and he has actually surprised himself ?Oh I do like this?.  But then if he 
doesn?t there will be an occasion where he will just have to make a sandwich 
or do those things.  My husband says I cater too much to the kids.  But I tell 
him, if I don?t like something I don?t make it, so I feel like my kids should 
have some opinion and some choice (Mary Wirth)  
[Do you plan meals around what your husband wants to eat?] No, definitely 
not.  I pick what I want to eat and if he likes it, fine.  He?ll let me know if he 
doesn?t like something.  I have to admit he?s pretty flexible.  If I say tonight?s 
potatoes, he?ll say fine.  He?ll eat anything I make, he really will.  He?ll tell 
me if he doesn?t like it but he will eat whatever I give him. I know what the 
kids won?t eat.  I might fix us vegetables and them not, you know the kinds 
they won?t eat (April Malloy). 
For some children or family members with medical problems or food allergies, 
choosing the appropriate food is a significant issue: 
We use frozen vegetables because Marney has kidney stones and she can?t 
have all that salt from canned vegetables.  Unless the canned vegetables are on 
a really good sale, it is mostly frozen (Jane Smith). 
I don?t do much prepared foods because of Gerilyn?s allergies.  Some things 
we have to look for in food, with the allergy, nothing with a nut warning or 
nothing with a peanut warning.  Peanuts or tree nuts, but there are cookies that 
are made with peanut flour, plain sugar cookies, so someone can?t hand me a 
sugar cookies oh it?s a sugar cookie, its fine.  I need to see a label, because 
there are sugar cookies in Hy-Vee that are made with peanut, I can?t think of 
the names but some that you throw in the oven to bake are made with peanut 
flour.  So that?s what you have to look for, even though it doesn?t specifically 
say nuts it made on the same equipment that nuts. (Stacey Ostrander) 
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Several provisioners not only had to worry about their own children, but also 
extended family members and other non-related children.  Karen Calhoun works 
around her mother?s food needs: 
Grandma gets so confused that she might be eating supper at 2 in the 
afternoon so I have to have something ready for her plus now she adds a new 
dimension to the grocery shopping because she?s very, very finicky--now I 
have to pick and choose things that she will eat as well.  Week by week 
changes because she has forgotten what she likes the week before.  Like this 
week she does like fish, she does like chicken, she will not eat anything that is 
mixed together like spaghetti, casseroles, anything like that she won?t eat, so 
you have to keep everything separate. Her needs are probably 90 percent of 
the grocery planning because my family will eat anything so I have to cook 
things that she will eat (Karen Calhoun). 
Jackie Engle runs an in-home day care which adds another layer of complexity to  
shopping:
I?ve got day care in my house about 20 days a month so I?ve got to do the 
fruit, vegetables, and the main course that we?re having since I have to keep 
up with regulations.  So I?m always getting those things and being up on those 
and then I have to consider my family (Jackie Engle)  
Division of Labor 
How do these shoppers negotiate the household shopping labor?  Most of the 
shoppers in my study indicate that grocery shopping is their responsibility because 
their partners do not have the skills and knowledge necessary knowledge to perform 
this work. April Malloy, for instance, states that her husband is a shopping liability: 
?He will start seeing things [in the store] and it?s like (sigh).  He?s terrible.  He?s very 
34
spontaneous and wants things as he sees them. It doesn?t matter if they are on sale or 
not.?    
Some shoppers feel they have to be the primary shoppers because their 
partners cannot control their impulses and would only buy junk food.  Jane Smith, 
when asked if she did most of the shopping replied,
Yes, I?d say I do 90%.  If I send John to the store to get hamburger we get ice 
cream, chips, more ice-cream.  He likes Oreo cookies, I never buy those.  He?s 
a fiend for junk food.  He will go willingly [to the store] but he doesn?t do 
well with staying on my list?it?s just easier to do it myself.  You think you?re 
going to make tacos but you don?t have any cheese but you have a lot of ice 
cream (Jane Smith).   
Lisa Corbin said that her husband was not capable of doing the shopping.  When 
asked why, she replied: 
he wouldn?t get the right kind of apples, or he wouldn?t get the right kind of 
string cheese, or we don?t really need that. (the right kind?  That your kids 
like?)  Yes, the kind that my kids like, or like just the wrong brands maybe, or 
he would just determine that we don?t really need that or skip that thing.  He?s 
never shopped, never been a shopper, it?s a difficult thing shopping for a 
family of six. 
Jackie Engel attributes the fact that she is in charge of the household labor to 
innate differences in men and women: 
I mean the reason women do most of the work is that they can multi-task I can 
be working and think ?oh I have to get milk for tomorrow? and just jot it 
down real quick whereas my husband if he?s doing whatever he?s doing I 
don?t care if he?s hammering a nail into the wall or watching a football game 
that?s what he?s doing.  He doesn?t have those trailing thoughts ?we?ve got to 
get salt for the softener? like I do.
35
Some shoppers even articulate that it is difficult for them to share this work 
with their partners.  Tracey Kennedy?s family goes shopping together but she 
wouldn?t think about ?letting? her husband go on his own:  
 I don?t mind the shopping most of the time. I feel like I?m in control, I?m 
making the decisions for the family. I don?t like it when Mark wants to do the 
shopping by himself--it freaks me out.  I can?t tell if the right decisions are 
being made.  
Yes, although you know what most of our lives even when I was working and 
even when I was going to school full-time I did the shopping.  Probably that is 
for two reasons: one is he probably has no interest in doing it at all and two I 
was, I am really controlling over what gets bought.  There is some power for 
me.  It?s very scary for me to send someone to the grocery store not knowing 
what they are going to bring home.  Because I may say apples and they buy 
the wrong kind?.I guess I have my ideas of what is best (Kay Worthington).   
Even households in which both partners shop for food, women express a 
greater concern with nutrition and the overall connection between food and health.
This issue will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter but Jessica Pierce 
hints at the problem when she said:  
He [her spouse] used to cook when he stayed home with our daughter but in 
order for the children to eat healthy you go ahead and fix the meal for them. 
Only a few spouses refuse to participate in the shopping process.  When I 
asked April if her husband went shopping, she replied:
Maybe once a month when I?ve gone on strike and don?t want to go shopping 
and he is finally starving enough to get out there but yea but not unless there is 
nothing to eat.  He thinks that it?s my job and my purpose in life to bring the 
groceries in. 
36
She told the story recently about going on a shopping strike when they were out of 
toilet paper.  She was waiting for her husband to go to the store to buy the toilet 
paper, but when the standoff lasted for several days she finally broke down and 
bought it herself.
 Many of the spouses did shop in some capacity, although most were there to 
get specific items or were provided lists arranged by the primary shopper.   
When asked if her spouse did any of the shopping, Stacey Ostrander stated 
Once in a while. Not very often.  If I ask him to stop at the grocery store on 
the way home it is for something very specific.  It isn?t to say please go 
shopping, it?s to say, please pick up a gallon of skim milk and a dozen eggs.   
Mary Wirth said:  
I do all the planning, I do all the thinking of what we need.  I will call him and 
say ?can you pick up a couple things and if it?s more than two then it has to go 
on a list because you don?t remember?.  But he will go pick up a few items but 
if the list gets too big then he doesn?t want any part of it.  He does not like the 
grocery experience at all.  He doesn?t like shopping experience at all.  He 
wants to go in and grab the milk and leave. 
Karen Calhoun sends her husband with a list so he can shop after work in the larger
town:
Dan goes shopping once I make out the list and tell him exactly what to get 
and then he checks it off when he gets that item.  But he does a fine job of it.  
He does my Aldi?s list because he is in Topeka so the things that I know that I 
can get cheaper and Aldi?s we like their fresh produce and stuff and milk is a 
little cheaper and he does the Aldi?s run. 
37
At the Store:
Grocery shopping at the supermarket is a very standardized process.  Almost 
all stores first require an automobile, unless the store is on a bus route or shoppers 
have an alternative means to get there.  Once the shopper is parked in the large 
parking lot, she walks in through the automatic doors, grabs a grocery cart and then is 
expected to follow the layout of the store (first produce, then meats/dairy, grocery, 
breads), chose products from the shelf, place in cart and eventually take these items to 
the cash register.  Some stores require customers to bag their own groceries or even 
use self-check out. However, within this standardization of the shopping experience 
there are variations in how individuals experience this process. 
 For the three shoppers who didn?t have children or were retired, the work of 
shopping was much more flexible.   They spent much less time planning meals, and 
expressed less anxiety about feeding issues when only one or two people were in the 
household.  They also had more flexibility in timing their shopping trip; they had 
fewer schedules to work around, were not required to make meals at a certain time, 
and could even decide to eat out more often.   
 Jill Burnett, a single woman with no children, describes her shopping trips as 
?getting what I need and what I like.  She rarely makes a list and spends less than 20 
minutes in the grocery store on her way home from work.  One of her most pressing 
shopping issues is buying the right amount of food:
I don?t buy a bag of potatoes I buy a couple potatoes because I won?t even eat 
them up before they are no good.  You know a bag of chicken breasts I have 
to think long and hard whether I?m gonna will they go bad before I eat them 
up.  Or it will get dried up with freezer burn or whatever.  So I typically don?t 
38
buy large quantities of things like that.  I?ll buy a couple chicken breasts.  I 
think about a package of hot dogs I?m never gonna eat the whole package 
before it so I do throw away food because it will go bad in my fridge. 
 On the other end of the spectrum is the stay at home mother of two who 
spends the most time shopping of anyone in the study.  Karen states that food is very 
important not only for health but also for connection:  
I try to incorporate everybody as much as I possible can, I try to eat the food, I 
try to grow my own food, I try to show the kids where the food is coming 
from as much as I can so if I can have interaction with the farmer or if I can 
have interaction with the baker that we do, and still furthermore because what 
we eat is so important we kind of go as a family.  Um, that?s a big part of our 
lives, probably one the major parts of how I raise my kids or how our family 
connects.
She shops in many different venues as well as maintains a garden in the back yard.  
There is no separate ?grocery trip?; purchasing food is part of their weekly routine: 
We normally go to the farmers market on Saturday and then on Sunday we go 
shopping, either Sunday or Monday we go shopping at the Merc (local health 
store) and then I do, because the Dillons (supermarket) is only a couple blocks 
away, then we go over there, probably every other day or something.  We 
don?t do a big shopping, we get our bread at the bakers and we?ll ride our 
bikes to the bakers once a week probably.  So food buying is a huge part of 
what we do (Karen Jones). 
She does acknowledge, however, that if she were working full time, her shopping 
work would be different.  She states, ?It would be real different, I would think.  I 
would not be going all the time.  But because I?m home and can do that, I do it.?   
  Even the physical act of shopping is much more difficult for some shoppers 
than others. The no-frills or discount store is a warehouse box store that is designed 
for large shopping trips.  For some shoppers, including the single mother with kids or 
39
the elderly, this configuration requires extra physical work including walking from 
the huge parking lot in front of the store, getting kids into the cart or keeping them 
occupied, having to walk through much of the store even if for a few items, sacking 
your own groceries, and carrying them out and loading them into the car.   
The experience of shopping is also different depending on how many people 
the shopper must take with her.  Negotiating kids and shopping is a frequent topic of 
discussion.  Jackie Engle said
I try to escape my three children.  And try to go without them.  Honestly 
because if I take my kids I spend $10 more just because they all have an 
opinion about what they want.  But there were days when they were tiny and 
Ron was coaching, I had three kids in car seats, not just booster seats, with 
coats in the winter and you might only need two things but you still had to 
take them all and that?s the hard stuff.   
I asked Lisa Corbin if she takes her kids shopping with her.  She replied: 
yea, my kids are always with me.  I try to make them help.  I ask them to pick 
out a couple of good apples, pick out the macaroni and cheese that we want, 
that kind of thing, but the baby is the worst. (Have you found any strategies 
for him?)  No, I just let him scream.  I used to think how could mothers let 
their kids scream like that? But now I am that woman. I let him scream?It?s 
an exhausting experience, physically and mentally. 
Colin Moore usually goes with his spouse and child.  He says she usually rides in the 
cart and he ?hands her stuff and she reads the names of it and puts it in the cart.?  If 
he doesn?t give her something to do she would be ?eyeing stuff and saying ?I want 
this, I want that?. 
 Karen Jones believes that a huge part of her shopping effort is to manage her 
two year old and four year old during the shopping trip.  She said: 
40
When we are at the [supermarket] they get a book or hold a toy or be engaged 
in some kind of eye spy game.  There is something going with them so they 
are engaged or playing with me.  Occasionally S will help me shop by going 
down the aisles and getting whatever it is I need.  In the cart, E is a toddler 
isn?t old enough to play those kinds of games and I have to keep her 
entertained as much as I can, which is a large part of what I do at the store.
For the single mother in my study with a two year old and a six year old who 
uses a wheelchair, shopping becomes a marathon.  To negotiate the store itself, Peggy 
uses one hand to push the cart and the other hand to pull the wheelchair.   Because 
she is on a strict budget, she sometimes takes a calculator and stops after each product 
is put in the cart to calculate the total amount.  After she loads all her products on the 
conveyer belt, she then bags her own groceries and then has to negotiate the parking 
lot.  She tries to park near a cart corral, because she doesn?t like to leave the kids in 
the car while she takes the cart back.  This is her description of getting both the 
groceries and the kids in the car: 
sometimes if it?s not real bad out I will sit there and I will leave the kids 
sitting outside and I will load everything and I will push the cart and pull 
Teddy and I will take the cart up there and then carry Ken on my hip and push 
Teddy?s wheelchair back to the van because I don?t like leaving them sit 
there.?   
At the end of a shopping trip she is ?totally exhausted?. 
41
    Conclusion 
 Food provisioning has long been considered women?s work, often requiring 
women either to grow their own food, employ other women to shop and cook in their 
stead or to procure it on the market.  Changes in transportation, energy use, and 
residential patterns have all contributed to the contemporary nature of grocery 
shopping.  The physical work of food provisioning, once a visible and daily activity, 
is now confined mainly to the grocery store. However, much invisible work is also 
necessary for this activity to occur, including menu planning and list making, 
accounting for household needs and schedules, negotiating with partners, and 
knowing what is available and what is good to eat. 
 We also see that grocery shopping is still a gendered activity.  Although some 
shoppers shared the cooking and shopping with their spouses, all women in my study 
assumed management for the shopping and cooking work.  How these shoppers 
accomplished the tasks of shopping and cooking depended on their relationship to 
wage work.  Women who worked full-time spent much less time planning and 
cooking and used greater convenience foods such as eating out or prepared deli meals 
to feed their families.  However, they still assumed responsibility for getting that food 
home and arranging schedules.  Women who worked part-time or stayed at home 
spent more time planning, making meal plans and cooking at home, as well as 
shopping.    
42
 We also hear in the words of the shoppers a certain knowledge of ?how? to 
shop that is culturally and historically specific and which shapes their activity of 
shopping and provisioning their families.  These shoppers complain that they cannot 
send their spouses to the store because they will often buy ?junk? foods or foods that 
only they will like; they rarely shop with the household or children?s nutrition in mind 
and they are often unaware of the necessity of strategies of shopping that will save 
money.  In the next chapters I identify two institutional discourses, one regarding how 
to shop efficiently and another about what kind of food is good for their families, that 
shape how shoppers approach the work of grocery shopping.  In these chapters I 
discuss what these discourses entail and map out specific institutional agents who 
create and disseminate this information.  
43
Chapter 3: Individual Responsibility for Nutrition 
In the last chapter we saw that shopping involves many activities and skills.  
Starting in the work of these shoppers and the language they use to describe it, the 
next two chapters work upward to investigate how this work is organized by texts and 
discourses that originate in the work of others in the institutional food complex.  In 
this chapter I will give examples of one textually-based discourse and investigate how 
this discourse affects the choices of working class and middle class shoppers in 
different ways.  Ultimately, the discourse that standardizes the knowledge of 
nutrition, which I call the individual responsibility for nutrition, makes all shoppers 
accountable for the health of the individuals in their household.  This individual-level 
response ignores the larger community and societal factors that contribute to health, 
and makes it possible for corporations and governments to maintain their claim of 
non-responsibility for human reproduction (Acker 2006). 
Many shoppers, especially middle class shoppers, expressed significant 
concerns about nutrition and the health of their families in relationship to the work 
they do in grocery shopping.  Jackie Engle told me: 
I do try to cook stuff that?s low fat and stuff like that.  I?m not a big sugar 
worrier and I should be more.  My kids can have Post Toasties with sugar and 
something else on it and I don?t even care.  I should, I should worry more 
about that but they are eating and they are having milk and you know. My 
kids are not real vegetable people and that?s my fault because we didn?t 
probably push them enough when they were little.  I should have really 
shoved the vegetables at them so it would be better. 
44
Jackie ?knows? that her family should not eat sugar or fat and eat more 
vegetables and is implicitly referring to some kind of institutional knowledge about 
what is ?good? and ?healthy?. But she lets her kids eat sugared cereal, she only buys 
certain fat-free foods and does not require her children to eat vegetables.   She doesn?t 
experiment much with the family meals but does realize that she is accountable for 
her children?s nutrition and thus their health-- when she states ?it would be better? she 
means that she would fulfilling her responsibility as food provider if she lived up to 
these standards and her kids would somehow be healthier. 
Tracey Kennedy ?knows? that her family is supposed to eat more fruits and 
vegetables but encountered this dilemma over broccoli:
Should you put the fattening Ranch on it to get them to eat the vitamins?  I 
don?t know what the answer is.  I guess I know what we are doing to get the 
vitamins from the broccoli and at least cultivate some getting it down them 
versus no vegetable at all. I?m ambivalent but that?s what we are going with.
And here we use a lighter ranch with reduced fat and again I don?t know what 
the long term consequences of those things are (Tracey Kennedy). 
Her ambivalence is related to her connection with expert nutrition knowledge that 
stresses low-fat foods and high intakes of fruits and vegetables.  But what about the 
dislikes and desires of the individuals who are eating the food? It is the shoppers? 
responsibility to reconcile their local relationships and experiences with this nutrition 
information. 
 Maggie Waggoner has battled her weight for many years and worries that her 
kids will have the same issues.  One of her biggest nutritional concerns is the amount 
of fat in her family?s diet.  She gives these examples: 
45
I am really into watching the nutrition value of food and I do watch what 
kinds of food we have.  Walmart?s got this really good brand of breaded 
chicken breasts, they are frozen and are all ready just to microwave them or 
whatever, and I justify buying them is that they are like 7-8 grams of fat per 
chicken patty, well, most brands are like 30 grams of fat.  I get chicken rings 
that are like 2 grams of fat per serving.  We do a lot of frozen French fries 
because you have to check your brands some have 8-10 grams of fat per 
serving but then there are those that have 2-3.  And so we throw them on the 
George Foreman about twice a week, my kids love it.  My husband is like, 
these kids eat too many French fries and I?m like, two grams of fat?  A baked 
potato is going to have more grams of fat because you are going to be putting 
butter and whatever on them.  
She does try to have fresh fruit on the table every night and most nights also a fresh 
vegetable. While she does try to keep ?healthy? food in the house, she also confesses 
that she also buys ?junk?: ?You know last night I brought home Oreo cookies.?   
Since she also tries to limit calories, she drinks diet pop.  Her kids also drink 
diet soda, due to weight concerns and cavity issues.  But even this causes concern as 
she states: 
But there are people who are looking at me and go ?you should not be giving 
kids diet pop.?  But they get one diet pop a day, one artificial sweetener a day.
And that?s another one of my things, what?s better for you?  Is sugar any 
better for you than sweetener? 
 While food safety is another significant issue for her, overall, it is her kids? 
diet that she is most concerned about.  She spends time shopping and preparing the 
foods she thinks are important for her kids to eat, and expends emotional energy 
thinking and worrying about what they eat.  She states:
I would never have worried about all that [nutrition] before the kids?..I don?t 
think I was always such a worried, obsessive person about when it comes to 
food, but I think I?ve always been that way when it comes to my kids. 
46
Nutrition Knowledge 
Shoppers do not see, smell, or taste fat, calories or sugar grams; these 
concepts are not known from experience but are based on knowledge disseminated 
through discourses that are created at extra-local institutional sites.    For institutional 
ethnographers, this signals an institutional knowledge that goes beyond the everyday 
lived experience; shoppers did not know these terms intuitively, they had to acquire 
this knowledge from outside their experience.  The second step in IE is to identify 
texts that influence the work of shopping.  My shoppers identified and referenced 
texts such as women?s magazines (More, Simple Living, Good Housekeeping),
television news shows (Good Morning America, Today Show,) local news shows, 
newspapers, government agencies (United States Department of Agriculture, Health 
and Human Services), medical brochures and store advertisements as sources of 
information about food shopping and nutrition.   
Analyzing these sources for shopping information, I identified a discourse I 
term ?individual responsibility for nutrition?.   This discourse is science-based; it 
reduces nutrition into constituent nutrients, for instance into fat, proteins and 
carbohydrates, antioxidants (even flavonoids!), and assumes that the individual will 
acquire this information, thus holding the individual accountable for this knowledge 
and the consequences for not using it correctly.   This reductionist approach to 
nutrition began in Progressive Era changes to standardize the American diet in the 
face of increasing numbers of immigrants (Levenstein 1997). 
47
 Between 1880-1930 W.O. Atwater, a chemist and the first director of the 
USDA?s Office of Experiment Stations, discovered that food can be broken down 
into constituent parts, i.e., proteins, carbohydrates and fats (Roth 2000).  Dubed the 
?Father of American Nutrition?, Atwater viewed the body as a machine and food as 
fuel for that machine (Mudry 2006).   From this mechanistic perspective, chemists 
and scientists who worked for the United States Department of Agriculture began to 
break food down into its constituent parts?calories, fat, protein and carbohydrates.
Home economists with the USDA borrowed this discursive understanding of food to 
create food buying guides as early as 1917 and taught the public about proper eating 
using numbers (Mudry 2006).  Industrial food founders such as John and William 
Kellogg (the inventors of Corn Flakes) and Sylvester Graham (who invented the 
graham cracker) incorporated this perspective on nutrition into their food production 
processes and established a firm link between discourse and industry practice (Roth 
2000).
Atwater directed his prescriptions to eat more protein to the working classes 
but it was actually middle-class housewives who began to learn the vocabulary of 
protein, fat, and carbohydrates (Levenstein 2003).  Home economists helped spread 
the nutrition discourse in their work of educating women on the basics of maintaining 
households in a consumer economy.  As women became food purchasers rather than 
growers, and found the number of choices rising at the supermarket, they needed 
information on how and what to purchase.  While the food industry developed new 
marketing practices as a means to direct purchases, these institutional ?experts? 
48
stepped in to provide information on how to be a good household consumer. Thus, 
one of the extended social relations dedicated to food purchasing that connected the 
local household to the extra-local relations of ruling was the home economics 
profession. Using the language of science to create a more rationalized consumption 
system, home economists became mediators between industry, government and 
consumers and played an important role in shaping consumer products and their 
usage (Goldstein 2006). 
Ironically, home economics developed as an academic and practical discipline 
because many educated women, shut out of the mainstream professions, carved out a 
niche in the academy through domestic sciences.  Ellen Richards, one of the founders 
of the American Home Economics Association, was the first woman to receive a 
degree from MIT in chemistry.   Turned down for private chemistry positions, she 
eventually became an instructor in ?sanitary chemistry? and applied science to 
everyday problems for women in their households (Stage 1997).  Rather than 
confining women to the home but without directly challenging the cult of 
domesticity, Richards envisioned a place for women in the larger community based 
on their domestic skills.  She was the chief nutritionist for the New England Kitchen 
in 1890 that sold soups, stews and puddings to the working classes to be taken home 
for dinner as well as one of the founders of the Boston School of Housekeeping 
which certified women in domestic service (Stage 1997). 
 But the larger economic ethos of the time was caught up in the efficiency 
movement.  Taylor was developing scientific management techniques to rationalize 
49
the factory and the home economics movement mirrored that shift.  The household 
became the site of women?s ?job? and home management experts used methods taken 
from time and motion studies in industry to streamline household tasks such as food 
preparation, dishwashing, and laundry.
Christine Frederick, an early advocate of Taylor?s efficiency studies and home 
engineer, declared that housewives must become purchasing agents for the 
household: ?[E]very woman running the business of homemaking must train herself 
to become an efficient ?purchasing agent? for her particular family or firm by study, 
watchfulness and practice (Strasser 1982).?  Scheduling and planning were crucial to 
efficient household management: meals should be planned one or two weeks in 
advance with every ingredient needed on a ?purchasing sheet? (the forerunner to our 
modern list).    Planning would not only keep material and financial waste down but 
also reduce the effort expended on food preparation.  For example, one type of 
cooking should be used in every meal to economize on effort, whether it be boiled, 
baked, or fried, and any food that is left should be incorporated into future meals.  In 
this way, the ?left-over? becomes a ?planned over? and waste is minimized (Strasser 
1982: 214). But the overall goal of household efficiency was to save time for other 
household tasks such as helping the husband with his business or working with the 
kids.
Trained home economists in the 1940?s and 1950?s were usually well-
educated women who were writing and teaching other women to become good 
household managers.  These women sought to educate the public through courses 
50
taught in schools, colleges, and extension services and through articles in popular 
publications. As more women entered the paid workforce, less time was available for 
housework, and many women were interested in learning how to manage time 
effectively. Also, as new consumer products such as dishwashers and washing 
machines came on the market, consumers were eager for advice about how to select 
and use these items (Stage and Visconte 1997).   
 Although home economics went through a decline in the 70?s and 80?s, most 
of the content now fits under the rubric ?family and consumer science?.  The College 
of Home Economics at Kansas State University, for example, has been renamed the 
College of Human Ecology and those who complete the B.S. in Human Ecology are 
employed as educators in high schools and middle schools, or as Family and 
Consumer Science agents or 4-H youth programs with the Cooperative Extension 
Service (Karen Pence, Assistant Dean of College of Human Ecology, personal 
communication 5/9/07).   Programs in dietetics, nutrition, public health, family 
studies and human services are available at these institutions (usually land grant) and 
many majors also go on to work as registered dieticians and nutritionists.  The Bureau 
of Labor Statistics data indicate that the professions of dietitians and nutritionists are 
overwhelmingly female; thus, the historical trajectory of female professionals 
directing female consumers continues into the twenty first century.  
Contemporary Nutrition Discourse 
Nearly all contemporary shoppers are familiar with the basics of nutrition 
knowledge, having been introduced either to the four food groups or the food pyramid 
51
in both its early 1980?s manifestation and the newer MyPyramid version. The 
antecedent to the food pyramid, the four basic food groups, was the basis of US food 
policy until the mid 1970?s (Nestle 2002).  This policy instructed individuals to eat 
from the four basic food groups-milk, meat, vegetables and fruits, and breads and 
cereals-to ensure that they are getting the right balance of nutrients (Nestle 2002).    
Nearly all mainstream nutrition and dietary information is directly based on 
federal recommendations delineated in ?The Dietary Guidelines for Americans? a 
joint publication of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US 
Department of Agriculture.  The report states that it ?provides science-based advice to 
promote health and to reduce risk for major chronic diseases through diet and 
physical activity (U.S. Dept.of HHS, Dietary Guidelines, 2005).?  The USDA?s food 
pyramid is based on this scientific evidence and is one of the basic building blocks of 
nutrition discourse.  The government?s MyPyramid, which recently replaced the 
?one-size-fits-all? food pyramid, calls for Americans to ?make smart choices from 
every food group, find your balance between food and physical activity, and get the 
most nutrition out of your calories (USDA 2005).?  Individuals are instructed to make 
food choices based in terms of ounces or cups (rather than number of servings, as in 
the old food pyramid). 
One of the main recommendations from the current food pyramid for the 
average adult on 2,000 calories a day is to ?consume a variety of nutrient-dense foods 
and beverages within and among the basic food groups while choosing foods that 
limit the intake of saturated and trans fat, cholesterol, added sugars, salt and alcohol 
52
(US Department of Health and Human Services Guidelines 2005).?  More 
specifically, Americans should consume 2 cups of fruit and 2.5 cups of vegetables a 
day, 3 ounces or more of whole-grain products, and at least 3 cups of milk or 
equivalent milk products a day.  No more than 10 percent of food should come from 
saturated fat, with total fat intake between 20-35 percent of calories, less than 2,300 
mg of salt, and limit alcoholic beverages.  There are specific requirements for older, 
younger and special needs but these are the basic guidelines.  Exercise at some level 
of intensity is also recommended. 
 The nutrition discourse also advises individuals to avoid foods.  A wide range 
of sources (from USDA publications to women?s magazines (Stamos 2007) advise 
individuals to cut back on sugar, especially from soda and fruit drinks.  These sources 
state that sugar provides calories but no nutrients; people who consume foods with 
added sugar tend to consume more calories than people who consume fewer added-
sugar foods.   Trans-fat is another nutrient to be avoided.  According to the US Food 
and Drug Administration, trans fat is made when manufacturers add hydrogen to 
vegetable oil in a process called hydrogenation. Hydrogenation increases the shelf life 
and flavor stability of foods containing these fats.  Researchers have found that trans-
fats raise LDL (bad) cholesterol in the blood. 
Thus, these experts argue to be healthy individuals must educate themselves 
by learning nutrition information and reading labels at the grocery store.   Experts 
suggest that to become a smart shopper one must first know what nutrients are good 
(iron, fiber, vitamins, etc.), what nutrients are bad (saturated, trans fats), what 
53
amounts one should eat of the particular nutrient (i.e., 5 percent or less of daily value 
of sodium), and what certain terms mean (low calorie, for example, means less than 
40 calories per serving) (ADA 2006). This expert knowledge is rather extensive and 
quantifiable; but the implication is that individuals are responsible for this knowledge 
and the consequences for following this expert advice.
   Institutional Agents  
This discourse has powerful agents who support and disseminate this 
information. The United States Department of Agriculture is the leading 
governmental organization for nutrition information and includes several agencies 
that propose and support nutrition research, policy and education, including the 
Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP), the Food and Nutrition Service, 
and the Cooperative State Research and Education (CSREES) agency.  The CSREES, 
for example, is also connected to land-grant institutions and the extension offices that 
operate under these universities. Cooperative extension offices are county agencies 
that are staffed by ?experts? who ?provide useful, practical, and research-based 
information to agricultural producers, small business owners, youth, consumers, and 
others in rural areas and communities of all sizes (http://www.csrees.usda.gov/).?
The ?experts? employed at these agencies have degrees in agriculture and family and 
consumer sciences education, which also includes diet and nutrition.
  The US Department of Health and Human Services also has a stake in grocery 
shopping advice, especially as it relates to health.  One aspect of this department?s 
mission is ?protecting the health of all Americans,? and services include health and 
54
social science research, preventing disease, including immunization services and 
assuring food and drug safety (www.hhs.gov/about/whatwedo.html).  Under the HHS 
umbrella are the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), National Institutes of Health 
(NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  The HHS publication, A Healthier 
You: Based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, is based on nutrition policy 
developed under the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion at the USDA and is a 
joint publication between HHS and Office of Disease and Health Promotion.  The 
main message in several of their publications is that ?Healthy eating is associated 
with reduced risk for many diseases, including the three leading causes of death: heart 
disease, cancer, and stroke (www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/nutrition/index.htm).?  
These agencies base their nutrition information on the food pyramid, while also 
emphasizing the connection between food and disease.   
The American Dietetic Association (ADA) is another institutional agent in the 
dissemination of health and nutrition information.  Comprised of registered dieticians 
and nutritionists, this organization?s shopping and food information is based on the 
food pyramid and has cross references to the USDA and CNPP websites.  Their 
mission statement states that ?the ADA serves the public by promoting optimal 
nutrition, health and well-being. ADA members are the nation's food and nutrition 
experts, translating the science of nutrition into practical solutions for healthy living 
and well being (www.eatright.org).?
Many of the ADA?s publications for consumers are also sponsored by large 
agro-food companies.  For example, the ?Nutrition Fact Sheet: Dietary Fats: 
55
Clarifying an Age-Old Issue? is sponsored by the Promise Institute, an organization 
under the umbrella of Unilever (the company which makes Promise Buttery Spreads).  
The nutritional message from this publication is that ?To maintain heart health, the 
best choice is to reduce both saturated and trans fat by replacing butter, lard, and 
shortening and hard stick margarine with unsaturated fats such as soft, non-
hydrogenated margarine and vegetable oils like olive, canola, sunflower and soybean 
oils (eatright.org).? Interestingly, the Promise Spread happens to fit these guidelines.
But, if the consumer did have more questions, they can go to the Promise 
Institute website and send an email message to a staff dietician.   Unilever is also 
introducing an Eat Smart logo to ?help customers make healthier choices amongst our 
products. Because shoppers are so busy and reducing the amount of trans fat, 
saturated fats, sugars and sodium is so important to health and overall well-being, 
Unilever has made it easy to chose food items that ?meet specific Unilever criteria 
which are based on U.S. Dietary Guidelines (www.unilver.com).?   
Other food industry corporations are involved in promoting the nutrition 
discourse.   Wendy?s, the fast-food restaurant chain, sponsors a Fact Sheet on the 
ADA website titled ?Eating Better Together: A Family Guide for a Healthier 
Lifestyle? in which a section of the two page brochure is devoted to tips for choosing 
a restaurant when ?on the go?.  One of the bulleted points is to ?select colorful fruits 
and vegetables like spinach, tomatoes and mandarin oranges.?  At the time this fact 
sheet was published in 2005, Wendy?s was the only fast food chain to include fruit, 
56
specifically mandarin oranges, in their children?s meals.  Wendy?s also has a website 
titled ?Mom~RD? that connects moms with registered dieticians.
Retail stores are also promoting the government?s guidelines on food and 
nutrition in several ways.  Albertson?s, a large supermarket chain, is offering 
personalized MyPyramid information on making ?healthy choices for their families? 
by having shoppers punch in their age, weight height and level of physical activity at 
store kiosks (standing computers).  This information can be used to purchase food 
items based on these recommendations.  Aisle markers and shelf tags are color-coded 
to help locate specific categories in their personal food pyramid (Supermarket News 
2007).  Retailers are also adding dieticians to their staff, who can offer customers 
?practical nutrition and healthy lifestyle information? (Progressive Grocer 2007).
Hy-Vee has dieticians at the corporate level who customers can contact on their 
website with particular health and wellness questions.
One dietary research firm believes that supermarkets can take dietetic 
information ?to the next level? by designing supermarket carts with computers that 
would remember the shopper?s demographics as well as his/her nutritional needs.
This cart could then recommend recipes and meals as well as provide coupons to fit 
the shopper?s demographic and nutritional profile.  The receipt at the check-out could 
provide not only the total, but also the dietary needs met by the purchased products 
(i.e. daily amount of calcium provided) (Brown 2003) 
But the official government guidelines that shape most of the official nutrition 
policy have not been immune to pressure from industry groups representing particular 
57
food sectors that attempt to make sure the guidelines will not harm their marketing 
potential.  For example, the Cattleman?s Association was opposed to any 
recommendations in the 1980?s food pyramid that suggested decreasing consumption 
of meat.  The food pyramid guidelines thus read ?choose lean meat? instead of eat 
less meat as a result of their lobbying efforts (Nestle 2002).  The current MyPyramid 
uses ounces as the recommended measure of how much food to eat in each category 
but never instructs individuals to eat less of any product. 
Activists have also demonstrated other institutional connections between the 
USDA and agro-food organizations.  Prior to her selection as G.W. Bush?s Secretary 
of the USDA, Ann Veneman (2001-2004) served on the board of biotech company 
Calgene (later taken over by Monsanto). Many of Veneman?s aides and the heads of 
various USDA agencies spent much of their career prior to government service 
working for agribusiness companies and trade associations. For example, Veneman?s 
chief of staff also served as legislative liaison for National Cattlemen?s Beef 
Association (NCBA) (Mattera 2004).  Thus, we find powerful institutional actors 
with multiple connections creating and disseminating scientific-based nutrition 
knowledge.
  Critiques of Nutrition Discourse 
The scientific approach to nutrition is not without critics.  Crotty (1995) 
argues that the shift from food groups to dietary guidelines in national nutrition policy 
turned from selecting food for health promotion to selecting food to reduce the 
prevalence or delaying of certain kinds of disease, especially heart disease.  The main 
58
message of this expert knowledge is that if you don?t eat ?right?, you will end up 
?diseased? in some way.  This discourse ties nutrition not only to health but to 
disease.  If we are not eating the correct combination of foods and nutrients, we are 
more likely to be sick or ill. The discourse identifies what you should eat-- fruits and 
vegetables, whole grain products, and milk?in addition to certain amounts of 
vitamin, minerals and other micro-nutrients.  If don?t get these, you won?t be healthy. 
Critics of this ?expert? nutrition point out the reductionism and institutional 
interest inherent in this textually-based discourse. Both Dixon and Banwell (2004) 
and Pollan (2007) discuss the growing trend for food to be reduced to its constituent 
nutrients, for food to be equated with health but to be driven by industry and science.
Dixon and Banwell?s term, nutritionalization, encompasses ?the growing dominance 
of nutrition and health considerations in all facets of dietary discourse and of the food 
supply itself (119)? culminating in a diets-making complex (DMC) of government 
agencies, science firms, and nutritionalists.  In a similar vein, Pollan (2007) writes 
about nutritionism or ?the widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to 
understanding food is the nutrient?since nutrients are invisible it falls to the 
scientists to explain it to us. We need lots of expert help.?
Marion Nestle (2002) also points out the methodological problems in a 
science- based nutrition research that relates diet to disease.  First, applying lab-based 
results to real populations of people can only establish associations but never 
causation between dietary factors and disease.  Not only is it difficult to people to 
actually remember and document what exactly they ate, placebo effects are also 
59
difficult to separate from true nutrient effects.  While researchers are good at isolating 
nutrients, they have a much more difficult time analyzing the how nutrients interact 
with each other.  For example, iron is absorbed better when eaten in conjunction with 
vitamin C.   
An example from Good Housekeeping titled ?The ABCs of Vitamin D? 
provides a good illustration of nutrionalization, which reduces health to the 
consumption of individual nutrients based on scientific knowledge: 
Take a close look at the label on your multi: Unless the vitamin D is listed as 
D3 (or cholecalciferol) you?re getting shortchanged.  Some bills contain D2 
(ergocalciferol) once thought to be equivalent to D3 but now proven to be 
?substantially less potent?, says Reinhold Vieth, Ph.D., director of the Bone 
and Mineral Laboratory Mount Sinai Hospital.  Low Vitamin D blood levels 
have been linked to a host of health problems, from osteoporosis to several 
cancers.  Many experts advise all adults to get about 1,000 IU of D daily, 
whether from supplements or fortified foods, including milk and yogurt 
(Hammock, 2007). 
Another example of the issue of fruits and vegetables that speaks to the dilemma of 
the mother listed above is found in Parade Magazine.  The article asks ?why is it so 
important to eat more servings of fruits and vegetables?? The answer: 
Fruits and vegetables are full of good stuff-such as fiber, antioxidants, 
vitamins and minerals-that helps to reduce your risk of certain cancers and 
many chronic diseases, including diabetes.  Unfortunately, more than 90% of 
us don?t get t recommended average of 10 servings of fruits and vegetables in 
our daily diets.  Here are a few examples of single servings from the 
Department of Agriculture: a medium fruit (such as an apple or banana); a 
half cup of chopped, cooked or canned fruit or vegetables; or 4 ounces of juice 
(O?Shea, 2007). 
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Even the local food cooperative advertisement includes information on the nutrients 
in their food.  This advertisement features acai, a type of fruit juice grown in the 
Amazon rain forest.  The ad states  
it has a rich berry-cocoa flavor, is packed with more antioxidants than blueberries 
or pomegranates, and contains loads of healthy Omega fats, protein and dietary 
fiber (The Coop Advantage May 2008). 
 Thus, the nutrition discourse is a science-based approach to eating that breaks 
food down into constituent parts and makes it the individual shopper?s responsibility 
to choose these nutrients wisely.  This standardizing approach to nutrition also 
standardizes the work of shopping which ignores the real-life constraints that many 
shoppers face.  All shoppers now must be familiar with this knowledge and shop 
toward its dictates. Starting with the work of the shoppers, and listening to how they 
describe what they do, forces us to see all the work that is involved in trying to satisfy 
the demands of this discourse with their real-life experiences. 
   Shopping for Nutrition 
All the shoppers in my study indicated some knowledge of the nutrition 
discourse, but middle-class shoppers intimately connected with nutrition texts 
expressed a much higher level of anxiety concerning the food they were buying for 
their family than my working class shoppers.  This finding parallels other research 
(DeVault 1991; Dixon 1999) that shows working class shoppers draw on experience 
and tradition for their nutrition knowledge, whereas in the professional middle class, 
science and style are prized over experience (DeVault 1991: 221).
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My working class shoppers, those who had attained at least a high school 
diploma and some who had taken college courses, acknowledged some familiarity 
with the nutrition discourse but didn?t express serious concerns about nutrition and 
even downplayed some of the ?expert? information.  Jane Smith is a mother of six 
who works part-time at a city position.  One of her daughters has kidney stones and 
she used to read labels to watch for sodium.  But now Jane states ?we don?t worry too 
much.  If I?m making tacos, you know, whatever is in it, is in it.? 
She does acknowledge aspects of the nutrition discourse but then rejects it 
using the efficiency discourse.  She says:
We probably should be reading labels, I think we?d all be healthier for it.  But 
I figure if you need sour cream you need sour cream.  Why pay a dollar more 
for something that says ?fat free? and then you find out that the fat free thing 
gives you cancer anyway.  Just give me the fat and we?ll call it good.   
She also points out what to her seem like absurdities:  
I saw on the news last night if you eat enough vitamin D you won?t get 
cancer.  But you have to drink a gallon of milk a day to get the benefits.  Now, 
I thought ?who is going to that?  Who is going to drink a gallon of milk every 
single day to not get cancer??  
Another working class mother, Karen Calhoun, fixes traditional casseroles for 
her three girls and her husband, many of the same dishes that she grew up with.  She 
is caring for her mother with Alzheimer?s in her home and now that her mom cannot 
have any food touching (which precludes casseroles), Karen has had to branch out 
into meatloaf or chicken dishes or even fish.  She tries new recipes from Taste of 
Home, which features recipes sent in by readers and are what Karen calls ?tried and 
true, the best for families?. In terms of ?healthy foods? like whole grains she states 
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that ?stuff like that might be better but it?s costlier too because anything that is 
healthy for you they always jack up the price of it. I don?t get that technical.?  She 
does read labels sometimes but ?more times its stuff that is new and I?m sure it would 
be quite an eye opening experience to read the stuff we normally get.  But you are 
always in a hurry, always busy and before you know it you are off to the next thing.?
Overall, although she does acknowledge some acquaintance with nutrition 
information, she is not convinced enough by its efficacy to alter her eating or 
shopping patterns.
When I asked Peggy Fiske, a single mom with two kids, if she had any food 
concerns, she stated that she had read something on Walmart.com about the bird flu 
and she was worried because she had just bought a whole turkey and didn?t want to 
have to throw it away.  She knows that there are guidelines to keep people from 
getting sick, but she stated that when she buys fresh vegetables and stuff like that ?I 
clean them before I fix them? and she makes sure that she doesn?t buy any produce 
with cracks in them to let in bacteria.   
One of Peggy?s main concerns is her son getting ?real? food to eat.  His doctor 
and a nursing company advised her that he have at least three cans of Pedia-sure a 
day, the amount of which they raised at some point to six cans a day.  In terms of the 
health benefits, Peggy says that he has to have the Pedia-sure ?to make sure he?s gets 
enough nutrients and that?s calories and I don?t know.?  I asked why he was had to 
have the Pedia-sure and she said
He had a problem with reflux.  And then they kept raising the amount of 
Pedia-sure he was getting and you know first he was getting sick every time 
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he ate and then he didn?t even have an appetite because he was getting 6 cans 
a day of Pedia-sure and he was about three years old, so basically I?m having 
to re-teach him how to eat and trying to remind him you know ?you used to 
love this?.  And so its kind of trying to rebuilt his palate I guess because I 
don?t want him on a liquid diet forever. 
She is worried less about the specific nutrients, but has to contend with the experts 
that are telling her how many cans of Pedia-sure he has to have: 
We used to have a nursing company that gave him two or three cans a day and 
they were wanting him to gain like two pounds a week.  I was like you know 
if he continuously gains two pounds a week he?s going to be overweight very 
quickly and he was holding steady at his weight. And they were just ?he?s not 
gaining any weight we need to raise the number of cans.?  And they really 
pushed for it and I was being overridden and so the doctor wrote up the order.
You know nobody was wanting to let me get my two cents in.   
 Finally, she got his doctor to agree to decrease the number of cans as long as 
his weight holds steady, which it has for several months. 
 Lisa Corbin has a bachelor?s degree and is currently working part-time from 
home.  When she talks about shopping for her husband and four children she does 
acknowledge a familiarity with nutrition, but felt that since her kids were home with 
her she could control what they ate.  She said,  
Nutritionally I wish I made things more from scratch because I know that 
packaged food is very fattening.  But we eat wheat bread, I try to get calcium 
in a lot of our food, because a couple of my kids don?t drink any milk at all, 
they don?t like it.  So I try to make sure they are getting enough calcium in 
other things, fortified orange juice, and I look for frozen waffles that have 
calcium.  We don?t eat sweets a lot, so the snacks that we have are granola 
bars and yogurt not candy. We never go to the store and buy just candy.  We 
eat healthy cereal, we don?t buy sugar cereal (well I shouldn?t say never, 
probably once every couple of months we buy Fruit Loops or something but 
otherwise we eat Wheaties and Cheerios).  So I?m not terribly, terribly 
concerned because I just try to only buy chips about once a month. That 
means that I?m really not concerned a lot about what they are eating because I 
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know that what they are eating is mainly good for them.  Then I figure that as 
long as they are active, I?m not really concerned about the fat in food, because 
I think that kids need some fat anyway and I just think that if they are active 
enough they will be fine. 
 Middle class shoppers with higher levels of education (especially 
professional) and who are committed to expert discourses about food express 
significantly more anxiety about what they are eating and especially what they are 
buying for their kids.  They have higher ?standards? for what food they want to eat 
and emphasize the health issue of food as a strong variable in their food selection (as 
well as the ability to pay for it).   Kay Worthington states that she  
would never buy something that we wouldn?t normally eat.  Like any of the 
ready-made, like Kraft macaroni and cheese, or something like that, we don?t 
eat that kind of stuff and I wouldn?t even buy it if it was 10 cents a piece 
because I would worry about the nutritional aspect.  I worry about this 
constantly.  Every facet of it?. I mean honestly the end point of the whole 
nutritional discussion is that you will die or get sick if you don?t eat the 
certain healthiest stuff. I believe it in my gut. 
Kay spends almost $900 a month on food, making sure she buys the freshest and most 
healthful products and is the primary household meal preparer. She goes shopping 
every couple days because she worries about produce like staying fresh and losing its 
nutrition if it is in the refrigerator over too many days but will not compromise on 
price over taste and nutrition.
Other shoppers explicitly seek out information on nutrition, and read articles 
and books on the alternative discourses about nutrition.  They discuss eating organic 
and pesticide-free foods and they emphasize local foods.  Those with time and money 
can translate this knowledge into action and employ a variety of different food 
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provisioning strategies, including growing food, farmers markets, buying from 
bakeries, and visiting local farms.   
 For Kelly Jones, a stay-at-home mom with a Master?s degree in social work, 
shopping is an on-going event:
I normally go to the farmers market on Saturday and then on Sunday we go 
shopping, either Sunday or Monday we go shopping at the local health food 
store and then I do, because the Dillons is only a couple blocks away, then we 
go over there, probably every other day or something.  We don?t do a big 
shopping, we get our bread at the bakers and we?ll ride our bikes to the bakers 
once a week probably.  So food buying is a huge part of what we do. 
She considers it her duty as a parent to shape what her kids are eating: 
it?s [food provisioning] such a huge part of our job.  It?s also something I feel 
like I have the most control over.  What my kids eat-that I can shape. 
Somehow help shape their bodies and their well-being.  I think that what you 
put in a person?s body affects how they grow, their health?.I can?t really 
influence, at the end of the day, different influences on their lives but what I 
can say is that I?m in charge of what we eat in this house.  I think that actually 
is a really big thing. 
While Kelly says that her husband is as involved with the kids as she is, the work of 
food shopping is still not quite evenly split because 
I get the final word on what we are going to eat or not.  It?s probably more 
important to me what goes inside the kids, not that he doesn?t want to have 
healthy food but he?s not going to be as neurotic about the ingredients in 
everything they eat as I am. 
She does confess, though, that although she enjoys staying at home with her kids, she 
is scared of trying to get back into the job market after a long hiatus, and admits that 
if she were working,  she would not be able to shop and feed her family in this 
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manner. One of the main reasons she stayed home in the first place was her concern 
about breastfeeding: 
And I think that the nursing thing, is really part how, more than anything, I 
ended up staying home.  Now looking back on it, it seems kind of silly to me 
but at the time, when you are that new mothering and a couple months went 
by and she still wasn?t taking a bottle, still nursing and I couldn?t see, I just 
couldn?t in my head figure out how she was going to eat while I wasn?t there. 
Now if another mother would talk to me about it I would be probably be able 
to tell her rationally, it will work out, a couple week adjustment but you will 
figure out a way.  But at the time I couldn?t figure out, I felt kind of panicked 
about it. It wasn?t worth it to me and again I was in a situation where I could 
make that choice with Jerry?s help but everyone can?t choose to do it. 
Colin Moore said he usually doesn?t think about health concerns when 
purchasing food but acknowledged that his wife does.  ?Meg thinks more about 
buying organic food; for instance, over time she is getting organic carrots instead of 
the regular ones.?  Meg corroborated his response with this story.  She signed up for a 
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription in order to get organic food 
for her family.  It was difficult for her to justify the price and when her husband found 
out he was somewhat shocked. ?If I?m without him and I?m shopping I feel more 
freedom to buy stuff that?s more expensive because he just gets more edgy about it.?  
He does support what she is doing but is not as concerned about ?healthy? food.  She 
states that ?Colin thinks about food a lot but not in the same way.  Its not so much we 
need to buy local or we need to buy organic, its like just different methods of cooking 
or different things to do that he hasn?t thought of before?.We are talking about 
someone who eats hot dogs and bologna.?   
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Meg was reading more about the nutritional value nutritional value of the food 
her family ate as well as the larger state of the food system. After she became 
pregnant a second time, she began questioning the larger food system: 
Food travels thousands of miles to get to the dinner table - not sustainable at 
all!  And it makes no sense.  Yet, I just bought squash at my local grocery 
store that came from Michigan when I know full well that there is local squash 
at the farmer's market - which I never have time to go to because they have 
such limited hours.  That made me feel bad, knowing I was participating in a 
destructive system. 
So she searched on the internet for local grains, cheese and other vegetable growers 
and found herself going to many different stores, including the supermarket for non-
local foods, the farmers market on Saturdays, the local co-op, and several local farms 
for fresh produce.  After she went back to work, this type of shopping abruptly 
stopped.  She states: 
I stopped feeling guilty about buying produce at the grocery store when I 
realized that it is NOT possible.  Supporting sustainable agriculture is not 
sustainable in our society.  Now I still get my few things at the local health 
food store but just get the rest from the supermarket.  I bake quick breads 
every other week, but not bread-bread.  I just don't have the time.  I feel like I 
don't have much of a choice anymore but to just participate in the system.  It 
basically sucks. 
But while some mothers explicitly seek out these foods, some simply have to 
make choices within the constraints of their time.  Jessica Pierce, a professional mom 
with two children expressed significant anxiety over the pesticides in the food that her 
kids eat and believes conventional food to be ?chock-full? of hormones and 
pesticides.  She expresses guilt over not putting more time into food shopping but she 
finds that organic food costs significantly more and she doesn?t have time to cook 
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from scratch. The farmer?s market, for instance, is open only twice a week during her 
work hours.  But as her work can last until 8 PM on some nights, many times she is 
just focused on getting her kids fed before they go to bed, and cannot count on her 
husband to help her:
One time when I got home at 9:00, my 5 year old son said that he was hungry.
When I asked him what he had for dinner he said ?nothing?.  My husband said 
?oh yea, I forgot to feed them.?  I don?t worry so much about my 11 year-old 
daughter who can fend for herself, maybe find a frozen microwaveable dish in 
the freezer and heat it up, but my five year old can?t.   
 Thus, while working class women express some knowledge of this discourse, 
they give little credence to its dictates, perhaps due distrust of authorities in general, 
but also because they have to contend with how to feed their families on a limited 
budget.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive and in the rural store they are also 
not readily available or of low quality.  Middle class women, especially professionals, 
are very familiar with this discourse but in keeping with the culture of intensive 
mothering (Hays 1996), tend to spend a great deal of emotional and physical labor 
trying to live up to its standards. 
   Individual Responsibility for Nutrition Discourse 
 Even though nutrition is ?done? differently, and has significant consequences 
for the shopper and the replication of social class, one aspect of the institutional 
organization of food and nutrition information is the construction of nutrition as an 
individual household responsibility, and by extension the responsibility of the 
shopper.  The ?obesity epidemic? is a prime example of constructing disease as an 
individual dysfunctional relationship to food.   Determined by calculating an 
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individual?s body mass index (BMI), which is weight in kilograms divided by square 
of height in meters, the number of obese people have doubled between 1980 and 2000 
(National Center for Health Statistics 2003.)  The government estimates that 65 
percent of Americans are now overweight or obese; more than 61 million adults are 
obese, and about 16 percent of children and teens are overweight (US Dept of Health 
and Human Services). 
Those extra pounds are linked to heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, 
cancers, and other chronic conditions. The USDA, NIH and HHS began a national 
policy campaign that targets two main institutions with regards to childhood obesity: 
the school and the household.  Healthier lunch choices and mandatory physical 
education have been touted as the answer to combat obesity in schools; in the home it 
is the parents? responsibility to create good family eating habits and encourage 
physical activity.  One government brochure, for example, states that one small step 
families can do is ?put a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter and making a family 
agreement not to have chips or other high-calorie snacks in the house (US Dept. of 
HHS, 2005).
Health experts recommend eating at home as a main method for combating 
the obesity epidemic, especially in children.  These experts assume that someone is 
cooking a meal, not getting take-out from the grocery store, coordinating schedules to 
make it possible to eat together, and has the time to shop for fresh foods.   One 
magazine article stated: 
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One way around the ?obesogenic? environment is to eat at home, where you 
can control both portion sizes and the content of meals.  Families who eat out 
a lot tend to consume fewer fruits and vegetables, nutrition researchers at St. 
Louis University found (RealSimple 2007).   
Research from the Harvard Medical school on the relationship between family 
meals and obesity is often cited: eating dinner at home is associated with more 
healthful dietary intake patterns, including more fruits and vegetables, less fried food 
and soda, less saturated and trans fat (Family Dinner and Diet Quality Among Older 
Children and Adolescents Arch Fam Med. 2000;9:235-240. )  NEED CITE Recently, 
the Osage County extension office distributed a pamphlet from The National Center 
on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University called ?Family Day? that 
offers scientific studies to show that not only are family dinners more ?healthy? they 
also reduce children?s risk of substance abuse.
A 2007 study investigated the effect of watching TV on dietary intake of 
adolescents.  While watching TV is associated with poorer dietary quality, boys and 
girls who watched TV during regular family meals were more likely to report a 
healthier diet than those who ate alone.  The authors of this report gave several 
possible explanations.  Families who eat together are more likely to try to prepare 
well-balanced, nutritious meals; or parents have more opportunity to observe dietary 
behaviors and correct them.  Overall, ?study findings provide clear evidence for the 
role of the family meal in enhancing dietary quality among adolescents (Feldman, 
et.al. 262).? 
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 Women are still responsible for the family meal and thus are responsible for 
their kids? weight.  In one Pennsylvania school district, children are measured at 
school and their BMI numbers are sent home with their report card because ?families 
do not generally have an accurate perception of the issue? (Kantor 2007).  Parents are 
responsible for their children?s BMI score in the same way that they are for their 
grade card.  A recent AP on nutrition education states that the forces that make kids 
fat are really strong but parents have the greatest influence over what their kids eat.
Parents then, especially the mother, are to blame if kids are fat.  Taking this to the 
next level, the article quotes Dr. Robert Trevino of the Social and Health Research 
Center in San Antonio who states ?If the mother is eating Cheetos and white bread, 
the fetus will be born with those taste buds.  If the mother is eating carrots and 
oatmeal the child will be born with those taste buds (Mendoza, 2007).? 
 Meg F., one of my shoppers, has to fill out a health grade card every week for 
her school-aged child.  She has to calculate how many fruits and vegetables her child 
ate each day and how many minutes of exercise she got.  If the parent fills out the 
card each week, the child will get a prize at the end of the month?a little shoelace 
ornament.  Kids then collect these as they go through the year and Meg states that she 
feels a lot of pressure to turn in the card, because her child is embarrassed if she 
doesn?t have as many ornaments on her shoes as her classmates.  Meg also feels 
inadequate when she is filling out the cards because her child rarely gets 5 servings a 
day of fruits and vegetables, even though she feels that they eat healthy. 
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  Individual Responsibility Ignores Social Context
It is difficult to argue that individuals should not share responsibility for their 
health. It is axiomatic that individuals should eat food that is good for them and that 
adults should feed their kids healthy food.  However, if individuals can be made 
ultimately responsible for their ?choices?, it is easier to mask the larger social context 
of food provisioning.  A recent study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research 
(April 2008) extends obesity research to look at the influence of community factors 
on health.  Their findings highlight the significance of the community environment: 
people who live near grocery stores are more likely to eat the recommended amounts 
of fruits and vegetables and less likely to be obese or have diabetes.  Conversely, 
people who live near fast food restaurants and convenience stores compared to 
grocery stores have a higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes.
Although the highest incidence of obesity and diabetes are found in lower 
income neighborhoods with higher numbers of fast food restaurants, individuals in 
higher income neighborhoods with fewer grocery stores and more fast food places 
also experience higher levels of disease compared to neighborhoods with healthy 
food environments.  Instead of focusing on individual choice, the study recommends 
providing incentive for retail store development and improvement and promoting 
retail innovations, including smaller-scale markets selling healthy foods.
Food deserts and food insecurity are issues in both urban and rural areas.
Studies in Philadelphia (The Food Trust, 2003) found the same relationship between 
disease and shopping geography as the UCLA study.  The data in this report show a 
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strong association between poverty, poor health, and lack of access to fresh food from 
supermarkets. Furthermore, reduced access to supermarkets corresponds to higher 
levels of consumption of take-out food and decreased consumption of fruits and 
vegetables.   The same relationship exists in US nonmetropolitan areas. Individuals 
living in food deserts (areas with few or no supermarkets) pay higher prices for 
groceries and have fewer choices of healthy food, such as fruit and vegetable markets.  
This translates into lower levels of nutrition: In Mississippi, researchers found that 
residents of food deserts are 23.4 percent less likely to consume five or more servings 
of fruits and vegetables than residents of non-food deserts, after controlling for age, 
race, gender, and education (Blanchard and Lyson, 2003). 
 Ignoring societal causes of chronic diseases obscures policy solutions.  Other 
research suggests that major illnesses are higher in states where participation in civic 
life is low, racial prejudice is high or a large gap exists in income between rich and 
poor and men and women (Glasner 2007).  The lead investigator states: 
We still labor under the myth that somehow we are on our own and as 
individuals we can make these choices to prevent heart disease? Polices that 
appear to have little to do with health, like macroeconomic policies to reduce 
the level of income inequality, can have a major impact on driving down the 
rates of illness in society (Glasner 2007). 
 Thus, those with the fewest resources have the least access to the essential 
components of a healthy diet. A concerted effort to improve access to fresh food for 
the most vulnerable populations could have an important effect on public health 
concerns stemming from poor diet. Preliminary results from a study in the UK 
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suggest that improving access to full service grocery stores does improve residents? 
diets (Wrigley, et.al. 2002) 
These findings have significant policy implications as well as individual 
ramifications.  First, these findings suggest that throwing money into education will 
not be efficacious if individuals do not have access to supermarkets or money to 
purchase good foods.  Second, a nutrition discourse that individualizes responsibility 
hides the work of the shopper to procure and provide this food for their households. 
The labor of shopping and emotional labor/administrative labor involved in food 
provisioning is rendered invisible by discourses that promote an individual-level 
responsibility for food and nutrition.  With ?experts? constructing health as a 
consequence of what nutrients get ingested, the individual who is putting those 
nutrients in their bodies or their kids? bodies is responsible for the outcome.  The 
social context of food provisioning is easily ignored. 
 The discourses discussed in the next chapters, the efficiency discourse and the 
food industry discourse, cement this individual responsibility and even make it more 
difficult for women to provision households due to often conflicting information.   
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Chapter 4: The Efficient Housewife 
 In the past two chapters we?ve seen that food shopping involves household 
relationships, and negotiating a nutrition discourse that makes providing healthy food 
an individual responsibility.  This chapter will focus on another aspect of food 
shopping: shopping as a process of household financial management.   Food 
purchases comprise 6-10 percent of the average household expenditure depending on 
income level (United States Department of Labor 2006), which is an historically low 
number per household but translates into an aggregate expenditure of $750 billion for 
food eaten at and away from home.  When I asked shoppers about budgeting and how 
much money they spent on food, only two could give me an exact amount.  Two-
thirds of my shoppers, from a wide income range, said they spent $100 a week.  This 
seeming discrepancy can partially be explained by the routine nature of most 
shopping trips: most shoppers tend to get roughly the same items every week, or have 
a set of basics that they know they need to have on hand and thus spend about the 
same amount every week whether or not they are aware of the amount. 
But what explains the widespread focus on saving money as a bedrock 
principle of grocery shopping?  Sue Brown, a mother of three kids and home day-care 
owner, starts her food shopping when the ads come in the Wednesday mail.  She has a 
mental idea of what kind of food her family will eat and plans out the weekly menu 
by what is on sale. She writes the list according to the store layout (?in case someone 
else will be shopping? she laughs) meaning she lists grocery items starting with 
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produce, then dairy, meats, and grocery items by aisle.  She explains her planning 
rationale like this: 
If I were in the store everyday I would spend $30.  That would be $900 a 
month!  It?s worth your time, do your menu, buy everything you need and I 
don?t care if you had to invest 6 hours doing it?if you made a weekly menu 
and knew exactly the stuff you needed?you would spend less because you 
wouldn?t be at the store all the time and we all tend to go when we?re hungry 
when we spend more.  
Kay Worthington, a student and mother of a teenager, also plans her meals 
around the Wednesday sale ads.  When the ad comes in the mail, she takes out her 
large leather planner and plans her meals around what is on sale.  She tries to have 
several menu ideas for certain days but then leaves open other days thinking she can 
either serve leftovers on that day or if she has some extra time she may run by the 
grocery store. Writing her list on a notepad in her planner, she flips through the ad 
several times to make sure she has not missed anything.  She showed me her most 
recent list: asparagus, spiral ham, pineapple, Barilla pasta, and tuna.  She explains that 
these items are on sale this week and she will make meals from these items, but she 
would never buy things that her family would not normally eat since they may not 
like it. 
She feels like she is being an economical shopper this way and would ?just die 
if I bought something and later it was on sale.  I would feel like a failure, like I should 
have known better and bought it when it was on sale because it is the right thing to 
do.?  She feels that she is helping with the family bills by reducing the household 
grocery costs.
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Stacey Ostrander told me a story about her husband and junk food.  He once 
went to the store and bought potato chips at the regular price, something that Stacey 
just couldn?t live with.  She said: 
Gary is the snack food person, and I?ve tried weaning him off snack foods, I 
didn?t buy any and I let it run out.  But that didn?t work because when I buy 
them I buy them on sale 3/$5.00.  Well when we ran out he just went to the 
store and paid full price!  Its like you just paid 3.45, I paid 1.60.  We have 
carrots in the house, we have bananas in the house, there are grapes in the 
house, there are apples in the house, there is always fresh fruit and veggies in 
my house.  Eat something healthy!  So I gave up and just started buying it 
again because I can save money that way. You feel funny when you are 
walking out with six bags of junk food, but if it?s on sale for 3/$5.00 and you 
are going to eat it? 
 Spending time to save money, being an economical shopper--shoppers 
indicate that they are being good shoppers when they save money at the grocery store.  
Sue and Kay indirectly articulate that their work preparing for shopping is the ?other 
side of the paycheck (c.f. Weinbaum and Bridges 1986)?; they are contributing to the 
household purse and supplementing their spouse?s and their own wages by shopping 
efficiently.
.  In the 20 interviews I did with the main household food provider, I heard 
many shopping strategies: plan meals in advance, always shop with a list, buy on sale, 
shop at night without kids, don?t allow husbands to shop alone.  Everyone ?knows? 
that making a list contributes to saving money and time in that it keeps the shopper 
focused on buying only products that are needed and shortens the time necessary to 
spend in the store. 
 But on what advice are these shoppers basing their strategies?  What does 
being a ?good? shopper mean?  Where do shoppers get their information about 
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shopping strategies? Although many stated that it was just common-sense, when 
pressed they suggested that they did get some information on shopping from the 
morning talk shows and news shows, women?s magazines such as Simple Living, 
Good Housekeeping, and Country Living, the Weight Watchers program, and internet 
searches.   While shoppers are not reading or listening to all these programs, they are 
aware that there is a ?good? way to shop that is promulgated by the experts through 
these media outlets.   
Efficient Housewife Discourse 
I have identified a discourse that shoppers used to discuss their work of 
shopping that I term the ?efficient housewife? or efficiency discourse for short.  The 
efficiency discourse has historical roots in the home economics movement (see 
discussion in chapter 3), is contemporarily administered by federal institutions such 
as the USDA and its extension services and has filtered into media outlets such as 
television news shows, the internet, and women?s magazines.  There is a 
contradiction between the ubiquitousness of this discourse and the demographic 
changes in household composition and women working outside the home; it is still 
based on the traditional household configuration because it assumes a housewife to 
manage the household but also is updated in some ways that it presents information 
on how to be an efficient housewife in addition to being a wage-laborer.  I will lay out 
the main tenets of this discourse and then discuss how it structures shoppers? work. 
The efficient food consumer is one who plans meals out in advance of the 
actual shopping trip, creates a list of products based on these meals plans, makes sure 
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she is getting the best deal for her money, avoids buying things she doesn?t need, uses 
coupons and shops the ?sales?.  The experts who write and produce these texts 
include nutritionists, dieticians, extension officers, financial advisors, corporate 
representatives, among others.  One of the main themes of this discourse is that the 
efficient housewife should be organized, disciplined to withstand impulse buys, stay 
in the budget, and make ?rational? choices.    
Pre-Shopping Strategies:
Planning meals for the week is the first step in the process of being an 
efficient shopper.  Stephanie Nelson, the ?coupon mom? and ABC correspondent, 
advises:
Plan meals for the week before you make your shopping list.  Make sure you 
have the basics on hand to create a week?s worth of meals.  Write the meals 
planned on a piece of paper and post it on the refrigerator to remember 
(Nelson 2007). 
The United States Department of Health and Human Services advises ?Think 
ahead about the meals you plan to make and write a list of what you?ll need to buy 
(U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services 2006). The American Dietetic Association 
reminds the shopper when making a list to keep in mind 
which days you will have time to cook from scratch and which days you will 
be pressed for time to put dinner on the table.  Organize the list, checking 
menu options against the food guide pyramid (ADA 2003) 
Experts also advise shoppers to write the list to correspond to the aisles in 
which the store is set out.  Phil Lempert, the self-proclaimed ?supermarket guru? and 
NBC Today show correspondent describes his suggested list:
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use your old receipts and cross off all the items you didn?t need.  Then look in 
your refrigerator, cupboards and freezer to see what you are missing, and add 
these products to the list.  2) write any additional items that you will need in 
the aisle order. 3) Under the additional items draw a horizontal line for each of 
your "allowed" impulse items. Keep the number of impulse items fixed from 
week to week - don't vary it. That wastes time and money. (Lempert 2007).  
An article on organizing from Real Simple, a middle-class women?s magazine, 
adds several steps to the list making process:   
Make a list, grouped by aisles.  Add all items you stock your shelves with that 
you don?t need to buy this time.  Take this list to the store.  As you shop, write 
down the aisle number next to each item on the list.  When you get home, type 
up the list according to the aisle numbers.  Print several copies and stick on 
the refrigerator.  Superglue mini magnets to a pen and a small stapler and keep 
both on frig next to your list.  When you run out of an item, use the pen to 
check it off,  Staple coupons to the list and write C next to items for ?double 
insurance? (Humphreys 2004). 
The main reason for the list is to keep the shopper from buying any items or 
products she does not need, or in other words ?impulse items?.  The list also keeps the 
shopper on-task and thus in the store the least amount of time as possible, and thus 
away from temptation.  The shopping list is not only about saving money but will 
?save trips and help avoid buying items you don?t need (Human Nutrition 
Information Service Home and Garden Bulletin No.232-10.).  According to K-State 
Extension Service professionals, the average shopper spends 40 percent more on 
impulse purchases when shopping without a list (Heck and Higgins 2006).
Efficient housewives also favor thriftiness over convenience.  Shoppers 
should cook and bake more from ?scratch? in order to save money on convenience 
foods.  For example, instead of frozen chicken breasts, the shopper should buy a 
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whole chicken and cut it into pieces (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 
2005).  The ?Shopping on a Shoestring? author extends this advice to suggest we 
learn how to butcher and use all the parts of a chicken as the first steps to ?real 
economy? in the kitchen (Friedman 2007).  Shoppers should also do batch cooking 
and freeze some for future meals, as well as ?assemble healthy snacks at home in 
small baggies? rather than buying pre-packaged snacks (American Dietetic 
Association 2003).  Consumer Reports tells shoppers to ?shred it yourself and save: a 
1 pound bag of Dole whole carrots in New York cost 99 cents while a 10-ounce bag 
of Dole shredded carrots costs $1.99 (Consumer Reports 2006)?.   
Your meals are planned, your list is made.  What other strategies will save 
money?  The advice on coupon use is mixed.  Coupons, when used for products you 
need or regularly buy, can definitely save money.  Consumer Reports reports that 
coupons save $30 billion dollars a year. However, coupons can also entice you to 
buy products you may not need or may be unhealthy.  Shoppers are thus encouraged 
to be judicious in their use of coupons.
If you were to use coupons correctly, you may be able to whittle your food bill 
to nothing.  The ?coupon mom? Stephanie Nelson has written an entire book 
dedicated to shopping with coupons.  Many of her advanced saving strategies involve 
a detailed understanding of retail coupon policies as well as retrieving and managing 
coupons once you get them.  She states that she saves more than $50 a week with 
coupons, as well as $50 a week just on sale prices.  This management system takes 
time to organize, however.  For example, she suggests using the Virtual Coupon 
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Organizer, an interactive database listing all the grocery coupons that have come out 
in the newspaper.  To use this site: 
Create a ?best grocery deals? list for an unlisted store and sort the list 
alphabetically to create your own best deals.  When you see an item you need 
on sale, you can quickly see if a grocery coupon is available for the item.  
Check the boxes to display your list.  Once you have your printed list of 
coupons needed at your store, you can sit down with your collection of saved 
circulars and cut out only the coupons needed.  Sort the list by expiration date, 
to make sure you take advantage of coupons that will be expiring soon 
(Nelson, 2007). 
You should also plan to shop in more than one store for the best buys.  A 
Women?s Day article states that  
shoppers who hit two stores in one day saved $15 on average, compared to 
those who shopped in only one store.  Make it a habit to shop at another store 
besides your favorite supermarket, and that?s close to 800 dollars in savings a 
year.  Go first to one or two bargain stores, then buy whatever else you need 
from your primary grocery store.  Buy as many items as possible in bulk at 
shopping clubs (Costco, Sam?s Club)? (Steele, 2000). 
Always make sure you use the store?s shopper card.  ?The time it takes to 
register for one may be well worth it? (Gibbons, 2007).  Many experts are now 
advising people to shop online to save time. 
Another important strategy in resisting temptation and being efficient is to 
leave the kids at home.   According to the experts, grocery shopping with children can 
add $100-$400 to your grocery bill (Steele 2007). Stephanie Nelson advises shoppers 
to leave the kids at home, if possible to avoid their impulse purchases.  But if you 
can?t, you should set up a reward system like a fun activity or a free cookie at the 
bakery if they don?t ask for anything (Nelson 2007).  Other experts suggest shoppers 
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should go to the store when the kids are busy because shopping is faster if you go 
alone.  ?Plan grocery store forays when the kids are at school or music lessons, or 
have your spouse mind them while you shop (Weinstein and Scarbrough 2007).?  If 
you have to take your kids, shoppers should have something for them to do, perhaps a 
game or even have them practice shopping.  A Women?s Day article gives this advice: 
?Train little shoppers.  Grocery shopping with children can add 100-400 
dollars a month to your bill.  With kids spend more time in store but also ?kids 
are masters of impulse buying.  If you can?t go solo, turn the kids into smart 
shoppers.  Give them choices or have them use real money for anything not on 
the list (Steele 2007). 
What should you do with your kids?  An overwhelming majority of the 
experts emphatically recommend shopping sans children as a method of saving 
money.  Even if you can discipline yourself to buy only what is on your list, your 
kids? impulsiveness will add anywhere from $100-400 per month.   A USDA 
pamphlet advises shoppers to ?Leave your child with a friend or sitter if you need to.
Stores put many foods that children like, such as candy and products with prizes, 
where they can see and reach them (Nibbles for Health USDA, Food and Nutrition 
Service).  Weight Watchers advises shoppers to plan to shop when the kids are busy 
because shopping is faster if you go alone.  ?Plan grocery store forays when the kids 
are at school or music lessons, or have your spouse mind them while you shop 
(weightwatchers.com).?   
 If you must take your children, find something constructive for them to do.   
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 ?If you can?t go solo, turn the kids into smart shoppers.  Give them choices or have 
them use real money for anything not on the list (Morano, 2006).?  The American 
Dietetic Association advises us that 
an enjoyable grocery shopping experience with children is possible!  Use it as 
an opportunity to give your kids a lesson in color, smell, and names of new 
foods.  Engaging them in the food selection can turn a trip to the store into a 
great teaching tool about nutritious food choices (JADA 103.3).   
The last issue to consider before you enter the store is your mood.  One of the 
most universal recommendations is to make preparations to be in the right frame of 
mind before shopping.  Avoiding temptation in the face of the myriad ?choices? in 
the marketplace is a central theme throughout this discourse. Shoppers should make 
sure to eat before going grocery shopping, so they are less tempted to buy too much 
or the wrong kind of food.  Shoppers should not be ?stressed? out either; the expert 
shopper is always on guard to resist supermarket strategies. ?Everything about the 
supermarket is designed to prolong your trip? (Consumer Reports 2006). 
The ?supermarket guru? Phil Lempert advises shoppers to  
Never shop when you're hungry. You'll end up with all kinds of impulse items 
in your cart. Another rule is not to shop when you're stressed out. The crowds 
and lines will only make you more frustrated. Some people, however, find the 
supermarket to be therapeutic. Figure out which type of shopper you are, and 
shop when it suits your mood. 
A Weightwatchers article advises shoppers:  
Shop on a full stomach.  If you shop when you are hungry, you?re subject to 
spur-of-the-moment cravings and impulse buys.  To manage the lifestyle you 
want, shop after lunch or dinner (Weinstein and Scarbrough 2007)?.
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Christine Palumbo, a registered dietician (R.D.) states that ?when you are 
hungry, everything looks good so don?t go hungry.  Likewise if you are frazzled or 
feeling down, save the trip for later when you are less vulnerable to impulse buys? 
(Hennen 2006).  An article in Health advises shoppers to ?make sure you?ve eaten 
and go shopping when you are in a calm, stable mood.  Hunger and stress make you 
more susceptible to temptation (Haspel 2006).?   
Shoppers should also make plans to shop on the same day every week and at 
times when few shoppers will be in the same store.  Janis Jibrin, RD, advises: ?Shop 
on the same day if possible and spare yourself aggravation by avoiding the busy 
times: weekday evenings or weekends (Jibrin 2007).?  One of the worst times to shop 
in terms of crowds, under-stocked shelves and over-worked employees are weekdays 
between 4pm and 7pm; one of the best times for highest efficiency is early Friday 
afternoon, before the weekend rush but after the store is stocked (Associated Press, 
2008).
In-Store Strategies 
After all the planning is done, the kids are at the sitter?s and the shopper has 
eaten a light and healthy snack, what are the most efficient ways to shop once in the 
store?  Most experts advise the shopper to stay on the ?perimeter? of the store.  The 
produce, bakery, meat and dairy aisles provide the healthiest and freshest food.  But 
try to avoid the big outside aisle, known as ?the race track? where the shopper is 
encouraged to browse good sales or delicacies like imported cheeses 
(msnbc.msn.com).  Consumer Reports even advises shoppers to ignore the standard 
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store set-up and shop clockwise, which encourages the shopper to spend less time in 
the store and therefore save more money (Consumer Reports 2006).  
The shopper should be aware of the strategies managers use to encourage 
purchases. Managers stock their most expensive brands or their private labels at eye-
level so shoppers are should look at the highest and lowest shelves for generics and 
specials. Buy store brands or generics that are often placed higher or lower on the 
grocery shelves (US Dept of Health and Human Services 2005).  ?Buy one, get one 
free? sounds good, but often the ?one? is marked up to begin with.  Managers will 
also use ?loss leaders? such as a brand name cereal that they are willing to sell at cost 
or less to attract customers who will buy other products while in the store, so 
shoppers should be wary of shopping at a store for a certain sale (Weaver 2005). 
The shopper should read and compare labels.  Unit prices are displayed on the 
store shelves below the foods; shoppers should use these to compare the cost on 
different sized packages (Foods and Nutrition Education, Cooperative Extension 
Service).   Some experts advise to buy in bulk (nutrition.gov); but sometimes bigger 
packages may not be more economical.  The shopper should then use unit prices to 
make a decision, especially when one size is on sale (Consumer Reports 2006).   
Shoppers should also compare prices in different parts of the same store.  Sometimes 
cheese, for instance, is more expensive in the deli than in the dairy case. 
Shoppers should also think about buying seasonal and local to save money on 
the shipping (Friedman 2007).  If you can?t get fresh produce, some frozen fruits and 
vegetables are fine to buy frozen, including peas, broccoli, corn kernels and berries 
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(weightwatchers.com).  More experts are advising shoppers to buy organic fruits and 
vegetables, although this advice is only found in magazines, not from government 
agencies.
Shoppers should avoid convenience foods which are of course more 
expensive.  For example, since individual packets of oatmeal are more expensive the 
shopper should buy a large container and adding fruit (LINC-Meal Planning and 
Shopping).  Bagged lettuce costs considerably more than a head of ice-burg lettuce 
(Consumer Reports 2006).  The shopper should privilege money over time when 
making the choice to buy convenience foods. Shoppers should cook and bake more 
from ?scratch? in order to save money on convenience foods.  For example, instead of 
frozen chicken breasts, the shopper should buy a whole chicken and cut it into pieces 
(U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2005).  The ?Shopping on a 
Shoestring? author extends this advice to suggest we learn how to butcher and use all 
the parts of a chicken as the first steps to ?real economy? in the kitchen (Friedman 
2007).  Shoppers should also do batch cooking and freeze some for future meals, as 
well as ?assemble healthy snacks at home in small baggies? rather than buying pre-
packaged snacks (American Dietetic Association 2003).  Consumer Reports tells 
shoppers to ?shred it yourself and save: a 1 pound bag of Dole whole carrots in New 
York cost 99 cents while a 10-ounce bag of Dole shredded carrots costs $1.99 
(Consumer Reports 2006)?.    
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   Notes from Real Life 
The efficiency discourse assumes a household with a housewife--someone 
who has the time and inclination to assume the role of efficient purchaser.  This 
discourse is especially relevant for households where saving money is important; in 
my study this discourse was more salient for women who were not working for wages 
outside the home, who were working part-time, or who had only one wage-earner in 
the household.  A study published by the Agricultural Research Service finds that 
food shoppers can be divided into two groups based on participation in labor force: 
one third report working over 50 hours a week and one third report part time or part 
of a year.  From this food shoppers can be roughly divided into two broad groups: 
those with lower incomes who are ?economizers or price conscious? and the 
?convenience-oriented? who are looking for ways to save time (Kinsey and Senaur 
1996).
 The work of shopping is different for these two different groups.  For 
example, using ads is rarely a concern for full time wage workers.  In fact, none of the 
working mothers I interviewed used the Wednesday ads regularly, if at all.  One 
working mom summed it up: ?I used to do all that: cut coupons, look at the ads.  I 
used to spend a $100 bucks a month on food.  I would go to Food 4 Less in Topeka 
and I would get all these things and that?s when I used to stockpile when the kids 
were babies.  I was very efficient.?  What asked what changed she replied  
Time.  I don?t have the time to go through and look at all the prices and try to 
find the best deals and spend the time looking for all that.  I think it?s just the 
time factor-I?ve got 15 minutes and I need to pick up supper and I?ve got to 
zoom through here?.I just don?t want to spend my time doing that.  I need to 
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be on the road doing other things like taking the girls to ball and tumbling 
(April Malone). 
Jessica Pierce, another working mom who as an assistant director of a large 
non-profit puts in long hours, states 
I don?t use coupons or ads because that would require me to go several stores 
and have a lot more time devoted to that then probably what we would devote 
to it, or than I would like to devote to it.  I mean if something is on sale and 
it?s something I want I would consider myself lucky that night I suppose. 
So there is a tradeoff between time and money.  The mothers who work for 
wages have the luxury of spending money on full price items (and not spending time 
cutting coupons or comparison shopping) but are squeezed for time both in terms of 
shopping as well as preparing the meal.  Another working mother loves to shop and 
cook but when she gets off work at 5:30 and needs to have meals on the table at 6:00, 
she does not have the luxury of spending much time in the grocery store.   In terms of 
making dinner she will   
either go home, and look around thinking what do I have on hand or think 
about what can I quick stop and get on my way home?  I?m not near as 
organized about it as I used to be when I wasn?t working as much (Mary 
Wirth).?   
 For some working mothers, the organization and planning of shopping takes 
on a larger role the more hours they work outside the home.  Two mothers in the 
study had just experienced transitions from working part-time to full time.  They 
found that they had to be more efficient in order to get both the wage work and the 
shopping work done and spent a considerable time on the weekends planning meals 
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for the week, as well as creating lists and planning when they could actually do the 
shopping.  Their shopping was much more leisurely when they had more time to 
devote to it.
 Eating out was a more frequent strategy for full time wage workers and more 
than one working mom assuaged their guilt of eating out by taking their kids to 
Subway instead of McDonalds.   But I surmise that eating out was also underreported.
When asked how many times they would eat out, shoppers would state not very often.  
But when asked for specific meals they had made over the course of a week, many 
would report eating out at least once a week, if not more.  Although I didn?t probe at 
the time, I believe that eating out still carries a stigma of not being a good food 
provider.
 Almost all part-time workers report knowing and using some form of the 
efficiency discourse.  Karen Calhoun states that ?I go through the ad and look for the 
things we normally use, anything that?s on sale that I might want or that sounds good, 
I open up the pantry, open up the cabinets, ok, what are we low on, and make my list 
from there.?  She does report that she is constantly tempted by things that are not on 
her list or that look good in the store, even if they are pricy.  However, she always 
stocks up on products that her family will use if they are on sale.  For instance, during 
her last grocery visit Best Choice Vegetables were on sale for 29 cents, and she 
bought the maximum limit allowed (6). 
 Melissa Long, whose children are now out of the house, remembers how she 
used to shop when her four kids were young: ?With the kids, I actually looked at ads 
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and made lists.  And when I was a stay at home mom I went once a week in Lawrence 
so I had my whole menus for the week planned out and what I needed and I just 
shopped that way and of course we raised so much of our own food at that time.? She 
used to look at the ads and compare what was on sale.  She used to cut coupons and 
made a detailed list.   Now, with just her and her husband at home and with her full 
time salary, she shops whenever she wants or is out of something.  She states: ?I very 
seldom shop like I used to.  I?m one of those, if it?s frozen and it microwaves real 
good, I know.  You know how I do my cinnamon rolls (she uses Rhodes rather than 
make them from scratch).   I think it?s because of the way I work.  You know, when I 
get home at night, I?m tired and Harold?s tired and hungry and I need something that 
cooks fast and quickly and a lot of times our suppers consist of some type of meat, 
vegetables and a salad.?
 Many part-time wage workers could list prices from memory.  Jane Smith 
remembers that Tide with Downey is $6.47 for 100 oz. at WalMart; if the local store 
is selling it cheaper she will pick up a bottle or two.  Her husband, however, figures in 
the amount of gas and time that is spent to go to Walmart, and determines it is 
cheaper to buy it locally.  Even though is not fond of WalMart, she states ?you just 
can?t beat the price?.  Another shopper, Sue Brown, who also uses price as a main 
factor in her decision-making process, states that chicken tenders at Aldi?s are $6.89, 
whereas they are $8.99 at the local store.   Karen Calhoun knows that the price of 
milk is 20 cents higher at the local store then one of the discount grocery stores.  But 
price is a very tricky issue.  In the US, food production is subsidized by the 
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government for billions of dollars a year so a true open market price is rarely 
accountable.  Also, the ads that many shoppers use as a foundation to their weekly 
shopping are controlled by the major industries subsides to the retail stores, which 
will be discussed in the next chapter. 
 Kelly Barnes, a single mother of three school-aged children, makes $40,000 a 
year as a junior high school teacher.  This is how she describes her preparation for 
shopping:
I don?t put much thought into it, I really don?t. I don?t make menus, I don?t 
make lists, I just think about what we need.  It?s very rare that I don?t have to 
go to the store two, three, four times during the week.  Honestly that?s because 
we just kind of get through a day, or two?. I just kind of fly by the seat of my 
pants.
She recognizes that if she were more organized, she could save herself money and 
buy better food to eat.
As a single mom who does struggle from paycheck to paycheck, should I be 
on a budget, should I look at ads and all that sort of thing, it makes sense, yes, 
I probably should.  But I just don?t have the time or inclination.  I just really 
don?t have a budget for anything.  I just pay what I can pay, I mean, seriously.  
I mean, usually I can make it from paycheck to paycheck and most of the time 
I?m sweating by the end and that?s just the way it is.  I?m really bad about 
that.  I know if I was a better budgeter or if I spent my money better that I 
wouldn?t be sweating at the end of the month, but if I?m going to eat it I want 
it to taste good. 
Kelly?s kids are getting old enough that they can walk to the store to get some 
ingredients and cook some basic meals, like spaghetti.  But usually their schedule is 
so busy they end up eating sandwiches, or some kind of frozen dinner, or what they 
are selling at the concession stand at the school activity.
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Sometimes I get home 4:15, 4:30, sometimes I don?t get home until 5:00 or 
5:30 so that just depends. There is extracurricular stuff a lot of times too so if 
I get to come home and just get to worry about dinner then that is one thing 
but usually there is other stuff going on.  Like everyday this week we have 
other stuff going on, there?s no time.  I?m even thinking ok, taco salad may 
wait until next week because if we are out and it is late, its 7:00, 7:30 or 8:00 
when we get home, I don?t cook dinner.  And usually the girls are getting 
ready for bed or finishing up homework and taking showers, I mean we just 
need to eat and move on. 
She feels guilty about not cooking ?I think I?m supposed to cook for my kids because 
I am the mom?, but she just doesn?t have the time, and when she gets home from 
work and coaching, she is so tired she just wants to sit down and relax.
And I feel guilty and especially after teaching junior high I don?t like what I 
do and it?s stressful every single day. Sometimes it?s more stressful and then I 
come home and the kids are fighting and doing whatever and sometimes I 
think to myself ?I don?t want to eat with you guys, I just want to be by 
myself.? And I do feel guilty about that.  And especially because Maggie will 
say ?eat at the table mom.? 
Kelly recognizes that if she were more organized, if she spent more time 
planning menus and clipping coupons, she could save money and not live paycheck to 
paycheck.  But she also has very little discretionary time to plan after working a full 
day and then caring for three children. She also values eating what tastes good to her, 
not what is ?on sale?, or in other words, what she is supposed to buy under the tenets 
of the efficient housewife.  She is not willing to deny herself what tastes good to her 
to buy a cheaper substitute even though she cannot afford it.  One small example she 
gives is her taco sauce, Spanish Gardens, a more expensive brand that she has always 
eaten and tastes better than cheaper sauces. Another example she gives that illustrates 
her rejection of the efficiency discourse is generic versus name brand drugs.  Kelly 
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said, ?Sometimes I?ll buy generic pills but I won?t buy the generic in the liquid 
because it tastes gross and then the kids won?t take it.?  
 Peggy Fiske does not have the luxury of ignoring the efficiency strategies; 
her household?s survival depends on her success at being an effective shopper.  She 
receives $363 a month from food stamps to feed herself and her two children.  She is 
proud that she can feed her family on this amount and her strategies include using 
coupons, store discount cards, and making a list and finding the best sales when she is 
at the store.  She can?t really stock up on these sales since her freezer is very small 
and she doesn?t have extra space in her small apartment.  She can?t afford a 
newspaper subscription so she doesn?t get the larger store?s advertisements to plan 
from.  She does, however, take a calculator with her and adds up her purchases as she 
goes along.  If she forgets a calculator, she says ?sometimes I?ll just sit there and I?ll 
write every thing up and I?ll keep track on like the side my list how much I?ve spent?.   
She does spend money on packaged foods like Hamburger Helper (which she 
doctors with extra seasoning) and the Homestyle Bakes with everything in the kit 
because it makes it so much easier for her to cook with two small children in the 
house:  ?The quick stuff comes in very handy and there are times when I am just 
exhausted and I don?t I don?t feel up to making a big meal but I have to cook 
something.?  They rarely eat out, because it is too expensive and it is difficult to 
maneuver her son?s wheelchair in a restaurant.  If they eat out, it is fast food, perhaps 
Taco Bell where they can get ?filled up? for a reasonable amount of money. 
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She tries to look for sales on rice and other staples that she can use to ?stretch? 
foods, but sometimes her older son will eat really well one meal and refuse to eat it 
another time.  She coordinates meals not only so she will not waste any food but also 
so the kids won?t get tired of eating the same things repeatedly: 
One night I?ll make a roast and then ?sometimes it?s beef, sometimes it?s 
pork, depends on what looked good or what was on sale.  And then the next 
night I?ll make pork and noodles or I?ll make beef and noodles, and I use the 
broth that I?ve got from baking the roast because my broth always comes out 
really, really rich and just so much better than if you?d get a can of broth to 
cook your meals in.    And I?ve used the broth and sometimes I?ll make 
mashed potatoes I will eat until my stomach hurts.  And you know it?s a way 
to get the stuff used up but the kids don?t realize so much that they are having 
leftovers.
 Peggy was thrifty enough to manage the small amount of money she receives 
and feed her family.  She also receives assistance through the free/reduced school 
lunch program, as well as private programs like Kid Screen.  Families receiving food 
stamps also receive monitoring on whether they are using these programs effectively, 
and if not will often be referred to agencies such as the USDA?s Expanded Food and 
Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP).  This agency provides food resource 
management training to identified families and posts ?success stories? on their 
website, stories of shoppers who successfully incorporated the efficient housewife 
strategies in their work of grocery shopping. 
 The underlying theme is that by teaching efficiency skills, the household not 
only is better off but manages the state?s money more effectively.  One ?success 
story? is about Sue in Iowa.  She never had any money left over at the end of the 
month, and the EFNEP nutrition assistant worked with Sue for three months to set a 
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budget and plan for grocery shopping.  Sue now can keep track of her income and 
expenses, she plans her meals two weeks in advance, and shops according to a 
grocery list.  She is also catching up on other bills (USDA 2006).  Another mother in 
Illinois learned how to construct a weekly budget, gets the newspaper to check for 
sales and coupons, and plans weekly meals.  ?The success the mother got from 
improving her diet gave her the security she needed to improve the rest of her life.  
She now has a settled living arrangement and is exploring her job prospects.?
These mothers have made the successful transition to efficient consumer, but 
we also do not see all the work that is involved in the process.   A local newspaper 
food editor Jill Wendholt Silva took the Food Stamp Challenge and attempted to feed 
her family on $129.50 per week, which is the maximum amount a family of four can 
receive on food stamps.  What strategies did she utilize to make sure she could feed 
her family?  Her approach read right from the efficiency discourse: make a menu for 
the week, check the weekly food ads, make a shopping list and stick to it, be a ?smart 
shopper? by comparing prices, know the store layout, and shop at more than one 
store.  However, it is her reaction to this experience that is instructive.  She wrote  
I spent nearly every moment I was not at work thinking about or preparing 
food.  I constantly feared I would run out of food. It was exhausting to shop 
three times in one week to get the best deals.  Even though I stayed on a 
budget, our entire family lost the freedom to choose what to eat and when 
(Silva 2007).
She was also skeptical that anyone who works a full-time job could actually pull off 
this kind of planning week after week. 
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 Retailers and grocery stores also benefit from shoppers adopting efficient food 
shopping strategies. Contrary to conventional wisdom about higher profits on 
convenience foods, retailers report that an efficient consumer is more profitable for 
their stores.  For example, marketing research indicates that customers whose main 
shopping goals are to care for their families, shop efficiently and use smart budgeting 
strategies account for almost half of all supermarket trips and almost 63% of total 
supermarket spending (Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council of North America 
2008). With the rise in fast foods and restaurants, grocery stores, supermarkets must 
contend with competition from already prepared food and take out restaurants.  
Making a meal from scratch to eat at home usually costs more than buying a prepared 
meal, and those consumers who make meals at home are usually more loyal 
customers.  One corporate sales manager explained: 
Great shoppers make a list and they come to the store prepared.  They?re great 
shoppers in the fact that they organized and they still eat at home, you know 
that is not always the case anymore.  There?s a lot of people that fly by the 
seat of their pants, they run in the store, they don?t plan anything, they run in 
the store everyday, they are good shoppers too....Mrs. Brown who makes a list 
and comes once a week usually has a nice big order one time.  We know that 
she is a regular customer and everybody else kind of flies by the seat of their 
pants.  Although they might be regular customers, but they might be just as 
apt to pull into Hy-Vee because they are over there and getting something 
from them.  Usually I think there are people that lay out all of the ads and go 
to all the store because they have nothing else to do but that is a dying breed.  
So we like the people that still have family dinner and still eat at home.   
Interestingly, he also connects ethnicity and efficiency:
As a side note, the Hispanic trade has been our savior.  In the stores that have 
a Hispanic trade because they still cook from scratch.  They still buy the core 
ingredients and build meals from scratch.  And they are really good 
customers, it?s like it used to be.  America?s kind of got away from 
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that?hurry up and eat.  It?s not dining anymore, it?s just like fulfilling a need 
and moving on with your busy life (Mike Schultz). 
     Conclusion  
What we hear in my shoppers? descriptions of their work is a certain kind of 
knowledge about how to get food from the store shelves into their homes that derives 
from the emphasis on efficiency that prevails in our modern economic system.    How 
and why do we learn that ?getting a bargain? or shopping the sale means being a good 
shopper or provisioner? Learning and remembering prices, comparison shopping, 
clipping coupons?all of these activities take time and involve certain knowledges 
based not so much in the needs of the family but based on the dictates of the political 
economy of the food system.  A certain kind of rationality is necessary for being a 
successful food shopper, a rationality of efficiency.  A recent NYTimes op-ed mirrors 
this message: ?It turns out that making up a precise list beforehand and getting the 
errand done as quickly as possible is the best way to save money. Cutting time cuts 
costs, as well (Stein 2009).? 
While being an efficient shopper may save time in the grocery store, it does 
not necessarily mean less work for shoppers.  The efficiency discourse instructs the 
shopper not only to save money but to discipline herself against the onslaught of 
choices at the supermarket.  The shopper must spend time making lists and meal 
plans, comparison shopping, checking the ads, and arranging child care.  In the store 
the shopper must fight her impulse to buy the wrong product or too much of a 
product; she must exhibit self-discipline to balance economy with nutrition.  In this 
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way she will save her household money, stretch the wage dollars that come in, and 
allow for the purchase of other consumer goods.   
Full-time wage earning shoppers from two-earner households in my study 
were aware of the efficiency discourse, but were less likely to follow these strategies 
because of time constraints and the ability to pay for food and services.  Working 
class shoppers and part-time workers usually were trying to save money through 
shopping and used the efficiency strategies such as planning meals, comparison 
shopping, etc which took extra time to accomplish and became part of their job of 
saving money for the household.   
The contradiction between the efficient housewife discourse and the 
experiences of real life shoppers is especially sharp for those shoppers who do not fit 
the necessary structural characteristics of the housewife, especially having the luxury 
of time or money to fulfill the efficiency tenets.  The two single mothers in my study 
had the most difficult time managing both time and money.   Managing jobs, money 
and children (in one case a disabled child) was a balancing act that involved many 
strategies including shopping at low-price stores like Walmart, using federal subsidies 
and child support payments, and even alterative financial strategies such as floating 
checks.  Acker (2006) argues that this structural reality for some women reflects the 
class structure in the United States, defining class broader than income, education and 
status to include ?unequal power and control over, and access to, the means of 
provisioning?.this disadvantage is most evident in the case of those who have low-
paying jobs or who have no family (husbands) to provide money (Acker 2006).?  
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Larger social institutions in the complex of the relations of ruling have a 
significant interest in the consumer becoming a successful household manager. 
Grocery shopping is a specific form of economic activity that is crucial not only to 
the household?s survival strategy but also for the functioning of larger social 
institutions.  Economists are now worried that higher food prices will mean less 
money spent on discretionary items like clothes and entertainment, those goods and 
services that have driven the ?consumer society? since after WWII.  Keeping the 
grocery dollar to a minimum means more dollars circulating elsewhere. 
Not only does the economy in general depend on consumer spending, but 
other social institutions have a stake in how households spend their food dollar.  The 
federal government, through agencies like the USDA and HHS, is concerned not only 
with providing information on food and nutrition but also educating shoppers on how 
to be efficient with their money, since many of the shoppers they are educating are on 
federal subsidies such as food stamps, TANF and WIC.  An inefficient shopper not 
only deprives their family of food, but also costs taxpayers money. 
Finally, efficient shoppers also spend more money in the grocery store.  
Managers indicate that efficient shoppers are better for the store?s bottom line 
because they buy more at one time, are more likely to shop at one store, and are more 
likely to eat meals at home rather than restaurants (their main competition).  
However, while managers and store owners prefer ?good? shoppers, the retail 
discourse discussed in the next chapter instructs them in practices to encourage 
particular buying habits, including impulse shopping and buying new products.
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Chapter 6: Retail Organization 
?In the market system the ultimate power, to repeat, is held to be with those who buy 
or choose not to buy; thus, with some qualifications, the ultimate power is that of the 
consumer.  Consumer choices shape to the demand curve.  As the ballot gives 
authority to the citizen, so in economic life the demand curve accords authority to the 
consumer. ?Belief in a market economy in which the consumer is sovereign is one 
of our most pervasive forms of fraud. Let no one try to sell without consumer 
management, control.?   
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Economics of Innocent Fraud (2004) 
 I have shown how institutional agents influence and standardize the work of 
grocery shopping through discourses transmitted in such diverse texts as 
advertisements, news shows, women?s magazines, and government brochures.  The 
efficiency discourse extols self-discipline and rational planning to minimize wasted 
time and money at the store and to keep the household budget balanced and family 
time maintained; while the nutrition discourse places responsibility for the household 
nutrition on the food choices the shopper makes at the grocery store.  
 The physical environment of the grocery store is also important in how 
shoppers accomplish their work.  The supermarket strategy is a particular retail 
organization that standardizes both the physical structure of the store and relies on 
marketing and advertising to encourage shoppers to buy increasingly standardized 
products.  Managers and owners are central to this strategy and their work is also 
shaped by extra-local discourses that operate to support the supermarket strategy.  In 
this chapter I will first present the contours of the retail discourse that shape how 
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managers administer both the store and the customer?s work in it, and then illustrate 
how this discourse takes material form in the ways the store is set up, the ways the 
shelves are organized, and the way the ads are constructed.  I argue another discourse 
operates simultaneously, a consumer sovereignty discourse that employs a 
mainstream economic conception of supply and demand to justify the power of the 
consumer but actually serves to cover the power relations that are evidenced by the 
managers? practices.  Finally, I use my shoppers? perspectives to show that consumer 
wants should not necessarily be equated with what they buy. 
Supermarket History 
Throughout much of history, individuals ate food that they grew or was 
produced not far from the household, although trade was not uncommon for spices or 
other luxuries especially in more commercial centers (Zukin 2004).  If individuals 
obtained food outside the household, they transacted directly with the producer or the 
merchant.  Although more people are currently engaging in these more direct forms 
of food procurement, such as shopping at farmers? markets or growing their own 
food, one model of food provisioning has been preeminent in the second half of the 
twentieth century and into the twenty-first: the supermarket.   The distinctive features 
of the supermarket model include volume-selling, cheap prices, a wide variety of 
goods sold, stores as part of a chain or cooperative buying agency, a specific 
management strategy including shelf-arrangement, store design, display techniques, 
and impulse-buying, and perhaps most importantly self-service (Humphries 1998; 
Lawrence and Burch 2007).
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 The rise of chain stores in food retailing and manufacturing led to the decline 
of both public markets and family-owned grocery stores.   Although chain stores like 
A&P (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) and Kroger opened their stores 
as early as 1890?s and eventually adopted all the tenets of the supermarket after 
WWII, they pioneered a new economic strategy to food sales.  Chain stores offered 
lower prices as they were utilizing economies of scale through bulk buying and 
dealing directly with food manufacturers, which meant that product turn-over was 
essential to sustain volume sales (Mayo 1993).   Owners had to shift their business 
design from small inventories with high mark-ups and direct service to designing 
strategies for moving products faster and lowering overhead costs.  
One strategy to achieve a higher sales volume was to standardize all facets of 
the  store, including design, layout, management practices, and customer service.  
Instead of selling to individuals in communities, stores were now selling products to 
the masses.  Where products were once stocked from floor to ceiling on the outer 
walls requiring clerks to retrieve the goods in the independent stores, the new 
supermarket strategy involved rearranging store design to put the product and the 
consumer in immediate contact with each other.  One retailing strategist in 1935 
stated: ?As far as possible every square inch of the eyes? range of vision, from the top 
of the shelving down to the floor, wherever the customer stands, wherever she looks, 
should display merchandise (Dipman, 1935, quoted in Bowlby 1997).  The counter 
was eliminated and the shelves were low enough that the customer could reach for 
any item she wanted.  Customer movement also had to be regulated to maximize 
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purchases; managers had to train their workers in customer service.  All stores in the 
chain had to be uniform in both layout and service.  Management also used new 
techniques for managing product turn-over and began monitoring the volume of 
certain sections of different shelves throughout the store (Mayo 1993).
But the most successful organizational change and the basis for the new 
supermarket economic strategy was to eliminate the clerk and allow customers to 
choose products themselves.  Clarence Saunders, the owner of Piggly Wiggly, in 
1915 introduced the first self-service grocery store in which the customer could select 
her own merchandise from display counters and pay cash (Zimmerman 1955; Bowlby 
1997; Humphries 1998).  This store also featured the first check-out stands, prices 
marked on all products, and a full line of nationally advertised brands.  Supermarkets 
were eventually larger and had a more diverse range of food products, but the main 
feature was self-service.  By 1953, self-service had become the norm: over 90 percent 
of all supermarkets had complete self-service dairy departments and prepackaged 
produce departments were found in 44 percent (Mayo 1993).   
The supermarket form and logic were firmly entrenched in the retail market 
by 1960 when supermarkets sold nearly 70 percent of all of America?s food 
(Humphrey 1998).   The supermarket expanded rapidly due to a growing post-war 
economic prosperity, increasing suburbanization, and the widespread use and 
ownership of the automobile.  The contemporary evolution of the supermarket is the 
hypermarket, a large-scale format that combines the features of the supermarket and 
the department store into a one-stop shopping trip (Lawrence and Burch 2007).  Also 
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convenience store models, where a few items are on display in a much smaller, more 
?convenient? venue but at a higher retail cost (Mayo 1993). 
In the last twenty years the supermarket strategy has extended in both 
directions--to larger hypermarket-type stores with over 50,000 items offered on one 
end to convenience stores with a small assortment of grocery items on the other (see 
Table 2 for breakdown).  This has created a very competitive market for retailers; in 
addition to the wide variety of store configurations, the increasing number of fast 
food and restaurant outlets has also increased the competition for the food dollar.  In 
1970, 69% of food was eaten at home, whereas in 2003 this figure had dropped to 
53% (USDA 2003).  This increased competition has led to retail consolidation and 
concentration (Lawrence and Burch 2007). Dixon (2007) argues that supermarkets 
have capitalized on these trends and positioned themselves as food authorities who 
can significantly shape the choices and lifestyles of their consumers. 
But even as the supermarket evolves, self-service is a pre-requisite of its form. 
Self-service was the essential feature of mass merchandising as it decreased labor 
costs and facilitated volume consumption.  Self service transferred the labor from the 
clerk to the individual shopper and in many ways brought a new autonomy to women. 
Where the clerk was once the intermediary between the product and the shopper, 
shoppers now had immediate contact with the product and management encouraged 
them to look, touch, smell and otherwise ?squeeze the Charmin?.  Many women 
welcomed this new autonomy in food shopping; they were no longer at the mercy of 
male clerks and enjoyed the larger selection, lower prices, better lighting and cleaner 
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stores (Bowlby 199; Deutsch 2002; Humphreys 1997 for the  Australian context).
For those shoppers who began moving to the suburbs as early as the 1920?s, they had 
no choice but to learn the new strategy as chain stores were disproportionately located 
in the suburbs and independents could not compete with the cost savings enjoyed by 
bulk buying.
In addition to saving labor costs, another consequence of this shift to self-
service was an unprecedented rise in impulse (or unplanned) purchases.   Market 
research indicated that between 1949-1965 almost three-fourths of all supermarket 
food purchases were unplanned (Levenstein 2003) and today industry analysts 
estimate that at least half to two-thirds of purchases are a result of impulse buying 
(Underhill 1999).  During the early period of the supermarket, established 
manufacturers were alarmed by this trend because it allowed new products to be 
directly chosen by customers without the intervention of a clerk; thus packaging and 
marketing for these products became even more important than ever.  One industrial 
designer wrote ?In the modern supermarket women are no longer cajoled into buying 
a particular brand.  As a result, an entirely new kind of package design has 
developed...the ladies who trundle their little shopping wagons among the shelves and 
tables need packaging to entice them to read products (Egmont Arens, 1950, quoted 
in Levenstein 2003).?  Paul Willis, an early president of the Grocery Manufacturers 
of America, emphasized the importance of marketing:  
When grocers had store clerks, they could influence what consumers 
purchased. By eliminating the store clerks, self-service gave consumers an 
uninterrupted opportunity to make their own choice. By displaying the 
manufacturers' products instead of hiding them behind the counter, 
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supermarkets gave branded products an opportunity to be chosen (Willis 
quoted in Greer, 1986). 
Marketing Discourse 
As marketing became an integral aspect of the supermarket model, marketing 
strategists focused less on selling specific products and more on influencing the 
consumer to make a purchase (Dawson 2003).  The Grocery Manufacturers of 
America?s current definition of shopper marketing is direct: food marketing is about 
leading the shopper to make a purchase which includes ?all marketing stimuli, 
developed based on a deep understanding of shopper behavior, attitudes and 
emotions, designed to build brand equity, designed to engage the shopper (i.e. 
consumer in ?shopping mode?) and lead him/her to make a purchase (Risom and 
Balkenburgh 2008).?  This retail and manufacturing marketing discourse directs 
managers and manufacturers to single out individual customers based on 
demographic information, and discusses how to alter the shopping environment to 
allow customers to accept new products or increase the number of products included 
in the shopping cart (Dawson 2003: 52).  Marketing is about managing the customer 
before, during and after the shopping event.
In 2000 marketing expenditures by food companies, which included 
advertising and discount incentives (coupons, slotting fees), totaled $33 billion 
(Nestle, 2002).  The USDA figures for 2004 are even higher: marketing amounted to 
$171 billion (USDA-Economic Research Service). The advertising budget for Kraft 
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alone in 2007 was $1.55 billion (msnbc.com).  Seventy percent of the total was spent 
marketing convenience foods whereas 2.2 percent was for fruits, vegetables, grains 
and beans (which constitute the bulk of acceptable foods on the food pyramid) 
(Nestle 2002).   Thus, shoppers encounter the work of marketers (which includes 
advertising) as an important institutional factor in how they perform their work of 
grocery shopping.
 I interviewed six managers for this study, the head manager of the no-frills 
suburban store, the assistant manager at the full-service suburban store, the owner and 
two managers at the rural store and a sales manager at a corporate office.  These 
managers indicate that they read trade industry publications, especially Progressive
Grocer and Supermarket News, general marketing newsletters printed by 
organizations such as the Food Marketing Institute, specific corporate newsletters, 
food and beverage magazines as well as business newspapers such as The Wall Street 
Journal.  I analyzed the two leading trade publications for articles on consumers and 
identified at least two different themes related to consumers and how they shop: the 
importance of ?knowing? your customer and building ?relationships?.  We see, 
however, that these practices are not designed to contribute to shoppers? ability to 
feed their families but rather to manage the shopper. 
   Know Your Customer 
?Knowing your shopper? to manufacturers and retailers means gathering as 
much information as possible about the demographics of their customers, what their 
customers are buying, and what their customers shopping practices are.  One main 
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avenue that marketers use to ?know their shoppers? is through the information 
gleaned from loyalty cards, the cards that customers sign up for to get discounts on 
purchases in the store as well as on other goods such as gasoline.  Retailers designed 
these cards to track consumer  purchases and their responses to new promotions.
Marketers and retailers also purchase information from companies that compile data 
based on UPC purchasing (tracked with bar-code technology) as well as conduct their 
own consumer research through surveys, focus groups, online consumer panels 
(Karolefski, 2007). 
 Retailers, one article states, are working harder to know what their customers? 
needs and then tailor promotions accordingly.  How do they understand what the 
shopper needs?   
Retailers analyze loyalty card data and sending color-coded coupon offers to 
different shoppers depending on their spending behavior.  Shopper insights 
help us understand what a customer is doing in the store. Retailers can then 
use targeted marketing to ?build customer relationships? (Moses 2005).    
 Why is knowing your customers and what they ?need? so important? 
According to America's Research Group, Charleston, S.C., it costs three to four times 
as much to attract new customers (using advertising, marketing and promotions) as it 
does to retain an old one (Moses 2005).  So creating ?relationships? is an important 
marketing strategy to keep customers in the same store. 
 In an increasingly competitive retail market, marketers state that knowing and 
rewarding their most loyal customers is very important.  Retailers should identify 
their best customers and market specifically to those people.  Some retailers are doing 
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this through closed-network TV systems, while others do it with sampling or on-site 
events.  Retailers should be marketing their stores to hold onto these loyal customers 
and actually increase their spending by targeting promotions to them (Hamstra and 
Zweibach 2005). 
Large retailers are also connecting with manufacturers to provide promotions 
through the loyalty card.  For example, customers can download Unilever coupons 
directly onto the Kroger store card and use these coupons at the checkout line.
Krogers? corporate loyalty vice president views ?coupons as a way to build customer 
loyalty by saving them time and money (Angrisani 2008).?   
Marketers do not conceptualize their customers as individuals with needs but 
by ?types? of shoppers.  One article states that consumers have four ?shopping 
modes? as they cruise the aisles: auto-pilot, variety-seeking, buzz, or bargain hunting.
In understanding these particular shopper ?modes? the retailer can ?disrupt? 
consumer behavior by advertising, new offers, price and promotions.  ?Marketers can 
leverage this brief window of opportunity to trigger change by understanding which 
hot buttons to push (Progressive Grocer August 16 2007).?  Another marketing 
manual breaks the consumer up into nine consumer ?need states? ranging from 
?caring for the family?, to ?stocking up?, to ?smart budgeting? to ?immediate 
consumption?.  Using this information the store manager is expected to determine 
what ?need state? they want to target and then brand the store and brand the image 
(Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council 2008).  Another marketing study divides 
organic consumers into six categories: health enthusiasts, organic idealists, 
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unengaged shoppers, hogwashers, bargain shoppers and distrustfuls.  The key to 
reaching this consumer is to then target promotions and signage to the different 
consumer types (Progressive Grocer July 2008). 
Marketers tout technology as one of the keys to ?serving? customers.  Loyalty 
cards are very important as they give the retailer an opportunity to monitor food 
purchases while also tailoring sales.  Kroger uses loyalty card data to tailor 
promotions based on what the consumer buys.  Through a partnership with 
Dunnhumby, a British loyalty marketing firm, these companies analyze frequent-
shopper data, segment its best shoppers into different categories, and send them 
relevant offers and information (Angrisani 2005).   
Retailers are using stand-alone counters, known as kiosks, to individualize 
marketing strategies. One article suggests that retailers should add kiosks throughout 
the store where the shopper can scan her loyalty card and can see her cumulative 
savings, as well as receive targeted coupons and specials.  These offers are for the 
products the shopper most frequently purchases and related items and are only 
available through the Shopping Solutions kiosk.  The kiosk is one of a series of 
promotions, however.   Once the shopper gets her coupon, she then is treated to 42-
inch digital plasma screens, in departments like produce and meat/deli, and also audio 
programming.  The marketing manager states that ?We also use the emotion of video 
and the immediacy of point-of-purchase to bring awareness of products and 
promotional services." One store that featured this multi-pronged approach to 
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introduce a new product experienced a 131.3% increase in sales versus only 86.5% at 
the regular store (Garry 2006). 
 A chain of stores in San Francisco tried using finger-scan biometric 
identification instead of digital loyal cards to provide instant offers at the checkout 
line to customers as well as make payments.  This scanning information was used 
along with customer email and cell phones to send them targeted sales promotions.  
Although the technology didn?t take off, the goal of the promotions was the same: 
"By increasing relevancy, we will encourage shoppers to buy more. If you like Pepsi 
and I like Coke, we can both shop at the same store because discounts are available 
for both products (Garry and Mercado 2005).?
While technology is touted as a means to increase sales it also increases the 
work of the shopper in the store. Not only are self-check lines common in most 
stores, but coming down the pike are hand-held scanners that customers use as they 
shop.  However, retail management states that this added work will benefit shoppers 
by speeding up the checkout process in addition to allowing shoppers to keep a 
running tally of their purchases which ??reassures shoppers on a fixed budget. 
Indeed, those shoppers may be empowered to spend more than they would without 
knowing their total (Garry and Mercado 2005).?  Supermarkets may also have a scale 
that ?allows? shoppers to weigh their own produce and make bar codes by entering 
price look-up numbers. 
The ultimate goal of retailers is is not only to reward loyal shoppers but also 
to shape their behavior, because understanding consumer behavior also allows stores 
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to develop strategies to maximize profit.  ?Through case studies and examples, a deep 
understanding of consumer shopper behavior will result in the right promotions to 
maximize lift (sales) (Progressive Grocer, July 27, 2007).?   One study titled ?Data 
Mining for Precision Consumer Marketing? examines how retailers' frequent shopper 
data can be analyzed to pinpoint everything from how loyal a family is to a specific 
laundry detergent to how often they purchase macaroni and cheese. The study 
describes how an effective data collection partnership between manufacturers and 
retailers could potentially increase annual brand sales more than 10 percent, while 
significantly improving the store?s bottom line in general and in certain product 
categories (Grocery Manufacturers of America 2000).   This study states in no 
uncertain terms that consumer data is directly connected to increased profits.   
Build Relationships 
Marketers and retailers use consumer research information in an attempt to 
know who their customers are and provide them with the products, services and 
promotions that they ?need?, in effect building a loyal customer base.  Understanding 
what customers want to one way to build relationships.  According to one marketer, 
customers want healthy food at low prices but they are also fickle:  ?Retailers will be 
in a stronger position to consistently satisfy the American shopper's constantly 
changing tastes and buying preferences?(retailers) should form a stronger 
relationship that goes beyond price (Lempert 2008).?  But where do they get their 
changing tastes?  Much of this originates in marketing campaigns. 
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One retail and manufacturing strategy to satisfy needs and ?build 
relationships? is branding.  Branding is a standard marketing term that describes the 
process by which a good or service is associated with a certain brand name.  Once the 
consumer connects the product with a name brand and prefers this brand over others, 
a relationship has been established.  A good example is found in an article in 
Supermarket News that encourages supermarkets to boost their hair care sales by 
better catering to consumers' needs.  Instead of listing what those needs are, the 
article recommends resetting shelves and including ?branded hair care centers? (such 
as Redkin) with special signage, lighting or shelving (Gates 2008).
Marketers encourage retailers to make a connection with their customers to 
keep them coming back by building relationships through branding the store image as 
well as individual products.  One marketer stated ?Brands are powerful commodities. 
The best of them represent more than a product or service?they inhabit those parts of 
our brain that connect to basic feelings of self-worth, comfort, power, and 
attractiveness (McLeod, 2008).?  This marketer advises retailers to create the right 
kind of shopping experience for the customer to brand their store image. 
Walmart is trying to reposition itself as a good source of healthy products for 
families.  They have introduced a new branding campaign that connects Walmart 
with an iVillage.Inc website called momtourage.com, a networking group that offers 
expert advice around mothering issues.  Through this marketing campaign Walmart 
hopes to connect its image with the knowledge of mothers to brand the store as not 
only the choice for good products but for products that are endorsed by mothers.   In-
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store displays and recorded messages featuring parenting tips will help reinforce the 
branding message (Gallagher 2008).   
Many stores are using the current concern with the environment to create 
customer loyalty as well as brand stores with a green image.  One marketer advises 
that stores need to win the loyalty of environmentally conscious shoppers now 
because soon ?ecologically friendly attributes will be a given?.  The benefits to 
environmentally conscious branding are significant:  
Retailers hoping to make connections with socially minded consumers can 
most effectively do so by maintaining transparency while communicating the 
?tribal? benefit of a particular product.  ?It's going to be very important that 
the brand empowers and enables our joining a community of like-minded 
people that share our values,? said Mitch Baranowski, founding partner of 
BBMG, a New York-based marketing firm (Hamstra 2008). 
Many stores are now eliminating plastic bags and providing cloth bags for purchase.
Although one executive suggested that their stores cloth bags were an effort to do the 
right thing, offering the bags also ?helps burnish the company's image in the area of 
environmental sustainability (Hamstra 2008).?  
Branding also allows retailers to make a connection between the customer and 
the product.   Marketers advise retailers to make some kind of emotional connection 
with shoppers, to
?meet their needs through signage, layout and ambiance.  Bundle products 
by theme---say barbequing---and present them with strong imagery.  Entice 
shoppers to buy store brands by offering samples to taste (Moses 2007).   
Retailers should use emotional branding as a way to make people feel better about 
themselves.  ?People are not going to be buying products just for functional value.
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They're going to look at products that make a difference in their lives (Angrisani 
2005).?
Branding should begin as early as possible to hook consumers.  In response to 
media reports on the rising obesity epidemic, supermarkets are connecting with 
marketers to ?brand? fruits and vegetables with licensed cartoon characters from 
Disney and Nickelodeon such as the Incredibles, Dora the Explorer, and SpongeBob 
SquarePants on the packaging.  This campaign is designed to promote healthy eating 
choices for children by increasing the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables.  But 
the article ends with a quote from a marketing executive on the benefits of this 
strategy to the manufacturing companies: 
If you can get that young child to eat broccoli, for example, you'd hope you're 
developing a long-term broccoli consumer?We need to make sure we're 
getting kids hooked on fruits and vegetables as early as possible so we do not 
only give them a better chance at learning in school and growing up strong 
and healthy, but also, we're going to build consumers for life? somebody 
who will be eating your products for 60, 70, 80 years," Michelle Poris, 
director of quantitative research for Just Kid Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based 
market research company said (Sung 2006). 
 The retail and marketing discourse, in essence, standardizes the shopper.
Instead of embodied individuals with specific needs, the marketing discourse 
describes customers as certain demographics and instructs retailers to ?know? their 
customers and ?build relationships? not with individuals but as a demographic whose 
needs they can shape. 
Consumer Sovereignty 
 As this sample of the marketing discourse attests, manufacturers and retailers 
should gather as much information as possible on their customers in order to shape 
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what and how they shop.  This process creates a closed feedback loop--customers buy 
what they are marketed.  However, when I asked the managers in my study about 
how they decide what products to sell, all began by saying it is the customer who 
really decides what gets on the shelves.
 O?Donnell, the rural store owner, states that customer wants drive what he 
buys; he has been in the business long enough to know what the people in his 
community want and will buy.  For example, his customers (and customers in 
general) want grapes all year round, even when they are out of season so he makes 
sure he always has a shipment of grapes even if they have to come from Mexico.  His 
customers like skinless chicken breasts rather than pork chops, which sell better in the 
next town.
 The manager of the discount store states that his customers expect low prices 
and that desire shapes how the store is organized.   He states 
We are not about image, we are about cheap groceries, low food prices. We 
are a case-cut store, we cut the tops off the cases and cut out the front.  They 
hand stack stuff so a case of vegetables has three cans and I get three cans in 
there where they can stack one row and their section can be three times 
smaller and have the same amount of product. Our customers want and expect 
low prices. 
So his job is to give the customer what they want: low prices. 
 The assistant manager of the full service store is much more specific about 
what drives their product selection.  The emphasis of this particular store is customer 
service.  Customer service to the assistant manager means  
Giving the customer the best price, the best quality of the products that they 
buy, and the freshness of the products that they got.  It is being sure that the 
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folks that greet them at the door are pleasant with them and doing every thing 
to go above and beyond everything that a customer would expect out of a 16 
year old sacking groceries or a gentleman in the meat department serving 
something over the counter.  And basically how I understand it is that you are 
not going to let anyone leave the store unhappy, no matter what you are going 
to have to do to make them happy, that?s what you are going to have to do. 
And making customers happy means providing the customer with everything they 
want (while at the same time maintaining an 8-10% profit margin).  The manager 
repeatedly stated that product selection is mostly based on customer demands. 
This same message is found in many texts that managers read or that are part 
of the industry literature. The Food Marketing Institute, one of the largest 
organizations promoting information and programs for retailers and wholesalers in 
the U.S., often reinforces the basic message of the consumer sovereignty discourse: 
?The singular force driving the [food] revolution is the consumer.  The consumer?s 
market power is growing strong and ingrained (FMI 2005).?  Royalty is not even an 
accurate description of the consumers? role: ?An old industry truism holds that ?the 
consumer is king.  Food retailers today would update saying to ?the consumer is 
dictator? (Food Marketing Institute 2007).? 
These texts connect customers? power with the economic laws: ?Consumers 
come out ahead, because of the laws of supply, demand and competition almost 
always favor the customer (Progressive Grocer, April 2000).?    ?Overall, the entire 
food system is in a very dynamic period?changes are being driven by fundamental 
shifts in consumer wants and needs (Kinsey and Senaur 1996).?  
This discourse seeps into popular media:  
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In the end, there are a couple things these die-hard competitors all seem to 
agree on. In a country where so many people are looking for such different 
things, the mass in mass marketing is probably a thing of the past. And who 
wins from all that competition? The consumer of course (?No Ordinary Trip 
to the Market, Nov. 20, 2005-CBS).
The marketing discourse even states that its goal is to satisfy consumers: 
?Successful marketing is customer driven: it addresses customer needs and desires 
(Churchill and Peter 1995).?
 This belief that consumer demand controls what is produced I term the 
consumer sovereignty discourse.  Consumer sovereignty attributes consumer 
satisfaction as the ultimate economic goal of markets, which means that the economy 
is fundamentally ruled by consumer desires.  Consumer sovereignty, part of the 
liberal economic tradition that assumes that consumers? needs and wants determine 
the shape of all economic activities, is best symbolized by the classic supply and 
demand curve.  If consumers want a product, the supply of that product will increase. 
If consumers don?t buy a product, the manufacturer will cease producing the product.
Consumer sovereignty is one of the core beliefs of the consumer society.  
Thomas Princen (2005: 150) summarizes the logic of consumer sovereignty:  
producers respond to consumer demand by producing the goods the consumer 
wants and at a price the consumer will pay.  If the consumer doesn?t buy the 
product, producers don?t make it.  Governments do likewise; they intervene in 
the economy to serve the consumer?[S] overeign consumers are entitled to 
have their desires satisfied, to have ever more goods, and to do so all at low, 
low prices. 
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The consumer sovereignty discourse emphasizes that the individual knows best what 
they want to buy, and there should be no interference between the consumer and their 
product from markets or governments.   
  Ultimately, consumer sovereignty supposedly reflects a kind of economic 
democracy: the consumer is voting with their dollar, making ?choices? about what 
products should make it into their homes and what shouldn?t.  The consumer 
sovereignty discourse doesn?t discriminate or rank between choices; the larger test of 
these choices is whether they increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Galbraith 
2004).  The market doesn?t discriminate between Coke or bottled water, so long as 
consumers are still buying products.   If consumers are buying Coke, for example, 
that must be what they really want.   
 But how do managers know what consumers want?  Are consumers actually a 
part of the process of determining what gets sold to them?  Looking at actual retail 
practices, we see that managers use the consumer sovereignty discourse while in 
practice follow the marketing discourse of using strategies to control what and how 
the shopper buys.  How do products get chosen to be on the shelves?  How do 
managers decide how to configure the store?  Although some of the store and 
marketing practices may seem trivial in and of themselves, the motivation behind 
these practices is not to help the consumer get their families fed but to shape their 
behavior.
    Retail Practice 
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 Product placement is one such issue that turns out to be less than 
straightforward and in large measure determined food manufacturers and distributors. 
Manufacturers order, stock and shelf several sections of the grocery store, which is 
otherwise known as direct store delivery (DSD). Pop, bread and snack sections are 
examples of these types of DSD where the manufacturer monitors the shelves, 
decides where to place the products he delivers, and sets the prices for the products.  
The store manager has little control over what is on the shelves or how the products 
are shelved but does benefit by the reduced labor costs of stocking the shelves.
Manufacturers benefit from this arrangement because they can not only place 
products but introduce new products without going through the retailer?s warehouse.
Manufacturers also get their new products on the shelves through slotting fees.
Slotting fee allowances are one-time payments a supplier makes to a retailer as a 
condition for the initial placement of the new product on the retailer?s shelves or 
space in the retailers warehouse (Federal Trade Commission, 2003).    Suppliers can 
spend up to $2 million in slotting fees for a new product and this amount makes up a 
large fraction of the revenues earned by some products in their first year.  Frozen food 
distributors (where shelf space is limited in the freezer and new product introductions 
are more common) are more likely to pay more and higher slotting fees.  Suppliers 
state that slotting fees are paid on between 80-90 percent of all new products (FTC 
2003).
Distributors assign a sales representative to a geographic region for all new 
product lines and even established branded products. These representatives visit 
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stores in their region, ask for their items to be placed on certain shelves and in certain 
places, as well as introduce new items to the managers.   Chris Morris, the no-frills 
store manager said he always has sales representatives coming up to him and asking 
?is there any way I can get this on?  Can we work this in??  The sales reps are always 
pitching him for new products for a certain demographic.  Each item is always going 
to be represented by a salesman of some sort: 
The salesman from Crossmark, a brokerage firm, represents everything from 
Pillsbury cake mix, Crisco oil, to Hefty plates.  They also have independent 
brokers that come in they will have, like one guy works for Shrowd and he has 
Malto-Meal cereal and I buy 10 pallets at a time.  He gets a commission off of 
that somehow.  Then you know Proctor and Gamble they have Tide, Era, Cheer, 
Bounty, Charmin, and 40% percent of the non-food, he comes to see me and 
that?s all he does is Proctor and Gamble.  So I buy from him, he sets me up on 
deals and stuff like that.  It?s rare that do we not see a salesman walk through the 
door every day (Chris Morris). 
 Sales representatives influence where managers place products on the shelves.  When 
asked how he determines product placement and if a section is doing well, Craig Wallace 
first says it is customer driven but in the next sentence contradicts himself: 
Proctor and Gamble or Kraft or someone that owns a huge portion of an item 
spread in a section may come out and say ?we are running this campaign? or 
?this is what works best for your demographic let?s set it up this way?.  Look 
at our room freshener section which would be the Glade candles and plug-ins 
and things like that. These companies wish it would get bigger; I have 8 feet 
in the store for it and there?s probably 5 or 6 new items that come out each 
week that I?m trying to fit into this 8 foot section.  If you look at it, it?s 
overwhelmed with 15 different flavors of apple-blossom plug-in and so at that 
point you say do I have to carry Ocean surf and Ocean mist or can I just have 
one of those? 
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Suppliers have also convinced the managers to introduced TVs at this store that air ads for 
their new products, and Craig is puzzled by the negative comments he?s received about the 
TVs.  He asked, ?Why wouldn?t consumers want more information about products??   
  Managers also use strategies to increase sales at the retail level.  If an item is 
not selling well, one manager has found that if they take it away for a time and then 
bring it back, customers will be more likely remember the product and it will sell 
quickly after that.  Signage is also extremely important.  Managers report that if they 
put out a sign that says ?new item?, people are more likely to look at it.  A sign that 
looks like a sale but is really a marked-up price is also effective in catching shopper?s 
eyes.  The frozen foods manager at the rural store puts a sign on Banquet dinners that 
states ?5/$5 on everyday low price?, which is actually an 18 percent mark-up, fooling 
people into thinking they are getting a sale.  Signs that state ?10 for $10? also confuse 
people as customers think they have to buy 10 of them.   
 Where managers place products on the shelf also influences what people buy.
When he is ?merchandising? his store, Wallace bases where he places products on the 
shelf on the average female height, which is about five feet five inches.  People are 
more likely to buy what they see, and by putting the products with the store brand at 
eye-level is most profitable for the store retailers are able to gets the store?s name 
onto people?s home pantry shelves.  Some sections are tailored to specific clientele.
Managers ?demograph? (Craig Wallace?s term) the cereal, candy and fruit snack 
aisles for a 3 foot person; retailers place the best selling vitamin and over-the-counter 
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medications on higher shelves so senior citizens don?t have to bend down to pick up 
items. 
At the store level, several managerial and industry practices are designed to 
influence shoppers? work.   The layout of the store is not accidental.  Food that 
provides the largest profits for the store are found at the perimeter of the store, which 
includes the produce, deli, and meat sections.  The grocery section (the aisles in the 
middle) has the least turnover and lowest profit margins.  The organization of the 
store encourages, almost forces, shoppers to enter each of these sections.  The 
organization of the store also encourages shoppers to make their trips as long as 
possible by routing them to all the different sections which means that shoppers are 
more likely to make unplanned purchases.  How much a customer buys is directly 
related to the amount of time they spend in the store (Underhill 1999), so practices 
that extend shoppers? trips are significant.
   Advertisement production 
 Many shoppers in my study said they used the weekly grocery store 
advertisement to make their list for their grocery store trips.  Since they identified this 
text as important to their work, I traced the process by which this text was created 
starting with the rural owner who was part of the advertising management team to the 
corporate sales department to the food show where the managers select the products 
that will go in the advertisement. 
 I?ll describe the process of making one representative ad from the rural 
cooperative.  The text I?m discussing is about 20?? by 12??, four pages long with sales 
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of perishables on the front and back page in big, bright colors (soda ads are in black 
and white, due to a commitment with Coke and Pepsi to alternate weeks when these 
sodas are on sale).  O?Donnell, the rural store owner who is also on the advertising 
committee, explains that the advertisement is for all the franchise stores and each 
store is thus required to have these products on hand.  Individual managers can set the 
prices for products on the front page only.  Occasionally they put a loss-leader on this 
page, which is a product that they are selling for less than wholesale cost in order to 
bring people into the store.   The advertising department makes these ads up to three 
months in advance using a holiday or seasonal tradition as a theme.  The ad that I am 
describing has a NASCAR theme and the tag line is ?Race in For Huge Savings?!
 O?Donnell explained that for each item listed in the ad, the supplier pays a 
marketing fee to the supplier in order to get their product listed as well as offered a 
lower wholesale cost to the retailer. The larger ads at the top cost more, and get less 
expensive as you go down the page.  There is some margin built into the inside ads, 
so that the store doesn?t lose as much as they do on the front page ads. 
 I next interviewed Mark Sullivan, the sales manager for the franchise 
corporate headquarters on how an ad is assembled at his level.  First, he said, when 
they create the ad they try to include products from all the departments to entice the 
customer to shop the entire store; items from produce, bakery, meat, frozen/dairy, 
grocery, health and beauty and even floral will appear in every ad.   The sales 
department also attempts to coordinate products so that shoppers will buy more to 
make a complete meal.  For example, if spaghetti sauce is on sale, the logic is that 
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shoppers will also buy spaghetti or if ground beef is on sale, they will also buy buns.  
Most ads are made at least twelve weeks in advance, based on an industry-wide food 
show (discussed below).
 While he?d like to say that the ad is based on what the customers want, in 
actuality ?these  manufacturers pay us to be in the ad, so a lot of it is based on what 
the manufacturer wants which pays for us to print this ad, so it?s vendor driven.  Our 
whole marketing division functions by selling these spots in this ad.?  The 
manufacturer will not only offer a certain deal to the retailers, for instance, three 
dollars off a case of Frosted Flakes, but will also pay the marketing department a fee 
to place their product in the advertisement.  The company is making profit on almost 
every item that is in the ad, anywhere from 5 % to 30 % to 40% profit.  ?If it?s in the 
ad, the manufacturer lowers the cost, we lowered it to the retailer, we lowered the ad 
retail so everybody wins.  We sell groceries, the store sells groceries and the 
consumer gets a better price.?  
    The Food Show  
 The Food Show is a regional food exposition that allows manufacturers to 
showcase their new food items.  These Food Shows are held roughly four times a 
year; the particular show that I attended was held at a convention center and featured 
over 200 vendors, including big manufacturers like Con Agra, Kraft, Nestle, Proctor 
and Gamble, and Kellogg?s, as well as a few regional suppliers. I attended the show 
with owner of the rural store, as well as the frozen foods, produce and meat managers 
of that store.  The store owner estimated that each company paid thousands of dollars 
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per table to be a part of the expo, and some companies like Kraft had ten tables alone. 
He commented that if companies would eliminate this step they could pass the 
savings onto the customer. But the frozen food manager commented, however, that it 
was important for him to see how items would look on a shelf.  Each table was 
decorated with signage and had a representative dressed in corporate attire in front 
handing out free samples.  At this show were some of the 20,000 new products that 
are introduced every year, and representatives were very anxious to get the managers 
to try their new items. 
 The dairy manager I was with was eager to put new items on his shelf. He 
stated that while people do like to try new things, new items are also significant 
because managers can set the price as there is no prior reference price for comparison.   
Regular mark-up (the difference between wholesale and retail price) on groceries is 
15 percent.  On meat and produce the mark-up is 35 percent, due to shrinkage (they 
factor in perishables arriving spoiled or going bad on the shelf).  With new grocery 
items you can get mark-ups of 20-25 percent.   Another reason the food show is 
important to the retailers is that they are eligible for an early buying allowance, which 
means if they buy from the show they will get an additional discount from the 
manufacturer for pre-booking it at the food show.  This is one way manufacturers 
deal with risk in the market, but the process also squeezes out smaller manufacturers 
and distributors who cannot offer these discounts.
 Managers sampled a wide variety of products, including fruit juice energy 
drinks, processed cheeses, meats, BBQ pork, Mt. Olive Kosher Dill pickles, and 
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Harley Davidson Beef Jerkey.  Each time they discussed whether or not the product 
would sell in their particular store.  At every stand they asked will people buy this?  
Can I sell it? They passed right by the organic section (the rural clientele is meat and 
potatoes, they said).  As an observer, I was struck by the fact that these people are my 
purchasing agents, and how little of what is available I as a consumer actually get to 
see or ?choose? from on my supermarket shelves.   
Notes from Real Life      
According to the consumer sovereignty discourse, consumers live in an 
economic democracy where they signal what they want by what they buy.  But reality 
shows consumer sovereignty to be a fiction in two ways.  First, in many cases 
consumers buy what they are marketed.  A good example of how marketers create 
?needs? is illustrated in an article in Supermarket News.  Three groups, a marketing 
company (The Perishables Group, ?an independent consulting firm focused on 
innovation and creating value for clients in the fresh food industry? 
(www.perishablesgroup.com), a corporate interest group (the United States Potato 
Board) and a particular supermarket (which was not named in the article) worked 
together to devise a new method to increase potato sales.  The goal of this partnership 
was to get customers to think differently about potatoes.  Their solution was to add 
kiosks next to the produce section with over 100 recipes using potatoes.  Sales of 
potatoes went up 10 percent without having to offer discounts.  While these groups 
may have been responding to customer need, the express reason for the campaign was 
to ?drive sales up in a mature category? or in other words, create a demand that didn?t 
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exist before for an established product (Supermarket News Vol.55, No 31; July 20, 
2007).
Although one could argue that selling more potatoes is an innocuous example, 
it is the disjuncture between the discourse and the lived experience of shopping that is 
significant.  Based on actual retail practices, the customer is certainly not driving the 
process of grocery shopping.  Products on shelves are supported by manufacturing 
?subsidies??manufacturers pay to get their product on shelf, they pay to get in ads, 
and they employ a large staff of sales people who stump for their product.  The 
physical organization of the grocery store is not designed to make it easier for 
shoppers to get food on their tables but rather to force shoppers to go through the 
entire store even to buy a few items.  ?Convenience? stores are one option to mitigate 
a supermarket trip, although there is a price premium for this service. 
 Often, the goals of the supermarket, the message of institutional discourses 
and the needs of the provisioner are contradictory; for example, the supermarket 
encourages shoppers to stay in the store as long as possible to encourage impulse 
buying, exactly what the efficiency discourse warns shoppers to avoid.  Avoiding 
extra sugar for kids is a message in the nutrition discourse, but in practice 
supermarket managers? shelf placement of sugared cereal is at eye-level of a three 
foot person who pressures the shopper for these products.   
The second example of the disconnect between the discourse, retail practice 
and the shoppers? experience lies in the nature of individual wants. What do 
consumers really want?  If consumer needs/wants were truly driving the food system, 
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what would it look like?  Unfortunately, I didn?t ask all consumers this question and 
when I did most could not think of a different way of obtaining food.  This lack of 
imagination of alternatives in food provisioning speaks volumes to the institutional 
power of our current system. 
But when I did ask shoppers how they liked shopping or what they wished 
were different, it was not the choice of certain products that they identified, but rather 
the work process of shopping that was discussed.   Several shoppers half-joked that 
they would like someone to do the work for them but then added that really they 
would like some kind of respite from the on-going work of feeding and provisioning 
their families.   Several shoppers talked about using a meal preparation service where 
for a fee all the ingredients are bought, chopped and presented in a store where the 
shopper becomes the assembler; one or two weeks worth of meals are frozen for later 
use.  Lisa Corbin said that if she were working and had more money she would go to 
one of those places: 
they make up your food for you and then you can freeze it and have it.  I 
would probably do that.  I?m too cheap to do it now.  I would have somebody 
else prepare it so I?m not constantly eating out or my kids aren?t always eating 
out and they are still having good food that is not always just frozen processed 
food.
Kelley Barnes also expressed an interest in this type of meal making as an alternative 
to
grocery shopping: 
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It?s like $200-$300 dollars and you have enough meals for a month, maybe 
like 3-5 meals a week for a month, you cook them all and then you freeze 
them.  That would be worth it, that would be awesome to be able to do that.   
 Other shoppers wanted more time for shopping and cooking.  As a 
professional working mother, Jessica Pierce said  
I don?t like to shop. I do enjoy cooking but right now I don?t have time for 
either.  I would definitely spend more time cooking and shopping if I had the 
time. 
 April Malloy, another working mother, wants more balanced meals with 
vegetables and a little variety.  She finds the meals she makes boring and said  
I would have more variety if I had more time to spend in the kitchen or spend 
at home.  More time to julienne my vegetables or to make a side dish with our 
pasta (AP). 
 Stacey Osterstrand had just switched from part-time to full-time employment 
when I talked with her about shopping for her household.  When she was working 
part-time, she was able to shop during the day and spent less time on planning; now 
she plans meals and does shopping trips on weekends and after work.   This shopping 
time (and other household responsibilities) now took the place of spending time with 
the family.  She told me (with her voice wavering) that 
We used to play games in the evenings; the errands were done, dinner was 
earlier and after dinner we would have time to sit around and play cards or 
play a board game.  And that has really fallen by the wayside because we get 
home later, dinner is later, she has to practice piano for 20 minutes, she has 
homework, and then its bedtime.  And I miss that, I miss the board games, I 
miss the card games, that?s the fun stuff.  I feel like we get everything done 
but that?s a fun thing I really miss.   
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 Another group of shoppers identifies the organization of shopping as 
something they would like to change.  Colin Moore, for example, finds shopping to 
be a chore.  For him, shopping at a traditional market where you knew the people you 
were buying your food from would make it more meaningful.  He would also like 
regional food: ?What you ate would be from mother nature, now you can get 
tomatoes all year round. It?s convenient, but is it right??  When I asked if he tries to 
eat locally, like going to the farmers market, he stated ?No, we you don?t have time, 
everybody has careers and 50 hour workweeks, even kids who have school and after 
school programs.  So instead we have Applebees drive-thru.? 
 Jill Burnett finds shopping to be a hassle trying to fight the crowds at the end 
of the work day.  She would love to give someone her list and have them shop for her 
but more realistically she would like a small market in her neighborhood, somewhere 
she could walk to.  Not only would it be smaller and more convenient, it would also 
be more personable.  She offers: 
Maybe you would know the people that work there and have them know you. 
It would be a better experience.  I don?t think I?d be listening to the sacking 
people at Dillons talk to each other and bicker which I have heard.  I just think 
it would be a better experience.
 One shopper was not happy about the choices she was presented with in the 
supermarket and took the ?250 Mile Challenge? to eat foods that were grown within a 
250 mile radius of her household.  She researched where she could get food from 
farms in the area, attended several different farmers markets, spent time deciding 
what food she must keep in her diet (oats and cheese where important), made all her 
food from scratch.  Although this cost more money than she was used to spending, 
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she justified the price by saying she was helping the environment, helping local 
farmers and eating better.   
  She also shopped at the local health food store where she would buy fairly 
traded shade-grown coffee, organic oats, local pecans, organic beans, local handmade 
soap, and organic body products.  She did have to shop at the supermarket for 
products she couldn?t get at these other places.  About this process she said: 
Shopping this way was a TON of work.  I started this experiment when I was 
working part time and my only child at the time was in full time school. When 
I started working again it was over.  I couldn?t do it anymore.  The guilt of 
buying produce at the supermarket slowly diminished over time and I realized 
that it is NOT possible.  Supporting sustainable agriculture is not sustainable 
in our society.  Now I still get my few things at the health food store but just 
get the rest from [the supermarket].  I bake quick breads every other week, but 
not bread-bread.  I just don't have the time?I feel like I don't have much of a 
choice anymore but to just participate in the system.  It basically sucks. 
Conclusion
 Grocery stores are designed to keep shoppers in the store as long as possible, 
because the amount of time shoppers spend in the store is directly correlated with 
how much money they spend in the store (Underhill 1999).  Retail industry discourse, 
based in the science of marketing, instructs mangers and owners to collect as much 
demographic information on their customers as possible in order to shape their 
behavior at the grocery store.  Managers should ?brand? the store and certain items 
through marketing campaigns, distrupt the customer through various marketing and 
store tactics and encourage impulse buying. 
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 The managers with whom I talked all state that it is the customers? needs and 
wants that drive what they do but their practices show they draw heavily on the 
industry discourse.  First, retailers design the store so that short trips for a couple 
items are not possible; in order to get a gallon of milk shoppers are required to walk 
through the entire store.  Managers use confusing signage to disorient the consumer 
as to the comparative price of items, place items on the shelf for impulse purchasing, 
and reward loyal customers with special sales.   
 The practices of managers at the grocery store work in contradiction to both 
the efficiency and the nutrition discourses.  Shoppers must work harder in the 
planning phase of shopping in order to subvert the retail practices that encourage over 
buying and impulse purchasing.  The sheer amount of non-nutritious choices that are 
given prominent shelf-space makes it more difficult for shoppers to resist, especially 
if they have to take their children with them.   But the consumer sovereignty 
discourse makes the thought and work that goes into the purchase of the shopper and 
the practice of the manager invisible by equating the needs of the shopper with what 
they buy. 
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Chapter 6: Conclusion 
 As I write this chapter, two momentous events have occurred.  One, of course, 
is the election of our first African American president.  The second is the worst 
economic collapse (possibly) since the Great Depression, a downward spiral in 
housing, credit and consumer markets brought about by decades of lax regulatory 
controls.  The unwavering neoliberal consensus that market forces are the catalyst for 
economic growth created the environment in which policies and decisions that were 
good for business were also good for the economy.  But even Alan Greenspan 
(NYTimes 10/23/08) grudgingly admits he had put too much faith in the self-
correcting power of free markets and failed to anticipate the power of unregulated 
business practices (specifically mortgage lending).   
 Since the summer of 2008 we?ve seen petroleum prices spike to 
unprecedented rates ($160 a barrel of oil!) only to fall to below $50.  Even though the 
price of oil has come down, food prices have remained high.  Stories on how to save 
money at the cash register have been flying on network television shows and 
newspapers.  Couple these high prices with rising unemployment, it is clear that 
families are straining to feed themselves.  Requests at food pantries outstrip supply, 
and the rush on baby formula at the beginning of the month suggests that people have 
to wait until the next paycheck to buy necessities. 
 What we don?t see or hear about is the invisible work behind the scenes to 
feed these households and families.  We?ve seen that grocery shopping involves a 
great deal of mental and manual labor, including planning meals and menus, making 
136
lists, doing budgets, arranging schedules, sacking groceries and loading them into the 
car, and unloading at home.  Among the people I talked with, feeding work is 
important to identity.  Mothers are still responsible for much of the nurturing of 
children and men and nothing is more nurturing than feeding bodies.
 Although women comprise more than half of the workforce, the 
breadwinner/homemaker dichotomy is still part of the structural logic of our political 
economy. Listening to how shoppers describe their work practices, I identified two 
discourses organizing their work, both of which are still predicated on an unpaid 
household laborer who cares for the children and men in the household.    
 The ?efficient shopper? discourse is a creation of the home economics 
profession that survives in consumer economics curricula and is used by nutritionists, 
dieticians, and other consumer science educators who work in government agencies, 
for the food industry and who are often featured in media publications.  These 
institutional agents, through textually-based discourses, instruct the grocery shopper 
to make rational decisions for the economic stability of her household; she must not 
only balance the household budget and save money through shopping but also exhibit 
certain personality characteristics of self-abnegation and strict discipline.   This 
discourse instructs shoppers to make lists, plan meals in advance, comparison shop, 
eschew convenience over cost savings, clip coupons and find someone to watch their 
children so they can negotiate the store alone.  Saving money and time through 
efficient shopping, the housewife is the CFO of her household. 
137
 The efficiency discourse is especially relevant for those shoppers who have 
few resources.  Shopping on a fixed budget is very difficult for single parents and 
low-income households and demands a great deal of skill and knowledge in order to 
feed a household.  Institutions such as the state and the retail store depend on this 
work, however, to accomplish their goals; spending tax-payer money wisely for the 
former and accumulating more money for the latter. 
 This housewife is also in charge of the nutrition of the household and the 
health of the family becomes her responsibility.  Shoppers must contend with the 
nutrition discourse, a discourse that demands a certain knowledge of food, a 
knowledge steeped in the scientific tradition of reducing food to its component 
nutrients and exhibited as a form of nutritional literacy.  Food becomes an equation to 
be solved: grams of fat, sugar, carbohydrates, plus calories equal the right food. 
Shoppers must know the difference between monounsaturated, saturated, 
hydrogenated and trans fat, and look for the right kind in the food they buy.  Thus, 
this discourse stresses a certain nutrition knowledge that is used in reading and 
deciphering nutrition labels.  Separating ?junk? from ?health? or bad from good food 
is the goal of the shopper.
 The nutrition discourse creates much anxiety for those shoppers who are 
familiar with it or chose to abide by it; making sure they are feeding their families the 
?right? food adds to their shopping work.  But ultimately the nutrition discourse 
makes individuals responsible for this information and shifts the responsibility to the 
shopper to make the right ?choices? at the grocery store.  The obesity debate is a 
138
prime example of the nutrition discourse: mothers are instructed to feed their children 
the ?right? food in order to combat childhood obesity.   
 The work of grocery shopping is not only gendered but is also mediated by 
class.  Working class and lower middle class women were more likely to pay 
attention to price; nutrition was mentioned usually in relation to weight loss and some 
basic knowledge of food groups.  As DeVault (1991) and Dixon (1999) also found, 
meals are based in tradition rather than novelty; shoppers feed their families foods 
that they are familiar with and what they were raised on.  These women do not often 
seek out additional information about food and nutrition outside what they read in the 
newspaper, see on TV or already know. 
 Middle class professional women express concern about what they are feeding 
their kids and are more likely to seek out organic or natural food (and can also afford 
it).  However, many of these women are working a full-time job or have a career and 
cannot devote the time they want to shopping and cooking.  But the anxiety over what 
they are putting in their kids? bodies is unmistakable in their discussions of food and 
shopping; the anxiety over whether Johnny should eat Ranch dressing so he will also 
eat his broccoli is part and parcel of the way shopping discourses structure our 
relationship not only to shopping but also to food. 
 Single mothers are faced with the added difficulty of provisioning the family 
on one income (even if it is supplemented by state aid or child support) and without 
another adult in the household (both of which theses discourses assume).  
Provisioning a family on $323 a month takes significant planning and usually 
139
involves other sources than just the grocery store such as food banks or free school 
lunches.  Buying Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and adding a hot dog for your kid?s 
lunch is more logical from this perspective: protein and carbohydrates fill a belly up 
faster and you?ve only spent $2.50.  Being efficient as a single mom when working 
40 hours a week requires taking time to plan, prepare, cook and clean up and also 
means less time with your children.  In this situation, ordering a take-out pizza makes 
more sense. 
 These discourses are often in contradiction.  Efficient shopping isn?t 
necessarily healthy (i.e., more ?convenience? foods that women can make in a short 
amount of time such as Hamburger Helper) and shopping for healthy food is not 
necessarily efficient or cost-efficient (making several stops for different foods like 
shopping at farmers markets for local vegetables or paying higher prices for organic 
or whole wheat products).  The dilemma that Stacy Ostrander faced illustrates this 
contradiction: does she buy the potato chips that she knows are junk when they are on 
sale so her husband doesn?t buy them at full price?  Why won?t her family choose the 
fruit she puts on the counter instead of Lays Barbeque chips?     
 Moving up to the next level of the institution and listening to how grocery 
retailers talk about their work, I encountered two more discourses operating, once 
again in contradiction:  the discourses of Consumer Sovereignty and of Food 
Marketing.  Managers talk about their work as though they are merely responding to 
customer needs and wants. Underlying their expressed understanding of the shopping 
process is a discourse of consumer sovereignty which attributes consumer satisfaction 
140
as the ultimate economic goal of markets.  Expressed in terms of supply and demand, 
the consumer sovereignty discourse assumes that the economy is fundamentally ruled 
by consumer desire. 
 But as I examined managers? practices I found a contradictory discourse 
operating.  These practices included misleading signage, higher mark-up on new 
products, targeted shelf placement, and particular product placement, and overall 
sensory overload that is designed to either mislead the customer or to control their 
behavior.  These practices are a product of a retail marketing discourse, found in 
industry trade journals and newsletters, that instruct managers to glean more 
information about their customers in order to shape their behavior in ways that benefit 
the store, not to make it easier for the shopper to accomplish her work and are often in 
conflict with the efficiency and nutrition discourses.  Retail strategies that encourage 
impulse purchasing are directly contrary to the efficiency discourse, and the focus on 
low prices discourages some shoppers from purchasing more healthy (and often more 
expensive) alternatives. 
 This study has limitations.  In making the choice to focus on households with 
children, I have left out single-person households which make up a growing number 
of the households in the United States (Hayden 2002).  Marketers are increasingly 
designing products for this demographic and an interesting research question would 
be whether and how the social organization of shopping is different for these 
households.
141
 The lack of people of color is also a limitation of this study.  Race is a 
significant structural factor that impacts the work of feeding families.  68% of all 
births to African American women are to single mothers (U.S. Census, 2001) and the 
poverty rate for all African Americans was 24.3 percent.  In poor urban African 
American neighborhoods, individuals often have less access to fresh and affordable 
food (The Food Trust 2003).  Shopping under these conditions can be extremely 
difficult, as my two single mothers? experiences attest to.  Culturally variable food 
patterns would also impact food shopping.  Anecdotally, when I discussed food 
shopping with several Latina mothers at a church camp our daughters were attending, 
they commented that making traditional Hispanic food requires several trips to 
different grocery stores and specialty shops to get the full range of ingredients, which 
adds extra shopping work in addition to cooking from scratch.   Mainstream grocery 
stores are, however, stocking more of these products, especially in towns with a large 
Latino/a population.
 Another limitation was the lack of men represented in this study.  Are men 
actually doing more shopping work and if so are they doing it the same way?  What 
sources of information do they draw from for their understanding of food? 
 Although the supermarket model standardize shopping in many ways, a next 
step for this research would be to start with the work of women of color and male 
shoppers and investigate whether different shopping practices exist for different 
communities and whether the mainstream shopping organization supports these 
shopping practices.  Another interesting empirical question is whether alternative 
142
discourses exist that may mitigate the individualizing effects of the mainstream 
shopping and nutrition discourses.
   Gender and Economic Sociology  
 I was able to illuminate social relationships that we participate in but may not 
be aware of only because I took seriously activities that are normally considered 
?passive? or ?unproductive?.  The work of shoppers is vital to the functioning of the 
food system.  Thus, the dichotomy that supports the hierarchical relationship between 
private and public, between consumption and production, between paid and unpaid is 
a false and misleading social construct.  My research suggests that to remedy this we 
need to expand the boundaries and widen the conception of the economy; broadening 
our conception of work to include activities that support daily life is a good place to 
begin.  Feminist economists have been working on this project for many years (Ferber 
and Nelson 1993, 2003; Folbre, Strober 1994; Strassman, Powers 2004).  Julie 
Nelson?s (1993:32) definition of economic activity as ?the provisioning of human life 
which involves the commodities and processes necessary to survival? is particularly 
useful in reconceptualizing economic labor.  Instead of economy as a fight over 
scarce resources, Nelson?s definition of economic activity begins in the work of 
reproducing people and includes provisioning and care-taking as central to the 
economic process.   
 Feminist sociologists have also been grappling with dismantling the 
production/consumption dichotomy (Glucksmann 1995, England, 2003, Zelizer 
2005b, Acker 2006.  Zelizer (2005b) propounds a new conception of the economic as 
143
a relational world, understood as a continuum from intimate to impersonal 
relationships rather than a dichotomy between personal and market relations.  
Economic activity occurs at every step along the continuum and this activity actually 
supports and reproduces the relations and settings along the continuum.  Power is 
always a part of these relationships, not because personal relations are mixed with 
economic activity but because individuals and groups use power in unjust and 
improper ways.   
 Once we determine that consumption is both a relational and an economic 
activity, research on grocery shopping offers new insights into the nature of economic 
life.  Mainstream ?economic man? assumes an individual who is not influenced by 
outside forces, and individuals in households are assumed to be entirely altruistic. I 
have shown, however, that choices shoppers make are neither one nor the other but 
rather relationally constructed.  Shoppers orient their work to their relationships with 
people in the house and try to satisfy both individual and household concerns.
Economic activity is neither entirely altruistic nor completely egoistic; our choices 
and behaviors depend on our relationships with other individuals and the larger social 
institutions in which we are enmeshed.    
 Economic decisions are also made in relationship to cultural texts and 
discourses.  I?ve shown how discourses, disseminated through a wide variety of texts 
including popular media (television, magazine, and internet), brochures, pamphlets, 
advertisements, and even store signage shape the work of shopping.  Thus, the 
government, institutions of higher education, professional organizations and the 
144
media are all important economic actors in their ability to shape knowledge and 
meaning and are thus intrinsic to the functioning of the larger economic system. 
 Some economic actors are positioned more advantageously in this system. 
Individual men have historically benefitted from women?s work in the household; 
larger corporate and government institutions also benefit from women?s unpaid labor 
of choosing and transporting food from the store to the household.  Power is intrinsic 
to this system.  If we ignore the power dimension of economic life, we obfuscate the 
consequences for individuals. If we ignore the relational elements in economic 
processes we also risk making misguided policy decisions.  For Zelizer (2005b: 306) 
policy questions should start with ?which arrangements actually enrich participants? 
lives??    
Mapping the social organization of grocery shopping through institutional 
ethnography illuminates the social relationships that organize our lives in often 
invisible ways.  Institutions attempt to standardize our everyday/everynight work in 
order to meet the needs of these institutions, rather than meeting individual and 
community needs.  Local relationships are thus increasingly controlled by extra-local 
forms of relations of ruling in a more corporate capitalist system.  The people who 
know our families do not make the decisions that determine the organization of our 
everyday lives.  Instead, institutions such as work in corporations, governments, 
professional settings, and organizations, universities, pubic schools, hospitals and 
clinics, determine what gets produced and how it gets distributed.  Smith (2006) 
elaborates: 
145
The relations and organizations in which these individuals are active are also 
those that organize our lives and in which we in various ways participate.
Watching television, reading the newspaper, going to the grocery store, taking 
a child to school, taking a mortgage out for a home, walking down a city 
street, switching on a light, plugging in a computer?these daily acts articulate 
us into social relations of the order I have called ruling as well as those of the 
economy; what we pick up when we are shopping will likely have been 
produced by people living far away from us whom we?ll never know?.The 
functions of ?knowledge, judgment and will? have become built into a 
specialized complex of objectified forms of organization and consciousness 
that organize and coordinate people?s everyday lives (Smith 2006: 18). 
The shoppers in my study attempted to navigate the frequent inconsistencies or even 
conflicts in the organization of their relationships with the individuals in their 
families, with food and industry discourses as well as the material environment of the 
grocery store.  Looking at the social organization of food shopping from the 
experience of the shopper suggests that grocery shopping is not organized to benefit 
shoppers.  The larger food institution, which includes government, media, food 
manufacturers and retailers, depends on the work of shoppers.  However, this 
institution does not includes shoppers in making important decisions about what kind 
of food is produced and how it is grown, how food gets distributed and put on the 
shelves, or even fundamental questions like whether the supermarket strategy is the 
best way to produce healthy individuals.
 When we start with the experience of people on the ground, policy solutions 
to social problems are likely to shift from individual-level responses to reorganizing 
at group levels.  For example, in the case of obesity, the current focus on more 
nutrition education to might shift to regulating the number of fast food restaurants in 
certain neighborhoods or regulating the production of high fructose corn syrup or 
146
even instituting shorter work days so people can spend more time preparing food or 
engaging in leisure activities.  Instead of blaming mothers for their overweight 
children, this perspective suggests that we must question the social context of food 
production and distribution that gives us industrial food and the frenetic pace of life 
that doesn?t allow for healthy food practices.
 Someone asked me whether my research has changed the way I shopped.  In 
many ways it hasn?t.  I still go to the grocery store about once or twice a week, I buy 
mostly the same ingredients, and I still have to squeeze the work in to my hectic 
schedule.  However, my orientation toward food has changed.  I was once a very 
efficient shopper and food was merely the means to the end of avoiding hunger.  As I 
became aware that my approach to food and shopping was a product of a particular 
social organization that encourages this more functional relationship, I found myself 
questioning not only what I eat but how I thinking about eating.  I now enjoy 
preparing food and eating it.   I have also come to believe that change in this system 
must come from below and outside, from consumers and alternate food producers, 
and from academics who challenge economic conceptions that leave out the work of 
reproduction. I hope that I have contributed to this effort.
147
Table A: Interview Demographics 
Name Age Occu-
pation
Educ-
ation
(Years) 
Income
(House-
hold)
# of 
Child-
ren in 
Home 
Marital
Status
Comm-
unity 
Type
Employ-
ment
J.E. 33 Day 
Care/
Dental
12+ 60,000 3 M Rural In-home 
H.K 32 Recep-
tionist
12+ 45,000 6 M Rural Part-time 
K.C. 48 Stay at 
Home 
12 20,000 3 M Rural Stay at 
Home 
P.G. 28 Stay at 
Home 
12 12,924 2 S Rural Stay at 
Home 
C.B. 39 Dept. 
of
Educa-
tion
18 40,000 3 S  Rural Full-time 
M.W. 42 Educa-
tor
18 90,000 2 M Rural Full-time 
A.M. 41 Accou-
ntant
18 90,000 2 M Rural Full-time 
J.F. 39 Asst. 
Direc-
tor
18 95,000 3  M Subur-
ban
Full-time 
M.F. 31 Student 18 65,000 1 M Subur-
ban
Part-time 
K.M. 45 Stay at 
Home 
18 100,000 3 M Subur-
ban
Stay at 
Home 
K.J. 33 Stay at 
Home 
18 70,000 2 M Subur-
ban
Stay at 
Home 
148
M.S. 30 Accou-
ntant
18 65,000 1 M Subur-
ban
Full-time 
Dad
J.B. 35 V.P. 
Bank
16 35,000 0 S Subur-
ban
Full-time 
Single
L.C.
32 Part-
time
Editor
16 40,000 4 M Subur-
ban
Part-time 
M.L. 50  Office 
Mgr.
12 85,000 0 M Rural Full-time 
L.K. 65 Retired 
Teach-
er
16 65,000 0 M Subur-
ban
Retired
J.M 82 Retired 
Home-
maker
16 40,000 0 Widow Rural Retired 
S.O. 50 State of 
KS
Emplo-
yee 
16 90,000 1 M Subur-
ban
Full-time 
S.Z. 32 Para-
profess
-ional
12 45,000 2 M Rural Full-time 
S.V. 39 Nurse 16 100,000+ 2  M Subur-
ban
Full-time 
         
149
Table B. Sample Interview Schedule 
Open-ended and semi-structured interviews to understand all the work involved in 
shopping for food:
A: Planning:
g120 How do you usually decide what food you are going to buy? (lists, recipes, 
menus, tastes).  What kind of meals do you make?  Do you eat out? 
g120 Do you have a particular store you shop at?  Do you ever go to other stores 
and if so, why? (variety, quality, size, price)?  
B: Financial/Budgeting: 
g120 How much money do you spend on food purchases in a week?  A month?  Do 
you have a set amount that you spend on food? 
g120 How do you pay for your groceries (cash, credit card, debit)?  Do you take 
money out of a checking account or out of a paycheck?  (joint checking 
account? Whose paycheck?) 
g120 What do you do to keep your grocery bills under control (coupons, sales, 
bulk-buying)? 
C: Buying Practices:
g120 How often do you shop?  How much time does it generally take you to shop 
for groceries?   How do you get to the store?   
g120 Do you take children with you? Do you ever make purchases that you 
wouldn?t have when your children are present? 
g120 Do you ever read labels to purchase foods? Do you buy brand names or 
generic?  What are the most important characteristics you are looking for 
when purchasing food (price? quality of product? convenience?).  Are there 
any particular products you will not buy?   
g120 Do you sack your own groceries?  How do you get the groceries home? 
D: Post-shopping practices:
g120 Who puts the groceries away? Who cooks the meals? 
E. Where do you get information about shopping or nutrition?
150
Table C: Post-Interview Survey of Demographic Information 
1.  How old are you?_____  
2.  What is the highest grade you completed in school?__________ 
3.  How many adults live in your household?________________ 
How many children? __________________________ 
4. How many hours a week do you work outside the home?_____________ 
5.  What is your total monthly income?_________  Yearly income?___________ 
151
Table D. Type of Retail Store and Market Share, Food Marketing Institute, 2004 
Type of Retail Store Characteristics Number of Stores /  
Market Share (2004) 
Conventional Supermarket Carries 15,000 items, including a full 
line of groceries, meat and produce, 
with at least $2 million in annual sales
14,690/ 12.4% 
Superstore Carries more than 25,000 items and 
more nonfoods such as health and 
beauty items 
8,225/20.1 % 
Combination Superstore and full-line pharmacy 
with general merchandise and 
health/beauty accounting for at least 
15% of sales 
14,690/ 14.1% 
Supercenter A large food-drug combination store 
and mass merchandiser.  These 
average more than 170,000 square 
feet and have more than 40% of store 
to grocery items (i.e., Kmart, Super 
Target, Wal-Mart) 
2,293/12.4% 
Convenience  Offer a small selection of dry 
groceries, beverages, nonfoods and 
ready-to-eat foods. 
26,259/2.4% 
Convenience with Gas  111,946/13.7% 
Wholesale Club a retail/wholesale hybrid that offers a 
limited selection of food and non food 
products.  These measure about 
120,000 square feet. 
1,050/6.7% 
Mass A large store selling primarily 
clothing and electronics but also 
grocery items 
4,170/6.6% 
Drug A pharmacy that sells at least 20 
percent of sales from grocery and 
other health and beauty items 
18,500/4.4% 
Super Warehouse Carries more than 50,000 items and 
full range of service departments 
520/1.7% 
Dollar A traditional format that sells 20-80 
percent of groceries at discounted 
prices
18,000/1.5% 
Other Traditional Outlets Strong emphasis on natural/organic 9,5000/1.4% 
Natural Food Small family-owned or ethnic stores 762/0.6% 
Military  Commissaries run by the DoD 181/0.5% 
152
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