Selling in place: the home as virtual storefront

In this themed section, we consider the ways that Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders impacted, and continue to impact, small retailers that sell niche goods like vinyl records, vintage clothing, and handcrafted items in urban areas within the United States. Now more than ever – as storefront businesses have had to shift their inventories exclusively online – sellers’ homes and small shops act as warehouses and staging areas for photographing, packing, and shipping merchandise. Members of what we term the digital vintage economy, many of whom are women, navigate additional domestic and reproductive workloads at the same time they engage in new forms of home-based selling labor. Platform labor builds on a long history of inequalities and exploitation related to racial capitalism, and even if some consumer experiences can return to “normal” after shelter-in-place orders end and the vaccine is distributed, many labor practices forged during this period will likely continue on as before. In many respects, the forms of labor described in these essays began before the pandemic and will continue to have reverberations in a post-Covid context.

The essays in this Crosscurrents section expand upon our past ethnographic work – situated in the United States – addressing how platform selling cultures we examined over time are shifting to meet changing conditions and consumer needs during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Starting in March 2020, in cities across the United States, many non-essential businesses had to close to shoppers and quickly pivoted to online sales. But for many independent sellers, e-commerce platforms like Etsy and Shopify, payment service providers (PSPs) like Square and PayPal, and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram were already fundamental to their businesses. Based on our long-term ethnographic research in cities like Oakland, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn, we define the “digital vintage economy” as an umbrella category for the online trafficking of collectibles like books, clothes, comics, furniture, records, and toys, including new “handmade” or artisanal merchandise sold by small, independent businesses (Kneese & Palm, 2020). While our work is based in the US, we have also attempted to emphasize the globalized nature of the digital vintage economy, in which small local shops interface with global audiences through a constellation of social media platforms, PSPs, and e-commerce sites.

Within US-based cities, the digital vintage economy is part of a larger indie revival, mobilized in response to post-Fordist or “immaterial” modes of production and based on re-imaginings of 19th and 20th century craft labor practices. Emily Matchar describes a “New Domesticity” that emerged around the time of the 2008 Great Recession financial meltdown, when some people returned to domestic arts and DIY practices (Matcher, 2013). Women, especially, turned to canning, crocheting, and other forms of in-home labor, which was to some degree tied to an ethos of thriftiness in a time of insecurity. Practitioners were committed to authenticity, set in opposition to mass-produced items, and a new desire for showcasing local makers. Often, this artisanal nostalgia is caught up in dubious fantasies related to gender, sexual, racial, and class politics, and critics have pointed to the overwhelming whiteness and gender essentialism endemic to the movement (Ayres, 2019; Close, 2018; Close and Wang, 2020; Gajjala, 2015; Hatcher and Tu, 2017).

As part of the same indie revival movement, small boutiques selling vintage or handcrafted items appeared in many cities throughout the US. Indie boutiques help make cities and specific neighborhoods into destinations for shopping and tourism. Such boutiques are often located in hip, formerly industrial neighborhoods are therefore also associated with gentrification and rising commercial rents. While indie shops lean into the coolness of their specific locations, they are able to leverage e-commerce and social media platforms to find larger audiences that extend far beyond local foot traffic. Through their descriptions and images on e-commerce platforms, from eBay and Discogs to Depop and Vinted, sellers learn to present the one-of-a-kind or rare attributes of their merchandise, combining influencer-style skills and platform know-how with vintage nostalgia. The indie revival simultaneously took advantage of new dedicated sites like Etsy while privileging handmade aesthetics rooted in particular locations; new technologies met industrial, artisanal nostalgia (Curran, 2007). In an ironic twist, the authentic materiality of DIY culture became intimately attached to digital platforms, allowing indie locals to reach consumers all around the world.

In some cases, such tensions play out in a singular physical object, such as a handmade cloth facemask used for protection from Covid-19. As Pham (2020) remarks, the Etsy cloth facemask, with its associated figure of Rosie the Seamstress as a white, middle-class, feminine iteration of what it means to a productive, virtuous woman during the pandemic, obscures the role of marginalized, low-waged women in the garment industry, in places like Bangladesh and Myanmar as well as in Los Angeles factories, who produce the majority of cloth facemasks. Pham (2020) argues that “the homemade mask reflects and enacts two linked processes of localization that are based on race and class — it localizes ideal feminist civic participation to the domestic mask-maker rather than the industrial seamstress and to the middle-class home rather than the garment factory. In the homemade mask, ‘women’s work’ is given new meaning and value because it’s defined as locally produced” (p. 326). Garment workers, who are often Latinx and Asian women, are not able to shelter at home like their white middle-class counterparts. Within the digital vintage economy under Covid conditions, the gig economy and DIY cultures coincide. Globalized platform labor collides with aspirational retail aesthetics and lifestyle politics.

When brick-and-mortar shops close, warehouse and garment workers toil behind the scenes to facilitate online sales. Meanwhile, the home is (as it has always been) also a primary worksite for retailers and individual sellers at the same time it is equated with comfort based on a gendered division of labor. Martin (2021) argues that, during the pandemic in Great Britain, “austerity celebrity” emphasizes stoicism and thriftiness in the face of disaster, playing on British colonialism and a kind of influencer appeal. With new barriers, such as a lack of childcare and additional cleaning responsibilities at home, and less space, neoliberal logics compel digital vintage economy workers to maintain or even increase their productivity while selling from home.

While the essays in this Crosscurrents section focus on indie platform sellers within the United States, the platform economy is connected to broader trends of globalization and austerity, with new and remediated forms of precarity connected to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, including microwork, the intensification and speeding up of knowledge work, the deterioration of working conditions, and the effects of global supply chains and automation on workplaces (Dyer-Witheford, 2015; Huws, 2014; Irani, 2015; Roberts, 2019). Lukács (2020) documents labor performed behind the scenes in Japan’s digital economy, where young women turn to digital platforms for DIY careers. Such work, including the production of cuteness, girlie photographs, and the creation of seemingly effortless lighthearted images, is connected to women’s invisible and unremunerated domestic and reproductive labor. In Japan as elsewhere, digital forms of labor, from mommy blogging to Amazon Mechanical Turk piecework tasks, are performed in the home amid a variety of other duties (Dubal, 2020; Jarrett, 2014). The overlap of domestic and employment-based duties are increasingly interconnected during the pandemic, when daycares and schools are closed and shop owners and clerks are left with little option but to perform most of their work from home.

Beyond the digital vintage economy, even supposedly traditional retail jobs are being reconfigured by changing expectations and norms associated with platform labor. Journalist Andy Newman profiled an Old Navy manager and found she used a total of seven company apps on her company phone to do her job. While on the sales floor, the manager was able to virtually check if an item was available in the storeroom, she received notifications about sales targets for that hour, and she helped a customer order something online that wasn’t available on site. Newman (2019) says, “This is the job of a retail clothing worker at the end of 2019: dashing back and forth between stockroom and fitting room and sales floor, online and in-store, juggling the hats of cashier and cheerleader and personal shopper and visual merchandiser and database manager.” At checkout, when a customer is solicited to sign up for an Old Navy credit card and declines, Newman shows the company still wins the data capture game: The customer agrees to an email receipt, thereby inviting Old Navy into future email communications and promotions. It is clear that retail’s experimentation with platform technology and e-commerce has multiplied the duties workers are expected to perform, and collapsed multiple jobs into one, rather than the techno-utopian dream of helping free up time and energy for workers. Platformization makes the work and worker all the more precarious, and the pandemic has exacerbated these trends. For example, Squeezebox Books and Music in Evanston, Illinois had a modest online presence before the pandemic, primarily an Instagram account where they posted new arrivals several times a week. During the Summer of 2020, Squeezebox’s owner reported that he and the store’s skeleton crew were monitoring 10 distinct channels of communication. As a result, they found themselves posting to Instagram less often, not because their procurement of inventory had slowed, but because of the dispersed demands of keeping up with the store’s array of channels and platforms (Tim Peterson, personal communication, 2020). One of our concerns in this themed section, now that stores are reopening, is noting how increased demands for an online presence and availability will remain as expected features of vintage retail.

Within the context of the digital vintage economy, platform labor, and algorithmically organized, recommendation-based content providers is changing the nature of selling online. What we refer to as “listing labor” entails animating online inventory with an aura of authenticity, through lively descriptions and photos (Kneese and Palm, 2020), which also means regularly producing engaging content and keeping potential customers invested through posts. Both objects for sale and shop personnel must project a feeling of authenticity, employing influencer-like tactics of social media broadcasting and personal branding to appeal to buyers. At the same time, many aspects of day-to-day work involve drudgery: mundane retail-related tasks like sorting, cleaning, and repairing merchandise, and maintaining records of transactions and expenses. Through ethnographic, historically oriented investigations of the selling of vintage clothing, vinyl records, and homemade or craft goods on e-commerce sites and the use of social media platforms to both promote and increasingly sell vintage items – we contextualize global platform capitalism by documenting how “platform labor” is intensifying the historical inequalities of labor practices organized by race, gender, age, class, and geography (Grohmann and Qiu, 2020; van Doorn, 2017).

Crucially, while retail boutiques within the digital vintage economy may be locally situated, their platformization lends them a global reach. Through social media posts and online storefronts, small branded merchants can entice potential buyers all over the world. The most successful locally based shops, at the same time that they may lean into the cachet afforded by their hip locations in urban centers, are able to translate their coolness into international sales. Etsy, Discogs, and Instagram are international platforms, and payment systems like Venmo and PayPal are part of global platform infrastructures, facilitating sales across borders and oceans. Despite their association with American West Coast technoculture, such companies are in fact transnational. The digital vintage economy, no matter how much it relies on nostalgia for older modes of production and an ethical aura of “keeping it local,” depends on contemporary, globalized platforms. This also complicates the temporality and logistics of selling online: now merchants must pack and ship items for international transit, paying exorbitant shipping rates, and sometimes eating the cost if customers are displeased with the items they receive. Small shop owners must learn to navigate customs declarations, import taxes, and shipping practices for a number of countries, creating more layers of labor than they would need to sell to a local person who visited the shop. Far from being a “friction-free” system (see Manzerolle and Daubs, 2021), the “on-demand” nature of indie platform sales cannot fall back on direct sales through Instagram, which is only equipped for shops with existing Shopify accounts and standard inventory practices.

Second hand markets, like other aspects of e-commerce, interface with other global supply chains. Fast fashion garments flood markets in the Global North and have afterlives as second hand threads in the Global South, often ultimately ending up as landfill. Etsy advertises many “handmade” goods that are in theory differentiated from mass produced Made in China merchandise. Craft is seen in opposition to such global supply chains and also takes on a performativity of whiteness. So much so that crafters of color may refrain from displaying their own hands in their Etsy stores, so as not to upset white patrons (Close, 2018). Furthermore, the craft imaginary that conjures artisanal modes of production is still not separate from global supply chains; many of the parts and materials required to make handmade or otherwise authentic items are produced in factories in the Global South; vinyl records are also mass produced commodities, even if some are celebrated for their rarity (Wark, 2013). Amid Covid-19, garment workers in the Global South are fighting back against large-scale corporate brands that are now refusing to pay for their labor after the fact, employing hashtags as part of the #PayUp campaign (Bobb, 2020). The digital vintage economy is just as much a site of worker oppression and resistance as other sectors of platform capitalism. As ethnographers of the digital vintage economy and platform labor more broadly, this collection of essays investigates how these tensions between local and global, or handmade and mass manufactured, play out, particularly in a moment of global crisis. With the pandemic, international flights, deliveries, and supply chains have been heavily disrupted. For locally situated merchants who cannot attract in-person customers, how do they navigate reaching a globally dispersed audience and, on a practical level, how do they facilitate the sales and shipping of items to customers around the world?

Our themed section and the individual essays therein situate platformization in mundane retail labor and material culture. If the digital vintage economy and its requisite listing labor is a site of intensification of other platformization processes related to cultural production (Nieborg and Poell, 2018; van Doorn, 2017), then Covid-19 is a point of still further intensification. The transformation from brick-and-mortar to digital storefront has implications for vintage, resale, and retail markets and labor conditions more broadly. It’s not just only megacorporations like Amazon that exploit workers: early on in the pandemic, some luxury fashion retail companies, such as RealReal in New Jersey, also compelled authenticators, photographers, and packers to work in their warehouses under unsafe conditions (Testa, 2020).

Our long-term research on the relationship between platformization and second-hand and craft economies can contextualize how retailers, store clerks, and individual entrepreneurs are responding to the crisis. As we describe in our essays, some local shops have switched to curbside pickup and local delivery. Others have honed their social media marketing strategies and found new ways of drawing in customers near and far by launching crowdfunding campaigns and selling new services all while adopting influencer and microcelebrity strategies documented by feminist theorists including Duffy (2017), Abidin (2016), and Marwick (2013). Such measures yield uneven and inequitable results. Store owners who were not accustomed to selling online will now be even further left behind while even the savviest of online entrepreneurs may find their business depleted and their relationships with selling platforms changed. What does the current crisis tell us about processes – including the relationship between platformization, gentrification, and increased wealth inequality – that were already in place?

The three essays of this Crosscurrents section address the remediation of “home” during the pandemic – as a work space while sheltering in place, and also how home is invoked in ethical appeals to shop locally, which took on a new urgency during the pandemic. Jennifer Ayres writes about how vintage entrepreneurs are adjusting to the increased competition and precarity during Covid-19. Tamara Kneese focuses on indie digital storefronts in Oakland, California, considering how Oakland history and geography inform shop owners’ responses to shelter-in-place. Michael Palm writes about how record shops are increasingly turning to digital platforms for sales, and he describes how Instagram specifically has been transformed into a point of sale for used records. The rise of Amazon warehouse labor and the gig economy have received a fair amount of journalistic and scholarly attention, along with the rise of social media-based influencer cultures and the platformization of the culture industries. As these essays demonstrate, platform labor is increasingly intertwined with basically any form of work. Platformization is changing the cultures and infrastructures of retail work, and here we examine material culture – the selling of physical goods, authenticity, and lifestyle politics – as it intersects with digital platforms. As Gandini (2021) laments, the term “digital labor” has become almost meaningless if it is not tied to specific platforms and situated cultures. With these essays, we showcase the specificity of digital labor in the context of vintage culture.