Description:

The CHSS Workshop Group will have a book discussion on Friday October 3rd on Kathleen Thelen's new "Attention, Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy". Participants will have access to and discuss the book's Introduction and 9th Chapter "Comparative Perspectives on Contemporary American Lean Retailing".

The United States is widely recognized as the quintessential consumer society, one where huge companies like Walmart and Amazon are famous for enticing customers with cheap goods and speedy delivery. Attention, Shoppers! traces the origins and evolution of American retail capitalism from the late nineteenth century to today, uncovering the roots of a bitter equilibrium where large low-cost retailers dominate and vast numbers of low-income families now rely on them to make ends meet.

Offering a comparative perspective on the history of American political economy, Kathleen Thelen shows how large-scale retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden faced a far less hospitable regulatory environment than companies in the United States, which enjoyed judicial forbearance and often active government support. As American companies grew in scale and scope, they assembled an ever-expanding political coalition that could be weaponized to head off regulatory efforts, leveraging their market strength to squeeze suppliers and workers and even engaging in outright rule breaking when they encountered resistance.

Placing the rise of the Amazon economy in a broader comparative-historical context, Attention, Shoppers! reveals how large discount retailers have successfully exploited a uniquely permissive regulatory landscape to create a shopper’s paradise built on cheap labor and mass consumption.

Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT. Her work focuses on the political economy of the rich democracies, with a current emphasis on the study of American capitalism in comparative perspective. She is the author, among others, of Attention Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy (Princeton University Press, 2025), Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (2014) and How Institutions Evolve (2004), and co-editor of The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (with Jacob Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Paul Pierson, 2022), Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (with James Mahoney, 2015), and Beyond Continuity (with Wolfgang Streeck, 2005). Her awards include the  Friedrich Schiedel-Award for Politics & Technology (2020), the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize (2019); the Michael Endres Research Prize (2019), the Barrington Moore Book Prize (2015), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the APSR (2005), the Mattei Dogan Award for Comparative Research (2006), and the Max Planck Research Award (2003). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in 2009. She was awarded honorary degrees at the Free University of Amsterdam (2013), the London School of Economics (2017), the European University Institute in Florence (2018), and the University of Copenhagen (2018).