“Our disposer came with the house, and I thought it was just a gimmick to increase its cost,” a California housewife told the interviewer for a nationwide survey sponsored by a plumbing and heating trade journal in 1963. “How wrong I was! Once I started using it, it became indispensable. The convenience is out of this world. I'd never give it up, and I can't imagine any woman not wanting one when it's explained to her what it can do.” About 22 percent of the women surveyed used garbage disposers, and most of them shared the California woman's enthusiasm. A Denver woman called hers “a little jewel” that “eliminates trips to my back alley in rain, snow and subzero weather.” A Florida homemaker supplied the hot-weather viewpoint: “I think any woman who lives in a warm climate would be out of her mind not to want a disposer,” she told the interviewer. “We have so many problems with insects. . . . Anything that will cut down on garbage and discourage the appearance of vermin . . . is a godsend.”

The survey responses highlight fundamental issues in the marketing of the electric garbage disposer, a device for grinding food waste that is commonplace in the kitchen sinks of American houses, although it is virtually unknown in Europe. Invented in 1935, its commercial development awaited recovery from World War II, like that of many other consumer products, and the way of life it represents constituted a major postwar transformation.

For more than twenty years, American historians of the United States have been exploring the twentieth-century history of shopping, advertising, and marketing as the activities of individuals and as arenas for corporate endeavor. They have studied the meanings of consumer goods as material culture; they have investigated the history of consumer protest and other aspects of politicized consumption and consumerist politics; and they have traced the evolution of commodified leisure, a central feature of consumer society. This interest in the history of consumption is relatively new: For most of the twentieth century, most historians in both Europe and the United States have been preoccupied with the more overt agendas of politics and statecraft. Even the Annalesschool, which attended to the details and mechanisms of daily life in the evolution of economies, showed little interest in the emergence of modern consumer society. Some of the scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt - especially Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer - did provide a critical perspective on contemporary consumption and mass leisure in Weimar Germany and interwar Europe. But although that perspective fueled an appreciation of the origins of consumer society, the Frankfurt School never offered any detailed historical account.

Scholarly interest in the history of consumption first emerged during the Cold War, when, as a number of chapters of this book demonstrate, the issue of consumption became a major vehicle in the political and ideological clash of capitalism and communism and consumer goods were described as weapons in the Cold War. With desire for cars, washing machines, and less expensive goods regularly satisfied in the capitalist West but not in the state-socialist East, empty shelves became a sign of the failure of state socialism.