Board games have been teaching us how to shop for more than a century

The origins of Park and Shop are a reminder that board games could be both prescriptive and descriptive. Developed by newspaper artist Campe B. Euwer and heavily promoted by the paper's owner, Donald Miller, Park and Shop was actually a clever attempt to promote a new parking system developed by merchants in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Fearful that their customers would abandon Allentown's downtown shopping district in favor of new and convenient strip-malls and stores at the edge of town, 48 merchants banded together in 1947 to create Park & Shop, Inc. By 1949 their corporation had purchased 10 public parking lots, and customers who shopped at participating stores were rewarded with four hours of free parking. Park and Shop drove home the merchants' message that shopping downtown could still be both fast and fun.

 

Few technologies have had as much of an impact on Americans' consumptive habits as credit cards. First introduced in the 1950s, credit card usage exploded in the 1980s, and the challenge of shopping with credit became a new dynamic for board games to explore. In Bargain Hunter, released in 1981 by Milton Bradley, players raced to furnish their new apartments with necessary items (which, interestingly, included not one but two pets).

In The Good Old Game of Corner Grocery, players took on the role of customers at a rural general store, competing with their neighbors to purchase as many items as they could before running out of money. Image © The Strong.

Though it came out only a decade later, The Game of Playing Department Store (created by McLoughlin Bros., Inc.) heralded a vastly different style of shopping, one that was taking hold in American cities. Instead of a simple general store, players were transported to a vast downtown department store modeled after one of the many "palaces of consumption" that were built in urban centers across the country in the late 1800s. While the overall goal of the game stayed the same (spend money wisely in order to collect more goods than your opponents), players now had a cornucopia of luxury products to choose from, all neatly divided into different departments like "drygoods" and "hosiery." Fresh seafood, ready-to-wear clothes, and toys (including board games!) were just a few of the items that players could choose between as they wandered through the