Abstract

Reinventing Tradition; Boots the Chemists’ Experiments with Self-Service in Early Postwar Britain

Self-service retailing was successfully pioneered within the grocery sector of interwar North America. Often associated with the arrival of the supermarket, the format was characterised by its economic efficiencies and cultural modernity. Scholars have thus chosen to emphasise the format’s transformative characteristics, with cultural historian Victoria De Grazia terming self-service as both a “revolution” and “the most important” retailing innovation of America’s interwar period. At the outset of the postwar era, British retailers became increasingly interested in self-service techniques. This included the country’s largest chain of high-street pharmacists, “Boots the Chemists”, who began trialling the format from 1951. Known as the “Chemist to the Nation”, Boots had been trading since the mid nineteenth-century and had established itself as a reputable retailer of quality service and good value. The emergence of self-service selling, and its attendant narratives of modernity, thus posed difficulties of integration for a traditional business like Boots. Drawing directly from business and cultural history, and based on original material from the Boots Archive, Nottingham, UK, this paper will use Boots’ experimentation with self-service to explore how the retailer simultaneously tempered and exploited themes of reinvention. By investigating these ideas, the paper will contend with a central question of postwar British commerce, namely how pedigree and modernity were successfully harmonised for a somewhat circumspect customer base. In Boots’ case, the revolution described by De Grazia was purposefully remodelled through a compromised adoption of “self-selection”, which sought to preserve as much as it altered. By focusing on self-selection, the paper highlights some of the pitfalls of reinvention. In doing so, it conceptualises reinvention not as a singular moment in time, but as an evolving process inflected with cycles of institutional knowledge and requiring consistent management and experimentation.