Intolerant Chic: The new “white people” are bigoted, but not the way you think—or they’ll admit...

[Gutenberg]

Yes, people shopped at Sears, but they also shopped at Monkey Ward and Penney's and Woodies and Garfinckel's and Macy's and Hutzlers and on and on and on. There are far fewer choices now than there were then.

And people bought Bing Crosby records and they also bought Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney and the Andrews Sisters and on and on and on.

You make it sound as if Sears was the only store making sales and Bing was the only crooner selling records. Not so at all.

Radio stations were more diverse in those days too. Even with payola, the locals didn't have a corporate playlist imposed on them, and the DJs were local instead of national.

guitarist wrote:
I don't disagree. But the explosion of choices in consumer culture and brand association and micro-consumer identity and all that is a lot more pervasive and fragmented than it was back then. The industrialized consumer age didn't really develop until after WW2. Before that, there was a Sears & Roebuck catalogue, and the radio. Before portable transistor radios and Elvis combined to popularize a division between teen music and adult music, there weren't many distinguishable differences between what different generations listened to. Bing Crosby sold hit records for nearly thirty years.

Which isn't to say there weren't a lot of sub-genres and subcultures flourishing below the radar of white mainstream pop culture. But it's fair to say there was, during the cold-war age of conformity, much more of a homogenous mass media pop culture than there is now. The website appears to make fun of how some people define themselves increasingly by their brand choices in a self-aware, self-mocking, ironic way.