Rachel Webster
speaker
380 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 16 Jul
Rachel Webster’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Susan Strasser studied three intersecting topics in her tenure as an American history professor, housework, the mass market, and trash. And she explained how these topics, while inextricably linked, are not treated as such.
Susan's understanding of all things Ikea made her the perfect advisor for our queries about all of us current, former, and future Maxinistas. And she explained that we were not, as Lady Gaga says... Rather, we became consumers over the course of the last 150 years.
And from 1880 to the 1920s, America transformed from people who make things to people who buy things, and eventually to people who buy things on sale.
Nor would she want to because there was no... Cute. Colorful. Fun. Appealing. Packaging.
Oh my god, when I think of a store like this, I picture the General Store from Anne of Green Gables. You know that one scene where... I've never seen Anne of Green Gables. What?
Okay, whatever. All right, that's a tragedy. All right, so I guess I'll have to paint a picture for you. Anne of Green Gables is set in the 1880s. Oh, like when Susan said all this stuff was starting to happen. Yeah. So everyone just buys all their stuff from the clerk at the general store. Okay. Okay, so Anne is an orphan. Okay, like little orphan Annie?
Just like little orphan Annie, except she's a bit older. But like little orphan Annie, she finds an adoptive guardian who has never had a child before and doesn't really know how to deal with what to dress her in. Okay. So Matthew, that's Anne's adoptive guardian. Okay. He wants to buy her a dress, but he's never done that before and he's really nervous. So he totally chokes.
And pretends that he's at the store to buy a garden rake.
But it's the dead of winter, so the clerk has to go all the way to the attic and see if she can find a rake. Because they only have one kind of rake? And they only keep them in stock during the summer? Exactly. Got it. And after she finds the one rake, Matthew's just standing there, still shaking in his one pair of boots. So he says that he might want to look at some hayseed. I might want to, uh...
Some sugar. He lands on sugar because people use sugar all year round.
But he has to make a choice because there's actually two kinds of sugar. Oh, domino and sugar in the raw?
White and brown. Oh, duh. And the sugar was in these, like, big bins with handwritten signs that said just, like, white sugar and brown sugar. Aw, that's so sweet. It's literally sweet. How much would you like? Ugh. Would 20 pounds be enough? So Matthew now has a garden rake in December, a 20-pound bag of brown sugar that he has to take home on horseback, and no dress for Anne. Oh, God, Matthew.
I know. So after looking around to make sure no one's listening, he whispers to the clerk.
Sleeves. Needs to buy a dress with puffed sleeves. So she goes to the window of the store and gets him the one and only dress that they have.
Listen, Anne has never worn anything but homemade clothes. She is so overwhelmed with this gesture, she wears her puffed sleeves straight into the barn to thank Matthew. Oh, my God.
It's more exquisite than any dress I could ever imagine. And Anne's whole thing is that her imagination is what saved her from a life of misery. So this is like a really big deal. Yeah, I kind of... Puff sleeves. She's prone to exaggeration, but she's also completely earnest. Okay, so this is the best part. He places a delicate kiss on Anne's head because he doesn't want to get her a sturdy kiss.
But Anne won't have this. Nothing is more important than Matthew, even her puffed sleeves. So she throws her arms around him. No! Even though he's in the dirty barn figuring out where to store 20 pounds of sugar. Oh, my God!
So to me, Anna's like the perfect example of how people responded to all these non-homemade items that suddenly started to show up all around them.
But even though the general store where Matthew bought Anne's dress had more stuff than people had generally seen around that point, it still didn't have anything that came close to the counter-appeal of a TJ Maxx until the invention of branding.
Hey. I need some soap, so I'm going to head down to the general store to see if they can cut me off a hunk of soap from the soap block. Oh, hang on a second.
Showing 61–80 of 380 · page 4 of 19
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