Self-service and the experience of high-street retail: shopping at boots the chemists in the post-war era, 1945-1980
Publication Date
December 6, 2025
Creator
Abstract
Self-service and the Experience of High-Street Retail: Shopping at Boots The Chemists in the Post-War Era, 1945-1980 examines the impact modernised self-service retailing had upon Britain’s foremost chain of retail-pharmacists. By demonstrating that Boots repurposed aspects of its own tradition and ethos, this thesis challenges the dominant historiographical interpretations of self-service as a transformative and unitary retail system. Using the company’s own historical archive in Nottingham, England, it goes beyond the business history of the company, to foreground the cultures and retail experiences of post-war British shopping. It provides the first in-depth analyses of ‘self-selection’ trading, offering a rare long-term perspective for how an established retailer combined elements of personalised service and the provision of healthcare advice with self-service’s promise of enhanced consumer choice and freedom. Its narrative is traced out in five thematic chapters: after exploring the company’s experimental adoption of full-scale self-service in 1951, it extends analysis into the 1960s and 70s, to understand how the retailer’s moderated sales system influenced its processes of in-store design, merchandising, staff-training and criminal abatement.
It argues the in-store experience generated by Boots’ own-brand version of self-selection represented a complex, delicate balance between the opposing forces of tradition and modernity, freedom and control, and commercial and healthcare interests. Boots’ adoption of self-service techniques was flexible and often deliberately indeterminate, which enabled its stores to appeal to both the era’s newly affluent and youth consumer, whilst upholding the dignified, high-class atmosphere of a traditional retail-chemist. It also demonstrates how Boots’ diverse approach was capable of retaining the oversight of their skilled sales personnel, while simultaneously promoting concepts of modern consumer autonomy. By arguing that this moderated system of self-selection was advantageous to the company’s ongoing success, it stresses the agency retailers had for altering self-service methodologies to their own-ends. It therefore contributes significant new evidence for the diversity of self-service practice present within post-war Britain’s retail landscape.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Supervisors
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
Department of History
eprints ID
82692
UoN Repository URI
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Moss Jack 20287495 Corrected submission.pdf
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Full-text
Description
Examined. Corrected submission
Size
4.56 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
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