Supermarket and consumer education in Italy. History of an educational space

Abstract

In the 1950s, the birth of the first Italian supermarkets started an undoubted social and anthropological revolution in the country; a revolution that has had a significant impact on the lifestyles and eating patterns of Italians, and consequently on their identities, thus assuming an implicitly educational character. In supermarkets Italians took their first steps in the new world of consumption, by learning to consume. In the 1980s, with the spread of large-scale distribution and the advent of mass consumption, COOP, a wellknown cooperative company, developed this educational value of supermarkets, putting it at the heart of a much more clearly articulated education project on conscious consumption (ECC) in a close partnership with schools that is still active today.