Fixing prices: on the mundane governance of market transactions in grocery stores (United States, 1922-2016)

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For lawyers, political scientists and economists, prices are generally conceived as abstract values resulting from global power relationships and interactions between supply and demand. For market professionals, prices are rather the material expression of local calculations, marketing strategies, and merchandising techniques. We would like to reconcile these two views, by looking at the “mundane governance” of prices, at the crossroad of (Main) street level practices and (Interstate) Federal regulation. More precisely, we will present the study of a century of price display technologies in the United States, based on the systematic reading of the trade journal The Progressive Grocer (1922-2016). This study shows that “price fixing” has at least the three meanings: price setting, price hanging and price mending, and that each of these ways to fix prices heavily (re-)shaped consumer cognition and the American economy.

Franck Cochoy is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and a researcher at the LISST-CNRS. He works in the field of economic sociology, with a focus on the technical devices that frame or equip consumer behaviour, such as packaging, self-service, QR codes and other digital tools. He recently published On the Origins of Self-Service (Routledge, 2015), On Curiosity, the Art of Market Seduction (Mattering Press, 2016), Markets and the Art of Attachment (Routledge, 2017, with Joe Deville and Liz McFall) and Digitalizing Consumption, Tracing How Devices Shape Consumer Culture (Routledge, 2017, with Johan Hagberg, Niklas Hansson and Magdalena Peterson McIntyre).

*This event will be delivered through the medium of English.

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