Introduction

The transformation of global retail value chains since the 1990s has been associated with significant changes in how people shop and goods are sourced. Women constitute the majority of retail customers purchasing many goods critical to household and family welfare. Gender norms have long shaped women's primary role as in the home, including the unpaid production of food and clothing for household consumption. However, as more and more women have entered the labour force, they have combined paid work with household and caring roles. Global retailers have facilitated these changes by expanding the availability of a wide array of commercially produced consumer goods at affordable prices. These include processed foods, ready-made garments and other household convenience items. Trends that first developed in North America and Europe have subsequently been replicated in middle- and lower-income countries.

Underpinning these changes has been a revolution in the operations of global retailers, with increasing dominance by a smaller number of companies. They monitor and help shape changing consumer trends through the application of information technology (IT) and marketing. They control and coordinate global value chains from the point of production through distribution to final consumers, facilitating supply of a vast range of goods cheaply on a just-in-time (JIT) basis. This has involved a transformation in global sourcing, changing how goods are produced, procured and distributed globally. Global sourcing has expanded production of manufactured and food products within many developing countries. This has generated a large feminized labour force to facilitate low-cost commercial production of consumer goods retailed. Trends in the Global North are increasingly replicated in the Global South.

This chapter provides an overview of changing gender patterns of work as well as dynamics of global retail value chains in the post-World War II period. It examines how global retail expansion has adapted to and helped shape changing gender patterns of work. It explores the retail revolution and global sourcing that underpins the provision of affordable commercially produced goods. Finally, it examines the commercial mantra of cost, quality and speed of delivery as key requirements of supply and purchasing practices of global retailers. This informs an examination in the next chapter of the implications for the feminization and fragmentation of work in production of consumer goods and gender profile of work across retail value chains.