Just as Victor Gruen and A. Alfred Taubman’s shopping malls produced the American suburban shopper (Gladwell 2004, the Galleria produced Frank Zappa’s Valley Girl (Zappa 1995/1982), and blue-light specials produced the Kmart shopper, Wal-Mart’s strategy of low prices has brought into being the “Big Middle” segment (Connolly 2004). Some, including Wal-Mart’s own strategists, erroneously predicted a premature slowdown in Wal-Mart’s growth (The Economist 2004; Moore 1993), but the “Wheel of Retailing” (Hollander 1960) has yet to turn against the company’s low-price strategy, and dramatic growth continues. Naturally, Wal-Mart and its many suppliers want to know how long this growth can be sustained and therefore pose tactical questions: How can we stimulate Big Middle consumers to spend? What are their buying triggers? These questions interest all who serve not only the Big Middle but other shopping segments as well.

Researchers have proposed several kinds of answers. In this editorial, I suggest that emerging directions of interest to retail researchers should be based more generally on consumer culture theory (CCT; Arnould and Thompson 2005). By capturing the motivating social and cultural contexts of retail patronage and purchase behaviors and the myriad factors beyond the immediate retail purchase decision and buying context that influence consumer behaviors, CCT complements the primary focus of behavioral decision theory and social cognition research on the purchase context (see Blattberg, Briesch, and Fox 1995; Tellis and Zuyfryden 1995; Uncles, Ehrenberg, and Hammond 1995).

For example, CCT highlights that people engage in shopping to realize a variety of projects[i] for which they deploy their own economic, social, and ideological resources (Arnould and Price 2000). As an illustration, Haytko and Baker (2004) demonstrate how American teenaged girls use mall shopping primarily to pursue conventional social projects. Most trips include companions, and the companion choice structures the trip trajectory and specific goals. The experience of bonding with employees and other shopper friends, as well as interacting with peer strangers (i.e., playful communing and socializing; Holt 1995), leads to an accrual of social resources, a key outcome. For many trips, purchase is secondary. Fischer and Arnold (1990) show that women who spend more time accounting and evaluating their purchases (Holt 1995) while Christmas-gift shopping reinforce their larger social networks and express their traditional gender orientations. That is, they accrue both identity and social resources.

These studies make the point that retailers offer consumers a variety of resources that can use to accomplish such projects. The purpose of a CCT-based approach to retailing is to account for this cocreation, namely, how consumers deploy cultural resources to accomplish the pursuit of their projects, aided by retailer-provided resources. In a CCT framework, the question of what triggers Big Middle purchase behavior is translated into other research questions: What Big Middle customer projects do retailer-provided resources animate? How can retailers align their offerings to invigorate these projects more effectively? What broader purposes animate Big Middle shoppers, and to what purposes do they put the items they cart home from such retailers?

Although the answers to these questions remain unclear, I propose a framework of further research into Big Middle retailing and outline some questions that may help shed some light on the link between consumers’ projects and retailing as a field of cultural resources. In this article, I review resource theory, and then suggest some of the purposes that retail-provided cultural resources present to consumers, along with some types of these resources. After raising the question of how customers animate these firm-supplied resources, I finally suggest a resource-based way of thinking about retail evolution.