THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE 299
in new residential areas. In addition to adopting modern cultural leitmo-
tifs from the West, economic planners hoped to establish a permanent
assortment of goods in order to be better able to manage the range of
products available. Not surprisingly, however, such plans often ran into
diffi culties. Quite often, there was not a suffi cient selection of goods avail-
able, for example, nor was it easy to put the necessary infrastructure of
cash registers, shelving, and, above all, proper packaging into place. Only
74 percent of the product assortment consisted of packaged goods in
1966; correspondingly, 10 percent of retail workers had packing jobs in
the same year. When it came to the packaging of products, this delayed
implementation of rationalization was quite typical of the dependence
on what could be produced (in this case, the amount of paper) within
the confi nes of the planned economy.^26 Simultaneously, however, it be-
came quite apparent that policy had given priority to the rationalization
of the retail sector. Since the focus was not intended to be on consum-
ers, the stores themselves as well as their product displays were purely
functional.^27
The important role of the consumer was already a focal point in West
Germany in the 1970s, where it clearly infl uenced advertising and mar-
keting strategies. From the mid-1960s into the second half of the 1970s,
Western market research was dominated by the hypothesis that consum-
ers communicate social diff erences through consumption. The idea was
that there was no uniform market as a whole that included every con-
sumer, but rather market segments that were primarily divided along the
lines of region, town size, age, gender, income, profession, educational
background, social status, and lifestyle. The marketing strategies of man-
ufacturers were pushed in a new direction, spurred on by several parallel
processes at the beginning of the 1970s. First, market saturation was
on the rise and the economic crises in 1967/68 and 1973/74 brought a
slump in sales, both of which were further exacerbated by pessimistic
analyses such as the study titled The Limits to Growth commissioned by
the Club of Rome.^28 At the same time, however, consumers themselves
began to set new priorities. The goal was no longer to show that social
diff erences had been eroded, but rather to express (following the the-
ory of Pierre Bourdieu) the “fi ne lines” between diff erent social groups
through individual cultures of consumption, which led to homogenizing
patterns within these groups.^29 Simultaneously, the critique of consump-
tion spread as a general criticism of society under the banner of “waste-
fulness” (Verschwendung), resulting in the establishment of a “leftist” and
later “alternative” form of consumption that fi rmly denied an interest in
profi t.^30 Lastly, a decidedly generation-specifi c type of consumption could
be detected in young people as early as the 1960s.^31