How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism

“This book proposes to explain global consumerism by using a surprisingly modest object as its focus: the shopping cart. In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism the seemingly simple, inanimate shopping cart takes on a networked liveliness far more vibrant and ominous than expected. Warnes’s study allows readers to see the many dimensions of these things and how they train us as consumers.”—Christopher Schaberg, author of The Work of Literature In an Age of Post-Truth

"In How the Shopping Cart Explains Global Consumerism, Andrew Warnes offers an understanding of consumerism—both in the United States and around the world—as a consequence of the invention, in the 1930s, of that humble yet ubiquitous device, the shopping cart. By focusing on the history of the shopping cart, Warnes returns us to the importance of material underpinnings even for abstract and diffuse social conditions. An outstanding book."—Steven Shaviro, author of Discognition