Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress: How Innovators of the Roaring 20s Created the Consumer Revolution

Description

Epic stories from the decade that taught Americans how to vote with their wallets.You can get what you want, when you want it, for a price you’d like to pay…or you’ll take your business elsewhere. That truth is so self-evident that we barely give it a second thought. But “consumer” culture means so much more to our lives than just buying stuff. Consumer expectations force employers to make accommodations if they want to keep the best talent. We expect our doctors to prescribe us the new wonder drug we saw advertised. Colleges invest in glistening food courts to lure the best students. We expect a boycott to change corporate behavior. Whether our expectations are good or bad depends on your point of view, but the underlying fact remains: having it your way ain’t just how we think about hamburgers. No one in living memory knows what it was like to expect anything else, so it’s tempting to think it was always that way. It wasn’t. There was a time when Henry Ford was right about getting any color you liked, so long it was black. You got what you got, when you got it, and you were happy to get it. Booze, Babe, and the Little Black Dress retells the epic stories of the most misunderstood decade in American history and how the 1920s gave birth to the most important skill in modern life: how to use our economic power. Voting with our wallets changed, and continues to change, everything.