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We examine the development of self-service grocery shopping from a consumer perspective. Using qualitative data gathered through a nationwide biographical survey and oral histories, it was possible to go beyond contemporary market surveys which pay insufficient attention to shopping as a socially and culturally embedded practice. We use the conceptual framework of the life course to demonstrate how grocery shopping is a complex activity, in which the retail encounter is shaped by the specific interconnection of different retail formats and their geographies, alongside consumer characteristics and their situational influences. Consumer reactions to retail modernization must be understood in relation to the development of consumer practices at points of transition and stability within the life course. These practices are accessed by examining retrospective consumer narratives about food shopping. [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]