¹ ‘Będzie Następna Billa’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 23 Feb. 1991. On grocery lines during communism, see Małgorzata Mazurek, Społeczeństwo kolejki: O doświadczeniach niedoboru 1945–1989 (Warsaw: TRIO, 2010).

² John Dawson and Masao Mukoyama, eds., Global Strategies in Retailing: Asian and European Experiences (London: Routledge, 2013), 12.

³ Application for establishing a company with foreign capital, 11 June 1990, Archiwum Akt Nowych Warsaw (AAN), Agencja do Spraw Inwestycji Zagranicznych (ASIZ), BI–44 1868/1, 2.

⁴ ‘Będzie Następna Billa’.

⁵ Cited in Dawson and Mukoyama, Global Strategies in Retailing, 12.

⁶ De Grazia illuminates supermarkets as ‘major agents of neoliberal capitalism’ as they made their way around the world. Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth–Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 398.

⁷ On the establishment of neoliberal hegemony in Europe, see Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

⁸ On communist-era consumer culture, see Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). On the ascendance of the supermarket model in the United States, see Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On self-service supermarkets in Western Europe, see Lydia Langer and Ralph Jessen, eds., Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945 (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing 2012).

⁹ On consumption after communism, see Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Melissa L. Caldwell and Marion Nestle, eds., Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Yuson Jung, Balkan Blues: Consumer Politics after State Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); Caroline Humphrey and Ruth Mandel, eds., Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002); and Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000). On continuities, see Krisztina Fehérváry, Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

¹⁰ See Patrick Hyder Patterson, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011) and ‘Making Markets Marxist? The East European Grocery Store from Rationing to Rationality to Rationalizations’, in Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, eds., Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 196–216; and David Crowley, ‘Warsaw's Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw’, in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2000), 25–47. For a recent historical work that transcends the 1989 divide, see Jill Massino, Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).

¹¹ Patterson, ‘Making Markets Marxist?’, 197.

¹² Ngai-Ling Sum, ‘Wal-Martization and CSR-ization in Developing Countries’, in Peter Utting and Jose Carlos Marques, eds., Corporate Social Responsibility and Regulatory Governance: Towards Inclusive Development? (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 50–76.

¹³ Neil Wrigley, Neil M. Coe and Andrew Currah, ‘Globalizing Retail: Conceptualizing the Distribution-Based Transnational Corporation (TNC)’, Progress in Human Geography 29, 4 (2005), 438.

¹⁴ Like the historiography of post-communism more generally, historical research on transnational supermarkets after 1989/1991 tends to relegate the subject to concluding chapters. On historicising post-communism, see Nodia, Ghia, ‘“Chasing the Meaning of Post-Communism”: A Transitional Phenomenon or Something to Stay?’, Contemporary European History 9, 2 (2000), 269–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Wrigley, Coe and Currah, ‘Globalizing Retail’.

¹⁶ Deutsch, Tracey, ‘Exploring New Insights into Retail History’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing 2, 1 (2010), 130–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Mike Sibley and Gina Nadas, ‘Multinational Corporations and the Competition for Media Influence in Developing Countries’, Business and Society Review 111, 1 (2006), 59–60. See also Alfredo Jimenez, Jonas Holmqvist and Diego Jimenez, ‘Cross-Border Communication and Private Participation Projects: The Role of Genealogical Language Distance’, Management International Review 59, 6 (2019), 1009–33 and Douglas Dow, Ilya R.P. Cuypers and Gokhan Ertug, ‘The Effects of within-Country Linguistic and Religious Diversity on Foreign Acquisitions’, Journal of International Business Studies 47, 3 (2016), 319–46.

¹⁸ On the press in the Solidarity movement, see Doucette, Siobhan, ‘Censoring Solidarity: Freedom of Speech and its Denial in Poland, 1980–1981’, Contemporary European History, 29, 3 (2020), 325–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the central role which women played in the publication of Tygodnik Mazowsze, and their subsequent obscurement after 1989, see Shana Penn, Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

¹⁹ Kochanowicz, Jacek, ‘Private Suffering, Public Benefit: Market Rhetoric in Poland, 1989–1993’, Eastern European Politics and Societies 28, 1 (2014), 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Krysztof Dzięciołowski, ‘Is There a Chance for Non-Partisan Media in Poland?’, Reuters Institute Fellowship Paper (2017), 20.

²¹ AM Kalinovsky has argued for greater consideration of ‘trust as a category of analysis’ in studies of 1989 and its aftermath. Kalinovsky, AM, ‘New Histories of the End of the Cold War and the Late Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History 27, 1 (2018), 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Following a series of law-permitting joint ventures, the late 1980s and 1990s saw a dramatic increase in the flow of foreign capital into Poland. A year before BILLA applied for legal status as a joint venture, Wyborcza reported on the staggering number of permits the Foreign Investment Agency granted in its first six months of operation: 203 permits totalling US$220 million in investments. Krystyna Naszkowska, ‘WIELKI KAPITAŁ Podobno Już Napływa…’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 30 June 1989, 6. By June 1990, over 1,000 such ventures were operational, doing business in Poland only a year after the conclusion of the Round Table Agreement and the formal beginning of post-communist reforms in Poland.

²³ Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner, ‘Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations’, SAIS Review of International Affairs 29, 1 (2009), 49, 58.

²⁴ Ibid., 58.

²⁵ Kim Humphery, Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

²⁶ Guy, Clifford M., ‘Controlling New Retail Spaces: The Impress of Planning Policies in Western Europe’, Urban Studies 35, 5–6 (1998), 954CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ John A. Dawson and John S. Henley, ‘Changes in the Structure of Grocery Retailing in Poland after 1989’, in Ajay K. Manrai and H. Lee Meadow, eds., Global Perspectives in Marketing for the 21st Century (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 279–82.

²⁸ ‘Będzie Następna Billa’.

²⁹ ‘Supermarket w zajezdni’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 7 Sept. 1992.

³⁰ ‘Supermarket w zajezdni’. Stołeczna's commentary on the installation of a supermarket in the Chełmska bus depot also included some consideration of the implications of privatisation for workers employed by the public transit authority in Warsaw. Stołeczna interviewed the transit authority director, who told the paper that ‘apart from paying the rent, BILLA will donate around several hundred million zlotys to a social fund for the [transit authority] work crew’. This served to portray BILLA's role as investor as a quasi-philanthropic one, seemingly contributing not only to the improvement of the consumer environment but that of labour as well.

³¹ ‘Ostrobramska Nie Dla Ludzi’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 23 Sept. 1991, 2.

³² Peck, Theodore and Brenner, ‘Neoliberal Urbanism’, 60.

³³ Richard W. Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), xiv.

³⁴ Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe, Reading Retail: A Geographical Perspective on Retailing and Consumption Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

³⁵ Deener, Andrew, ‘The Origins of the Food Desert: Urban Inequality as Infrastructural Exclusion’, Social Forces: A Scientific Medium of Social Study and Interpretation 95, 3 (2017), 1285–1309Google Scholar.

³⁶ Nagy, Erika, ‘Winners and Losers in the Transformation of City Centre Retailing in East Central Europe’, European Urban and Regional Studies 8, 4 (2001), 346CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ Bedore, Melanie, ‘Food Desertification: Situating Choice and Class Relations within an Urban Political Economy of Declining Food Access’, Studies in Social Justice 8, 2 (2014), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ ‘Billa W Porywach Droższa’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 23 Oct. 1991.

³⁹ ‘Pierwszy Dzień Billi’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 10 Oct. 1992.

⁴⁰ As Stołeczna wrote in 1993, ‘the meat-buying housewife [pani domu] can also buy Pamiętnik Anastazji P.’, the controversial tell-all alleging relationships between the author, the Polish journalist and writer Marzena Domaros (alias Anastazja Potocka) and various political figures published in 1992, alongside more mundane reading such as cookbooks and, for children, fairy tales and children's histories. ‘Zakupy Na Cały Tydzień’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 6 Jan. 1993. Simultaneously invoking the growing number of women who left the waged labour sector after 1989 for the purportedly ‘housewife's pursuits’ of shopping, cooking and childcare and one of the foremost, and deeply gendered, morality scandals of the early 1990s, Stołeczna embedded BILLA's striking range of goods as part of much broader sociocultural changes in this period.

⁴¹ Janina Blikowska and Magda Kłodecka, ‘Supermarket – Sklep Niezwykły’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 5–6 Nov. 1994.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Lalita A. Manrai, Ajay K. Manrai and Dana N. Lascu, ‘Retailing in the Transition Economies of Poland and Romania: A Comparative Analysis’, Journal of Marketing Channels 19, 4 (2012), 278.

⁴⁴ Marta Borowska-Stefańska, Michał Kowalski and Szymon Wiśniewski, ‘Changes in Urban Transport Behaviours and Spatial Mobility Resulting from the Introduction of Statutory Sunday Retail Restrictions’, Moravian Geographical Reports 28, 1 (2020), 29.

⁴⁵ ‘Wieczorne i Nocne Zakupy’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 24 Jan. 1992.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ ‘Traditional’ retail models, both in the Bloc and in the West prior to the ascendance of supermarkets, encouraged familiarity, given that these shops were embedded in neighbourhoods where shoppers, primarily women, often formed relationships with sales clerks, talked with their neighbours and viewed retail spaces as ‘a locus for exchange of information and advice’. Guy, ‘Controlling New Retail Space’, 954. As Małgorzata Mazurek argues, the creativity and resourcefulness demanded of consumers during periods of acute material shortage likewise ‘had a highly social character rather than an atomizing one’. Mazurek, ‘Keeping It Close to Home: Resourcefulness and Scarcity in Late Socialist and Postsocialist Poland’, in Bren and Neuburger, Communism Unwrapped, 311.

⁴⁸ Application for establishing a company with foreign capital, 11 June 1990, Archiwum Akt Nowych Warsaw (AAN), Agencja do Spraw Inwestycji Zagranicznych (ASIZ), BI–44 1868/1, 2.

⁴⁹ Pre-implementation study of a project of a company with foreign capital, June 1990, Archiwum Akt Nowych Warsaw (AAN), Agencja do Spraw Inwestycji Zagranicznych (ASIZ), BI–44 1868/1, 65–68.

⁵⁰ Although barcodes had existed since the early 1950s, computerisation really took hold in Western supermarkets beginning in the 1970s, complementing the already efficiency-driven premise of the modern standardised supermarket. Annika Menke argues that, with regard to the introduction of electronic scanners to the retail sector more generally, ‘food retailing proved to be a pioneer’. Annika Menke, ‘The Barcode Revolution in German Food Retailing’, in Langer and Jessen, eds., Transformations of Retailing in Europe after 1945, 220.

⁵¹ Jones, Peter, ‘The Spread of Article Numbering and Retail Scanning in Europe’, The Service Industries Journal 5, 3 (1985), 275CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Pre-implementation study of a project of a company with foreign capital, June 1990, Archiwum Akt Nowych Warsaw (AAN), Agencja do Spraw Inwestycji Zagranicznych (ASIZ), BI–44 1868/1, 65–8.

⁵³ Carroll Pursell, Technology in Postwar America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 84.

⁵⁴ ‘Tanie Lady’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 12 Dec. 1990, 1.

⁵⁵ Michael Palm, Technologies of Consumer Labor: A History of Self-Service (New York: Routledge, 2017), 218.

⁵⁶ ‘Będzie Następna Billa’.

⁵⁷ Amy J. Cohen and Jason Jackson, ‘Governing through Markets: Multinational Firms in the Bazaar Economy’, Regulation & Governance, (2020): 1–18, 13. See also Elizabeth C. Dunn, ‘Trojan Pig: Paradoxes of Food Safety Regulation’, Environment & Planning 35, 8 (2003), 1493–1511.

⁵⁸ ‘Zakupy na cały tydzień’.

⁵⁹ ‘Pierwszy Dzień Billi’.

⁶⁰ Edward J. O'Boyle, ‘Work Habits and Customer Service in Post-Communist Poland: Some First–Hand Observations’, International Journal of Social Economics 20, 1 (1993), 20.

⁶¹ ‘Nie Wiedzą, Co Sprzedają’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 5–6 Sept. 1992, 14.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ ‘Nie wie, co pisze?’ Gazeta Stołeczna, 12–13 Sept. 1992, 8.

⁶⁴ ‘Tajna Billa’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 3 Nov. 1993, 3.

⁶⁵ ‘Tajna Billa’. The numbers themselves reflect the massive inflation of Polish currency in the early 1990s.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Annika Menke has similarly argued that the EAN ‘translated the material world of goods into characters in a digital communication system’, rationalising but also depersonalising the retail experience. Menke, ‘The Barcode Revolution in German Food Retailing’, 220.

⁶⁸ Jerzy Kochanowski, Tylnymi drzwiami. Czarny rynek w Polsce 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Virtualo, 2015).

⁶⁹ Sara González and Paul Waley, ‘Traditional Retail Markets: The New Gentrification Frontier?’, Antipode 45, 4 (2013), 965–83.

⁷⁰ Andrea Morawetz, ‘A Backward Republic or “Brave New Austria”? Market and Motivation Research in Dichter's Home Country after the Second World War’, in Stefan Schwarzkopf, ed., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 191.

⁷¹ S. Grabner-Kräuter and A. Schwarz-Musch, ‘Ja! Natürlich: A Success Story’, in Martin Charter and Michael Jay Polonsky, eds., Greener Marketing: A Global Perspective on Greening Marketing Practice (Austin: Greenleaf Publishers, 1999), 285.

⁷² John Fernie, Suzanne Fernie and Christopher Moore, eds., Principles of Retailing (London: Routledge, 2015).

⁷³ See De Grazia, Irresistible Empire.

⁷⁴ Mazurek, ‘Keeping it Close to Home’, 313.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 310.

⁷⁶ Padraic Kenney, The Burdens of Freedom: Eastern Europe since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2006), 17.

⁷⁷ ‘Billa w Porywach Droższa’.

⁷⁸ Ibid.

⁷⁹ Grzegorz Karasiewicz and Jan Nowak, ‘Looking Back at the 20 Years of Retailing Change in Poland’, The International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research 20, 1 (2010), 110.

⁸⁰ ‘Zakupy Na Cały Tydzień’.

⁸¹ Kathryn James, The Rise of the Value-Added Tax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

⁸² Nico Pestel and Eric Sommer, ‘Shifting Taxes from Labor to Consumption: More Employment and More Inequality?’, Review of Income and Wealth 63, 3 (2017), 542–63.

⁸³ McClintock, Brent, ‘Whatever Happened to New Zealand? The Great Capitalist Restoration Reconsidered’, Journal of Economic Issues 32, 2 (1998), 500CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁴ ‘Zmiany Cen Nieznaczne’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 7 July 1993.

⁸⁵ ‘Kupcy Do Kupy!’, Gazeta Stołeczna, 15 Nov. 1993.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ Dries, Reardon and Swinnen, ‘The Rapid Rise of Supermarkets in Central and Eastern Europe’, 536.