Consuming the Common Market: Self-Service Food Commerce and European Integration in Franco’s Spain, 1956–66

This paper examines the political and cultural negotiations that accompanied the rapid spread of the supermarket in mid-century Spain. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Spain’s supermarkets grew from a single store, opened in 1957 by the Franco regime’s Commissary-General for Supply and Transport (CAT), into myriad store chains operating thousands of locations, including the multinational SPAR and VéGé grocery cooperatives.

Notwithstanding its speed, this was a contentious process that reveals deep divides and misgivings between Spain’s grocery trade professionals, officials, and consumers. Pressure from grocers scuttled an early plan for a state-run national network of 400 supermarkets that they claimed threatened private enterprise. Acting through a self-published women’s magazine, AMA, the CAT meanwhile labored to convince skeptical housewives to trust the supermarket’s new frozen and prepackaged products, and to support a series of CAT agricultural export drives by following the agency’s weekly shopping directives – measures by which the agency meant to increase Spain’s prestige and integration into a European Common Market in which they believed the nation’s future prosperity lay. Meanwhile, Spain’s new foreign grocery chains, most especially SPAR, similarly worked to familiarize hesitant shoppers with disconcertingly foreign-branded products.

Yet, despite these struggles, the supermarket’s arrival heralded significant sociopolitical changes for Franco’s Spain. Charged with contributing to Spanish prestige abroad by raising family nutritional levels to a perceived international standard, homemakers found their consumer choices imbued with new importance as nurturers of the Spanish body politic. And, in voicing hopes that the supermarket would produce a national rise to a foreign-coded modernity, Spanish champions of the supermarket drove a shift in discourse on Spanish national identity away from early Francoist national exceptionalism and toward a Europeanizing emphasis on international ties. This ultimately contributed socially and culturally for Spain’s political transition to democracy of the late 1970s.