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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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The analysis of brands in the contemporary social scientific literature, at least outside economics, has tended to focus on their narrative power and semiotic salience. Approached in this way, brands are primarily vehicles for potted ideologies, or else, more neutrally construed, operate as signifiers, able to be appropriated piecemeal in an ad hoc manner by consumers and incorporated into idiosyncratic composite narratives or configurations of signs expressive of particular social identities (Baudrillard 1996; Lury 2004; Twitchell 2004). While, to be sure, modern brands work in those ways, brands also have a more general and abstract meaning, and this was particularly so during the first half of the twentieth century. What early brands indexed, before anything else, was a commitment on the part of the companies they represented to provide goods endowed with stable quantities of use value. In that sense, attaching a brand name to a product was a kind of speech act—an implicit promise—that established certain expectations and obligations between seller and buyer. As Susan Strasser (2004, pp. 30–31 [emphasis added]) puts it in her history of the emergence of the mass market in America: “by marking [that is, branding] their products, manufacturers took responsibility for them.” That responsibility was, specifically, to make sure that products measured up to statements made about them on labels and in marketing campaigns, and more generally, to ensure that products conformed to broad expectations about standardized commodities.

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According to one interpretation, the quality assurance implicit in the act of branding a product was continuous with the best practices of craft production. Margaret Dana, writer of the “Before You Buy” column in the Los Angeles Times, opined that the branded commodity harkens back to an artisanal age, when craftsmen would sign the product of their skilled labor with a mark that “became, in efect, his word of honor that anything bearing that brand or name would be a product made by that craftsman, to the same high standard. The same thing is true today, even in our mass production economy.” Yet, she adds, the modern branded commodity comes with the extra assurance of having been subjected to rigorous objective tests, through which the manufacturer “ofers proof [of quality]. This is where oficial standards of performance and accepted tests back up the brand name which really means something.”4 The meaning of a brand name, on this view, is ultimately rooted in the underlying physical properties of the object it names, the quality of which is assured by standardized techniques of production.5

For consumer advocates, the grounding of the meaning of brand names in the material characteristics of the products they are attached to entailed that any change in product characteristics should be signaled by a change in name. This view was set out explicitly in a 1949 editorial statement in “Consumer Research Bulletin”: “It is CR’s view that every product should correspond to a particular composition or design; that each change of design characteristics should be accompanied by a change of name.”6 This idea ran in tension with the logic of the “family brand,” an approach initiated by companies such as Heinz, Standard oil, and National Biscuit, in which a range of products would be placed under one brand name (Silbur 1983). The idea that names should stand in a one-to-one correspondence with particular products suggests a kind of nominalist approach to brands, one that contrasts interestingly with marketing talk about the “essence” of a brand name, construed as some only vaguely definable quality carried by a large set of diferent products.

The primordial sense of brands as signals of quality is hinted at by the fact that early on in its history, the term brand name was interchangeable with the term quality name.7 And in the first half of the twentieth century brand consciousness was commonly equated with attaching importance to product quality.8 Technocrats and analysts of consumption in this period saw brands as a means to ensure the quality of consumer goods. Materials for the Household, a consumer advice publication put out in 1917 by the National Bureau of Standards, advised consumers to buy branded goods, on the grounds that they provide “some safeguard as to stability of quality” (Cochrane 1966, p.  137). Economist Clair Wilcox, writing in 1934, maintained that the rise of brands led to “uniformity and standardization,” while the considerable expense involved in marketing a brand gave companies an incentive to “keep quality high.” Likewise, Robert Lynd (1933, p.  876) in his contribution to Recent Social Trends—Hoover’s comprehensive report on the state of American society—averred that “national brands unquestionably make for greater uniformity of quality.” The association of branded products with quality was reflected in attitudes among retailers. According to a survey conducted by the marketing and research division of the Wholesale Dry Goods Institute in 1945, “most retailers believe they are in a stronger competitive position stocking nationally advertised brands on a quality and style basis than they would be if they emphasized unbranded goods on a price basis.”9 Sears oficials noted, in 1938, the dramatic success of its branded products: “The merchandise bearing our own brand names is meeting with a steadily increasing demand on the part of the buying public. These branded articles are made by manufacturers of other nationally known products, who make our branded merchandise according to Sears’ own specifications for quality and style. . . . The purpose of these brands is to ensure the customer quality at real savings, and every one is backed by Sears’ own guarantee and by the guarantee of a reliable maker.”10 The answer to the question the Sears oficial was responding to—“what’s in a [brand] name?”—was thus quality and dependability.

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The importance of brand names as indexes of product quality was a major theme in the battle in the marketplace between “private” brands and “national” brands, which took place in the 1930s and 1940s. Private brands were in-house brand names created by large-scale retailers, such as chain stores and mail order companies. Products labeled with private brands tended to be cheaper than national brand-name goods, and during the Depression years of the 1930s, they began to make inroads into retail markets. At the same time, the point of private brands, like national brands, was to reassure consumers that the goods they were attached to were in general reliable and of good quality. Although the retail companies that owned the private brands did not manufacture the goods they sold, the quality of the goods was supposed to be safeguarded by rigorous inspections performed before they were placed on the store floor. Faced with increasing competition from private brands, the national brands fought back, using the argument that their names were a surer guarantee of product quality. They even tried to persuade chain stores, many of which had their own private brands, of the unique value of national branded goods. At the 1931 annual conference of the Western Chain Grocers Association, H. H. Lestico, speaking on behalf of national brands, argued that chain stores should give up their private brands and instead stock nationally advertised goods. The argument he made was that the cost of advertising campaigns on a national scale ensured that the products being advertised would be uniform and of high quality. In Lestico’s words: “The national advertiser protects the millions invested in his label with rigid and scientific uniformity, which satisfies the exacting demands of your customers’ expectancy.”11 Because private brands, by contrast, did not engage in expensive national advertising campaigns, the suggestion was that they were less motivated to make good on their quality assurances.

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The cause of branded goods was represented by the National Brand Names Association, which organized campaigns to promote the general idea that nationally branded products denote quality and reliability. In the late 1940s, for example, the organization conducted a publicity campaign on behalf of its members, under the slogan “Buy the known brand.” The idea was to persuade the public that established national name brands would guarantee the quality of the products sold under their name to a degree that private brands, maligned as “no-name” brands, and unbranded goods never could.12 Despite the rapid growth of private brands during the Depression, in the afluent postwar years, the national brands bounced back. Marketing research, conducted in 1947, and reported on in Business Week, showed some evidence that consumers preferred products sold under national brands even where these were significantly more expensive, and with no obvious diference in quality. A marketing experiment was conducted in a department store in which identical beds were sold either as “Simmons,” a well-known national brand, or as “Dreamland,” a private brand associated with the store. Consumers chose the national brand item at a ratio of 15:1. In follow-up research, the price of the Dreamland mattress was reduced so that it was 12 percent cheaper than the Simmons—yet customers still chose the national-branded item over the private-branded one at a ratio of 8:1.13 The writer of the Business Week article covering the research predicted that private brands were doomed to a marginal place in the market, and that “the basic distinction will shortly be between manufacturers’ and distributers’ national brands, rather than between national and private brands” (p. 66). By the 1950s, the retail market had become increasingly segmented, with private brands remaining a significant presence on the low-end side, while national brands dominated the middle and high-end parts of the market. The issue was perceived quality versus price, for, as one analyst commented, “the buyer [of national-branded goods] felt sure that he was getting a standard quality when he bought a nationally advertised, nationally distributed item.”14 The problem for private brands was that the goods sold under their name were not manufactured by the retailers who owned the brand name. This meant that the “quality assurance” they ofered seemed removed from the actual production of the goods, which made it less believable.

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Above and beyond the particular cultural associations with a given brand, brands were thus received as signaling devices about product quality.15 Viewed in this way, the proliferation of brands, from the later nineteenth century onward, can be understood as one dimension of a more general concern to standardize product quality. The point of a brand was to indicate a standard set of properties that consumers could reasonably expect in the products labeled with the brand.16 And indeed, the arguments made by manufacturers in favor of branded goods were similar to those they made in favor of standardized goods. W. W. Wachtel, chairman of the executive committee of the Brand Names Foundation, speaking in 1951 on the importance of trademark protection, argued that, as a result of the quality commitments entailed by branding a product, “brand-name products will always resist the pressure of higher costs and material shortages, and are the last products upon which prices are increased or qualities lowered.”17 In the middle of the twentieth century, to brand a good was thus to indicate that it was a standardized product, notionally endowed with predictable and stable use value. And those goods were acquired using buying power that was safeguarded by inflation-resistant, productivity-linked standardized wages.

The emphasis on the mechanical properties of consumer objects was reflected in the content of advertising in the mass consumer market. The growth of consumer brands was accompanied by a massive expansion of advertising aimed at spreading brand name recognition. Between 1890 and 1929 advertising expenditure increased tenfold, from \$360 million to \$3,426 million, and thereafter continued to swallow an ever greater part of GDP (Bureau of the Census 1960, p. 526). By 1998, total expenditure on advertising amounted to \$201,594 million.18 According to cultural historian Jackson Lears, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, this marketing onslaught emphasized the narrow functional and material properties of commodities. In Lears’s account, this reflected a growing demand for “a kernel of hardness” or “actuality” in product information—a demand that came to inform the medium as well as the message of advertising. Lears suggests that the very rapid rise to prominence of the photograph as the dominant representational medium in visual advertisements can be explained by the belief that photography delivers an unmediated picture of reality. Photographs in advertisements thus disclosed the “actuality” of consumer products. In the catalog for a 1930 exhibition of advertising photography, quoted by Lears to illustrate this conception, photographs are described as promising: “sincerity in displaying [a] product [as well as] drama in portraying its virtues” (Lears 1994, p. 324, emphasis added).

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Richard Pollay’s (1985) quantitative study of 2,000 print advertisements between 1900 and 1980 broadly supports Lears’s contention that ads focused on the material qualities of goods. Pollay’s analysis reveals what he takes to be a perplexing tendency, especially from the 1950s onward, for advertisements to emphasize the attributes of products, as opposed to the benefits that would accrue to the consumer following the consumption of the good. As the emphasis in advertising shifted toward product attributes, Pollay notes that the presence of humans in ads decreased, pushed to the margins by the things themselves.19 Moreover, advertising pitches based on status associations with products were, according to Pollay’s data, less common than might be supposed. Pollay found that by the 1950, only 10 percent of ads appealed to status, while 27 percent emphasized technological prowess and 31 percent focused on newness.20 Even in the earlier part of the century, when the product-anchored utilitarian dimension was more muted, two-thirds of ads used what Pollay describes as a “straight pitch,” presenting “assertions where logical induction and deduction would lead to product preference” (p. 30). Pollay’s findings echo those of other research. A 1935 study of advertising content found that 85 percent of its sample of 2,500 magazine advertisements focused on product quality, as opposed to status or newness (Reid 1938).

The growth of brands qua signals of consistency of product quality was a response on the part of business to the growing influence of the normative expectation that products should be endowed with stable and predictable amounts of use value. For the brand to work as an incentive to buy a consumer good, it had to indicate, or at least suggest, the presence in the commodity of an acceptable level of quality. From this perspective, modern brands can thus be read as helping stabilize the notional purchasing power of the wage, by indexing definite qualities and durability in wage goods. In this way, brands contributed to the conditions under which labor could be commensurable with its wage.

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2. Standard Commercial Warranties

The idea that brands basically functioned as signaling devices, indicating the presence in commodities of acceptable quantities of potential utility, gains some support from the fact that modern branded products were typically accompanied by standardized commercial warranties. If attaching a brand to a commodity is, as suggested above, akin to a speech act performed by a company to the efect that it is taking responsibility for ensuring that its products can be relied on to be of a certain standard quality, then the commercial warranty put that commitment in writing—formalizing that responsibility.

Modern warranties can take one of two forms; they can be implied warranties, enforced by law, or voluntary commercial, “express” warranties. The implied warranty (about which more will be said in the next section of the chapter) is a legal obligation on the part of those who sell goods to ensure that those goods are reasonably functional. The implied warranty emerged quite recently and has become the default legal warranty attached to all commercial goods. It stipulates that products should be “fit for purpose,” and therefore “merchantable.” Express warranties, by contrast, are statements voluntarily made by the makers of goods about how those goods will perform in use. Typically, express warranties guarantee that goods will perform in the intended manner for some specified period of time.

Express warranties have a two-sided legal character. On the one hand, they are used by companies to unilaterally limit their legal obligations, by making explicit statements about the performance parameters of their products.21 The standardized commercial warranties that began to appear in the twentieth century were in part a response to changes in liability law that made manufacturers more accountable for mishaps resulting from the use of their products. One of the functions of the commercial warranty was, then, to specify written contractual limits to the liability of the manufacturer. At the same time, companies were legally obliged to make good on any statement about their products that they made in an express warranty.22 So if a warranty made claims about quality and durability that went beyond the legal minimum standard for “merchantable” or “serviceable” goods, the manufacturer had to ensure that its goods lived up to those claims.

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Commercial warranties operated to reinforce brands, serving to signal that a good has superior attributes, and to indicate that a manufacturer stands behind its products. One marketing innovation in the early part of the century was the creation of the “lifetime” warranty. The earliest newspaper advertisements for products with such a warranty appeared in the 1920s.23 The lifetime warranty was to some degree a slippery marketing ruse, since the meaning of “lifetime” could be the lifetime of the original owner, an indefinite commitment over the lifetime of all owners, some specified period of time (typically twenty or twenty-five years) thought lengthy enough to qualify as a “lifetime,” or, somewhat tautologically, the lifetime of the product itself, whatever that happens to be. Which of these applied in a given warranty was often left deliberately vague, or else was hidden in small print. At the same time, for some manufacturers standing behind their “lifetime” warranties was an important marketing strategy. Sheafer Pens, for example, was renowned for the level of support it provided for its “lifetime” product line, which was introduced in 1924 and was signified by the presence of a white dot on the pen cap. Sheafer’s 1924 advertising campaign for its new line of pens promised that they would be “unconditionally guaranteed for a lifetime.” The company had a very good reputation for addressing any issues consumers had with their products, regardless of how old the products were.24 Parker Pens, Sheafer’s main competitor, also warrantied many of its pens for the lifetime of the original owner.

It is tempting to think that ofering lifetime warranties was an attractive marketing strategy for these companies because pens are more likely to get lost than break, in efect limiting the costs entailed by the obligation to repair or replace broken pens. However, the robustness of the warranty ofered by these companies was reflected in the durability of the products covered by it. Both Sheafer and Parker made serious eforts to ensure that their products were maximally durable, insisting, for example, on manufacturing tolerances far more stringent than is typical of most contemporary consumer products. Sheafer’s whole marketing strategy was based on creating a reputation for producing uncompromisingly high-quality, durable pens.25 The principle followed in production was the opposite of planned obsolescence (a topic discussed at length in chapter nine of this book). The objective was to make products that would indeed last for a lifetime rather than for as many years as on average a pen would be owned before it was lost. The durability of perhaps the most famous pen in mid-century America, the Parker 51, for example, was such that it quickly approached the point of saturating its market, prompting the company to turn toward a segmented marketing strategy for the line.26 So at least in some cases “lifetime” warranties were anchored to products engineered to last for much longer than average durations of actual use. In those cases, durability was a significant selling point, and good warranty support was an important part of marketing and public relations.27 More typically, however, warranties specified conditions of “normal usage,” the violation of which would result in the voiding of the warranty.

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The standard commercial warranty provided engineers with a target level of durability to aim for in the products they designed. For instance, during a 1912 meeting of auto manufacturers on standardization, the discussion about how to standardize motor trucks went hand in hand with decisions about what form the standard guarantee for those trucks should take.28 Standardization was then a matter not just of rationalizing techniques of production but also of setting parameters of use for commodity objects, with implications for the conditions specified in the contract between purchaser and manufacturer. The notion of “normal use” was very much connected to standardization, in that some conception of typical, or “standard,” patterns of use was involved in the design of a standardized product. In that sense, warranties presuppose a standardization of practices.

Express warranties draw attention to the physical constraints that limit the duration of usefulness of consumer artifacts. Warranties, in efect, stipulate a minimum amount of use consumers can expect from the products they acquire, quantified as a temporal duration of use under “normal” conditions. In acquiring a bicycle with a five-year warranty, for example, the consumer notionally acquires at least five years of “normal” use from the item. When commodities are framed in this way, the social and political question of whether life in general is arranged such as to enable the item to actually be used for that duration of time drops into the background. The focus is on the physical, use-endowing features of the artifact, and the moral and legal obligation of manufacturers to “stand behind” their products. Warranties anchored use to the decontextualized mechanical attributes of the commodity, which both reflected, and in turn promoted, an understanding of the value of wage goods, and by extension of the wage, in terms of potential rather than actual or probable usefulness.

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3. From Caveat Emptor to the Implied Product Warranty

The development of commercial warranties did not take place in a legal vacuum. For the twentieth century witnessed fundamental changes in laws covering consumer transactions and product liability, and these changes formed the backdrop to evolving commercial practice. In broad terms, the changes can be characterized as an overturning of the legal principle of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), with moves, albeit not uncontested ones, toward its replacement by the opposite principle, caveat venditor (let the seller beware). President Roosevelt, in an address to Congress on March 29, 1933, referred to the new principle. Arguing for the need to regulate the market for securities, Roosevelt noted that “this proposal adds to the ancient rule of caveat emptor the further doctrine: Let the seller beware.”29 The new mood was echoed in retail trade magazines. The pronouncement was made in a piece published in 1931 in The Chain Store Magazine that “truly, the old maxim, ‘Let the customer beware,’ should be changed to ‘Let the merchant beware.’”30

According to the principle of caveat emptor, the buyer takes on the burden of risk inherent in any commercial transaction. If goods are faulty in any way, this must be discovered by the purchaser before purchasing the item. The only exception to this rule is where the buyer can prove that the seller deliberately concealed functionally significant flaws in the purchased product, in which case the buyer has a legal right to a refund. But the seller has no legal obligation to guarantee that the goods she sells are “fit for purpose.” Caveat emptor entailed that all consumer transactions are by default covered by an implicit “sold as-is” clause.

Although it had some precedent in Roman law, in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition caveat emptor first emerged in the sixteenth century. It remained, in the English-speaking world, the dominant legal principle covering marketplace transactions through the nineteenth century. In the United States, it was first clearly established as a legal principle in 1817, in the case of Laidlaw v. Organ. Legal scholar Walton Hamilton (1931), in his still definitive history of the subject, suggests that the doctrine of caveat emptor was even more influential in nineteenth-century America than it was in Victorian England.31 In the early twentieth century, however, thinking about commercial law in the US began to change. The turning point is marked by the Uniform Sales Act of 1906, which was loosely based on the British Sale of Goods Act of 1893, and first established the principle of the implied warranty. According to the principle of the implied warranty, the default legal assumption in commercial transactions is that a good should be fit for a specific purpose. Where goods are found to be not fit for their purpose, the consumer has legal recourse. To avoid legal obligations entailed by the implied warranty, the default assumption of fitness for purpose must be explicitly nullified by a statement on the part of the vendor to the efect that goods are sold “as is,” at which point the balance of risk in the transaction switches to the buyer.32 The implied warranty thus efectively reversed the situation obtaining under the principle of caveat emptor. It took some time for the implied warranty to be accepted throughout the United States. The Uniform Sales Acts encountered significant resistance from the states, especially those in the South, and by 1947, more than forty years after the 1906 act, only 34 states had adopted it. In 1952 a more comprehensive piece of legislation, the Uniform Commercial Code, superseded the Uniform Sales Act, and was promptly passed into law in every state. The Uniform Commercial Code reafirmed the legal principle of the implied warranty.

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