The taming of the buyer: the retail inventory method and the early twentieth century department store

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the workings of an accounting technique in an established domicile of consumption: the department store. We investigate the widespread adoption of the Retail Inventory Method by US department stores from 1920 to 1930. Our analysis reveals a constellation of events situated against a backdrop of new programmatic discourses that gave rise to the adoption of the method. The technical properties of the method created visibilities in store operations which substantiated a recasting of internal power relations. The resulting shifts facilitated the emergence of organizational arrangements familiar to the early twenty-first century consumer.