Social Digitalisation by Kornelia Hahn

Author:Kornelia Hahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030798673
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3 Technologies of Physical and Logistical Assemblage in the Department Store

These processes of dis/continuance were also manifested in the extensive mobilities and flows of people, things and signs in department stores. Contemporary descriptions provide ample evidence of the abundant amount of running and flowing of salespersons and customers, commodities and symbolically enhanced marketing strategies. We have already seen how the department store’s ‘machine’ was operated by the constant movement of numerous clerks; but the store’s increasingly numerous customers, now often transported by rail in large numbers from suburbs and towns almost directly to the capital’s department stores, were also made to run (Miller, 2014, p. 37). Zola again provides the most vivid description of this organisational logic in practice:On Saturday evening, as he [Mouret, the owner of the department store] was casting a last glance over the preparations for Monday’s big sale, which they had been working on for a month, he had suddenly realized that the way he had arranged the departments was stupid. It was, however, an absolutely logical arrangement […] Suddenly he had shouted that he wanted it all changed. This meant moving half the shop, and they had forty-eight hours to do it in. The staff, bewildered and working full stretch, had had to spend two nights and the whole Sunday in the midst of an appalling mess […] The governor was surely losing his mind; no one could understand it, and there was general consternation. (Zola, 2008, p. 236)

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