The Tower of Labels: Labelling Goods in the US Grocery Store (1922–2018)

While labelling is often conceived as an operation aimed at displaying the qualities of products, this chapter invites us to reflect on the labelling of prices. It proposes to study the technology as well as the micro-politics of price labelling in the long-term history of American grocery stores. The chapter relies on a study of the trade journal The Progressive Grocer from 1922 to 2016. It examines how various developments in labelling technologies, like sticker labels, price guns, printed price tags and UPC codes changed the division of labour between manufacturers and retailers in terms of product valuation and qualification and thus contributed to redefining not only the visibility of prices in market scenes and supply chains, but also the economics of the underlying qualities.