ABSTRACT
This chapter will examine the history of home shopping from its earliest origins in late nineteenth-century USA to its current status within the profitable and developing sphere of niche retailing. In the contemporary period the home as the traditional site of reproduction/consumption has been recast as a new consumption landscape of considerable potential, with other non-place routes to market such as television shopping and the Internet complementing catalogue retailing and enabling the substantial growth of this sector. But the home is not only an important site into which the ever expanding consumer market can penetrate; it also, and very obviously, acts as a space within which household provisioning takes place. Here we centre our analysis on the home as a specific and unique focus of contemporary consumption and demonstrate how various types of home consumption are equally entrenched in notions of identity construction and social formation as are more formal (and more documented) consumption activities, for example those that take place in the department store or mall.
