Abstract
Daniel Herbert and Derek Johnson’s edited collection makes a signal and important contribution to Media Studies. In their introduction they note the frequent absence of the retail store in many considerations of media consumption. The risk in discussing the social experience of consumption is that it can easily tend to focus on the subject’s (vexed or desiring) relation to the media commodity in ways that ignore the labor and material institutions that distribute, present, and stage that object. Retail Studies often consider the point of sale role of the store layout and service staff curation of goods, but these concerns have not been taken up in Media Studies since it tends to look either at the cinema as the main point of media purchase or the new virtualization of sale via platform streaming consumption. Yet despite claims of brick-and-mortar retail apocalypse (amplified now by COVID-19), “media culture is similarly informed by the beliefs, norms, and practices of retail professionals and countless media shoppers” (p. 3). For not only is Walmart a long-standing seller of “books, compact discs, and VHS cassettes”; it is also where “consumers have long purchased media technology: radio sets, televisions, stereo receivers, recording and production equipment, video game consoles, personal computers, and much more” (p. 4). Indeed, retail is where consumers gain industrial knowledge about formats and transmission formats. Even today, while the streaming platforms of the new monopoly studios (e.g., Disney, Amazon, Apple, and so on) seem to have resurrected the classic Hollywood studios’ control of production, distribution, and exhibition, the retail stores remain the location where “retailers and shoppers engage in meaning-making activities” (p. 7). As such, Point of Sale is a collection that deserves an audience, as its themes merit serious and more regular attention.
As a course-correcting intervention that links pre-existing Media Studies and Retail Studies, Point of Sale also begins a conversation about the next set of challenges for consideration. While Herbert and Johnson rightly task Media Studies for its amnesia about retail, especially during the 1980s to 2000s transformation involving consumption beyond the cinema and before the streaming era, there is another aspect that still needs foregrounding: retail labor. If media retail matters to the interaction of media transaction, then what happens when retail laborers carry out the functions that “front of house” laborers in the cinemas used to conduct? Arlie Hochschild’s (1983) The Managed Heart notably raised the question of the highly gendered emotional labor of female air stewards who had to perform happiness in a role that combines client management, food service, and brand cosplay. How do these issues play out now in the large retail store? Several essays in Point of Sale rightly call out the sexist nature of male retailer expertise in specialty stores. What changes, if any, have occurred through media retailing spaces in terms of gender, age, and ability? Is the TV/computer section still staffed mainly by (white) men? If so, then as the iconic film on male media retailers The 40-Year Old Virgin suggests, are these gendered identities different from the mythic rude High Fidelity video store clerk?
Media retail can’t be separated from a history of the neoliberal deregulation of media ownership, zoning regulations for Big Box stores, and the globalization of international trade. The world market conditions of East Asia are fundamental not only because of their new recording techniques (Betamax vs. VHS), but because the increasing incorporation of China into the global market after Hong Kong’s handover meant that the proliferation of affordable media devices (e.g., videocassette and DVD recorders) enabled the new point of sale transaction in the first place. A retailer like Walmart insisted on the “China price” of goods that hollowed out Western laborers’ lifeworld in ways that also reorganized these newly precarious workers’ “leisure” time in order to encourage them to buy these China-priced goods for cheaper home entertainment. Here, too, are matters of class. While Walmart is a mass media retailer, the essays often use Target as their exemplary site. Yet, as Herbert and Johnson note, Target imagines its “guests” to be around 40 years old, college-educated, and with a $64,000 household income (p. 10). Since Media Retail Studies often depends on a form of first-person anthropological field research (“what I saw during my shopping”), there might be a need for a conversation over confirmation bias of this methodology, as Anthropology has already begun, as well as one about the consumption of Media Studies itself as a retail commodity in the point of sale, neoliberal university. One approach that might be helpful here comes from existing work on commodity chains that are “geographically extensive and contain many kinds of production units within them with multiple modes of remunerating labor” (Wallerstein 2000, 2), as a means of tracking labor exploitation and seizure embedded in time and space.
A second challenge for Media Retail Studies is its emphasis on the structuring of adolescence. Historically, the notion of this life stage is not simply a product of the twentieth century’s legacy of anti-child labor laws, but also a creation of cultural media. For movies and comics represented the possibility and enactment of adolescence to its consumers. Consequently, many of the commentaries in the collection on media retail rest on questions about the MCU-Disney complex of superheroes and animated movies. But is the last place for contemporary DVD sales in the register corridor along with candies, as if DVDs are now mainly meant as a technology for viewers still too young to be trusted to browse the internet or control the Netflix account?
Another emerging issue for retail is that online shopping is not only virtual, but also enables algorithmic display and pricing even in physical retail. Emily West’s chapter on Amazon’s actual bookshops notes the absence of price-stickers on books, which need to be scanned to check the “Amazon price.” This combines Amazon’s desire to reduce the wage costs of the price-sticking labor, but also to gain data beyond the limit of actual sales as the book scans deliver useful information about intent or interest regardless of any purchase. Additionally, the Amazon stores re-educate purchasers’ consumption. As Amazon stores vastly reduce the number of books on display, this both limits potential interactions with retail labor and allows for a new kind of category distribution. Since books are shelved in isolated stacks of the same title facing forward rather than as a continuity of spine forwards, each stack can be much more easily shifted off the shelf and located elsewhere. In this way, Amazon can further break down the conventional genres into taste clusters wherein even the consumer no longer knows why they might “like” Amazon’s recommendations, given that the title is not easily shelved as belonging to a familiar genre.
All these questions are made possible by Point of Sale. Herbert and Johnson, and their contributors, have done great service to our understanding on how to link media consumption with Retail Studies.