Thus far we have considered a series of perspectives on the historical facts governing the evolution of commerce and shopping in the closing years of the nineteenth century. It is appropriate now to take account of shifts in thinking that pertain to the point of view of the consumer. For the increasing productive capacity of industry began to generate anxieties about the potential of the consumer to absorb the goods produced. An intimation of this occurs in Zola's novel Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (1876), when a député, lobbying the eponymous minister on behalf of sugar refineries in Marseilles, seeks to impress Rougon by complaining that ‘personne, à la Chambre, ne me paraît avoir étudié la matière à fond’ and cites research he has conducted on the ground in Marseilles: ‘Cette question des sucres est très importante. Il s'agit de toute une branche de l'industrie française’. Rougon's rejoinder is telling; to the man who has looked so closely at production he directs a more important question highlighting an issue he has overlooked, that of consumer demand: ‘Savez-vous le nombre des morceaux de sucre que l'on consomme par jour, au café Anglais?’ This was a matter that preoccupied many in government and elsewhere.