Abstract

"The Conquest of New Markets: Development, Income, and Domestic Refrigerators in Postwar South America"

Pablo Federico Pryluka, Harvard University (ppryluka@ccny.cuny.edu)

This paper traces the formation of the domestic refrigeration market and how the unequal access to it developed in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The paper shows how the creation of this new market came to be as the combined outcome of public efforts to boost industrialization and private marketers attempts to increase sales by incorporating new consumers into their markets. When refrigerators began to be available over the last years of the 1920s, and at least until the end of World War II, they were luxury goods that only wealthy households could afford. Starting in the postwar period, consumers in the three countries experienced the arrival of electronic appliances in a new, larger scale. It was not until the 1950s that two combined processes took place: the local manufacturing (or assembling) of these products and their dissemination through different social groups. Gradually, after national production took off, refrigerators turned into basic components of every modern kitchen. When more people began to purchase refrigerators, two things happened. First, replacements accounted for a growing share of the market. Second, as refrigerators became more common, they lost part of their distinction appeal. In response to that, manufacturers introduced new models, with different designs and features.

The paper is divided into three sections. In the first part, I delve into the archives of General Motors, General Electric, and Westinghouse to trace how during the postwar, overseas agents of those companies underlined what they defined as an industrial and nationalistic awakening of Latin American countries, and how their companies could grapple with this new reality in the aftermath of the war. In the second section, I focus on the first steps of locally produced electronic appliances in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and how these initiatives devised the expansion of consumer markets. Finally, in the last section, I provide a quantitative analysis of how these consumer markets changed over the 1950s and 1960s, while I analyze the degree of penetration of electric domestic refrigerators in the three countries.