Selling Out or Buying In?: Debating Consumerism in Vancouver and Victoria, 1945-1985

"Dawson is optimistic about our own agency to break out of the prison house of consumerism..."

Dr. Matthew J. Bellamy, BC Studies, online

"This well-researched engaging monograph uncovers the complex debates over store-hour restrictions that shaped the retail landscape of Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia, in the post-Second World War period."

Vicki Howard, University of Essex, Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol 52 no 105, May '19

"Thick descriptions of the kind presented by Dawson are valuable, and, when written engagingly, as this study is, they make for a pleasant read."

David Monod, Wilfrid Laurier University, University of Toronto Quarterly: Letters in Canada 2018

"As Selling Out or Buying In? convincingly argues, there is nothing natural or inevitable about contemporary Canada’s ‘wide-open’ around-the-clock shopping hours. In historicizing this phenomenon, Michael Dawson sheds light on the circuitous paths that have led to the current shopping context, questioning the assumption that it results from a combination of the ‘insatiable demand of consumers’ and the ‘entrepreneurial initiative of retailers.’ In the process, he also reveals the wide-ranging political, social, cultural, ideological, and religious tensions that simmered on the surface of these debates and that together reveal the ‘contingent and contested nature of consumerism’ in the country."

Nicolas Kenny , Department of History, Simon Fraser University

"Situating a series of historical episodes in context, Selling Out or Buying In? augments earlier studies of consumerism that defined people as consumers in both cultural and economic terms. Dawson’s work also takes another set of variables into consideration: the conditions under which consumers could expect to purchase goods, the implications of those conditions for workers and days of rest, and the slippery ideas of free enterprise and democracy, to name a handful."

Len Kuffert, Department of History, University of Manitoba