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A single day in a semilegal market in Lima, Peru, reveals a social world that defies conventional economic logic.

In the heart of Lima’s historic center, the markets of El Hueco (“The Hole”) and sprawling Mesa Redonda pulse with life, with thousands of vendors selling everything from knockoff electronics to religious icons. In A Day in “The Hole,” anthropologist Daniella Gandolfo immerses readers in a single, tumultuous day—the thirty-fourth anniversary of a vendors’ cooperative—while examining the dynamics that sustain these marketplaces.
 
Through a blend of cinematic storytelling and incisive anthropological insight, Gandolfo reveals a world with its own unique codes. She inspects how vendors embrace expenditure over profit and instability over order, and moving through the sights and sounds of El Hueco and Mesa Redonda, she finds a dissident economy that is as much about survival as it is about spectacle. Gandolfo redefines how we think about urban economies and the unexpected ways these defiant communities thrive in this textured portrait of Lima’s markets and the people who animate them.

Point of Sale offers the first significant attempt to center media retail as a vital component in the study of popular culture.  It brings together fifteen essays by top media scholars with their fingers on the pulse of both the changes that foreground retail in a digital age and the history that has made retail a fundamental part of the culture industries.  The book reveals why retail matters as a site of transactional significance to industries as well as a crucial locus of meaning and interactional participation for consumers. In addition to examining how industries connect books, DVDs, video games, lifestyle products, toys, and more to consumers, it also interrogates the changes in media circulation driven by the collision of digital platforms with existing retail institutions.  By grappling with the contexts in which we buy media, Point of Sale uncovers the underlying tensions that define the contemporary culture industries. 
 

The authors of this treatise attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the economic and political transformations now taking place in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They build up a detailed picture of the privatization process in the retail trade, catering and more general services. Not only are these sectors strongly relevant to consumers in these countries, but they also offer attractive possibilities for property ownership on a mass scale, as well as for the fostering of the small enterprises and entrepreneurial spirit that will be so important in the future.

Retail is now the largest employer in the United States. For the most part, retail jobs are “bad jobs” characterized by low wages, unpredictable work schedules, and few opportunities for advancement. However, labor experts Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show that these conditions are not inevitable. In Where Bad Jobs Are Better, they investigate retail work across different industries and seven countries to demonstrate that better retail jobs are not just possible, but already exist. By carefully analyzing the factors that lead to more desirable retail jobs, Where Bad Jobs Are Better charts a path to improving job quality for all low-wage jobs.
 
In surveying retail work across the United States, Carré and Tilly find that the majority of retail workers receive low pay and nearly half work part-time, which contributes to high turnover and low productivity. Jobs staffed predominantly by women, such as grocery store cashiers, pay even less than retail jobs in male-dominated fields, such as consumer electronics. Yet, when comparing these jobs to similar positions in Western Europe, Carré and Tilly find surprising differences. In France, though supermarket cashiers perform essentially the same work as cashiers in the United States, they receive higher pay, are mostly full-time, and experience lower turnover and higher productivity. And unlike the United States, where many retail employees are subject to unpredictable schedules, in Germany, retailers are required by law to provide their employees notice of work schedules six months in advance.
 
The authors show that disparities in job quality are largely the result of differing social norms and national institutions. For instance, weak labor regulations and the decline of unions in the United States have enabled retailers to cut labor costs aggressively in ways that depress wages and discourage full-time work. On the other hand, higher minimum wages, greater government regulation of work schedules, and stronger collective bargaining through unions and works councils have improved the quality of retail jobs in Europe.
 
As retail and service work continue to expand, American employers and policymakers will have to decide the extent to which these jobs will be good or bad. Where Bad Jobs Are Better shows how stronger rules and regulations can improve the lives of retail workers and boost the quality of low-wage jobs across the board.