Brick-and-Platform: Listing Labor in the Digital Vintage Economy

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Brick-and-Platform: Listing Labor in the Digital Vintage Economy Brick-and-Platform: Listing Labor in the Digital Vintage Economy

Tamara Kneese

Michael Palm

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SI: Platforms and Cultural Productions

Old-fashioned artifacts like vintage clothes and vinyl records

are valued in no small part for their pre-digital modes of pro-

duction. At the same time, niche markets for vintage goods

are increasingly facilitated through dedicated platforms,

which exponentially expand the geographic reach of local

merchants and individual sellers. On Discogs, for instance,

thousands of sellers based in 85 countries list over 33 million

vinyl records (as of August 2019). Shoppers can sort avail-

able copies by price, condition, age, and location; users who

keep a “want list” are alerted as soon as a copy is posted for

sale, and buyers and sellers are expected to leave one another

reviews. Vinyl record sales are fueled by the speed and effi-

ciency of algorithms and search engines, yet sites like

Discogs are often omitted from larger conversations about

the platform economy. One fundamental aspect of “plat-

formization” is an increasingly “centralized, proprietary

mode of cultural production” and exchange (Nieborg &

Poell, 2018, p. 4279); in niche vintage markets, this central-

ization is also specialized, meaning that platforms like

Discogs and Etsy have supplanted online clearinghouses like

eBay and Craigslist as the best places to buy and sell collect-

ibles like rare records and what insiders refer to as “true

vintage” clothing. The circulation of vintage styles and for-

mats is organized, however ironically, by the very technol-

ogy from which they purportedly offer an alternative.

We refer to the transactional platforms and online store-

fronts for old-fashioned commodities like vinyl records and

vintage clothes as the digital vintage economy, and we

describe the tasks and responsibilities of selling therein as

listing labor. The central component of listing labor in the

digital vintage economy is the online display of aged mer-

chandise. Customers are unable to assess items in person, so

sellers tell enticing stories about them—presented alongside

flattering images—to convince potential buyers of their

quality, authenticity, and rarity. The listing labor for vintage

goods is directly related to their status as historical objects,

with wear and tear that has to be accounted for. Product

933299SMS

XXX10.1177/2056305120933299Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> SocietyKneese and Palm

research-article2020

2020

University of San Francisco, USA

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Corresponding Author:

Tamara Kneese, University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton Street, San

Francisco, CA 94117, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Brick-and-Platform: Listing Labor in the

Digital Vintage Economy

Tamara Kneese

and Michael Palm

Abstract

Vintage goods are valued for their nostalgic association with pre-digital modes of production, but their contemporary

trafficking is increasingly organized by processes of platformization. The central component of what we call “listing labor in

the digital vintage economy” is the online display of collectible merchandise, but listing labor also entails promoting sellers’

brands on social media and using sales platforms and other logistical media to manage inventory, process transactions, and

handle shipments. Listing labor is performed by branded merchants and their employees alongside independent entrepreneurs.

The digital vintage economy connects brick-and-mortar shops and resale supply chains organized around flea markets, thrift

shops and charity bins, estate sales, and consigners, to online clearinghouses like eBay and Craigslist, and to social media

and payment apps. In this article, we argue that listing labor in the digital vintage economy further develops the concept of

“platform labor.” We focus on vintage clothes and vinyl records, dominated by women and men, respectively, to help us

analyze divisions of listing labor organized by gender, race, age, and class. We draw upon 20 semi-structured interviews with

shop owners and employees and on participant observation in independently owned clothing boutiques and record stores

in several US cities. The digital vintage economy provides another angle for understanding how identity-based distinctions

affect the opportunities associated with platform labor, and our account of listing labor highlights the need for studies of

platformization that analyze its effects on specific local economies as well as on job markets and commercial sectors.

Keywords

social media, self-branding, retail, platformization, digital labor

2 Social Media + Society

images and detailed descriptions are the lifeblood of online

retail sectors, and their aesthetic stakes are heightened in the

digital vintage economy, where it is more difficult for shop-

pers to verify an item’s condition online than it would be in a

store. The age and often the fragility of vintage goods

requires handling, cleaning, and packing techniques that are

elaborate, rigorous, and verifiable; in the digital vintage

economy, the risks of damaging rare items in transit are

greater and the costs of returns are higher than they are for

mass-produced commodities sold online. Listing labor also

includes promoting and publicizing sellers’ brands on social

media and digital storefronts, as well as using sales platforms

and other logistical media to manage inventory, facilitate

transactions, and arrange shipments. The niche markets com-

prising the digital vintage economy thrive on a gendered arti-

sanal and entrepreneurial imaginary that underpins what is in

fact mundane, physical labor—from cleaning and sorting

merchandise or sweeping floors to carrying boxes and mov-

ing backstock from warehouses to the selling floor. Listing

labor in the digital vintage economy is performed by branded

merchants and their employees along with independent

entrepreneurs flipping collectibles to make a living, fund

their own vintage habit, or both.

If the “platformization of cultural production” is a process

by which “cultural commodities become fundamentally

‘contingent’, that is increasingly modular in design and con-

tinuously reworked and repackaged, informed by datafied

user feedback,” then the digital vintage economy provides a

useful countervailing example, in that its commodities are

valued for their agedness, for a contingency that is more his-

torical and accumulative on a longer timescale than that typi-

cally associated with contemporary modes of data-driven

cultural production, distribution, and exchange (Nieborg &

Poell, 2018, p. 4275). The digital vintage economy also

offers an instructive space for documenting how platforms

are affecting local merchants and brick-and-mortar shops

(see Figure 1), and for understanding how their platformiza-

tion intersects with other trends, including gentrification, ris-

ing commercial rents, and the collapse of retail marketplaces

in many major cities (Smith, 1996; Zukin et al., 2009).

We argue that the digital vintage economy expands and

further develops the category of “platform labor” (van

Doorn, 2017). Service work’s “history of inequality and sub-

ordination extends into the networked present of the on-

demand economy, whose success depends on the algorithmic

intensification of established modes of exploitation” (van

Doorn, 2017, p. 900). The digital vintage economy is a par-

ticularly noteworthy site of this intensification because vin-

tage goods are valued for their perceived distance from

contemporary trends of cultural production and commodifi-

cation. Listing labor animates the valuing of vintage goods,

and so provides an interesting counterpart to practices of

algorithmically informed curation described in this issue

(Bonini & Gandini, 2019) and beyond (Seaver, 2017). Our

conception of listing labor is informed by historical

trajectories of “taste-making” among retail service workers,

whose interactions with shoppers become part of the com-

modities for sale (reflected more reliably in prices than in

wages). Listing labor provides a different perspective on

how platformization is changing the “relationship[s] between

value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem

of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience” (van

Doorn, 2017, p. 898). Employing some of the same strategies

as influencers and bloggers, digital vintage economy work-

ers hawk physical goods while simultaneously branding their

storefronts and often themselves (Duffy, 2017; Duffy &

Hund, 2015; Marwick, 2013).

We develop the category of listing labor by contextualiz-

ing it within histories of retail service work and trends of

cultural production and consumption, and we situate the

digital vintage economy within studies of online commerce

and platformization. We describe vintage clothes and vinyl

records as two prominent sectors of the digital vintage econ-

omy, dominated by women and men, respectively, to help us

analyze divisions of listing labor organized by gender, sexu-

ality, race, age, class, and geography.

Methodology

To delineate listing labor in the digital vintage economy as

a unique yet representative mode of platformization, we

engage historical and ethnographic studies of retail ser-

vice jobs (Benson, 1988; Sherman, 2007) and critiques of

cultural labor within contemporary capitalism (Gill &

Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2010; Srnicek, 2016). We have

engaged in participant observation in record stores and

clothing boutiques located in a number of cities and towns

across the United States, including New York, Chicago,

Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, and Durham and

Chapel Hill, NC.

Figure 1. “Brick and Mortar forever.” Instagram post of 9th

Street Haberdashery storefront in NYC, 24 January 2018. 9th

Street sells rare clothing from the late 19th and early 20th

centuries. Note the “Follow us on Instagram” icon in the window.

Kneese and Palm 3

We consider the gendered and racialized subcultures of

collecting vintage clothing and/or vinyl records. Vinyl and

vintage clothing boutiques are often located in the same

neighborhoods, even on the same blocks in urban centers or

cultural districts, and some shops sell vintage clothing,

accessories, and furniture as well as records. Popular record

collecting genres, such as rock, jazz, and blues, tend to attract

a predominately white male fan base (Palm, 2019, pp. 649–

651; Petrusich, 2014; Straw, 1997), whereas vintage clothing

is associated with femme subcultures, such as pinup fashion,

and the performativity of whiteness (Dahl, 2014; Gajjala,

2015) entwined with a fetishization of racialized novelty

prints and home goods (i.e., Tiki bar accessories). In our

broader project about the digital vintage economy, we are

interested in how nostalgia for earlier periods and kitsch col-

lecting intersect with assumptions about gender, sexuality,

race, class, and privilege; here, we focus more narrowly on

how vintage consumption trends contribute to the organiza-

tions and divisions of listing labor.

Site visits provide a window into how the digital vintage

economy functions in various cities, which are dealing with

their own versions of gentrification, affordable housing crises,

and rising commercial rents. Independently owned vintage

and vinyl shops provide an illuminating look at how the shift

to online sales and platform labor are affecting local econo-

mies and cultures. We have conducted 20 semi-structured

interviews with key informants across the United States,

including shop owners (10) and employees (5), as well as sell-

ers who closed their brick-and-mortar stores (5), to better

understand how platformization is affecting vintage retail

merchants as they conduct business online and offline. These

interviews directly inform our analysis, and we also quote sev-

eral informants’ online posts. Interview subjects represented a

range of identities and experiences related to position, gender,

race, class, and age. Tellingly, nearly every record store owner

we have interviewed is a white man, and every clothing bou-

tique owner we have interviewed is a white woman. The

employees who work in record stores and clothing boutiques

are more evenly divided by gender and race, while three man–

woman couples run vintage shops selling both records and

clothing. Participant observation included shadowing workers

in shops and working behind store counters while engaging in

the purchasing and selling of collectibles in stores and online.

In addition to visiting physical stores, we followed

branded sellers for several months on Etsy and Discogs and

on social media, primarily Instagram and Facebook. All of

our interview subjects use a combination of Instagram/Etsy

or Discogs, with PayPal as the most common method of

payment. There are secondhand specific apps and websites

individual sellers may use (e.g., Reverb and Popsike for

records; Vinted and Poshmark for clothes) and many sellers

also use eBay and Craigslist to buy, sell, and flip second-

hand merchandise, but here we focus on the platforms that

our interview subjects use to supplement or replace their

brick-and-mortar stores.

Delineating Listing Labor

A defining feature of listing labor is the cataloging of mer-

chandise online. That central task entails an assortment of

other laboring activities, including inspecting, describing,

and photographing items for sale; procuring and managing

inventory; and packing and shipping goods sold. Whether or

not merchants maintain a brick-and-mortar outlet, the pri-

mary worksites for listing labor in the digital vintage econ-

omy are transactional platforms and online storefronts, in

addition to social media sites utilized for promotion and

sales. At the same time, listing labor in the digital vintage

economy is no less embodied than traditional modes of retail

employment in the warehouse and on the selling floor.

Listing labor is always performed by workers situated

offline, while on the bus and in line at the post office as well

as in more formal worksites. Listing labor happens in virtu-

ally every sector of retail sales today, and we focus on the

digital vintage economy as a particularly revealing example

of platformization.

Just as the performance of listing labor necessarily bridges

online and offline worksites, it is also patently contemporary

yet deeply historical. Several trajectories of retail sales sec-

tors culminate in listing labor. For starters, posting merchan-

dise for sale online is a fairly direct descendent of mail-order

catalogs and print advertisements ranging from billboards to

coupons. The more revealing differences between the digital

aspects of listing labor and its predecessors, including store-

front window displays, catalogs, and print ads, involve the

technology and how it enables “flexible” employees and

entrepreneurs to present their own merchandise, instead of

hiring professional photographers, models, and graphic

designers. DIY versions of countercultural listing labor exist

in music zines that sell cassettes or records, or even earlier

examples like the Whole Earth Catalog (Turner, 2006).

However, when it comes to branded digital storefronts, the

data capture and analysis facilitated by platforms also engen-

ders tighter and more revealing feedback loops between dis-

play and browsing; Etsy alerts browsers to the number of

people looking at the same item and how many others have

the singular item in their carts. In turn, platformed merchan-

dise requires more rigorous maintenance of inventory by

employees and allows for more intricate surveillance of

employees by their employers and customers alike as every-

one’s actions are monitored and can be tracked in real time

(Stark & Levy, 2018).

Listing labor involves the display of merchandise for

shoppers to browse and search online, instead of or in addi-

tion to on the selling floor. By definition, listing labor entails

the physical separation of buyers and sellers. And, again, this

separation is in many ways new and unique to the Internet,

while also continuing and even intensifying socioeconomic

divisions among and between retail workers and consumers.

As labor historian Louis Hyman has noted, the Sears Roebuck

catalog was revolutionary in the Jim Crow South, in that it

4 Social Media + Society

allowed Black consumers to shop remotely (MacLellan,

2018). Despite these democratizing developments, the new

distance between buyer and seller rendered modes of retail

labor and its industrial supply chains newly invisible and,

therefore, as possible pockets of exploitation. The separation

of service workers from their employers’ customers is an

established mode of labor management in the contemporary

service economy, offline as well as online. For example,

guests’ experiences in luxury hotels are predicated on the

apparent absence of certain employees (e.g., housekeeping

staff, short order cooks) as much as the presence of others

(e.g., concierges and live musicians) (Sherman, 2007).

Similarly, the history of self-service consumption is littered

with back-office workers whose logistical support makes

possible the seemingly automated consumer tasks like ATM

transactions and self-checkout (Palm, 2017).

Online sales in the digital vintage economy are facilitated

by modes of labor that often embody absence and presence

in the same worker. Listing labor allows shoppers to browse

away from the watchful eye of sellers, yet responsiveness

and availability have become hallmarks of the digital vintage

economy and a key selling point for online merchants over

competitors with only brick-and-mortar outlets. In the digital

vintage economy, interactions between workers and shop-

pers take place via email or direct message and are mediated

by social media and chat apps, as well as a host of support

platforms like PayPal and older commercial services like the

US Postal Service and FedEx. Beyond discrete apps and

platforms, listing labor in the digital vintage economy dem-

onstrates how platform-ization is transforming the internet

writ large as a commercial technology.

As we elaborate in subsequent sections, online reviews

and ratings are essential to the digital vintage economy,

within which consumers’ habits and desires inform the man-

agement of listing labor at an affective and interactive level.

Meanwhile, interactions with hip clerks in brick-and-mortar

boutiques still lend pleasure and appeal (“value-added”) to

the shopping experience and, therefore, the prices of mer-

chandise (Benson, 1988). This is especially true for old-fash-

ioned products like vintage clothing and vinyl records. The

secondhand aspects of listing labor are connected to older

histories of peer-to-peer exchange, like record and clothing

swaps and flea markets, as well as other venues for the buy-

ing, selling, and trading of used goods, including antique

stores. Emerging from this larger culture, clerks in record

stores and vintage clothing boutiques are expected to be

knowledgeable and passionate about their wares before

being hired, with access to desirable goods and culture serv-

ing as a subsidy for low wages (Williams & Connell, 2010).

However, the hanging out and talking shop that have long

animated the experience of working in such stores is more

constricted now by online sales, promotion, and communica-

tion: clerks’ traditional down-time tasks is redirected from

pricing and stocking merchandise and monitoring customers

to tracking and updating unique inventory online, posting on

social media, answering emails, and arranging shipments;

workers’ attention is divided between the selling floor and

the screen.

Valuing Vintage

The digital vintage economy is part of a larger wave of arti-

sanal nostalgia, mobilized in response to post-Fordist modes

of production and based on re-imaginings of 19th and 20th

century craft labor practices that often elide their gender,

sexual, racial, and class politics (Gajjala, 2015). Vintage

clothing and vinyl records entail older ways of looking, lis-

tening, and being, not just as consumption and leisure, but as

lifestyle, identity, ethics, and even new forms of labor (Ayres,

2019; Cassidy & Bennett, 2012; Clark & Palmer, 2005;

Harvey, 2017; Thorén et al., 2017). In this section, we follow

feminist critiques of post-Fordism (Gill & Pratt, 2008;

McRobbie, 2010) and the “digital double bind” (Duffy &

Hund, 2015) by describing how nostalgia and platformiza-

tion cooperate to produce the mutually constitutive authen-

ticity of goods and sellers in the digital vintage economy.

The popularity of vintage clothing and vinyl records has

grown steadily since the turn of the century as younger gen-

erations seek out authentic engagement with culture.

Invoking Walter Benjamin’s canonical critique of mechani-

cal reproduction, Susan Luckman (2013) has theorized “the

aura of the analogue in a digital age.” Etsy is the most

familiar vintage platform, where stores, collectors, and

entrepreneurs display and sell their wares. Luckman (2013)

notes that Etsy, while founded by Silicon Valley men and

backed by venture capitalists, is flooded with young women

entrepreneurs selling craft items that take on an aura of the

handmade regardless of how they are produced. Records

are mass produced, yet similarly “signify authenticity to

today’s purchasers” (Barry, 2014). Collectible records and

vintage clothing have accumulated histories that further

enhance their Benjaminian aura. In the digital vintage econ-

omy, sellers conjure the materiality of commodities, imbu-

ing them with a power beyond their physical attributes or

commercial value alone (Appadurai, 1988). To foster online

sales, vintage clothing stores post images of the designer

labels within high-ticket vintage pieces and close-ups of

beadwork or authenticate their Bakelite jewelry through

burn tests. Along the same lines, vinyl vendors verify a

record’s authenticity by scrutinizing etched serial numbers

on the record itself, as well as the particular designs and

color patterns on the label to prove a record is the original

pressing and not a reissue. To spend hundreds or even thou-

sands of dollars on a rare record or vintage garment, one

must believe the seller’s assessment of its worth. The

authenticity of the vintage goods for sale circulates in tight

feedback loops with the credibility of sellers; listing labor

connects the two. The style of the platform, along with the

messaging of the content, must work together to produce a

feeling of vintage-ness.

Kneese and Palm 5

Like Craigslist and eBay (Lingel, 2019; White, 2012), and

as in so much of the platform economy (e.g., Airbnb listings,

Tinder profiles), dedicated vintage platforms like Etsy and

Discogs rely on images to prove that the objects for sale are

as they appear. Sellers also depend on buyers’ feedback to

prove their reliability, using site-specific ratings systems

akin to the review infrastructures on platforms like Amazon

and Airbnb. Craigslist and eBay were pivotal for the devel-

opment of the digital vintage economy, providing consigners

with a means of selling directly and fostering peer-to-peer

transactions instead of using vintage merchants as middle-

men: “[C]ustomers and suppliers [became] competitors on

eBay, adding to the supply chain complexity of second-hand

retailing” (Parker & Weber, 2013, p. 1107).

Thus, secondhand platforms and brick-and-mortar shops

have a complicated relationship. Vinyl’s darkest days as a

format coincide with the origins of the commercial internet.

As the mp3 and file sharing changed music listening and

exchange practices, new sites like eBay and Craigslist also

offered a bonanza of used records at bargain prices, a verita-

ble wild west for virtual crate digging. In the early 2000s, in

cities across the United States, an older generation of inde-

pendent record stores and vintage boutiques closed as online

sales and big box retailers like Walmart and Best Buy

replaced in-person browsing at locally owned shops. More

recently, even large retail stores have folded, as digital plat-

forms offering on-demand music streaming or fast, free ship-

ping have become the norm: the last Tower Records store in

the United States, on Manhattan’s West Side, closed in 2006,

and Lord and Taylor’s Manhattan flagship is now home to

WeWork.

Despite retail’s setbacks, new waves of boutique stores

continue to crop up from Portland to Brooklyn, sustained by

thriving subcultures associated with vintage clothing and

vinyl record collecting. Vintage shops help make cities and

neighborhoods into destinations for shopping and tourism,

bolstering local economies. Shop owners may hire local

designers and advertise in local media while maintaining

relationships with other local merchants and vendors (Parker

& Weber, 2013). On the other hand, boutiques are often in

hip neighborhoods, which means that vintage clothing and

record shops are also associated with gentrification, simul-

taneously contributing to rising commercial rents and the

displacement of communities of color (Lloyd, 2010; Smith,

1996; Zukin et al., 2009). Shopping local or supporting

small boutiques may apply to a small subset of newer hip-

ster shops, whereas earlier Black-owned businesses are

overlooked.

Markets for rare vintage goods are predicated on privi-

lege. While dollar bins of records and cheap vintage finds

persist at thrift stores and flea markets, curated stores sell

high-end vintage clothing and collectible records meant to

complement a cultivated lifestyle. Rare punk and soul sin-

gles sell for thousands of dollars, circulated globally among

cadres of wealthy, dedicated collectors, while vintage

aesthetics reinforce gender norms and white beauty ideals.

Vintage shapewear, dresses, and skirts are the most com-

monly sold vintage fashion items (Cassidy & Bennett, 2012,

p. 254). For femmes who collect vintage clothing from the

early to mid-20th century, when corsets and girdles narrowed

women’s waists, vintage shapewear is necessary to achieve

the pinup aesthetic (Cassidy & Bennett, 2012). Yet, as Ulrika

Dahl (2014) has noted, drawing on critiques by indigenous

fashion bloggers, not everyone wants to uncritically flaunt

pinup girl style despite its association with queer subcultures

like burlesque: “vintage both reflects and queers a broader

cultural imaginary wherein femininity, especially in its palat-

able and nostalgic 1950s version, remains racialized and

more importantly, links ‘high femininity’ to histories of

imperialism and nationalism” (Dahl, 2014, p. 605). Radhika

Gajjala (2015) offers a similar critique of the “New

Domesticity” trend of young women learning and sharing

traditional crafts, such as canning and crocheting, and its

commercialization on Etsy. While these cultures rely on digi-

tal technologies and contemporary social structures, they are

inflected by nostalgia for the past. Implicated in this nostal-

gia, as Gajjala exposes, are desires to return to imagined tra-

ditional gender roles and to white supremacy.

No less than consumption trends, the affordances of spe-

cific online platforms shape labor practices within the digital

vintage economy, reinforcing gender and racial hierarchies.

For instance, eBay’s categories can reinforce heteronorma-

tivity by classifying queer-centered items as “kink” and per-

petuate stereotypes in auctions for racist kitsch (White,

2012). Craigslist became a major platform for peer-to-peer

exchange, in part by allowing for anonymity when trading or

selling secondhand items, as opposed to newer platforms like

VarageSale, which emphasizes a feminized, “cute” entrepre-

neurial aesthetic (Lingel, 2019). Meanwhile, Etsy is struc-

tured by hierarchies and exclusion, and even racist

assumptions such as the racialized kitsch displayed on eBay

and assumptions of whiteness within crafting circles, leading

to crafters of color using white models in their Etsy shops

(Close, 2018, p. 880) alongside the ways that anti-Asian sen-

timents are imbricated in the presentation of handmade

goods on sites like Etsy, which are perceived as ethical alter-

natives to “Made in China” mass-produced commodities

(Close & Wang, this issue). Through platform infrastructures

related to race, gender, sexuality, and class-based assump-

tions about users, the digital vintage economy can reinforce

existing social inequalities.

Listing Labor Management

In the two remaining sections, we outline the ways that plat-

formization is affecting listing labor in the digital vintage

economy for both shop owners as entrepreneurs and shop

clerks as employees. We describe new challenges for brick-

and-mortar stores, distinguishing how the performance of

listing labor is different on platforms dedicated to selling

6 Social Media + Society

records versus clothing. Shop clerks and owners both have to

reconfigure their listing labor practices to balance physical

and digital storefronts, but entrepreneurs and employees are

differently invested in their work. Employees described the

struggle to keep up with the volume of customers’ demands

and inquiries communicated online, while entrepreneurs

articulated their concerns and calculations about whether or

not it was worth it to maintain a physical shop.

Vintage goods require upkeep and care, which affects list-

ing labor along with physical labor practices in stores.

Vintage clothing needs regular mending, delicate washing,

and steaming. Vinyl records must be protected from scratches

and kept from sunlight, heat, dust, and mold. Some patina

might enhance the authentic feel of a vintage garment, and

occasional crackling on a record may charm some listeners,

but collectors must maintain the overall health of their trea-

sures. Repair and maintenance tasks help distinguish listing

labor in the digital vintage economy from work in other retail

sectors. Online listings of a used record’s condition provide

two grades (e.g., VG+/G), one for the record itself and one

for the packaging—the cover, sleeve, and any additional

materials such as liner notes or posters. Listings for espe-

cially rare records may include a digital sound clip, so poten-

tial buyers can aurally as well as visually sample its condition.

For clothing and accessories, online sellers are careful to dis-

close any fading, holes, or other imperfections. In both cases,

not listing the flaws up front could trigger a return, which

would increase shipping costs for the seller.

In the digital vintage economy, the mutually constituted

authenticity of goods and sellers means that negative reviews

can be more costly than returns. For used records and vintage

clothes sold online, the most common complaints from buy-

ers are damage during delivery and a condition not measur-

ing up to the posted description. One reviewer of an Etsy

store wrote, “Would have been good to have the approximate

shoulder width, sleeve length and sleeve opening size

included” as the sleeve opening was too small. Their other-

wise positive review gave four stars instead of seller’s typi-

cal five-star rating, prompting the owner to add a disclaimer

instructing customers to ask questions about the shop’s one-

of-a-kind wares, emphasizing her position as a small busi-

ness owner. Listing labor within the digital vintage economy

requires meticulous attention to detail not needed when cus-

tomers can see items in person, touch them, try them on, or

hear them. Many merchants in the digital vintage economy

try to preempt negative reviews; it is not uncommon for sell-

ers to post pleas along the lines of this one on Discogs from

a seller located in Brazil: “If you are unsatisfied for any rea-

son PLEASE CONTACT ME BEFORE LEAVING ANY

FEEDBACK, THERE’S ALWAYS A FAIR AND HAPPY

MANNER TO SOLVE ANY PROBLEM . . .” The fact that

many of this seller’s sales involve international shipping,

with its higher rates, longer delivery times, and more poten-

tial for damage, only heightens the stakes of their “seller rat-

ing,” aggregated from buyers’ feedback. (Discogs members

are also assessed with a “buyer’s rating,” based on sellers’

feedback, a more democratizing feature than found on Etsy.)

In the digital vintage economy, the added expenses of refunds

and return shipments are often worth absorbing to ensure that

reviews remain positive.

In addition to making or breaking sellers’ reputations, the

platformization of the digital vintage economy is also affect-

ing how they settle on prices. Today, any thrift store or flea

market vendor knows which website to consult for their

fare’s going rates, which helps standardize the prices of vinyl

records and vintage goods across geographic regions and

between online and brick-and-mortar stores. Discogs and

Etsy both embody the centralizing, if not outright monopo-

lizing force of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016, p. 92),

albeit in different ways and each on a smaller scale than an

all-encompassing retailer like Amazon (Khan, 2017).

Increasingly, vintage clothing stores are no longer using

Etsy, which requires constant updating after every sale, and

are instead encouraging customers to purchase merchandise

through Instagram. Store M, a high-end clothing boutique in

Oakland, does not have an Etsy store, but posts new acquisi-

tions to Instagram, where they have 30,000 followers from

around the world. Customers DM the store account for

details or to purchase, providing their PayPal information.

Posting a photo on Instagram, rather than listing an item on

Etsy, can facilitate a faster sale, and can extend the listing

labor’s reach. Anyone scrolling through Instagram may hap-

pen upon the vintage item, instead of having to check the

store’s Etsy site. Vintage garments and accessories are often

one-of-a-kind, so their attendant inventory work and listing

labor are applied on an individual basis. Vintage clothing

vendors might charge slightly more for a rare item on

Instagram or in their Etsy store than they would in a brick-

and-mortar shop, factoring in the time it takes to list the item,

shipping costs, and because they are supplying the “on-

demand” convenience of having unique treasures at one’s

fingertips.

Dedicated platforms for vintage goods have increased the

number of individual online sellers. Competition for rare col-

lectibles is intense, among sellers as well as buyers (Ayres,

2019), and branded shops who sell online also have to keep

their brick-and-mortar prices in line with those found on sites

like Etsy or Discogs, despite the higher overhead of running

a physical store. While record stores tend to list rare or

expensive merchandise online, records tend to cost slightly

more in shops than online. This is in part because Discogs’

centralized database rewards sellers who price their records

to appear at or near the top of available copies sorted by

“lowest price.” Some record shops promote their online

offerings by touting their brick-and-mortar existence. For

instance, Store N in Brooklyn offers over 15,000 records for

sale via Discogs. In the comments section for each record,

Store N implores shoppers to “BUY FROM A REAL

RECORD STORE IN BROOKLYN,” highlighting the sup-

posed authenticity of a physical location in a famously cool

Kneese and Palm 7

borough. Indeed, “Record Store Day,” held on the third

Saturday in April since 2007, is predicated on the premise

that transactions conducted inside “real” stores are ethically

and experientially superior to online purchases (Harvey,

2017; Palm, 2019).

Online sales can both subsidize and cannibalize brick-

and-mortar stores. In fact, it has become a successful strategy

for new record and vintage clothing stores to establish their

business online before opening a brick-and-mortar.

Furthermore, whether or not a store sells online, social media

is a leading mode of promotion that few merchants can afford

to neglect. For example, Store H in Durham sells used

records in their store, but only sparingly on Discogs.

Nonetheless, every Wednesday, Store H’s Instagram follow-

ers can see a video of an employee’s hands flipping through

new arrivals, highlighting the tactility of browsing while uti-

lizing social media’s reach. While brick-and-mortar shops

and online sales can work in tandem, moving the entire store

online is often easier for shop owners. At a brick-and-mortar

location, small business owners have to employ workers to

cover the shop while they go out to look for more second-

hand merchandise, which involves going to yard, garage, or

estate sales and thrift shops, painstakingly digging through

Goodwill bins before other sellers nab the best goods (Ayres,

2019), scouring eBay or Craigslist for deals, or meeting with

individual consigners. As both owners and employees noted,

standing in a store is physically tiring and monotonous, and

shop owners who cannot afford to pay clerks may find them-

selves stuck in their shops five or more days a week. Several

owners (n = 3) have identified this staffing requirement as a

leading factor behind their decision to move to online sales

only, which often renders clerks’ jobs obsolete.

The trajectory of Store W in Portland from mobile trailer

to brick-and-mortar vintage clothing boutique to Etsy store

demonstrates the changes wrought by platformization. Store

W’s owner employed one part-time clerk, but she worked the

majority of shop hours herself to save money. Keeping the

shop open 6 days a week and almost never taking a day off

made her feel “trapped.” In addition to spending time at

estate sales, thrifting, or on buying trips in cheaper rural

areas, she managed her Etsy store, where she posted pricier

items. She eventually closed her brick-and-mortar store and

transitioned to selling online only. Her Etsy store, however,

is still technically based in Portland, lending her the cache of

a hip location, and features images from her original vintage

trailer as well as her brick-and-mortar location. She posts

new merchandise on Instagram, tagging interested parties to

let them know when she is about to list the items on Etsy.

Clothing that may have languished on the hanger for months

can be sold in minutes, to an online clientele that is much

larger than walk-ins and regulars. This more attentive and

motivated customer base leads to a more reliable revenue

stream that can absorb the shipping costs that accrue to

online sales, which themselves are usually a fraction of the

rent, insurance, and wages required to run a store.

Platformization affects local businesses and economies,

influencing shop owners’ calculations about whether or not

to keep a physical store open and producing new forms of

listing labor tied to social media promotion, digital store

fronts, and online ratings systems.

Selling Vintage Selves

Retail sales work has always included the management of

affect as well as inventory (Benson, 1988) and in this final

section we describe how platformization can exacerbate as

well as alleviate the personal aspects of listing labor in the

digital vintage economy. Authenticity is paramount in the

digital vintage economy, and listing labor requires the authen-

tication of not only merchandise for sale but also the people

selling it. Not unlike the role of authenticity in fashion blog-

ging (Marwick, 2013), listing labor bridges the commercial

and the affective, and for entrepreneurs especially, perform-

ing an authentic self is essential to success (Duffy, 2017). In

the digital vintage economy, store owners and employees

often appear in photos and videos for the shop’s Instagram

and Facebook presence, and the performance of authenticity

means that they must embody the right vintage look while

projecting a desirable affect. Instagram Stories provide an

intimate if fleeting connection between customers and mer-

chants, as store personnel dance near a spinning record or a

clerk models a vintage skirt, twirling the fabric for effect.

Indeed, Duffy and Pruchniewska’s (2017) elaboration of “a

digital double bind” applies to many workers in the digital

vintage economy, whose jobs are structured through what

they define as “soft self-promotion,” “interactive intimacy,”

and “compulsory visibility” (p. 845).

The digital vintage economy creates new forms of labor

and visibility for shop clerks, subjecting them to the tempo-

ral machinations of platformization while also appropriating

and branding their personal style. This can lead to new forms

of exploitation of listing labor beyond the day-to-day tasks,

which themselves can be emotionally exhausting and physi-

cally demanding. For instance, boxes of vinyl records are

extremely heavy, vintage boutiques require workers to stand

on ladders and use hooks to reach wall items, and workers

regularly sweep, dust, and mop. As Duffy and Hund (2015)

found in their analysis of influencer culture, online entrepre-

neurs often show themselves working through consumption,

balancing their lifestyle with productivity. Within the context

of the digital vintage economy, store owners and clerks will

photograph themselves soaking or cleaning items or packing

and shipping inventory while also portraying themselves

enjoying their time in the shop, posing with new acquisi-

tions, or in curated spaces outside the shop, such as parties or

other aesthetically rich events, like pop-up shops or DJ nights

at local bars.

Meanwhile, the pace of social media demands that vin-

tage vendors keep generating content, even if they do not

have new items coming in. A lack of new merchandise to

8 Social Media + Society

display can generate pressure on owners and employees alike

to share personal details and photograph themselves. But

unlike influencer culture, this self-presentation and curated

sharing is tied to material goods that not only have to be pro-

moted and used, but procured, displayed, sold, packaged,

and shipped. Workers in the digital vintage economy pro-

mote their own bodies, personalities, and lives as part of their

listing labor, not to attract or satisfy sponsors and advertisers,

but to attract customers; 10,000 Instagram followers will not

help their bottom-line if nobody buys anything. Shop owners

and clerks in the digital vintage economy are not necessarily

interested in crafting online personas and may in fact be

opposed to new technologies as part of their vintage aes-

thetic. Several shop owners, for instance, do not have Wi-Fi

in their stores and conduct in-store transactions through

archaic machines instead of using Square. Still, once a shop

begins selling online, or even if they just turn to social media

to attract customers to their physical location, entrepreneurs

find themselves searching for new ways of producing con-

tent and promoting themselves to remind customers of their

existence.

Given the gendered division of labor within the digital

vintage economy, these modes of self-presentation and per-

formed intimacy are especially common in women-owned

and women-staffed vintage clothing boutiques. As with

many of the listing labor tasks described already, the contem-

porary presentation of listing laborers online has a deep

brick-and-mortar history. “Shop girl” is a vernacular term

used by vintage clothing store employees and owners alike,

partly tongue-in-cheek, harking back to an imagined earlier

era and playing on gender stereotypes. Several vintage cloth-

ing boutiques have advertised their need for new “shop girls”

on Instagram and post their past and current “shop girls”

wearing vintage threads in the store. Histories of the shop

girl remark on the role of embodiment and projected fantasy

in retail labor; at the turn of the last century, the shop girl

“mediated the desires of consumers on the other side of the

counter, be they women who wanted to purchase the items on

display or men who might desire the shopgirl herself as

another type of merchandise” (Sanders, 2006, p. 1). Rather

than merely appealing to customers in stores, digital vintage

economy workers’ images may be circulated far and wide; in

the most stylish vintage boutiques, clerks also act as models

on Instagram and Etsy. Clerks in vintage stores are often

young, thin, and conventionally attractive or photogenic,

which is not a great departure from expectations for shop

girls in the Victorian era through the high-end department

stores and boutiques of the present day. However, their

images on the same platforms that they also use to facilitate

sales and interact with customers. Their personal Instagram

handles are often tagged in these shop-related photoshoots,

narrowing the separation between work and personal life.

They are not paid for this modeling work and, unlike vintage

fashion and/or music bloggers who may provide free adver-

tising for local vintage boutiques by taking photos and

tagging shops, low-wage store clerks are not necessarily con-

nected to influencer culture and do not directly benefit.

We should emphasize that shop staff are typically mini-

mum wage workers who do not receive health insurance

through their jobs. Their positions are generally part-time

and they are often paid under the table, sometimes with dis-

counted merchandise, so there are no official records for tax

purposes. One vintage clothing shop worker, a first-genera-

tion college student, realized this when she went back to

school and applied for financial aid, but had no way of prov-

ing her income.

In addition to the shifts they spend at the store, clerks who

use their personal devices and sometimes their own social

media accounts to interact with customers may find their

workdays expanded. Now, they are responding to DMs while

not technically on the clock. Not only that, but the longer

process from sale to delivery includes packing, shipping, and

tracking, and culminates with reviews and online ratings.

Intermediaries like PayPal expand listing labor’s time hori-

zons further still while also creating new elements of risk.

Customers may impulsively buy a coveted object through an

Instagram DM or on Discogs, but never follow through with

their PayPal details or respond to the merchant’s request. If

the customer fails to pay, the item must be posted and listed

yet again, creating more labor for shop workers. On-demand

convenience for consumers means that shop workers must be

constantly available, but that each individual sale often takes

longer. This exposes the “power-chronography” inherent to

listing labor (Sharma, 2014). PayPal adds to workers’ work-

load and anxiety while increasing risk in a way that cash or

credit cards do not, calling into question the so-called ease of

the newest wave of app-direct purchases in the digital vin-

tage economy.

Listing labor demands the kind of emotional labor Arlie

Hochschild (1983) famously associated with flight atten-

dants. Like other retail and service workers, the people work-

ing in boutique vintage and record stores are expected to

cater to customers and maintain friendly composure no mat-

ter how they are treated, especially in women-centered cloth-

ing boutiques, whereas a certain detached coolness may be

more acceptable in record stores. In digital storefronts, shop

workers must refresh merchandise while responding to cus-

tomer’s questions and demands around the clock, lest they

lose the sale to another online vendor. As negative reviews

often show, vintage shop clerks who fail to project friendli-

ness online or off are disparaged, sometimes called out by

name. We interviewed one vintage clothing boutique clerk

who was fired after a customer complained in a Yelp review

about her reading behind the counter. As this admittedly

extreme example demonstrates, the demands of emotional

labor in record stores and vintage boutiques fall dispropor-

tionately on women. The vast majority of workers asked to

model vintage clothing are women, while the preponderance

of men shopping in record stores means that women workers

can endure unwanted attention and interactions. One

Kneese and Palm 9

interviewee who worked at both record and vintage clothing

shops said she had experienced sexual harassment at both

jobs, but that her interactions with men at the record store

also included them “mansplaining obvious bands like The

Cure” to her. Tellingly, a Facebook post from a woman clerk

at Store A in Carrboro, North Carolina, suggesting that

“record shops should have one day a week where white men

are prohibited from shopping,” generated 60 likes, loves, and

laughs, and 28 comments.

One commenter on the thread suggested that “dudes who

can’t mind their own business should just never be allowed

to shop outside of the internet,” and while this prohibition

would relieve some of the stress imposed upon women inside

physical stores, it ignores how online communication reme-

diates rather than alleviates the emotional demands of listing

labor. In Oakland, one vintage furniture and clothing shop

owner we interviewed lamented, “I hate taking photos for

Instagram,” but to take a break from posting might mean that

the fickle algorithmic gods stop favoring their store, so their

usual customer base won’t see their content. Some vintage

sellers have pointed to the stress created by this new selling

system and additional layers of work. A Portland-based vin-

tage jewelry and clothing shop owner posted a selfie and a

description of her listing labor fatigue on Instagram. She

later deleted the post after several followers chastised her,

but then reposted it as a way of pushing back against this

affect management:

I posted this selfie a few days ago, trying to capture how hard it

is to authentically self promote on IG [Instagram], to come up

with images, be part of my own feed and share my struggles as

a real person and a business owner and designer. I do not have a

social media person doing the work for me. I had some negative

comments that made me delete my post.

The shop owner’s initial removal of a post in response to

negative comments reveals another level of emotional labor

involved with the selling of merchandise on digital plat-

forms. Sellers are expected to be cheerful, providing glimpses

of their curated homes and cute pets, but they must be careful

not to disclose anything controversial, especially about their

own labor conditions. Vintage entrepreneurs may selectively

share information about shoplifters or delinquent consigners

as well as personal details, including the loss of loved ones or

breakups. But it is hard for them to know which posts will

result in positive attention versus which will attract online

hate.

In addition to sharing without oversharing, workers, and

especially owners, must be able to write and communicate

well, a problem for those who do not have formal training or

education.

Chatting with customers is a different skill than

writing artfully about rare vintage items or communicating

effectively through messaging systems. Some shop owners

have enough technical and creative expertise of their own to

maintain their online presence, while others rely on hired

social media consultants or their shop clerks who perform

supplementary listing labor without additional pay. The skills

required to balance the physical demands of brick-and-mor-

tar sales and the care of vintage items with curated online

content and influencer chic can heighten existing social hier-

archies within the digital vintage economy.

Conclusion

Listing labor in the digital vintage economy demonstrates that

“platform labor” includes employees and entrepreneurs uti-

lizing platforms to sell goods, alongside those workers whose

labor and other resources are being sold directly on a platform

(van Doorn, 2017). Delineating listing labor provides another

angle for thinking about the ways that identity-based distinc-

tions such as class, race, and gender condition the opportuni-

ties associated with platform labor. Beyond contract, gig, or

supplementary labor performed through Airbnb, Uber,

TaskRabbit, and UpWork, or hidden labor associated with

Amazon Mechanical Turk, warehouse and supply chain labor,

and content moderation (Gray & Suri, 2019; Roberts, 2019),

listing labor in the digital vintage economy shows how even

more supposedly traditional retail jobs are being reconfigured

by changing expectations associated with platformization.

Listing labor may not be directly organized through a particu-

lar platform, but platformization directly influences what it

means to work in the digital vintage economy.

The digital vintage economy circulates rarified material

artifacts associated with pre-digital forms of production.

Listing labor entails animating online inventory with an aura

of authenticity. Our delineation of listing labor in the digital

vintage economy, as a specific mode of “platform labor,” has

revealed two key insights, both of which build on and extend

critiques of the platformization of cultural production more

broadly:

1. The aged artifacts for sale in the digital vintage econ-

omy provide a different perspective toward the “fun-

damental contingen[cy]” of cultural commodities

when their trafficking and/as their production under-

goes platformization (Nieborg & Poell, 2018, p.

4275). Sales in the digital vintage economy are predi-

cated on the verification of sellers as well as their

merchandise as authentic.

2. Our analysis of dedicated platforms in digital vintage

economy, such as Etsy and Discogs, demonstrates

how the platformization of cultural traffic is unfold-

ing with more scaler complexity than is often allowed

for in critiques of monolithic corporate giants like

Apple or Amazon (Arditi, 2015; Khan, 2017).

Alongside analyses of specific labor pools grappling

with platformization, such as taxi and livery drivers

negotiating ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft

(Dubal, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018), a focus on cultural

labor, more specifically, can help account for the

10 Social Media + Society

ways in which platformization is affecting local

economies by contributing to gentrification as well as

to unemployment and underemployment.

Such insights from our analysis of listing labor in the digi-

tal vintage economy can inform further studies of the plat-

formization of cultural production.

Listing labor embodies the histories of gender, race, and

class-based divisions of retail service labor, and the digital

vintage economy contributes to gentrification. Nostalgic

consumption affects racialized and gendered listing labor

while affecting urban socioeconomic patterns of displace-

ment and rising commercial rents. Discogs is part of the

growing “Silicon Forest” in Portland, while platforms like

Discogs contribute to the economies of scale that lead many

shops, including many in Portland, to close, relocate, or

move online. Future research into the “platformization of

cultural production” should address platforms like Discogs,

Etsy, eBay, and Instagram as workplaces and employers,

with their own interior cultures as well as external impacts

on market sectors and labor pools. The digital vintage econ-

omy provides another angle for thinking about the ways that

class and identity-based distinctions, along with their inter-

sections with historical forms of discrimination, affect the

opportunities associated with platform labor (Noble, 2018),

and it highlights the need for studies of platform labor that

contextualize it within specific local economies as well as

within job markets and economic sectors.

Just as retail and service work require mundane, physical

tasks from standing and smiling to sweeping, vinyl records,

and vintage clothing are tangible objects, decidedly not digi-

tal in nature. Their value is associated with agedness, authen-

ticity, and materiality, attributes that collide with the logics

of “contingent” commodification within the growing plat-

form economy (Nieborg & Poell, 2018). Clothing boutiques

and record stores are certainly distinct from colonizing cor-

porations like Uber and Airbnb, but, as we have shown, they

do not sit outside of platformization any more than they are

being eliminated by it.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect

to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tamara Kneese https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9905-5914

Note

1. Similarly, Ticona and Mateescu (2018) have shown how

older or not formally educated care workers have trouble

transitioning to Care.com or other online platforms for domes-

tic and reproductive labor.

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Author Biographies

Tamara Kneese (PhD, New York University) is assistant professor

in the Department of Media Studies and Program Director of

Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Her research interests include mediated mourning rituals, digital

care work and labor practices, and structural inequality in Silicon

Valley.

Michael Palm (PhD, New York University) is associate professor of

Media and Technology Studies and director of Graduate Studies in

the Department of Communication at the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include the histories

of automation and consumer culture, supply chain infrastructures,

and critical theories of labor and technology.