The Rise and Uneasy Decline of the Impersonal Price

This chapter deals with a market arrangement at a moment of uncertainty and concern around its continued existence. This arrangement is what I call the impersonal price, or a system of impersonal retail prices, elsewhere also referred to as a system of fixed prices. These phrases describe markets where prices are visible, homogeneous across customers, and non-negotiable. As the chapter shows, impersonal retail prices did not just happen. They are the product of complex interactions between legal regulation, material-technical arrangements, and economic theories, as mobilized in different historical contexts to different socio-political and economic ends.