Sign Story: Shifting Discourse on ‘signage’ in Progressive Grocer Magazine, or the Supermarket Under Late Capitalism

Authors

Mario Rodriguez

Abstract

The supermarket industry is an “industry in flux.”[1] Modern grocery stores face multinational opposition at the millennium paralleling the extinction of neighborhood “mom-and-pop” stores with the rise of chain stores of the late 19th century (Strasser, 1989). With this large-scale reorganization of the grocery store industry comes a concomitant restructuring of what constitutes a grocery store itself—its architecture, services, and signs. The following study analyzes the evolving discourse on signs—or ‘signage,’ as it is called in the industry—in Progressive Grocer magazine over the 12-year period from 1996 to 2008. First, signs are contextualized in terms of the history of in-store marketing, beginning with the birth of packaging that accompanied the shift away from neighborhood stores to chain stores at the close of the 19th century. This transformation parallels the change supermarkets faced at the close of the 20th century in response to consolidating forces, out of which emerged a new strategy for survival in the form of highly integrated customer-oriented marketing. This marketing strategy encompasses a number of themes, including streamlining organization of the grocery store to maximize profit, outsourcing of store design, re-evaluation of the role of labor and the creation of new in-store environments emphasizing customer experience. These conflate with the fragmentation of what has traditionally been called a sign. Finally, the study looks at some possible future trends for signage, including the integration of RFID into shelves, the increasing struggle to win space in shelf-ads, and a vision for the overhaul of the entire spatial construction of the store. The development of signage as a source of revenue in-and-of itself is considered in the context of emerging surveillance networks, and also from the perspective Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange and the meaning of commodity fetishism under advanced capitalism.

Recommended Citation

Rodriguez, Mario (2009) "Sign Story: Shifting Discourse on ‘signage’ in Progressive Grocer Magazine, or the Supermarket Under Late Capitalism," Fast Capitalism: Vol. 5: Iss. 2, Article 7.
DOI: 10.32855/1930-014X.1153
Available at: https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/fastcapitalism/vol5/iss2/7