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This chapter wonders about the overemphasis placed on consumers in marketing research. It starts from two questions: Is studying consumption exactly the same as studying consumers? Can consumption be understood through consumer behavior only? The emphasis placed on consumers tends to neglect at least two other factors that yet significantly frame the consumption game. The first factor is the supply side. Consumption is shaped by consumers, but also by marketers. As a consequence, if we want to fully understand consumption, we have to study both types of actor; we must research marketing as well as purchasing and consuming. The second factor is that of market objects, devices, and technologies (Callon & Muniesa, 2007). If we really want to account for consumption, we thus have to study the three vertexes of the triangle: we need to supplement the study of consumers with a study of marketers, and the study of consumers and marketers with a study of “market-things” (Cochoy, 2007). The chapter proposes to follow such a view in starting from the latter vertex: through an analysis of the trade press journal Progressive Grocer over the 1929–59 period, and from the perspective of actor-network theory, it shows how many market-things (cans, shelves, turnstiles, magic doors, …) were put in motion and articulated in order to help grocers and consumers behave differently, thus modifying the very actions and identities of consumers and other marketing actors.

French influence on English was largely lexical, but because of the high volume of loanwords the effect on English morphology was extensive. This chapter outlines the historical context in which thousands of words were transferred, the two main dialects from which they came, the death of French in England as seen in records of the London Grocers’ Company, and the suffixes that became productive in Middle and Early Modern English.

This chapter provides an historical overview of Deanwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It details several key periods in the neighborhood’s development and the role food played in each, arguing that self-reliance was integral to the early sustainability of the neighborhood, as it undergirded the development of schools, small businesses, and small grocery stores. Secondly, this chapter explores the systematic decline of supermarkets in the poorest and blackest areas of Washington, D.C., and examines what that decline meant for residents and the city.

German, Irish, and ethnic entrepreneurs shaped the economic landscape of post–Civil War Charleston. R. G. Dun and Company hired local agents throughout the United States to evaluate the credit-worthiness of local businesses. European immigrants, Jews, women, and African Americans owned and managed businesses that stimulated Charleston’s postwar economic recovery. Moreover, white and black workers served ethnic entrepreneurs in a variety of manual and non-manual occupations. German, Irish, and Jewish business practices had long created tension with native-born white southerners. At the same time, African Americans faced great difficulties in opening or expanding their businesses. Moreover, black Charlestonians did not appreciate the high prices that Germans charged or their refusal to extend them credit, and German liquor merchants prospered, supplying alcohol to African Americans who lived in conditions that were seen as conducive to drinking. Germans had transitioned rapidly from petty entrepreneurs to middle- and upper-class businessmen, and that created more social distance between them and African Americans, while bringing them closer to white Charlestonians.

To be praiseworthy for a right action is to act out of good will (an intrinsic desire for the right or good), or out of indifference to the lure of the wrong or bad; to be blameworthy for a wrong action is to act out of ill will (an intrinsic desire for the wrong or bad), or out of indifference to the lure of the right or good. This account of praiseworthiness involves nothing but acting on desires, and yet it is compatible with theories on which there are side constraints on moral action. It requires not merely that the right or good be the referential content of a praiseworthy actor's desire, but also that the actor conceive of this content in the right way: as relieving suffering, being respectful, being truthful, or the like, but not necessarily as doing what is right or good.

By the 1920s, the prevailing question in the grocery trade centered on whether small independent grocers or corporate chains would dominate retailing. The answer to that question was unclear well into the 1930s, with both the definition and the future of small business at stake. New business methods, including self-service and vertical integration, combined with innovative organizational forms such as voluntary cooperatives, started to shift the tide toward chain stores. The Colored Merchants Association (CMA) and the Independent Grocers’ Alliance (IGA) mimicked chain stores’ organizational style and appearance while retaining independent store ownership, with varying results. Legislative regulation in the form of chain store taxes and the Robinson Patman Act (1935) sought to protect small business but ultimately redefined independent enterprise in the vision of “big business,” making standardized, corporate systems the model for local retailers. By the 1940s, corporate chains could claim new authority as archetypes for American business enterprise.

Notions of community, service, and loyalty that once branded nineteenth-century small businesses as old-fashioned have become hallmarks of modern American retailing. Mega-retailer Walmart, as well as regional chain supermarkets, now draws on these same principles to sell their large-scale enterprises to local communities. They have built smaller stores, provided social spaces for customers to meet, and cultivated a neighborhood atmosphere to their standardized operations. Smallness and innovation endures as a profitable business model, making clear that the roots of the modern grocery trade lie with independent grocers, and that industrial capitalism came of age in the countless neighborhood shops and warehouses as much as in the factories, rail yards, and refineries they bordered.

It has been argued by Arpaly and Markovits that an action with moral worth is done for the right reasons—reasons that make it right. This chapter argues that the “right reasons” view of moral worth has implications for normative ethics. The simplest conclusions concern the relationship between the true normative theory and commonsense morality. A more elaborate argument shows the “right reasons” view points us towards ethical pluralism, and if that view is true, familiar versions of Kantianism and utilitarianism are false and there are multiple factors involved in making actions right, one (but not all) of which has to do with wellbeing. An important premise of this argument defended herein the claim that Kant is wrong about the moral worth of actions performed from altruism and not from the categorical imperative.