Loading...
Sensory Service Stations - Gasoline Retail and the Making of Neurocapitalism
Scales, Gary
Scales, Gary
Citations
Altmetric:
Genre
Thesis/Dissertation
Date
2024-08
Advisor
Committee member
Group
Department
History
Subject
Permanent link to this record
Collections
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10646
Abstract
My dissertation examines the history of gasoline retailing in the United States from just after 1910 to 1999. Primarily focused on retailers, I argue that the imperceptibility of gasoline at the point of purchase produced a system of “sensory retailing” in which retailers had to engage to sell and profit from their operations. I contend the sensorium became a marketplace whereby sensory perception produced emotions on which economic decisions were based. I call this system “neurocapitalism.”
This began in the early 1920s following unsuccessful experiments with the visibility of gasoline as a sales technique. Over time, marketers relied more and more on sensory appeal which shifted their focus further away from gasoline which itself could never produce satisfactory profit. As retailers refined the sensory retailing method, they learned how three major objects at the gas station—the sign, the pump, and the building—all worked together as a single function. This system, I show, controlled, but was also influenced by, the sensorium. By developing and relying upon this system, marketers struggled to handle contradictions of having to advertise their sites, services, and products as places which at once provided emotional relief and further anxiety for customers.
In working out this contradiction, gasoline retailers slowly began to view the automobile and the customer in the same way, and appealed to both with the same marketing techniques. By placing objects at the center of my method, I use anthropological and material culture ideas to show that people and objects have similar, often equal, agency in the making of consumption and should be seen as one explanatory actor. I posit that the meaning of one of America’s most frequent transactions was derived from processes driven by, and in, the sensorium. As such, my analysis suggests American capitalism is driven as much at the neurological level as it is at the economic level.
Description
Citation
Citation to related work
Has part
ADA compliance
For Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodation, including help with reading this content, please contact scholarshare@temple.edu