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The period between 1950 and 1975 marked a dramatic shift in food retailing in Britain with the introduction of self-service stores and supermarkets. It also witnessed a significant rise in shoplifting, which many contemporary observers blamed on the introduction of self-service retailing. Using material from the retail trade press, newspaper reports, contemporary academic and marketing studies, and the publications of consumer associations, this article reflects on the fractured nature of the public discourse surrounding shoplifting in the early post-war period and looks at the factors that made self-service food retailing such a potentially problematic innovation. We argue that an ambivalence arose because shoplifting was regarded as a 'housewives' crime', and because of some of the specific characteristics of the self-service innovation. The introduction of self-service retailing not only fundamentally altered the relationship between consumers and retailers, and between consumers and goods, but had the effect of throwing into question existing definitions and perceptions of consumer crime. This article will show that there was considerable public debate and disagreement over who was to blame for the sudden surge in the crime, over what could be done to prevent it, and over how to treat those accused and convicted of shoplifting. Some of the ambiguities in public responses to shoplifting evident in our period were witnessed in the earlier experiences of the nineteenth-century department store. Then, as in the 1950s, public debate on the causes of shoplifting occurred within the context of broader critiques of consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of self-service and supermarket retailing marked a significant departure from the counter-service format that had dominated food shopping in - Britain until the 1950s. But reactions of shoppers to this new mode of shopping are poorly understood. The Reconstructing Consumer Landscapes Project was designed to cast light on the complexities of consumer reaction to changes in food shopping between 1945 and 1975 through a large-scale survey combined with one hundred and twenty-two semi-structured oral history interviews. This article introduces approaches to understanding consumers, and looks, in particular at the ways in which academic scholars have characterised the reactions of consumers to the rise of self-service and supermarket shopping. The article then highlights some of the strengths we observed in our use of oral history interviewing in reconstructing the experiences of shoppers in early supermarkets. We also discuss our use of a content analysis approach to analyse material from the interviews and what this has revealed about consumer reactions as seen in interviewees' accounts of their first experiences of supermarket shopping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]