Consumer Culture and Personal Finance: Money Goes to Market

261 Pages·2010·1.49 MB·English

by  Jacqueline Botterill (auth.)

Consumer Culture and Personal Finance
Consumption and Public Life
Series Editors: Frank Trentmann and Richard Wilk
Titles include:
Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (editors)
GOVERNANCE, CITIZENS AND CONSUMERS
Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics
Magnus Boström and Mikael Klintman
ECO-STANDARDS, PRODUCT LABELLING AND GREEN CONSUMERISM
Jacqueline Botterill
CONSUMER CULTURE AND PERSONAL FINANCE
Money Goes to Market
Daniel Thomas Cook (editor)
LIVED EXPERIENCES OF PUBLIC CONSUMPTION
Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents
Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham
MEDIA CONSUMPTION AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Beyond the Presumption of Attention
Amy E. Randall
THE SOVIET DREAM WORLD OF RETAIL TRADE AND CONSUMPTION
IN THE 1930S
Kate Soper, Martin Ryle and Lyn Thomas (editors)
THE POLITICS AND PLEASURES OF SHOPPING DIFFERENTLY
Better Than Shopping
Kate Soper and Frank Trentman (editors)
CITIZENSHIP AND CONSUMPTION
Harold Wilhite
CONSUMPTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
A View from South India
Forthcoming:
Roberta Sassatelli
FITNESS CULTURE
Gyms and the Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun
Consumption and Public Life
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–9983–2
Hardback 978–1–4039–9984–9 Paperback
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a
standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us
at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the
ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Consumer Culture and
Personal Finance
Money Goes to Market
Jacqueline Botterill
Brock University, Canada
© Jacqueline Botterill 2010
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-00867-0
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted her right to be identifi ed as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-28419-1 ISBN 978-0-230-28118-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230281189
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents
List of Illustrations and Table vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Prudent Investment and Modest Consumption 23
2 Women, Home, Consumption, Lending, & Ill Repute 44
3 Hire Purchase, Home Furnishings, and
the Cult of Domesticity 75
4 Gentlemanly Bankers Adopt a New Set of Manners 100
5 Big Bang Banking 132
6 The Press Takes on Personal Debt 157
7 Three Personal Finance Discourses 170
8 Personal Financial Identities in Psychology
and Popular Literature 197
Conclusion 216
Bibliography 225
Index 246
v
List of Illustrations and Table
Illustrations
3.1 Whiteley’s Furniture Advertisement, London Times 78
3.2 Buick Automobile Advertisement, London Times 92
Table
4.1 Growth of Barclaycard 129
vi
Acknowledgements
I acquired many social debts during the writing of this manuscript that
I would like to acknowledge. The University of East London provided
a sabbatical that allowed me to undertake much of the initial research,
as well as a stimulating intellectual environment in which many of
the ideas in this book took shape. Helen Powell and Iain MacRury
gave invaluable collegial succor. I owe a special debt to Mica Nava who
provided just the right mix of rigorous criticism and friendly support.
I am indebted to Kayla Foster for her bibliographical work and
beholden to Soya Felix and Alan McEwen who kept me going in the
final phases of completing this book, while they diligently tidied my
mistakes and clarified my prose. I own all errors that remain.
Finally, the intellectual and personal support generously given by
Stephen Kline, quite simply, bankrupts me. I dedicate this book to my
father, Stanley Botterill.
vii
Introduction
In 2005, Richard Cullen of Bath, England was found behind the wheel
of his car, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from the running engine.
Although the coroner’s report called it suicide, the press coverage
implied a kind of foul play, depicting Mr Cullen as the victim of an
emerging cultural pathology they dubbed ‘debt related suicide’ (Ronson,
16 July 2005). They explained that Mr Cullen was an ordinary man in
every way; his troubles started with an innocent loan to pay for a pri-
vate hospital operation for his wife. As the illness progressed, Mr Cullen
had to take time off work to care for her. This loss of income quickly
drained his savings and made him dependent on his credit cards. He
began to miss bill payments, discovering he could only pay for his wife’s
treatment by juggling a mountain of debt, which grew to £130,000 by
the time he sought to escape the only way he knew how.
Looking for motives, journalists found the banks guilty, submitting
the smoking gun in Richard Cullen’s mail pile as evidence: among the
aggressive collection letters from the banks they found seductive flyers
inviting Mr Cullen to assume even more easy credit through debt trans-
fer to manage his mounting financial worries (BBC One, 2003; Morgan,
16 April 2004). Mr. Cullen’s death, journalists implied, was at the hands
of heartless debt-promoting bankers. In 2005, as bankers counted up
their large bonuses, their insensitivity towards the plight of the ill-
starred debtor became increasingly egregious. When he fell victim to
fate, he had no alternative to the financial institutions’ easy credit
schemes, aggressive marketing, high interest rates, service charges,
and heartless collection strategies. Journalists asked: is not the bank’s
aggressive advertising of easy credit as hypocritical as the church’s sale
of papal bulls (Dunn, 24 October 2004, p. 31). They labelled the banks
‘uncaring fat cats’ and modern day loan sharks. The banks responded
1
2 Consumer Culture and Personal Finance
that they were simply answering to a credit-hungry public while carry-
ing out the consumer-led economic strategy of the Labour government
whose popularity rose with escalating house prices and falling unem-
ployment.
Although Mr Cullen’s situation foreshadowed the looming credit
crisis that was to unfold in Britain during the following few years, few
commentators paid much attention to the cultural underpinnings of the
consumer-led expansionism of the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Yet amid the economic downturn of the 1990s, psychologists Lunt
and Livingstone had sounded similar unheeded warning bells. Their
survey showed that people thought about and talked about money a
lot – especially about debt. But debt-ridden consumers were less troubled
by feelings of social shame or fear of public humiliation – the plight
of nineteenth century debtors – than with a sense of enslavement and
the loss of personal liberty that their growing indebtedness imposed.
The most deeply indebted consumers especially expended considerable
psychological resources to manage their complex and contradictory
feelings towards money – which both empowered them as consumers
and enslaved them as debtors (Lunt & Livingstone, 1992).
In his growing indebtedness, Mr Cullen was no different from mil-
lions of Britons for whom getting and spending defined the pivotal pre-
occupation of living. Since WWII, impatient for the good life, mortgage
lending and bank loans had significantly accelerated many consumers’
access to a middle-class lifestyle: homeownership grew from 48% of the
population to 70% in 2006. So too cars, TVs, and appliances in every
home were the ready signs that consumerism was a democratizing
historical trajectory. In Britain’s burgeoning economy, domestic con-
sumption now accounted for 70% of GDP. Yet amid growing affluence,
per capita savings had declined while personal debt now exceeded the
Gross National Product (£1.16 trillion). In 2006, the UK became the
world’s most credit-card-intensive nation, with 67 million credit cards
for a population of 59 million people – even more than American where
the cards were invented (Ronson, 16 July 2005).
In this respect it is possible, from the historical perspective, to claim
that the dilemma that Mr Cullen faced was symptomatic of the underly-
ing changes taking place in Britain’s consumer economy. After WWII,
successive governments mandated the banking sector to provide more
banking services to consumers. To achieve this goal, they began to
loosen financial regulations. The British banks, which for years had
specialized in large-scale short-term credit, best suited for the needs of
the state, industry, and wealthy families shifted, sometimes painfully,