Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada

Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada By Donica Belisle Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011 .iii + 308pp. Figures, acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and index. $85.00 (hardcover), 9780774819473; $32.95, 9780774819480 (paperback).Donica Belisle examines how Canadian department stores influenced and guided what it meant to be Canadian from 1890 to 1940 in her book Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada. She focuses on marketing and employment practices used by department stores at the turn of the twentieth century, but she also fills a void in the scholarship by examining the effects of these practices on the mindset of their customers. Eaton's Department Store, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC), and Simpson's were the three major stores that represented Canadian pride, nationalism, and modernity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Belisle agrees with previous scholarship that these large department stores helped to modernize Canada but she introduces evidence that Eaton's, the HBC, and Simpson's also negatively impacted Canadian culture. She argues that, while department stores helped bring Canada into the modern age, they also created tensions in society by focusing on specific segments of the population - Anglo-Celtic, male, and the upper class. Belisle notes that the large department stores' business practices created racial, class, and gendered frictions in the working and shopping environments of the stores and also helped root idealized standards in society as a whole. She also contends that the three big companies intentionally developed business practices that excluded a large portion of the population in order to make their brands appear more desirable and sophisticated.Belisle's research is innovative because she also attempts to discover how mass retail affected the populace and how people responded to the large department stores. Her bibliography is extensive and her sources include department stores archives, family papers, newspaper articles and advertisings, company photographs, and department store catalogs. Belisle's use of images in the book is also exceptional. She effectively uses illustrations in every chapter that support her arguments.Retail Nation is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. Chapter One chronicles the rise of mass retail in Canada in comparison with Europe and the United States. Belisle points out that department stores in Canada appeared later than department stores in Europe and the United States, but contends that the stores in Canada became major players on the retail scene rather quickly. Chapter Two examines the role advertisements from Eaton's, the HBC, and Simpson's played in making Canada a modern nation at the turn of the twentieth century. Department stores used newspaper and catalog ads to make consumerism seem natural. They infiltrated Canada with ads promising people more happiness if they purchased their goods. Belisle also shows that the three big stores created a connection between their goods and national pride in their ads - to be Canadian was to buy goods from Eaton's, the HBC, and Simpson's - especially during WWI and WWII when the department stores prided themselves in taking care of their employees who were fighting for Canada.The third chapter focuses on the founders of the department stores and their paternalistic actions towards their employees and customers. Belisle notes that paternalism was a positive for some employees, because of the willingness of the owners to take care of their employees, but it also had negative consequences. She shows how paternalism kept women and minorities subjugated to the men of the corporations and argues that these actions were important to Canadian society as a whole because Eaton's, the HBC, and Simpson's were some of the largest employers in Canada at the time.Chapter Four describes how department stores exploited their employees' bodies - mainly female - to showcase their products. …

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