Time now to take a step back, way back, if only to gain our bearings. To appreciate how the Sell Side brought us to where we are today and where it might be taking us –social retailing? a wonder drug to cure compulsive shopping? – it helps to look into a time-tested mirror, that is, the rearview mirror. There’s no need for an exhaustive history of how the modern Buy came to be, but a detour now and then will help us keep things in focus.

Our daughter Katherine, soon to enter college, and our son Ned, now a college junior, are fourth-generation American shoppers. The first generation, Katherine and Ned’s immigrant great-grandparents, fresh off the boat in the New World, didn’t know from supercenters. They knew from pushcarts. Come the weekend, they’d ride the trolley from the Lower East Side to a world newer and more improved than they ever bargained for. Imagine what it must have been like: to hop on at the corner of Scarcity and Subsistence and then, ten minutes later, hop off at the intersection of Abundance and Glitz. There they gazed in wonder as they walked through immense, astonishingly grand department stores filled with goods from around the globe – this was, after all, the dawning of the age of choice — where floorwalkers in white gloves served customers amidst marble staircases and crystal chandeliers. These first-generation modern American shoppers pressed their noses to the display glass, gaped at the soaring skylights, and no doubt hoped to return one day not just to look but to buy. When and if they finally joined the party, material abundance would be hailed as the great social leveler, the American stand-in for socialism, as sociologist Daniel Bell would later observe in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

Katherine and Ned’s grandparents, second-generation modern American shoppers, also shopped from pushcarts, but only as little kids. Then they moved to a better neighborhood. Not to the suburbs, which were still around the corner, but to a part of town where stores were cleaner and more fully stocked than in the old neighborhood. Then came the Crash – the first one – that left everyone without the carfare to trolley over to the grand shopping palaces. Everybody was stuck, and for a good long while, at the corner of High and Dry.

The saga of third-generation modern American shoppers — that would be us, Linda and me – is by now all too familiar. Much as I’d like to move the story along and bring us back to the Sell Side of today and tomorrow, it’s a good idea to linger here for a bit. In the fifties the Sell Side as we know it today kicked into gear. The American economy exploded, but in a good way compared to now. More babies were born between 1948 and 1953 than over the prior thirty years. The Sell Side simply adored kids: strollers, cribs, car seats one day; hoop skirts, hot rods the next; breakfast cereal now and forever. In the ten years following World War II, new auto sales quadrupled. The Sell Side loved cars as much it adored kids.

Haul out the family album and you’ll see all of the above, preserved in now-faded Kodacolor: the post-war family at play in a new nation, conceived in affluence and dedicated to the proposition that there was nowhere to go but higher and higher still. You’ll see all-electric kitchens, Mixmasters, closets jammed with poodle skirts and saddle shoes, rec rooms strewn with bowling balls and hula hoops, garages full of Schwinns and Radio Flyers. You’ll see an inflatable pool in every backyard, and not one but often two cars the size of Queen Marys parked in every driveway. You’ll see a festival in “Populuxe”, a term propagated by Thomas Hine, who published an illustrated retrospective on the era. Hine’s book rings the usual bells: how ever more giant corporations created a bulging middle-class workforce; how shopping malls and supermarkets spread as rapidly and indiscriminately as crabgrass. It is this version of American “progress” that passes for what is by now a happy-face view of the 1950s.

But it was also in the fifties that America underwent a bloodless coup that turned us from engaged citizens into self-indulgent consumers. We became, in the words of historian Lizabeth Cohen, a “Consumers’ Republic.” In this new political and economic order, to be middle-class and white was to inherit a freshly minted unalienable right: the pursuit of stuff. Indeed, to acquire more and more of it was tantamount to a patriotic imperative, so it’s not surprising that merchants and Madison Avenue came to regard the post-war period as America’s Great Leap Forward. Consumption ruled. Americans didn’t have to make things to feel rich and happy, we just needed to buy things, whether we could afford them or not….