THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO

THE HISTORY OF RETAILING

Retail history is a rich, cross-disciplinary field that demonstrates the centrality of retailing to
many aspects of human experience, from the provisioning of everyday goods to the shaping of
urban environments; from earning a living to the construction of identity. Over the last few
decades, interest in the history of retail has increased greatly, spanning centuries, extending to all
areas of the globe and drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives.
By offering an up-to-date, comprehensive thematic, spatial and chronological coverage of the
history of retailing, this Companion goes beyond traditional narratives that are too simplistic and
Euro-centric and offers a vibrant survey of this field.
It is divided into four broad sections: 1) Contexts, 2) Spaces and places, 3) People, processes
and practices and 4) Geographical variations. Chapters are written in an analytical and synthetic
manner, accessible to the general reader as well as challenging for specialists, and with an
international perspective.
This volume is an important resource to a wide range of readers, including marketing and
management specialists, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists and urban planners.

Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research ranges
across a wide variety of topics relating to retailing and consumption in England during the long
eighteenth century.

Vicki Howard is a Lecturer at the University of Essex and author of From Main Street to Mall:
The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store, which won the Hagley Prize in Business
History.

They are co-editors of the Taylor & Francis journal, History of Retailing and Consumption.
ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS IN BUSINESS, MANAGEMENT
AND ACCOUNTING

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work of reference, Routledge Companions can be cited as an authoritative source on the subject.
A key aspect of these Routledge Companions is their international scope and relevance.
Edited by an array of highly regarded scholars, these volumes also benefit from teams of con-
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Individually, Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting provide an
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Published titles in this series include:

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MANAGEMENT BUYOUTS

Edited by Mike Wright, Kevin Amess, Nick Bacon and Donald Siegel

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CO-OPETITION STRATEGIES

Edited by Anne-Sophie Fernandez, Paul Chiambaretto. Frédéric Le Roy and Wojciech Czakon

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO REWARD MANAGEMENT

Edited by Stephen J. Perkins

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ACCOUNTING IN CHINA

Edited by Haiyan Zhou

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO CRITICAL MARKETING

Edited by Mark Tadajewski, Matthew Higgins, Janice Denegri Knott and Rohit Varman

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE HISTORY OF RETAILING

Edited by Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Comp

anions-in-Business-Management-and-Accounting/book-series/RCBMA
 THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO THE
HISTORY OF RETAILING
Edited by Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard
 First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stobart, Jon, 1966– editor. | Howard,Vicki, 1965– editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to the history of retailing / edited by Jon
Stobart and Vicki Howard.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge companions in business, management and accounting |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018023990 (print) | LCCN 2018025760 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315560854 | ISBN 9781138675087 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Retail trade—History.
Classification: LCC HF5429 (ebook) | LCC HF5429 .R68 2019 (print) |
DDC 381/.109—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023990
ISBN: 978-1-138-67508-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-56085-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

List of figures viii

List of tables xi
List of contributors xii

1 Introduction: Global perspectives on retailing 1

PART I
Contexts, trends and relationships 13

2 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds 15

Christopher Dyer

3 From consumer revolution to mass market 31

Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

4 Retail development and urban form in the United States during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries 50
Richard Longstreth

5 The future of retailing: From physical to digital 67

Fiona Ellis-Chadwick

6 Bargain hunt? Selling second-hand, c.1600 to the present 80

Sara Pennell

v
 Contents

PART II
Spaces and places 99

7 Markets and market halls 101

Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón and Sergi Garriga

8 High Street/Main Street 119

Ian Mitchell

9 History of the department store 136

Sarah Elvins

10 The supermarket as a global historical development: Structures, capital

and values 154
Patrick Hyder Patterson

11 Village shops and country stores 180

Douglas McCalla

12 Arcades, shopping centres and shopping malls 197

Vicki Howard and Jon Stobart

13 Big-box stores 216

Stephen Halebsky

PART III
People, processes and practices 227

14 Penny retailers and merchant princes 229

Susan Spellman

15 Retail workers and their unions, 1850–2016 245

Daniel Opler

16 Retail management 260

Martin Purvis

17 Multiple retailers 279

David Delbert Kruger

18 Co-operative retailing 301

Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger and Greg Patmore

vi
 Contents

19 By mail and rail: A history of mail order commerce 319

Howard R. Stanger

20 At the margins? Itinerants and pedlars 340

Laurence Fontaine

PART IV
Geographical variations 357

21 Retail history: United States and Canada 359

Bettina Liverant

22 Western Europe (including Scandinavia) 377

Ilja Van Damme

23 Retailing in Russia and Eastern Europe 396

Marjorie L. Hilton

24 Retailing in Australia and New Zealand: Historical perspectives

through the distinctive lens of innovation 413
Dale Miller

25 History of retailing in Latin America: From the corner store to the

supermarket429
Martín Monsalve Zanatti

26 Caravanserai to Carrefour: The retail history of the Middle East,

600–present444
Omar Foda

27 Modern retailing history in Japan: From the Meiji Restoration of

1868 to the beginning of the twenty-first century 460
Harada Masami

28 Western models and Eastern influences: Japanese department stores in

the early twentieth century 477
Rika Fujioka

29 Retailing in India: Strategic overview 495

Nitin Sanghavi

Index510

vii
 FIGURES

2.1 Early sixteenth-century shop, Lavenham in Suffolk, England 23

3.1 Exterior of La Maison Tietz, a grand department store in fin-de-siècle
Antwerp, Belgium 40
3.2 Interior of La Maison Tietz, Antwerp, Belgium 41
3.3 A typical narrow street near the centre of Antwerp, Belgium, c.1893 43
3.4 A traditional shop selling dried fish displayed on the shop front and on
trestles in the street; next door, a more modern looking tobacconist has neatly
arranged his merchandise behind a glazed window. Antwerp, Belgium, c.1893 44
4.1 Commercial buildings, 100 block of Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, mostly
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries 51
4.2 Astor stores and other commercial buildings, Broadway, New York, ca. 1850s
and before 54
4.3 Marshall Field & Company department store, 1902–14, D. H. Burnham &
Company, architects (on left) and other commercial buildings, State Street,
Chicago55
4.4 Cross County Center, Central Park Avenue and Cross County Parkway,
Yonkers, New York, 1947–52, Sol G. Atlas, developer, Lathrop Douglass,
architect.View of pedestrian mall, looking south towards Gimbel Brothers
department store, added to complex 1953–55 61
5.1 Retail profitability: UK retail and e-retail sales values and store numbers,
2000–201871
5.2 The changing face of online retailing 75
5.3 The uptake of basic online functionalities 75
6.1 Osborne desk bookcase, c.1700–1720 81
6.2 Trade card of Thomas Denton of Abingdon, clockmaker [no date] 87
6.3 Thomas Mayhew, “Petticoat Lane” 89
7.1 Birds-eye view of Les Halles, París 103
7.2 Interior view of the market hall in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland, with concrete
arches, 1906–1908 107
7.3 Clientele areas of Barcelona’s zonal municipal market halls, 2011 113
8.1 Northgate Street, Chester, c.1810 123

viii
 Figures

8.2 High Street, Chesterfield, England 125

8.3 Main Street, Buffalo, c.1905 129
9.1 Wanamaker’s department store bridal window display 139
9.2 Wanamaker’s New York store rotunda interior with Christmas decor 140
9.3 Line drawing of the centre of Wanamaker’s store 142
10.1 Interior of an Albertson supermarket 157
10.2 Montgomery, Alabama. Produce truck making deliveries at a supermarket,
March 1943 161
10.3 A department store from communist Czechoslovakia’s state-owned PRIOR
chain, now repurposed for use as a shopping mall, with a large ground floor
supermarket operated by the Austrian Billa chain, a subsidiary of Germany’s
REWE Group 162
10.4 SPAR hypermarket entrance, New South China Mall, Dongguan, China 169
10.5 Housewife shopping in supermarket, May 1957 172
11.1 Store at Lang Pioneer Village, Peterborough County, Ontario 183
11.2 Store at Lang Pioneer Village, Peterborough County, Ontario (Interior) 192
12. 1 The Arcade, downtown Cleveland, OH 200
12.2 Barton Arcade, Manchester, UK 202
12.3 Country Club Plaza, Kansas City 204
12.4 Suria KLCC, a shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur, located at the base of the
landmark Petronas Towers 210
15.1 Sales clerk and customer examining a dress at Saks Fifth Avenue store
following a fashion show presented by the Chrysler Girls’ Club of the
Chrysler Corporation in 1942 252
16.1 Mazur’s Organisational Plan for Department Store Management 269
17.1 J.C. Penney Store #3 (Cumberland, WY) 284
17.2 J.C. Penney Store #300. J.C. Penney exiting antique car at new (re)location
(Kansas City, KS) 285
17.3 E.C. Sams and J.C. Penney 286
17.4 J.C. Penney Store #113. Cortland prototype layout. (Williston, ND, 1941) 287
17.5 J.C. Penney Newspaper Ad, 1929 288
17.6 Jim Sinegal and Sol Price 295
18.1 Bakers Lennart Lindmark and Åke Granström with the ‘Derby’ baking
machine. Co-operative bakery, 17 July 1946 304
18.2 New co-operative convenience store in Årsta, 1948 310
18.3 An example of recent success: the Barossa Co-operative Mall in South
Australia, 2009 312
19.1 Larkin Company Catalog, 1917 323
19.2 Anti-mail order cartoon, 1914 330
21.1 Peddler E.H. Farrell with his cart 363
21.2 Interior view of Jenkins’ Groceteria, Calgary, Canada, c.1918 367
21.3 West Edmonton Mall 370
22.1 Market scene with sale of fowl, taking place on the Meir of sixteenth-
century Antwerp, Belgium 380
22.2 Exterior of the multiple retailer Le Lion Delhaize Frères & Cie,
Huidevettersstraat 49 Antwerp, Belgium, c.1905 387
22.3 Interior of Le Lion Delhaize Frères & Cie, Huidevettersstraat 49 Antwerp,
Belgium, c.1905 388

ix
 Figures

22.4 Front cover of the Grand Bazar supermarket annual report 1957–1958,
Antwerp, 1958 391
24.1 Interior of Finney Isles store, Brisbane, 1910 416
24.2 Electric trams, George Street, David Jones corner 417
24.3 Anthony Hordern & Sons Palace Emporium, Brickfield Hill, Sydney, 1935 418
25.1 Supermercado, Chile 432
25.2 Bodega E. Wong 433
25.3 Augusto Fernando Oechle 434
25.4 Almacenes, Peru 435
27.1 New building of Mitsukoshi’s main store, constructed in 1914 462
27.2 The first store of Daiei, Shufu no Mise Daiei, established in 1957 468
27.3 The first store of 7-Eleven Japan, Toyosu store, established in 1974 472
28.1 Central Hall at Mitsukoshi Nihombashi store in 1914 480
28.2 Western-style umbrella, shoes and hair accessories department at Mitsukoshi
Nihombashi store in 1914 481
28.3 New-built Seoul store in Korea in 1916 488
28.4 New-built Dalian store in China in 1937 489
29.1 Shoppers Stop, Andheri, Mumbai 1991 and 2017 500

x
 TABLES

5.1 The Adoption of E-commerce by Retail Category (in 1997) 76

5.2 The Adoption of the Internet by Retail Category (in 2005) 76
5.3 The Adoption of the Internet by Retail Category (in 2013) 77
27.1 Number of supermarkets in Japan, 1964–74 467
27.2 Expenditure by Japanese consumers by type of outlet, 1964–74 (%) 467
27.3 Sale of different categories of goods by type of supermarket (%) 467
27.4 The development of convenience stores in Japan 471

xi
 CONTRIBUTORS

Bruno Blondé is Professor at the History Department of the University of Antwerp, where in
2003 he founded the Centre for Urban History. His major research interests include the history
of transportation, economic growth sand social inequality, material culture, retail and consump-
tion in the Low Countries (fifteenth–nineteenth century). With Ilja Van Damme, he is writing
a new synthesis on the material culture of Antwerp.

Christopher Dyer is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leicester, and he pre-
viously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Birmingham. He has been President of the
Society for Medieval Archaeology and Editor of the Economic History Review. His books include
Making a Living in the Middle Ages (Yale University Press), An Age of Transition? (Oxford Uni-
versity Press) and A Country Merchant. Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages (Oxford
University Press).

Fiona Ellis-Chadwick is Senior Lecturer in Retail Management at Loughborough University.

She had a successful commercial career in retail management before becoming an academic.
She has worked on projects in digital marketing; online retail management and the digital high
street and is published in the Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing, Interna-
tional Journal of Retail Distribution and Management, Internet Research and Journal of Retailing and
Consumer Services.

Sarah Elvins is Associate Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches
courses in American history. She is the author of Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional
Identity in Western New York State, 1920–1940 and articles about the history of Depression scrip
and cross-border shopping. Her research explores consumption, retailing, food and culture in
the modern United States.

Omar Foda is a historian of the modern Middle East. He has published in Arab Media and
Society, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Social Sciences and Missions and in several
volumes, including The Birth of the Arab Citizen and the Changing of the Middle East. Currently
the Middle East and North Africa Librarian at George Washington University, he is working

xii
 Contributors

on his monograph Grand Plans in Glass Bottles: Making, Drinking, and Selling Beer in a Changing
Egypt 1880–Present.

Laurence Fontaine is Senior Researcher in the CNRS attached to the Center Maurice Halb­
wachs (CNRS-ENS-EHESS). She was professor at the History and Civilisation department
of the European University Institute (Florence-Italy) from 1995 to 2003. Her most recent
publications include Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century
to The Present, L. Fontaine (ed.), Berghahn, Oxford, 2008; The Moral Economy. Poverty, Credit
and Thrust in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press 2014 [Gallimard: 2008] and Le
Marché. Histoire et usage d’une conquête sociale, Paris Gallimard, 2014.

Rika Fujioka is Professor of Macro-marketing at Kansai University. She was an associate of

the Oxford Institute of Retail Management and held visiting positions at University of Oxford
and Erasmus University. Her recent publications include: ‘European luxury big business and
emerging Asian markets, 1960–2010’, Business History (2015, edited with Pierre-Yves Donzé),
Comparative Responses to Globalization: Experiences of British and Japanese Enterprises, (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013, edited with Maki Umemura) and Global Luxury: Organizational Change and
Emerging Markets since the 1970s, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, edited with Pierre-Yves Donze).

Sergi Garriga is an architect and researcher in the theory and history of architecture. He
has been awarded a scholarship to develop his doctoral thesis at the Polytechnic University of
Catalonia on the contemporary renovation of the Barcelona markets. His subjects of interest
have been developed around the changing relationships between architecture, the urban form
and its historical contexts.

Manel Guàrdia is Professor of Urban History at the Vallès Higher Technical School of Archi-
tecture of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. His most recent books include: M. Guàrdia,
J.L. Oyón, Memòria del mercat del Born, El Born CCM, Barcelona, 2017; M. Guàrdia, J.L. Oyón
(eds), Making Cities through Market Halls. Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, MUHBA, Barcelona,
2015; and J.L. Oyón, La ciudad en el joven Reclus. Hacia la fusión naturaleza-ciudad, Ediciones del
Viaducto, Barcelona 2018.

Stephen Halebsky is Associate Professor in the department of Sociology and Anthropology

at State University of New York, Cortland. He is the author of Small Towns and Big Business:
Challenging Wal-Mart Superstores (Lexington Books, 2009) as well as articles on the politics of
retail development, the effect of chain stores on their local economies and the modern corpora-
tion. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Mary Hilson is Professor of History at Aarhus University. Her publications include: The
International Co-operative Alliance and the Consumer Co-operative Movement in Northern Europe,
c. 1860–1940 (Manchester University Press, 2018); Co-operatives and the Social Question: The
Co-operative Movement in Northern and Eastern Europe 1880–1950, edited with Pirjo Markkola
and Ann-Catrin Östman (Welsh Academic Press, 2012) and A Global History of Consumer Co-
operation since 1850 with Silke Neunsinger and Greg Patmore (Brill, 2017).

Marjorie L. Hilton is Associate Professor of History at Murray State University in Murray,

Kentucky (USA). The author of Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 (2012), she

xiii
 Contributors

has also published articles on Soviet advertising and gendered cinematic representations of the
ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism in the 1930s. She is currently research-
ing the re-opening of the State Department Store (GUM), following Stalin’s death in 1953.

Vicki Howard is Visiting Fellow in the history department at the University of Essex. She is the
author of two monographs published by University of Pennsylvania Press: Brides, Inc. American
Weddings and the Business of Tradition (2006) and From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the
American Department Store (2015), winner of the Hagley Prize in Business History. She is cur-
rently editing the Cultural History of Shopping, 1920–present forthcoming with Bloomsbury and
is co-editor of the Routledge journal, History of Retailing and Consumption.

David Delbert Kruger is Agricultural and Business Research Librarian at the University of
Wyoming in Laramie,Wyoming. He has published two award-winning articles on the history of
J. C. Penney stores in the United States as well as a recent book J. C. Penney: The Man, the Store,
and American Agriculture through the University of Oklahoma Press.

Bettina Liverant is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Univer-
sity of Calgary, Canada. Liverant has a degree in architecture as well as a Ph.D. in Canadian
intellectual history. She has written extensively on Canadian consumer society, on corporate
philanthropy and on architecture for both academic and general audiences. Her most recent
publication is Buying Happiness:The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada (Uni-
versity of British Columbia Press, 2018).

Richard Longstreth is Professor of American Studies, Emeritus, at George Washington Uni-

versity, where he taught from 1983 to 2018. He is author of many works, including Looking
Beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism (University of Virginia Press,
2015) and The American Department Store Transformed, 1920–1960 (Yale Univesity Press, 2010).
His City Center to Regional Mall (1997) and The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation
of Commercial Space (MIT Press, 1999) won four national awards in the fields of architectural
history, urban history and historic preservation.

Harada Masami completed the doctoral programme in commercial science from Doshisha
University, in 1988. He became an associate professor of the Faculty of Economics at Fukui
Prefectural University in 1992 and became a professor of the Faculty and the Graduate School at
Fukui Prefectural University in 1996. He took his doctorate in Economics at Kyoto University
in 1993. He has been a representative of the Market History Society (Sijo-shi Kenkyu-kai) and
a director of Socio-Economic History Society (Shakai-Keizashi Gakkai) since 2015.

Douglas McCalla is University Professor Emeritus, Department of History, the University

of Guelph, where he formerly held the Canada Research Chair in Rural History. His books
include Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada (McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2015) and Planting the Province:The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784–1870 (Uni-
versity of Toronto Press, 1993). His articles include the memoir, ‘A World Through Commerce:
Explorations in Upper Canada (and Beyond)’ (Canadian Historical Review, 97: 2 [ June 2016],
244–71).

Dale Miller is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing, Griffith University.
Dr. Miller’s research on branding and retailing appears in the Journal of Historical Research in

xiv
 Contributors

Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, the International Journal of Retail & Distribu-
tion Management, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Marketing and Journal of Brand
Management. She is joint winner of the 2013 Stanley Hollander Best Paper Award at the 2013
CHARM Conference, Copenhagen.

Ian Mitchell is Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research, University
of Wolverhampton, UK. After graduating from Oxford University, he worked for two govern-
ment departments, and then as a Church of England minister. On his retirement from full-time
ministry, he returned to his long-standing interest in the history of retailing and consumption
in England in the period 1700–1850. His book, Tradition and Innovation in English Retailing,
1700–1850: Narratives of Consumption was published by Ashgate in 2014.

Silke Neunsinger is Associate Professor in economic history and Director of Research at

the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm. She has recently edited a number
of volumes, amongst them together with Dirk Hoerder and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk,
Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers (Brill, 2015); together with Mary
Hilson and Iben Vyff, Labour Unions and Politics under the North Star. The Nordic Countries 1700–
2000 (Berghahn, 2017) and together with Mary Hilson and Greg Patmore, A Global History of
Consumer Co-operation since 1850 (Brill, 2017).

Daniel Opler is Associate Professor and Chair of History at the College of Mount Saint
Vincent in the Bronx, New York. His primary research interests include the overlap of class,
gender and radical politics in twentieth-century New York City. His book, For All White-Collar
Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York City’s Department Store Unions, 1934–1953,
was published by Ohio State University Press in 2007. He is currently working on a study of
radicalism and American composers in 1930s America.

José Luis Oyón is Professor of Urban History at the Vallès Higher Technical School of Archi-
tecture of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. His most recent books include: M. Guàrdia,
J.L. Oyón, Memòria del mercat del Born, El Born CCM, Barcelona, 2017; M. Guàrdia, J.L. Oyón
(eds), Making Cities through Market Halls. Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, MUHBA, Barcelona,
2015; and J.L. Oyón, La ciudad en el joven Reclus. Hacia la fusión naturaleza-ciudad, Ediciones del
Viaducto, Barcelona 2018.

Greg Patmore is Professor Emeritus of Business and Labour History and Chair of the Busi-
ness and Labour History Group and the Co-operative Research Group in the University of
Sydney Business School. He is currently researching the history of Australian co-operatives, and
the history of the Berkeley Consumer Co-operative. His publications include: A Global History
of Co-operative Business (2018, with Nikola Balnave), Worker Voice: Employee Representation in the
Workplace in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, and the US, 1914–1939 (2016) and Australian
Labour History (1991).

Patrick Hyder Patterson is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Univer-
sity of California, San Diego. His research centres on the history of twentieth-century Eastern
Europe and the Balkans, with major emphases on everyday life and consumer culture and on
the interplay of Islam, Christianity and secular society. He is author of Bought and Sold: Living and
Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Cornell University Press, 2011) and numerous articles
on consumer society in Eastern Europe.

xv
 Contributors

Sara Pennell is Senior Lecturer in early modern British history and Programme Leader for
the undergraduate History programmes at the University of Greenwich. Her most recent book,
The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850 (Bloomsbury, 2016), combines these concerns. At the
moment, she is working on two very different projects: a biography of a seventeenth-century
woman writer of domestic manuals; and a cultural history of domestic mobility in England.

Martin Purvis is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds. He has a long-
standing interest in the history and geography of retailing in Britain and continental Europe.
Martin’s research initially explored the nineteenth-century origins and development of
consumers’ co-operation. More recently he has published on retailing in interwar Britain,
including aspects of the managerial practice of Marks and Spencer. Martin’s current research
focuses on retailing during the years of depression, war and austerity from the 1930s to the
1950s.

Nitin Sanghavi is Professor of Retail Marketing and Strategy at Manchester Business School.
He has held senior positions in major retail and retail-related organisations in the UK and
overseas and founded the MBS Retail Centre. His publications include: ‘Employing Social Net-
working Media as a Marketing Tool in Large Emerging Markets: The Case of India’, Proceedings
of 14th International Conference of the Society for Global Business & Economic Development
(2016).

Susan Spellman is Associate Professor of History at Miami University. Her research focuses
on American business and capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is
the author of Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business
(Oxford University Press, 2016). She received the 2005 Russel B. Nye Award for the Out-
standing Article published in the Journal of Popular Culture.

Howard R. Stanger is Professor in the Department of Management at Canisius College and

holds an affiliated appointment in History. His research has focused on marketing, employee
relations and corporate culture in the United States. He has written about employers’ associa-
tions in the commercial printing industry and labour relations in the newspaper and digital
media industries. Stanger holds degrees from Queens College (CUNY), Rutgers University and
Ohio State University.

Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research

ranges across a wide variety of topics relating to retailing and consumption in England dur-
ing the long eighteenth century. These include the grocery trade, village shops, the sale of
second-hand goods, and country houses as sites of consumption. His most recent books are two
edited collections: A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2016 – with Johanna
Ilmakunnas) and Travel and the British Country House (Manchester University Press, 2016). He
is currently working on a project which explores comfort in the eighteenth-century country
house.

Ilja Van Damme is Professor in Urban History at the University of Antwerp. He is the current
academic director of the Centre for Urban History (CSG), and board member of the Urban
Studies Institute (USI) of the University of Antwerp. His research interests relate to the late
18th- and 19th-century city as lived and spatial environment. He recently co-edited Cities and
Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present (Routledge: London, 2017).

xvi
 Contributors

Martín Monsalve Zanatti is Associate Professor at Universidad del Pacífico and President of
the Universidad del Pacifico Press. His most recent publications include: Regional Elites in Peru
in a Context of Fiscal Boom: Arequipa, Cusco, Piura y San Martín, 2000–2013 (co-author with
Paula Muñoz et al.) and Evolution of the Peruvian large family business, 1896–2012 in Paloma
Fernández Pérez and Andrea Lluch (editors), Evolution of Family Business: Continuity and Change
in Latin America and Spain.

xvii
 1
INTRODUCTION
Global perspectives on retailing

I. Introduction
The digital age has severed retail’s historic ties to geography and place. Shoppers have turned to
their smart phones and computers to purchase everyday items like food and clothing as well as
luxury goods and personal services. Internet commerce is now a global challenge to the so-called
brick-and-mortar retailer. On both sides of the Atlantic, historic retail firms have gone under,
whilst many others are struggling to compete in the new environment. By many accounts, the
High Street is in crisis in the United Kingdom, indicated by declining footfall of shoppers in
central business districts and by store closures. Concerns over the displacement of the High
Street economy in the UK have spurred numerous studies and hopeful plans for redevelopment
(Portas, 2011; Wrigley, 2015). In the United States, a country with much more retail space per
person than Europe, “dead malls” have become a well-known phenomenon (Europe’s Retail
Market, 2017). Although a global trend, e-commerce has diffused across national markets in
varying degrees: in the United States, it hovered between 9% and 10% of total retail sales in
2017; Great Britain saw online sales hit 16.5% of total retail sales in January 2018, yet China
dwarfed this, accounting for 40% of total e-commerce spending globally. Every nation has
experienced growth and disruption in this sector, signalling another retail revolution is upon
us (Statistical Bulletin, 2018; Quarterly Retail, 2018). While the future is not foreseeable, it is
safe to say that recent trends are unprecedented in their global reach. Industry observers have
described a “retail apocalypse”, seeing the end of traditional face-to-face modes of selling in a
physical setting. The rise of e-commerce, which is less labour intensive by nature, has nega-
tively affected retail employment opportunities as well. Amazon might employ more than half a
million people, but these are lean numbers in relation to the firm’s value. Currently the world’s
third most valuable company, its market capitalisation stands at more than $702 billion at the
beginning of 2018 and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is the richest person in the world (Carr, 2018).
This revolutionary commercial landscape calls for a reconsideration of the general history of
retailing. Retail has never been static, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, and
lessons for the present can be learned from the past. Just to take the United States as an example,
current concerns over retail monopoly and the effect of bigness on small business enterprise
can be seen to have a long history. Nineteenth-century American department stores were the
Walmarts of their era, posing a threat to single-line merchants who were unable to complete

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with their low prices. Mail order firms like Sears and Montgomery Ward reached rural markets
as never before with their general merchandise catalogues and subsidised distribution, undercut-
ting small retailers in the same manner as Amazon. Chain stores undersold independents which
instigated a successful movement in the interwar period to tax and regulate away their econo-
mies of scale. After World War II, American branch department stores in the suburbs began
to undercut downtown sales, damaging urban centres. And, by the late twentieth century,
discounters and big-box stores overtook them all. In the past, such retail developments were
geographically confined: their effects limited to local, regional, and in some cases national mar-
kets. Place shaped the identity, practice and success of retail firms throughout most of its history.
In the computer era, however, this is less the case. But, although the Internet age has collapsed
time and space, allowing unprecedented market access for a diverse range of entrepreneurs and
firms, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how different national contexts continue to play
an important role in shaping retail traditions and practices.
Despite recent threats to the survival of traditional retailing, the industry is still a vital part of
the early twenty-first century economy. In the UK, the retail sector as a whole contributed just
over 11% of total economic output in 2016 and was the largest private sector employer (The
Retail Industry, 2017). Wholesaling and retail combined were the second largest employer
in the EU, after manufacturing, constituting 13% of the labour force (Retail and Wholesale,
2014). And across the Atlantic, retail employed roughly 16 million people in the United States
at the beginning of 2018 and contributed $2.6 trillion to the nation’s GDP (Current Employ-
ment, 2018; Economic Impact, 2018). Brick and mortar retailing remains a central feature of
the commercial landscape, the physical place where everyday business is conducted and the
ordinary experience of life goes on. Whether located on UK High Streets, American Main
Streets, in open-air street markets or in privately developed shopping complexes and malls, it
provides the public space that creates communities.
And it has done so for a long time. Indeed, we might argue that retail history tracks the evo-
lution of human societies and their economic activity, which makes it surprising that scholarship
has often been quite narrowly defined. Previous histories of retailing have followed national
lines or tracked the evolution of different retail formats, such as public markets, shopping
malls, or department stores. In this Companion to the History of Retailing, the authors draw on
their disciplinary specialties, but were tasked to bridge national divides wherever possible. As a
result, some key influences and processes are revealed. Western retailing practices, for instance,
shaped business enterprise and shopping experiences the world over, but local and regional
differences are also shown to have persisted or in some cases, created interesting hybrid forms.
A longer perspective has also shaped the picture of change over time, with strong continuities
being identified and new periodisations suggested. Previous scholarly works have focused on
the consumer revolution or the rise of modern mass retailing, but what comes from our longer
chronological view and global perspective is a messier, more interesting history.

II. Approaches
Retail history is a rich, cross-disciplinary field that demonstrates the centrality of retailing to
many aspects of human experience, from the provisioning of everyday goods to the shaping
of urban environments; from earning a living to the construction of identity. This diversity is
reflected in the broad range of disciplines that contribute to retail history, including economics,
business, labour, architectural and social and cultural history, historical geography, marketing
and management studies and urban planning. This diversity is a real strength, making the study

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of retail history a vibrant and constantly changing field of enquiry: each discipline brings its
owns perspectives and concerns, asking a different set of questions, and each writes retail his-
tory in a different way. Diverse sources are drawn on to reconstruct the spaces, dynamics and
practices of retailing: architectural historians might use plans, designs and the extant fabric of
the city, whereas economists utilise statistics of sales, wages and the like, and business historians
draw on the records of individual companies. These different sources reflect different method-
ologies: the quantification and model building of economists, for example, or the case studies
and “thick descriptions” of social historians.
Such diversity is underscored by the different approaches and timeframes considered by his-
torians in different countries. To caricature: American scholars tend to focus on the emergence
of big business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whereas those in Europe also examine
medieval and early modern retailing, and are more concerned with a diversity of retail forms
(Strasser, 1989; Leach, 1993). More subtly, definitions of key institutions (such as department
stores) can vary, as can the relative importance of issues such as race or the role of central and
local government in retail regulation (Benson, 1986; Howard, 2015; Monod, 1996). This disci-
plinary and national diversity is readily apparent in this volume, bringing to it a range of voices
and perspectives that illustrate the varied ways in which retail history is studied and written. For
instance, the discussion of itinerant tradesmen, written by the French social historian, Laurence
Fontaine, is very different in style from Nitin Sanghavi’s account of the retail history of India,
which reflects the perspective and priorities of business management.Yet both, and all the other
contributions to this volume, offer rich and varied insights in the many facets of retail history.
Indeed, this diversity enriches our understanding of retail history in its many forms.
Uniting these different perspectives and approaches is a broad consensus around the overall
narrative of retail development, a consensus that has both temporal and spatial dimensions. Start-
ing from the ancient world, the focus is largely on markets and fairs, which were increasingly
formalised and regulated. Social and spatial gaps in provision were met by an array of itiner-
ant retailers who were especially significant in serving the needs of rural populations less able
to access urban markets (Holleran, 2012; Stabel, 2001; Fontaine, 1996; Calaresu and van den
Heuvel, 2016). Yet shops were always present alongside the market, often operated by crafts-
men who made as well as sold their wares; these fixed shops became increasingly important,
eventually dominating retail provision, especially for durable goods and non-perishable foods – a
process traced by Dyer in this volume (see also Keene, 1990; Welch, 2005; Carlin, 2007). In part
because of gild regulations in many European cities and in part because of the growing array of
goods available, retail provision diversified and specialised, a process that often involved the sep-
aration of production from retailing. In colonial America, import merchants sold goods through
several distribution chains, including their own stores located at their warehouses in port cities
and through networks of smaller merchants in the hinterland (Matson, 1998). Across Europe,
the eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation of shops that were much more geared towards
actively selling their wares, as Blondé and Van Damme outline in this volume. This process
continued into the nineteenth century with the emergence of ‘modern’ retailing in the form of
department stores and chain stores, which ushered in a new set of retail practices (Leach, 1993;
Levinson, 2011; Spellman, 2016). The spatial focus here switches to America, where the devel-
opment of mass retailing is seen as being most rapid and thorough (see the chapters by Elvins,
Kruger and Liverant). Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, retailing grew
further in scale and in its impact on both cities and citizens (Howard, 2015; Isenberg, 2004;
Longstreth, 1997) with US practices being copied across the world (see the chapters by Miller,
Howard and Stobart, and Purvis). As the twentieth century progressed, new forms of retailing

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took hold, including self-service and supermarkets; growing personal mobility drove a process
of suburbanisation and a consequent decline in city centres – a trend first seen in the USA and
accelerated in recent years by the emergence and growth of online shopping, as discussed here
by Hyder, Halebsky, Stanger and Ellis-Chadwick.
Variations on this basic narrative reflect local differences in timing, emphasis and extent,
but there is broad agreement on the sequence of change. Whether this amounts to evolution
or revolution is, in part, a matter of perspective, although there is a growing scepticism about
notions of a single retail revolution, as we discuss below. What remains clear, however, is the
way in which retailing offers a window onto other key social, economic and cultural changes,
including the emergence of a consumer society, the vibrancy of the economy (ides of consumer
confidence and retail sales), the vitality of towns and urban institutions and relationships of
power, such as race, gender and class.

III. Key themes

Given the variety of disciplinary perspectives, it is unsurprising that there are many different
themes within retail history. Naturally, these have changed over the course of time, one of the
most notable shifts in the last few decades being a move away from supply side to demand-side
viewpoints, a move which reflects the emergence of the consumer as the key economic actor
in the 1980s era of Thatcherism and Reaganomics (Koehn, 2001; Jacobs, 2005). This not only
illustrates very clearly how retail history, like any aspect of history, is at least partly a product of
the time in which it is written. Trying to step back from the detail of myriad approaches can be
difficult, but doing so allows us to identify three broad groups of themes: economic, spatial and
socio-cultural.
The idea of modernity and the process of modernisation form a perennial focus, espe-
cially for economic and business historians (Hollander, 1960; Chandler, 1977; Benson and Shaw,
1992). At their worst, such approaches can be teleological: seeing all changes in retailing as part
of an inevitable and inexorable march to the present day, often in a series of stages which involve
new forms of retailing replacing more traditional formats. Thus, markets decline in the face of
fixed shops; traditional specialist retailers are replaced by department stores and multiples, and
suburban shopping malls replace the High Street/downtown. Conversely, other studies find har-
bingers of modernity in the early modern world: fixed prices, perhaps, or active marketing (e.g.
Walsh, 1999; Stobart, 2013). Despite a growing distrust of such approaches and the simple read-
ings of modernity on which they are often based (see Cox, 2000; Mitchell, 2014; Blonde and
Van Damme, 2010), there remains a focus on key transformative formats and practices – depart-
ment stores, advertising, “scientific” management and new technologies – and on measuring
shifts in productivity and profitability (Belisle, 2011; Elvins, 2004; Howard, 2015; Lichtenstein,
2009 Longstreth, 2010; Scott and Walker, 2012; Spellman, 2016). Whilst simple notions of retail
revolution have long since lost their traction, the key measures and building blocks of this trans-
formation remain important parts of retail history – see, for example, the chapters by Elvins and
Purvis. At the same time, the idea that any transformation was all encompassing has been largely
abandoned, not least because of growing evidence that ‘traditional’ retail formats thrived into the
‘modern’ era: open markets, itinerants, village shops and second-hand exchange, as seen in the
chapters by Guardia et al., Fontaine, McCalla and Pennell.
Running in parallel with ideas of modernisation is the question of the role of retailing in cre-
ating or nurturing a consumer society – an issue discussed in detail by Blondé and Van Damme.
The publication of McKendrick’s seminal analysis in 1982 created a tidal wave of studies that

4
 Introduction

attempted to discover how changes in retailing and consumption were connected, and deter-
mine the direction of causality (e.g. Blaszczyk, 2000; Coquery, 2011; Stobart, 2010). Some
have challenged the periodisation, finding evidence of a productive symbiosis in earlier times
(Peck, 2005; Welch, 2005) or arguing that both sets of changes belong more properly in the age
of mass retailing and mass consumption (Leach, 1993). Others have argued that consumer trans-
formation took place in an essentially traditional retail context (Blonde and Van Damme, 2010).
Retail credit is seen by some as being central to modern consumerism; store cards and credit
cards gave easy access to personal credit in the late twentieth century, building on the freedom
provided earlier in the century by hire purchase agreements which brought a wide range of
consumer durables within the reach of ordinary householders (Calder, 1999; Hyman, 2011)).
Yet credit has always been central to the selling and buying of goods and to the relationship
between retailers and consumers. It is apparent that the link between supply- and demand-side
changes remains a key focus for historical enquiry, with the conclusions reached often reflecting
the location and social group being examined, and the perspective of the researcher.
Debates about retail and consumer revolution often assume that both shopkeepers and their
customers were entirely free agents, able to determine the course of history through their
personal agency. Yet retailing has always been subject to government regulation (Cohen, 2003;
Esperdy, 2008; Jacobs, 2005; Monod, 1996). As Dyer demonstrates in his chapter, medieval mar-
kets were closely controlled by civic and manorial authorities concerned with open and fair
trading, and Guardia et al show that state involvement in markets has continued into the present
era. Gilds played a large role in shaping retailing in many European cities into the eighteenth
century and sometimes beyond, while civic authorities were increasingly active in asserting
planning control and devising improvement schemes that involved radically remodelling retail
streets – a process which reached its apogee in the comprehensive redevelopment schemes of
postwar Europe (Howell, 2010; Morrison, 2003; Gosseye, 2015). National, state and local gov-
ernments also stepped in, regulating prices, wages and hours of operation and sometimes using
retail as a political tool for social and economic modernisation – see the chapters by Harada
and Foda.
Globalisation is another thread that ties the various histories of retail together. One per-
spective on this focuses on the growing power of retailers to shape production. This is perhaps
most obviously seen in the influence of late twentieth-century supermarkets to influence price
and product specification of a wide range of agricultural products, but there is a long tradition
of retailers involving themselves directly in the supply chain – from co-operatives to depart-
ment stores (Lichtenstein, 2009; Spellman, 2016). A second perspective highlights the spread of
Western-style retailing throughout the world. However, as many of the chapters in section 4 of
this volume attest, this influence was not always monolithic or one-directional. Non-Western
and socialist societies developed department stores and shopping malls, for instance, but their
meaning and even the shopping practices they encouraged were somewhat distinct from their
American and European origins – see the chapters by Miller, Foda and Hilton. And Western
models might be hybridised and exported to other parts of the world, as Fujioka demonstrates
was the case with Japanese department stores.
The relationship between retailing and the city forms a second broad theme, linking retail
history to urban and architectural history, and historical geography – as highlighted in particu-
lar in Longstreth’s chapter. Despite the growing industrial specialisation of urban economies,
especially from the eighteenth century, retailing continued to dominate town and city centres;
understanding its geography and its impact has therefore been a key topic of enquiry. For his-
torians of ancient and medieval cities, this has often meant focusing on market buildings and

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market squares; for more recent periods, attention switches to shops and the high street, and
subsequently to precincts, malls and shopping centres (Stabel, 2001; Coquery, 2011; Furnee and
Lesger, 2014; Howard, 2015; Longstreth, 1997, 2010). This sequence can be traced through the
chapters by Dyer, Mitchell and Howard and Stobart which draw out the shifting functional and
geographical locus of urban retailing over the longue durée. Mapping the changing location of
retail infrastructure or the concentrations of specialist retail trades provides a window onto a
range of broader processes and relationships, from business location strategies and the economics
of clustering, to the daily pathways of urban dwellers and the persistence of local and regional
identities (Hardwick, 2004; Elvins, 2004). Retail is seen as playing a key role in shaping the
layout of the city, and more especially its built environment: the style, scale and orientation of
buildings were determined in part by imperatives of selling. This is most obvious in department
stores and malls, but is also apparent in market halls and corner shops (Morrison, 2003; Long-
sreth, 1997, 2010; Guardia and Oyon, 2015). Buildings carry messages about the retail company,
for example through monumentalism and house architectural styles; together they help to define
the identity of the city, although a key concern in recent years has been with the growing same-
ness of high streets and city centres, as highlighted in Mitchell’s chapter.
The link between retailing and the city centre has been weakened by the progressive decen-
tralisation and suburbanisation of shops. Originally, retail location was determined by accessibil-
ity on foot; mass transport systems, especially trams and omnibuses, provided a strong impetus for
shops to locate along the route and particularly around terminals. All these meant that city centre
locations were favoured. However, this was first challenged and then broken, from the 1950s in
the USA and slightly later in Europe, by the rise of the motorcar and the personal mobility that
this offered. Residential decentralisation in the United States following World War II spurred
development of new shopping complexes outside of traditional city centres (Longstreth, 1997,
2010). American car culture increasingly dominated the commercial landscape with the appear-
ance of new competitors in the shape of discounters and big-box retailing, built on low-cost land
outside of city centres. These shifts have created fundamental changes in the urban fabric: down-
town in many American cities in particular now has little to do with retail. Restaurants, bars,
cafés, cinemas and other leisure-oriented businesses have populated downtowns, replacing the
types of businesses that serve everyday needs, such as grocery and hardware stores. While many
lament the death of downtown in America, historians have emphasised the continual evolution
of retail formats and their meaning (Howard, 2015; Isenberg, 2004; Spellman, 2016). Over the
last decade or so, focusing on grassroots movements and local efforts, some have emphasised
survival and transformation, rather than destruction and decline (Isenberg, 2004).
Historians are also interested in retail space at a finer scale, within malls, arcades and even
within shops themselves. Some of this concerns the ways in which store layout influenced
consumer behaviour, as seen in analyses of the infrastructure for display that increasingly char-
acterised eighteenth-century shops and the heightening of such practices in nineteenth-century
department stores (Walsh, 1999; Stobart et al., 2007; Whitaker, 2011; Howard, 2015). It is also
apparent in the construction and layout of supermarkets, malls and shopping centres – see the
chapters by Hyder, Halebsky and Howard and Stobart. In all these retail environments, space
was produced and manipulated by retailers to mould people’s interactions with goods and their
perceptions of the retailer, with the ultimate aim of increasing sales. However, more recently,
there has been growing interest in the ways in which retail space has been constructed and
sometimes subverted by the spatial practices of shoppers: high streets and arcades were used as
promenades and by flaneurs, department stores formed distinctly female spaces, and malls were
colonised by the young and old as places to hang out or stay warm and dry. Moreover, retail

6
 Introduction

venues, operating as a quasi-public privatised space, have been sites of political resistance. Soci-
ologists, for example, have examined the various ways that different groups, such as women and
the politically oppressed, have deployed such spaces for their own purposes (Srivastava, 2015).
As this suggests, retail history is increasingly being explored through a social or cultural lens.
This includes using traditional categories such as gender, class and race, and increasingly in terms
of identity construction and counter cultures. Class has often been examined in terms of labour
relations. On the one hand, this has involved juxtaposing powerful merchant princes and penny
capitalists, as Spellman does in her chapter (see also Benson, 1992). This can be seen as part of
a broader historical tradition that explores economic and social change through the actions of
great heroic figures, be they manufacturers, social reformers or retailers. It is most prominent in
histories of department stores, but also characterises the histories of chain stores and even super-
markets (Briggs, 1956; Moss and Turton, 1989; Mathias, 1967; Buenger, 1998). On the other
hand, there is the relationship between the shop owner and their workers, which could some-
times be highly antagonistic. The former often fought attempts at statutory control of working
hours, whilst also pushing for resale price maintenance, which meant that goods cost more to the
consumer (Scott and Walker, 2018).The latter, meanwhile, are often portrayed as being deskilled
as retailing ‘modernised’ through adopting new management practices, fixed prices, open dis-
play and self-service – a trend that continues through to today, with zero-hours contracts and
automated check-outs (see the chapters by Purvis and Opler). Class was also important in terms
of the status of customers, where they shopped, how they interacted with salespeople and what
they purchased sometimes being determined by and then serving to cement their social stand-
ing (Abelson, 1989; Benson, 1986; Miller, 1981). In this context, co-operative stores has been
portrayed as empowering the working classes by assuring good quality and fair prices, an aspect
developed by Hilson et al in their chapter. In contrast, second-hand was increasingly seen as the
recourse of the poor, but this was, as Pennell demonstrates, time and sector specific: before the
eighteenth century, second-hand was important for all sectors of society and recent years have
seen the growth of “vintage” shops (see also Stobart and Van Damme, 2010). Department stores,
meanwhile, are celebrated a democratising luxury, although different stores catered to different
social groups (especially when we look beyond the Western world (Whitaker, 2006).
In the USA, race was also important in shaping peoples experience of retailing. The Jim
Crow practices of Southern retailers and boycotts of segregated store facilities and discrimina-
tory labour practices have been well-documented by historians of the civil rights movement.
Business historians have evaluated the response of managers to boycotts and legislative pressure,
and have also documented the contributions of black-owned business to retail history (Cham-
bers, 2008; Dyer, 2013; Weems, 1998; Wright, 2013). The broader subject of racialised consump-
tion and racial discrimination in the commercial sector has recently attracted the attention of
scholars across a wide disciplinary spectrum (Bay and Fabian, 2015). Race has been less of an
issue in the history of European retailing, although the growing number and variety of small
shops owned by immigrants from former colonies and the more recent growth of shops selling
east European foods demand fuller attention – as Van Damme notes in his chapter.
A more general and widely shared concern in the more recent historiography is with gender
and especially women’s relationship with retailing and shopping. As with class, attention has
focused on issues of oppression and inequality versus empowerment and liberation. Shopkeepers
have long included women as well as men, and the shopkeeper’s wife was often crucial in run-
ning the family business (Van den Heuvel, 2013; Barker, 2017). However, there has always been
a tendency for women to trade in lower status and less remunerative retail trades, sometimes
at the margins of legality. The rise of big retail businesses is sometimes seen as offering greater

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opportunities for female shop assistants, although their opportunities for advancement through
the tiers of management were restricted in Europe, at least before World War II (Lancaster, 1995).
In the United States, department stores provided more opportunities for women to rise up the
ladder as buyers and middle managers, though with the arrival of big discounters after World
War II a more male-dominated climate prevailed (Howard, 2015). Poor working conditions and
the danger of sexual exploitation were apparent in the early modern era and continued into the
twentieth century. As a key female occupation, retail work has attracted attention from women’s
and labour historians (Benson, 1986; Opler, 2007). Although the unionisation of retail workers
has also lagged behind that of industrial workers in the United States, women played key roles
in the history of union organising, a position that created sometimes antagonist relationships
with customers (Opler, 2007). Analyses of women as customers paint a more positive picture.
Shops and shopping formed an arena in which they could engage in the public sphere, although
the liberating spaces of department stores were balanced by the dangers of social heterogeneity
which it brought with it (Lancaster, 1995; Benson, 1986). Social historians have documented the
tensions within an emergent culture of consumption, visible within retail institutions such as
the department store. Concerns about gender and class in Victorian America, for example, came
together within the shoplifter-kleptomaniac identity given to middle-class white women (Abel-
son, 1989), although recent work has questioned this association – as discussed in the chapter by
Blondé and Van Damme.

IV. Volume overview

The world’s retail history is too rich and vast to receive full coverage within one volume, no
matter how broad its remit and ambition. Recognising that it is impossible to cover every con-
ceivable topic, retail format and location, we have sought wide-ranging coverage that is both
thematically and geographically inclusive. To this end, our Companion to the History of Retailing
is divided into four broad sections: [1] Contexts, trends and relationships, [2] Spaces and places,
[3] People, processes and practices and [4] Geographical variations. Thematic chapters in the
first three sections focus mostly on Europe/UK and North America, reflecting the strength of
scholarly literature in this area. The geographical scope of the chapters in section 4 provides an
opportunity to move beyond the European/UK/North American perspective of the volume
and much of the literature. Here, we get a clearer picture of variations in retail histories across
the globe although some notable global players are sadly absent. It is our hope that future studies
will address areas we were not able to investigate.
Spanning the medieval world to the present, the history of retail is marked by both change
and continuity. The distribution of goods and services might seem a universal activity, but as the
scholars here demonstrate, everyday market exchanges are the product of diverse historical con-
texts, trends and relationships. Thematic chapters in this section attempt to address the historical
contingency of retail phenomenon by placing such activity within its broader economic, politi-
cal, technological and environmental contexts. Examining the chronological breadth of retail
activity from the medieval and early modern periods and into the modern era allows the sub-
ject’s connection to broader trends to emerge. Globalisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, the
emergence of consumerism and the rise of bureaucratic and state controls shaped retail activity
in vastly different ways over time as our authors demonstrate. Chapters reveal social relationships
forged by economic exchange undergoing immense change in the modern era, first with the
consumer revolution and the rise of mass markets, then with the more recent upheavals of the
internet age. At the same time, several of our authors warn against seeing retail history as a suc-
cession of revolutions, with many values and practices continuing from one era into the next.

8
 Introduction

The chapters in section 2 also examine retail activity in all its diversity and distinctiveness, but
a focus on building and organisational typologies highlights many interesting similarities of retail
form across the globe. Architectural formats are shown to have evolved slowly over time, for
instance from open-air markets and market stalls to purpose-built market halls and from village
and high street shops to the large-scale enterprises that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Chapters draw attention to the shared social and cultural experience of the spaces and places
where people shopped. As our authors show, retail spaces and places exerted tremendous cultural
and social power over more than simply shopping or consumer behaviour. Indeed, department
stores, shopping malls and big-box stores like Walmart helped constitute the very meaning of
consumer society, providing the spaces where modern identities took shape. Other retail modes
influenced the most fundamental of human activities – eating.The rise of supermarkets not only
transformed food provisioning and eating habits, but was also connected to new agricultural
and technological regimes. Retail change influenced the shape of cities and their commercial
districts. By detailing the evolution of retail spaces and places, these chapters contribute to an
understanding of these broader historical changes across national boundaries.
Section 3 turns to the human actors who comprise all retail enterprise. Here, chapters docu-
ment the wide variety of people, processes and practices behind the retail industry, from the level
of individual enterprise to big business. That retail history can be told from the bottom up or
the top down is reflected in this section, which includes contributions on itinerants and peddlers
and on shop workers, as well as managers and merchant princes. In addition, this section reflects
the variety of retail processes or organisational modes within the distribution chain. The focus
here is on large-scale organisational structures – multiples, mail order firms and co-operatives –
and the ways in which their economic practices were suffused with social and cultural implica-
tions, most overtly in the case of co-operative societies with their conscious social and political
agendas. Smaller-scale retailers receive perhaps less attention than they merit, which in part
reflects their relative neglect in the literature: obscured by the bright lights of the high street and
mall, and the growing dominance of big business. Overall, the section overviews the evolution
of business and labour practices within a consumer-oriented society.
National boundaries, shaped by law, custom and geography, determine economic practices.The
final section seeks to illuminate the shared structures and diverse practices of different regions and
nations across the world. Chapters cover the retail history of the USA and Canada,Western Europe,
Eastern Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, the Middle East, Japan and India. Addi-
tional chapters on individual countries would have helped clarify national differences, for example
between countries in Mediterranean and northern Europe or different states in India; but limits of
space and a desire to provide a coherent overview of geographical variations meant that we focus
on global regions rather than dig down into local specificities.The authors draw on their historical
specialties to situate retail practices within their national contexts, but also seek to highlight connec-
tions across borders. In many cases, different countries shared markets, language, and political cul-
tures and it made sense to treat them together.Two notable absences within the volume – China and
Africa – have extremely long and diverse retail histories and need to be addressed by further study.
Through its various sections and chapters, this volume aims to provide both an overview
of the history of retailing and an entrée to its many and varied elements. It is unlikely that the
reader will tackle the whole book or even read through an entire section, although both would,
we feel, be rewarding exercises. Each chapter is thus written in a way that allows it to be read
on its own, to provide an overview of the history of itinerants or supermarkets, for example, or
the development of retailing in the Middle East or Japan. In whatever way the reader chooses to
approach this volume, it offers rich insights into retail history and its links to wider economic,
social, cultural and urban histories.

9
 Jon Stobart and Vicki Howard

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12
 PART I

Contexts, trends and relationships

 2
RETAILING IN THE MEDIEVAL
AND EARLY MODERN WORLDS
Christopher Dyer

Introduction: traditional views of retailing in the past

Commerce before the industrial revolution, and particularly before 1500, was once seen as
dominated by great merchants typically from such ports as Venice and Antwerp carrying bulky
and valuable cargoes over long distances. The traded goods would be for the benefit of the
wealthy elite: the rulers, aristocrats, higher clergy, and the patricians of the larger cities. Spices
and silks from the east, fine wines from south-west France or the Mediterranean, high-quality
cloth made in Ghent and Ypres, and the metal work of south Germany including armour, were
the expensive commodities which the courts of Europe required (Spufford, 2002). They would
be bought from the merchants by the officials of the grand households. Some producers of
prestigious artefacts, such as the painters, sculptors and goldsmiths, would often be employed
or commissioned directly by their wealthy patrons. This type of trade was seen as originating
around the year 1000 when the emerging urban economy was driven by the demands of aristo-
crats for luxuries which were traded from afar or manufactured in the towns. Towns expanded
as aristocrats increased their spending in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and faltered when
the elites suffered losses of income.
In this view of pre-industrial society, the great majority of the population, mainly living
from agriculture with a smattering of artisans, were expected to subsist on a few essentials, with
a mainly cereal diet. A high proportion of people, it was thought, practised self-sufficiency by
growing their own food and gathering from the commons. As much as possible they made their
own clothing and agricultural implements. The peasantry are depicted as achieving only low
levels of productivity in their farming, which prevented them from setting aside more than a
small surplus, and much of that would have been swallowed up by lords and rulers demanding
rents and taxes. The mass of the population existed insecurely because of periodic harvest fail-
ures. The production and consumption of food took priority, and left little to spare for manu-
factures such as cloth or utensils. The limited number of exchanges was conducted in weekly
markets and annual fairs, at which tolls were collected for the benefit of rulers and lords. The
majority of the population found it difficult to accumulate much cash, and exchange often took
the form of lending and bartering among neighbours.
Change came about through fluctuations in the human population, which grew up to c.1300,
perhaps to unsustainable levels, and then declined after famines and plagues into the fifteenth

15
 Christopher Dyer

century. Recovery in numbers lay behind the economic revival in the sixteenth century, but yet
more crises in the seventeenth, including a devastating war in central Europe, ushered in a new
episode of uncertainty.
Studies of towns have tended to concentrate on their government, above all by the wealthy
merchants and administrators who were anxious to protect the towns’ privileges. The majority
of the population were taxed and policed in such a way that profit and enterprise were discour-
aged. From the thirteenth century one of the major industries in the towns of Flanders, Brabant
and northern France, clothmaking, was controlled by entrepreneurs who supplied the craftsmen
with their materials, and supervised each separate stage of manufacture such as spinning, weaving,
fulling, dyeing and finishing. The guilds formed by these artisans, when they were permitted,
tended to concentrate on protecting the narrow interests of their members.
The historians’ picture of gross inequality, widespread poverty, and low levels of production
can be connected to the contemporary moral climate. The catholic church (in effect the only
church before the 1520s) endorsed versions of austerity and voluntary deprivation, from the
specialised life of poverty professed by the friars, to the universal practice of fasting in Lent and
on days of abstinence throughout the year. Merchants who bought cheap and sold dear were
regarded with suspicion, and commercial practices such as charging interest on loans were for-
bidden in the strongest terms. The secular authorities in seeking to control the market and pro-
tect the consumer made life difficult for middlemen, and imposed price and quality regulations.
Buying goods was apparently surrounded by risks: it was a necessity, and could serve a useful
function, but offered few pleasures.

Recent approaches to the history of retailing

The once prevalent view of a bleak pre-industrial past is supported by evidence and has some
validity as an interpretation. However, it serves the purpose of those who believe in the over-
whelming importance of the industrial revolution to highlight the misery and deprivation
experienced before 1700. The exaggeration of backwardness makes the advances of modern
civilisation seem all the more beneficial. In revising and modifying the general picture, historians
have shown, particularly in the last twenty years, that pre-industrial retail trade was not a trivial
or fringe activity, but a central feature of society.
Recent research finds that most trade was regional and local, but not narrowly confined to
close neighbours. For example, Cologne in Germany’s Rhine valley had a vital relationship
with its surrounding district extending as far as 40km to 70km from the city (Eiden and Irsliger,
2000). The city’s 40,000 inhabitants (in the period 1340–1750) bought foodstuffs, firewood
and timber that had been produced or collected in nearby farms and villages, and in return sold
to country people leather goods, textiles and metal utensils made in the city. As well as dealing
in relatively low value everyday goods produced in the region, such as grain, Cologne’s wider
hinterland kept its specialised industry in metal utensils supplied with raw materials, such as
iron bars for the city’s forges. The citizens’ demands for sea fish, wine and large quantities of
livestock were satisfied by traders operating at a considerable distance. Smaller towns around
Cologne, such as Julich and Neuss, interacted closely with their rural surroundings and would
not have had the large city’s wide connections.
The character of the trading and retail system can be assessed by noting the number of
towns and trading places, the proportion of people living in them and the occupations that
they pursued. Towns and markets had proliferated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
most towns persisted in spite of economic troubles after the Black Death into the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Counting small towns as well as large, the total in 1600 in Sweden was

16
 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds

forty-nine, and in Austria eighty-six. The Hesse region in Germany had as many as 138 in the
early modern period, and England around 700 (Clark, ed., 1995, pp. 80, 90, 190; Epstein, ed.,
2001, p. 32). These figures include not just large towns with populations in excess of 2000, but
also market towns with a few hundred inhabitants. Country markets are not included, only
those places with a concentration of permanent residents pursuing variety of non-agricultural
occupations.The best way of assessing the contribution of towns to the whole society is to calcu-
late the ‘urban ratio’, that is the proportion of the population living in towns.When this is done at
various times between 1350 and 1700, including small towns, the figure is often in the region of
20%, rising to 30% and more in the Low Countries and northern Italy (Clark, ed., 1995, p. 186).
In England the figures in 1377–81 and 1522–5 fell below 20% in the more underdeveloped
counties, but rose above 25% in Suffolk, in a region noted for its commerce and industry. Towns
usually lacked the agricultural resources to support their inhabitants, and instead the townspeo-
ple gained a living from intense engagement with trade and manufacture.
As towns grew the transport infrastructure was being developed, above all with the replace-
ment of fords and ferries with bridges, which often included causeways which allowed conveni-
ent access to travellers across low lying meadows (Harrison, 2004). Roads were rerouted and
improved, and wharfs and waterfronts were built alongside rivers. New channels for waterways
were dug, often for the convenience of a monastery, but also for general use (Blair, ed., 2007).
Attempts were made to protect road users from crime, such as clearing vegetation from road
sides where thieves might lurk, and by arresting and punishing highway robbers. Inns were
founded in towns on road junctions, and even out in the country, where travellers and their
horses and vehicles could be sheltered securely and provided with food and drink (Hare, 2013).
Speedier and more robust horse-drawn carts replaced the clumsy ox wains which had been used
in the twelfth century (Langdon, 1986).
The occupations of townspeople leave no doubt about the importance of making relatively
cheap goods for a large number of ordinary customers, some of them living in the town, but
many from the surrounding countryside. In any English town the food trades figure promi-
nently: bakers, brewers, butchers, fishmongers and cooks. As well as the raw materials for cook-
ing at home customers could buy “ready meals” and “fast food” in the form of pies, pasties,
puddings and sauces. Trade in cloth and clothing gave employment to drapers, mercers, tailors,
kempsters (dressmakers) cappers and hosiers. People wore and used leather goods, so shoemakers
were always prominent, with glovers and saddlers. The list grows with workers in wood, nota-
bly coopers and wheelwrights, the metal trades such as smiths and braziers (dealing in copper
alloy goods), and the chandlers who made and sold candles. These descriptive labels exaggerate
the degree of specialisation, as many townspeople would have a number of sources of income,
and would trade in a variety of commodities. Many dealt in at least small quantities of grain,
but few people were named as specialist grain traders, and the badgers, bladers or cornmongers
tended to be confined to the largest centres. The artisans often kept a shop or stall, selling goods
through a window at the front of their house, while making items such as shoes and caps in a
workplace at the back.The fishmongers and mercers were buying their stock in bulk from other
towns, and selling small quantities to their customers. Some producers would increase their sales
by engaging lesser traders to distribute their wares, most commonly the brewers whose ale was
sold by gannockers, tipplers and the like, who were often female. When we think of retail trade
we naturally focus on shops and market stalls, selling goods set out on a board. However a large
numbers of consumers were buying services, for example by hiring carpenters and roofers to do
work on houses or barns in the town or surrounding villages. Evidence that townspeople were
trading goods or services to customers from nearby villages comes from wills and court records
which give the names of those who owed money.

17
 Christopher Dyer

The number of artisans and traders, and the mundane character of their produce, shows that
most towns were not mainly engaged in supplying luxuries to wealthy aristocrats. Again using
England as an example, even small towns might contain a goldsmith or spicer, but these sup-
pliers of expensive high-grade goods and services were greatly outnumbered by the bakers and
shoemakers. A minority of peasants or artisans who had made a good living would occasionally
buy a silver spoon or a few ounces of pepper. Elite consumers would not be patronising a spicer,
tailor or shoemaker in the nearest market town: they would normally take their custom to high
status traders in very large towns or London. Purveyors of the most expensive goods, such as
vintners or grocers, are rarely found in small towns but instead congregated in ports such as
Southampton, or regional centres like Coventry, or the capital. Concentrating on the evidence
from smaller towns, if the links between individual rural buyers and urban sellers are plotted on
a map, the retailing hinterland is revealed as extending about 12 km from the town.
The artisans and traders selling goods and services to the mass of consumers attract our
attention because of their number, and therefore their collective contribution to the economy
as a whole.The rich deserve attention because they represent a sizeable proportion of consumer
spending. They negotiated their needs with great merchants, but they can be encountered visit-
ing shops and selecting goods. We find Francesco Castellani, a patrician of Florence, in 1459
buying fish for a dinner with guests, and in 1447 he visited a goldsmith to choose twelve silver
forks for a wedding present (these were relative novelties, as spoons and knives were the main
eating implements of the later Middle Ages) (Welch, 2005, p. 230). In Venice in the sixteenth
century, silk was sold in a specially organised display called a paragon at which the customers
made a choice in enforced silence (Welch, 2005, pp. 123–125). Such luxury purchases made a
major contribution to the retailing landscape of the largest towns, from Florence and Venice to
London, Paris and Bruges.
The number, size and occupational structure of towns is not the only evidence of the inter-
action between retailers and a broad spectrum of the population. Inventories of possessions of
ordinary people, or bequests made in wills, mostly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
contain lists of items that could not have been made at home by someone without special
skills or contacts with distant markets. Furnishings for example included carpets (that is, table
coverings), painted cloths hanging from the walls of principal rooms, bedding, cushions, chairs
and chests. In the kitchen would be pots and pans of cast metal, pewter vessels and many other
items that would have been bought from suppliers in towns (Overton et al., 2004). This is rein-
forced by finds from archaeological excavation of rural sites, where cheaper items which are
not mentioned in documents include ceramics which would sometimes be made in towns, but
more often were the products of a rural industry but distributed through the urban marketing
network. By the seventeenth century, superior pots, such as majolica in the Netherlands, were
regarded as valuable enough to appear in documents (Baatsen et al., 2016).

Demand for retailers’ services

In view of the limited spending power of a high proportion of the population, was there enough
demand to enable the retailers to survive? By a paradox shops, market stalls and other retail-
ing outlets were much used by the least affluent section of society, the smallholders, cottagers,
labourers and landless wage-earners. They were sometimes paid in grain or with meals, but the
cash that they received would have been used to buy food, clothing and other items. Peasants
with middling holdings (around 3 to 6 ha of arable) would work part-time for wages if the
produce from their land did not suffice for their food needs, so they might have bought from
bakers and butchers. Peasants with larger holdings would become customers of retailers if they

18
 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds

chose, as some did, to specialise. For example, peasants in fifteenth-century Worcestershire lived
in areas unsuitable for growing oats (in the south of the county) or peas (in parts of the north),
so they would buy these crops to feed their livestock (Dyer, 2016). Villagers in late medieval
Yorkshire, at Wharram Percy, would also purchase preserved sea fish from remote sources. In
many villages there were households which specialised in brewing ale or making cheese, and
sold their surpluses to their neighbours, or those seeking better quality foods would go to the
retailers in a nearby town. There is limited evidence for peasants making their own cloth or
utensils at home: instead they bought their textiles, clothing, shoes, spades and larger imple-
ments from specialist artisans, or middlemen dealing in manufactures. Rents and taxes did not
absorb all of their surplus, which meant that a tenant with 12 ha might have enough money in
a normal year to buy a 10m length of cloth or a cart and its gear. Part-time craftsmen worked in
many villages, of whom the smiths are best documented from the twelfth century onwards, but
might include tailors or shoemakers. Peasants retailed agricultural produce in towns, not just the
men who sold bulky loads of grain and wool, but also their wives and daughters contributed to
the household economy by selling eggs, poultry, dairy products, vegetables or fruit from baskets
(Dyer, 2000, pp. 126–127).
This story of partial self-sufficiency, meaning that country people were at least occasionally
engaged in retail trade both as buyers and sellers, does not apply in the towns, where a minority
only would have access to land, and everyone depended on the market for the necessities of life.
The demand for food, clothing, fuel and other goods from townspeople, working as artisans and
traders, labourers and servants ensured that many retailers were kept busy. In regulating trade at
Tarascon in Provence in 1370–1400 priority was given by the authorities to grapes, wine, bread,
wheat, oats, barley and salt meat, which were the main purchases of the townspeople. The
urban government protected general well-being by encouraging the flow of these foodstuffs
into the town, and sought to prevent traders taking these basic commodities out of the town in
times of shortage (Hebert, 1979, pp. 163–165).
Retail trade was stimulated by a growth in demand in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, and this was possible because of an increase in disposable income. The period has been
characterised, initially on the basis of the experience of the Netherlands, by the phrase “industri-
ous revolution”, but this is now regarded as a more general European phenomenon. It is argued
that members of households together maximised their earnings, not in order to survive, but to
enable them to buy goods which they desired. Women’s work made an important contribution,
and that of children, and longer hours were worked so that while daily rates of pay to individ­
uals sometimes declined, annual household earnings rose. Supply and demand moved in a circle,
because the efforts of the workers were often devoted to making the consumer goods for which
demand was increasing. In England knitted stockings, lace and straw hats were characteristic
products of industriousness: they required great quantities of labour, and were sold to a wide
spectrum of consumers. English labourers in the seventeenth century spent three-quarters of
their earnings on food, but this included some beef and other non-cereal foods, and inventories
written after the death of labourers show that during their lives they had bought quantities of
textiles, both for clothes and for furnishings such as bed hangings. Most labourers who have left
inventories (the upper ranks of their class) owned pewter vessels and chairs (Muldrew, 2011).
In pursuing the question, “was consumption affordable?” historians tend to be drawn into
rather speculative calculations of income, based on rates of pay, days in employment, and likely
profit from cultivating a number of hectares of land.This mathematical exercise often results in a
negative judgement: consumption was not possible. However, this is ignoring the ability of even
poor consumers to borrow money, and we have abundant evidence that sellers extended credit
to buyers, allowing them to delay payments. In Italy where pawn shops operated more actively

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 Christopher Dyer

than in northern Europe consumers would buy items such as bed linen when the going was
favourable, but in hard times would use these goods to raise money (Welch, 2005, pp. 196–203,
231–235). The trade in second-hand goods ought to be brought into the calculation, as it ena-
bled poorer consumers to afford clothing or household utensils.
Investigating the roots of the growth of consumption, which is apparent at least as early as the
thirteenth century and which expanded after 1500, requires posing questions about the deci-
sion-making and motives of ordinary people who have left little direct record of their thinking.
Were they impelled by a competitive spirit, seeking to own more and better goods than their
neighbours? Or were they anxious to live in a style which was appropriate to the status group
to which they believed that they belonged? We know so much about the bonds of kinship, and
networks among neighbours, demonstrated by such organisations as religious fraternities, that
we could suppose that groups of people moved along parallel lines, influenced by their fellow
townspeople or villagers, but not necessarily in competition (Rosser, 2015). Some historians have
seen a desire among the middling sort and lower ranks of society to emulate the lifestyle of the
elite. These ordinary people could not rival the magnificence and splendour of the great aristo-
crats and churchmen, but they could borrow some customs and emblems of affluence such as
household textiles or spiced food, in a movement towards the “democratization of luxury”,
or a desire among townspeople to “live nobly”, both phrases applied to changes in the con-
sumption patterns in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps these
desires could have been generated within non-aristocratic society, without the need to aspire to
matching upper-class role models. Ideals of convenience, comfort, enjoyment of colour and pur-
suit of pleasure could have been regarded positively by those who were acquiring the means to
buy goods beyond the reach of their predecessors.
Who made the decisions to spend, and then what specific items to buy? The evidence is not
consistent, as the account books and correspondence of upper-class Italians in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries show the domination of the male head of household. Such individuals were
often older than their wives, and society frowned on women going into the market place on
their own, so men did not just decide to buy, but went to the shops to make the purchase (see
above p. 18). In northern Europe in the same period women were more often seen as partners,
who could participate in collective decisions. Women might have their own source of income,
through a craft or trade of their own, which increased their capacity for independent judge-
ments about purchases (Howell, 2010, pp. 93–144).
The rise of retailing gives us an insight into one dimension of a society in which individuals
were developing self-confidence and a greater degree of independence. Particularly after 1350,
when the fall in population gave scarce tenants and workers more bargaining power, the power
of lords diminished and families exercised less control over the young. Both before and after
the Black Death, evidence for travel, migration, political and religious consciousness tell us that
people of all kinds had wide horizons. They knew about the kingdom or lordship in which
they lived, and about remote places of importance, such as Rome and Jerusalem.They were also
aware of the places where the best bargains could be found, or where, if they were selling goods,
the demand was greatest and the prices highest.

The location of retail trade: shops and shoppers

The settings in which retail trade took place varied over time, place and commodity. In the early
Middle Ages, people gathered in remote places, and left behind a dense scatter of coins and metal
objects apparently mislaid by the traders and their customers. For example at Cottam in east
Yorkshire on the site of a farmstead significantly sited on a long-distance trackway more than

20
 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds

a hundred metal objects, mostly belt fittings, have been found, together with thirty-five knife
blades and twenty-five coins of the eighth and ninth centuries. Such a concentration of objects
would not normally be associated with an agricultural settlement (Richards, 2003). In the later
Middle Ages fairs were trading occasions which were held annually, often to coincide with a
religious festival, and their timing gave them a specialist purpose. Local fairs were held for the
sale of livestock in May and June, or cheese and butter at the end of the summer.They were also
opportunities for retail trade, such as purchases of wooden household utensils for people living
within a few miles. In the thirteenth century a network of international fairs across Europe, such
as the fairs of Champagne, or those held at St Ives (Huntingdonshire) or Stourbridge near Cam-
bridge in England, had become opportunities for merchants to meet and conduct wholesale
transactions. Cloth often figured prominently among the goods that changed hands, but almost
any high value commodity traded over distances, such as furs and wax from the Baltic, spices
from Asia and Mediterranean dried fruits and nuts could be on offer at the temporary booths
erected on the fairground. Royal courts bought bales of cloth, and bishops and rich monasteries
acquired their spices and preserved fish at fairs. These rich consumers could acquire goods in
the large quantities that they needed, and at reasonable prices. In some countries fairs gradually
lost importance as more deals were struck in cities in merchants’ houses or in public buildings
where traders congregated. At the French city of Reims, the drapers sold cloth from the ground
floor of their houses in the city centre, and customers wanting linen would find it being sold in a
mercery where the linen merchants gathered (Desportes, 1979, pp. 371–375). The need for fairs
revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when states and cities developed new networks
focused on fairs such as those held at Geneva and Medina del Campo in Spain (Epstein, 2000,
pp. 73–88).
Retail trade was focused on towns in the period 850–1320, both in weekly markets and
shops which opened daily. A typical set of market privileges in Scotland was issued by the king
for Dumbarton in 1221, establishing the market day as Wednesday, and exempting the burgesses
of Dumbarton from paying tolls on their transactions anywhere in the Scottish kingdom. In
addition, all those bringing merchandise to buy and sell in the market “shall have my peace”, that
is come under royal protection (Ballard and Tait, ed., 1923, pp. 246, 254, 271).
Towns required extended space for market places.These often consisted of wide main streets,
which could accommodate rows of market stalls and still allow room for traffic. Alternatively a
larger rectangular or triangular space was created, with ample room for stalls and other struc-
tures. If they were being planned after the town centres had filled with dense housing and
churches, as at Florence and Bologna, buildings were cleared away, though sometimes market
places were sited on the edge of the town. In south-western France the early market places (in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries) lay within the walls of the castle, where the traders could be
protected, but also dominated and exploited by the lord. This limited space was abandoned and
the market was typically held near a church, or even in the churchyard in the thirteenth century,
which would be in a more central and convenient place. In the Hundred Years War the market
moved back into the security of the castle, but with the return of peace in the mid fifteenth
century migrated once more into the town (Petrowiste, 2004, pp. 176–194).
The typical English urban market place contained many stalls, ideally consisting of trestles,
boards and awnings which could be dismantled and stored until the following week, but some
stallholders turned their temporary booths into permanent structures with upper stories, or rows
of stalls were built by the authorities. A monumental stone cross would occupy a prominent
place, and its steps would be appropriated on market day by groups of traders who could not
aspire to open a stall, such as women selling butter from baskets. An official building would serve
as a toll booth, and be provided with a hall for courts to meet. Here a pillory would stand as a

21
 Christopher Dyer

deterrent for those offending against the rules on weights and measures or product quality. Part
of the toll booth or town hall, or a purpose-built market hall would serve as a covered market,
where traders would be better protected from rain. Specific groups of traders might be assigned
buildings, such as the shambles for the butchers. In English and French towns would be a drapery
and mercery for the sale of cloth, and Flemish towns such as Ypres had cloth halls. Even without
these designated spaces for trade, occupational groups tended to occupy the same streets, like the
linen sellers of seventeenth-century Amsterdam who set up their shops in Niewendijk (Lesger,
2011). In the market place at the small town of Newmarket in Cambridgeshire separate groups
of stalls were assigned (at least in name) to the mercers, drapers, ropers, cheesemongers and
shoemakers (Davis, 2012, p. 280).
A great quantity of trade passed through the larger urban market places, but they usually were
held for one day in the week, while the permanent shops opened most days. They were often
located on the ground floor of houses fronting on to streets, though some occupied wooden
structures leaning against buildings, including churches. The “shoprows” are often found in or
near market places, with a dozen or so lock-up shops in a terrace. Selds were similar structure,
not unlike small-scale shopping malls, in which customers walked along a covered passageway
with small shops on either side. The size of this type of shop was very small, often less than
2 metres wide. Some consisted of a board, chest or hutch like the fishmonger’s stall in Reims
which measured 8 feet by 4 feet (Desportes, 1979, p. 373). Modern tourists can gain a sense of the
high density of retail spaces in a prime city centre location by walking across the Ponte Vecchio
in Florence. The larger shops displaying a merchant’s wares would be built to impress, like the
draper’s premises in Toulouse where a large vaulted room of four bays with brick arches occupied
the street frontage of a merchant’s house (Wolff, 1954, p. 515). In less prestigious retail outlets
goods could be displayed in a window, or on a “stall board” jutting out into the street and covered
with an awning. A customer visiting a shoemaker’s house would be shown at the front of the
shop an array of goods by a salesperson, often the artisan’s wife, but would also be able to see in
the background the craftsman at work. The shop would be equipped with a counter and a chest
or chests for storing stock. At the end of the day the shop would be “shut” by lifting or removing
the stall board and locking the shutters across the window (Clark, 2000). A less common type of
retail premises can be found in towns with stone-built undercrofts with access to the street. In
these basement rooms in Southampton for example wine would be sold, but other goods could
also have been available for purchase (Figure 2.1).
Shops were numerous and concentrated in particular streets, demonstrating the importance
of the retail sector. In Chester the space for shops was greatly increased by building on the front-
age of the main streets rows of shops along a walkway on the first floor, in addition to those
conventionally available at street level. Oxford had 147 shops listed in the survey of 1279 (and
there were probably more); and in 1417, 118 shops were located along the High Street of Win-
chester. These were dwarfed by the retailing capacity of London, with 4000 shops in Cheapside
(the main shopping street, the Oxford Street of its day) in about 1300 (Keene, 1990). The flow
of trade through these shops, stalls and chests should not be underestimated. Around 1300 in
Cheapside tenants of shop premises were willing to pay an annual rent above £1, even as high
as £4, at a time when a labourer was paid not much more than £1 per annum. The quality and
quantity of shops varied from one street to another, and the most prized location was a corner
shop where two busy streets met, preferably near the market place.
Other points of sale could be found in the towns, such as the hawkers and huxters selling
from baskets in the street or going from door to door. Outside the town markets were held in
the countryside, and while some were quite small and inactive, others had stalls and shambles,
and generated a revenue in tolls which suggests quite a high volume of trade. Shops could still

22
Figure 2.1 Early sixteenth-century shop, Lavenham in Suffolk, England
Source: Courtesy of Abby Antrobus.
 Christopher Dyer

be encountered in villages, especially those with a market or acting as a place where trade was
focused, such as the Huntingdonshire village of Yaxley in the fourteenth century, a port on the
system of inland waterways in the fenland. In seventeenth-century Cheshire a scatter of village
shops identified as mercers, drapers and grocers are revealed by lists of their stock to have carried
a great variety of merchandise, which was supplied by traders active in nearby towns (Stobart,
2016, pp. 89–102). Some of these shops were located in villages which were not particularly
large or important. In both town and country bargains were often struck in inns, though these
could belong in the category of wholesale rather than retail trade.
Country dwellers bought from peddlers or chapmen.They were often based near a town, and
having obtained their packs of assorted goods from urban suppliers, walked or less often took a
pack horse from village to village. They gained a bad reputation, especially during episodes of
moral panic about vagrants, but their customers welcomed the opportunity to buy haberdashery,
pins, gloves, kerchiefs, beads and combs (Davis, 2007). Their numbers grew in the seventeenth
century, and when they were licensed in 1697, 2,559 were listed in England. They sold a great
miscellany of goods, but a very prominent element were textiles, that is linen and cotton rather
than woollens, and haberdashery, and so were providing country wives with the materials for
making clothes at home. The combined value of their annual sales in the late seventeenth cen-
tury could have exceeded £100,000, which amounts to a significant proportion of the country’s
commercial exchanges (Spufford, 1984).
The regulation of retail sales, both in markets or shops, were designed to maintain order, as
those in authority wished their markets to be peaceful and well-conducted. Shops were dis-
trusted on a number of grounds, mainly because it was believed that honesty was most likely if
transactions were conducted in an open public market. In Paris from the late twelfth century,
second-hand clothes dealers were regarded with suspicion, as the trade was believed to have links
with thieves who were disposing of stolen property (Geremek, 1987, pp. 263–269). Middlemen
also attracted criticism, as it was feared that they forced up prices. Legislation forbade forestalling,
that is intercepting goods on their way to market in order to sell them at a higher price. Regrat-
ing was also outlawed, as this meant acquiring produce, especially foodstuffs, in order to sell at a
higher price. Cooks and innkeepers were distrusted as they bought meat and fish, cooked them
as ingredients in meals, and made a profit from the diners. The authorities dreamt of an ideal
of honest producers, of fruit and vegetables for example, travelling to market to sell direct to
the consumers. In the real world a network of middlemen handled goods of all kind: even in
the apparently simple world of horticulture leekmongers and garlicmongers bought up sacks of
vegetables and passed them on to retailers. We now see this as an aspect of efficient distribution,
and regard middlemen as playing a necessary role in keeping commodities flowing along the
complex commercial chain (Davis, 2012).
The authorities in towns were especially concerned to protect consumers from exploitation
by food traders, which led them to restrict price rises and therefore to impose limits on the
profit margins of brewers and butchers. Bakers in England were especially closely regulated, by
the assize of bread which laid down the weight of loaves which were sold for fixed prices of 1d.,
a halfpenny and a farthing. In a bad harvest year, as the price of grain rose, the weight of the loaf
was reduced according to a sliding scale.The consumers were getting less bread for their money,
but at least the bakers were not making excessive profits, and the rules were known to the public
and regarded as fair. Similar measures were adopted on the continent, as is shown by the fining
of 30 traders at Ypres in Flanders in 1267–8 for selling loaves that were either small or of low
quality (van Uytven, 2001, pp. 90–91).
The town governments ensured that weights and measures were checked, and in some mar-
kets the price of grain was set by the town authorities. Trading days were regulated, and shops

24
 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds

were not supposed to open on specified religious holidays. Trade began at an agreed time, with
the ringing of a bell. Often the early part of the day was reserved for domestic consumers, to
prevent merchants buying the grain or bread and selling at an extra profit. Residues at the end
of the day, such as unsold fish, were reserved for the poor. Credit was subject to intervention by
the local courts, and in particular customers could be compelled to pay their debts. In general
such strong measures were not used frequently, because the trading system depended on trust
and a sense of mutual obligation.
Market places lay at the heart of the town, and the markets were the focus of the commercial
economy, both for the major traders such as drapers and the mass of consumers buying necessi-
ties. The market place also occupied a central position in the civic consciousness of the towns-
people, as it was the site of the town halls and other civic buildings. In Italian cities the podesta
and the captain of the people might have their palaces there, and in both southern and north
European cities a high bell tower with a clock symbolised the inhabitants’ sense of identity. Here
townspeople gathered to attend meetings and celebrations, to hear proclamations and to witness
judicial punishments.The town’s militia would assemble in the market place in times of troubles,
and rebels would gather in the same place (Bocchi, 2015).
All of this suggests a cohesive system designed to promote the common good. As is often the
case apparently benevolent motives are found to be combined with self-interest. The authori-
ties had to be seen to protecting the consumer, or otherwise they feared disturbances, and
occasionally food riots erupted in years of shortage, when crowds broke open granaries and
mills and sold the grain at a “fair” price. In years without extreme shortages a well-regulated
food market gave the wage-earning section of the population no excuse to ask for higher
wages. An example of market rules with mixed motives can be found at Liege in the Middle
Ages. In this town with many consumers, 20,000 in 1500, many of whom were wage-earners,
markets were to be held in daylight, that is under public scrutiny, and townspeople were given
priority in their purchases. However, the bishop of Liege and the canons of the cathedral, who
had large landed estates, were given monopolies at certain times for their profit. The consumer
protection measures were frequently announced, but there is little evidence for their enforce-
ment (Wilkin, 2015).
Much of the governance of marketing, and our evidence for actual sales, suggests a rela-
tively straightforward relationship between towns and the surrounding countryside.Towns and
markets were widely spaced, often at least 20 km apart, and hinterlands based on convenience
of travel defined the area from which country people went to market to sell their produce
and make purchases. Only in some places and periods was such a relationship compulsory, for
example when the state gave a town a monopoly on trade, or when, as in Italy, rural producers
were compelled to sell their grain in the market of a town that ruled over the surrounding
countryside. Normally the rural population had a choice between markets and towns, which
competed for trade. They might sell their produce in a local market town, which would
then sell it on to a larger place, as happened when wine grown in southwestern France was
ultimately gathered at Bordeaux for export. Traders in a large town dealing in a specialist
imported commodity, like the dye needed by rural cloth makers, would distribute it through
the smaller market towns. A striking example of the connection between large towns practis-
ing an international trade and local consumptions comes from the marriage contracts of peas-
ants living around Vic in Catalonia in c.1300. These documents might specify that a young
woman’s trousseau would include a dress made from cloth from towns in northern France and
Flanders, such as Bruges, Chalons or Ypres. These textiles would have been sold by retailers
in towns like Vic, but their ultimate origin in a famous textile centre was not forgotten (To
Figueras, 2016).

25
 Christopher Dyer

Changes in retail trade in the long term

The economic and social history of Europe is reflected in changes in retail trade. Little detailed
evidence survives for shopkeeping in the generation of towns that grew in the ninth, tenth
and eleventh centuries. An English riddle refers to a garlic seller, allowing us to glimpse a street
hawker at work.The archaeology of the period offers evidence for trade between town produc-
ers and rural consumers in the form of small metal dress fittings and brooches made by urban
artisans but found in the countryside (ten Harkel, 2013).
The great expansion of towns and markets in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which
was associated with thousands of new shops, stalls and other places for sale, embedded mar-
keting into social relations throughout much of Europe. In the period 1350–1500, when the
population declined and the overall volume of trade was reduced, towns shrank in size, but so
did the villages, so the proportion of the population living in towns did not change a great deal.
Plenty of shops remained in business, and industry continued to supply demand, for cloth for
example. A French commentator on the period remarks on the increased range of commodi-
ties, the extension in the range of social groups who were able to participate in consumption,
and the development of fashion (Petrowiste, 2018). Although the numbers of consumers eve-
rywhere was reduced, incomes of individuals were rising as holdings of land grew in size and
wages tended to increase. Those active in industry had to respond to shifts in demand, such as
the potters who made vessels for drinking, both cups and jugs, as individual consumption of
alcoholic drinks rose.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, population growth resumed, production in the
countryside increased and prices rose. A number of sections of society, such as better-off peasants,
did well in this environment, and although real wages fell, the “industrious revolution” enabled
the households of smallholders to increase their earnings. Calculations of English GDP and con-
sumption per head suggest that after some wavering after 1520, both increased decisively in the
late seventeenth century (Broadberry et al., 2015, pp. 206, 297). In the Netherlands, in its Golden
Age, households acquired “turned” furniture (that is parts of chairs and other items were finished
on a lathe) and a more varied range of textiles and household goods were acquired.
The facilities for trade changed. Shops became grander and more important features of the
city landscape. In Madrid in the late sixteenth century, at the centre of a unified state and a great
empire, the Plaza Mayor was planned as an imposing centrepiece of the city. The central square
was used as a food market, and bread and meat were sold from specially designed buildings, but
the colonnades of the main structure contained shops selling luxury goods to a wealthy clientele
(Escobar, 2007). London by the end of the seventeenth century had grown to become one of
the largest cities in Europe, and was developing as an imperial centre with trade links across the
Atlantic, and to the Far East and Muscovy. Its shopping facilities grew in size and sophistica-
tion with the building of arcades (as we would call them) or galleries, of which one of the most
celebrated was the New Exchange, opened in 1609.These shopping venues were built as invest-
ments by aristocrats with spare land in central London, in the case of the New Exchange by the
earl of Salisbury who owned the site on the Strand. Within the building large numbers of small,
specialist shops, selling high-quality goods, were built in line beside a walkway, along which the
customers could inspect the wares and negotiate purchases. They were assured that their fellow
shoppers were exclusive and well-behaved because a beadle monitored those passing through
the door. There was a good chance that visitors would meet friends and associates, so the galler-
ies served a social as well as a commercial function (Walsh, 2003).
In reviewing the economic importance of retail trade there is a tendency to see shops and
their wares as secondary symptoms of growth. This view presumes that production was the

26
 Retailing in the medieval and early modern worlds

prime mover in the economy, from which consumption followed. Yet the cumulative total of
retail trade could play an important role in forming the great chain of interactions that made
up an economy, and consumer demand could act as a general stimulant. Analysing demand from
the perspective of the purchaser leads us to explain their motives in terms of competition or
emulation, but we should take note of feedback from the retailer. Shopkeepers tempted custom-
ers, offered attractive items, set standards of consumption, informed customers about products,
including novelties and encouraged them to indulge their ambitions. Tailors in particular per-
suaded their customers to adopt new fabrics and styles.

The culture of retail

Sales in shops and markets served a useful purpose, in that households satisfied their needs, and
shopkeepers made a profit, but retail trade was not entirely functional. Markets and fairs were
public occasions which often included an element of display and even entertainment.The open-
ing of fairs could involve some ceremony. The fair usually coincided with a saint’s day, perhaps a
local saint who was commemorated with processions and religious services. Flemish authorities
in the sixteenth century who wished to promote their market would hire musicians and organ-
ise displays of flowers (Stabel, 1997). Entertainers wishing to make money would attend markets
and fairs on their own initiative and give displays of juggling or music, and a dancing bear might
be exhibited. Attendance by local sellers and buyers at markets would change seasonally, with
increased activity before or soon after the great feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. Those
attending would drink, and some stalls would tempt buyers into making frivolous or trivial
purchases – of playing cards, ribbons, children’s toys, pots decorated with comical faces, or in
the seventeenth century, chapbooks. Contemporary literature celebrates the pleasures of the fair.
A Welsh poet of the fourteenth century imagined events at a fair at Rhosyr (Newborough on
Anglesey), where young men wore goat skins and horns (symbolic of lechery), and well-dressed
people attended, including a young woman who rejected the poet’s advances. He had been
drinking wine (Fulton, 2012).
For Italian painters of the sixteenth century the displays of goods at markets carried meanings
beyond the simple temptation to purchase. The artists depicted market stalls, as a metaphor for
abundance, well-being and happiness. Fruit and vegetable stalls with their mass of colourful pro-
duce hinted at sensuality and fecundity. Attractive women were shown in attendance, and there
were hints of sinful conduct (Welch, 2005, pp. 65–68). Throughout Europe women played an
important role in the management of stalls and shops. The wives of the artisans promoted sales
by standing outside the shop in the street to lure customers, and then used their feminine wiles
(as contemporaries alleged) to persuade them to buy. They would presumably have adopted a
different approach with the high proportion (in northern Europe) of female shoppers.
Sales were promoted in ways that resonate with modern practices. Goods were not branded,
but there were close associations between particular places and their distinctive products. In
England, Thaxted knives, Kendal cloth and Banbury cheese all attracted instant recognition
among fifteenth-century consumers. Clothes, hats and head coverings, shoes, jewellery and
metal dress accessories all changed style quite rapidly, and some cities such as London and Paris
led the way and were much imitated. Fashion consciousness was widespread, and peasant clothes
reflected new styles. Advertising through the medium of print appears in the late seventeenth
century, with a leading role being taken by patent medicines.
A visit to shops could have been an opportunity for people to meet, converse and conduct
business. Galleries such as the New Exchange in London became an important part of the

27
 Christopher Dyer

social scene for the elite, as Pepys’s diary shows in the 1660s. But shops always lay on the edge
of respectability, offering opportunities for customers to flirt with the shop girls, and the New
Exchange eventually gained a reputation as a centre for prostitution.

Conclusion
Any discussion of retail trade leads historians along an optimistic route that gives an impression
of the early onset of modernity, and tempts us to overestimate the affluence that was possible in
a pre-industrial economy. The moralists of the time condemned the frivolity and waste arising
from following fashion. Critics with some justice warned that buying excessively expensive and
often trivial goods was self-indulgent and exposed all those involved to moral dangers.The trad-
ers cheated, and the customers had suspect motives as they were tempted by the sins of pride,
avarice, envy, gluttony and lechery. Sumptuary laws were passed in order to maintain social
distinctions based on the quality of clothing, or to limit perceived damage to the economy from
expensive foreign imports.
Those who emphasise the limitations of the pre-industrial economy, whose views were
expressed at the beginning of this chapter, have a point when they say that surpluses were insuf-
ficient to generate a very large retail sector. In particular there were regions with sparse popula-
tions and poor communications, such as Norway, where towns were few and small, and the rural
population could not afford to buy consumer goods in quantity. In the more developed areas
wealth was very unevenly distributed, and some groups such as unskilled labourers around 1300
had very limited spending power.Throughout the whole period a substratum labelled as “poor”,
estimated sometimes at 5% of the population, were excluded from the world of retail, except
for buying basic supplies of food. If their clothes resembled those of their neighbours, it would
have been the result of charitable gifts, or purchases of second-hand garments. Retailing did not
expand continuously, though it seems in the late seventeenth century to have embarked on a
long-term upward movement. Before that there were many short-term ups and downs, includ-
ing slumps lasting decades, affecting England in the middle years of the fifteenth century, and
the Low Countries towards the end of the same century. In years when harvests were deficient,
consumer spending would have been reduced, and trade was also highly seasonal, with more
activity in the period after the harvest and at Christmas than in Lent or early summer.
Retailing was born and grew up in the medieval and early modern periods, but its childhood
was uncertain and insecure.

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 3
FROM CONSUMER
REVOLUTION TO MASS
MARKET
Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

Introduction
Questioning the ‘consumer variable’ in history goes straight to the heart of most important
debates in recent retail historiography. Once causality in retail change was thought to be rather
straightforward: the distributive trades were seen as an appendage of the supply side system,
responding sensitively to production change and growth. Small-scale production equaled buy-
ing directly from producers’ shops or via periodic markets and peripatetic salesmen; whereas
ensuing industrialisation and mass production were followed by an equally ‘revolutionary’ and
large-scale retail transformation ( Jefferys 1954). Since the twin curves of demography and liv-
ing standards were thought to bump inevitably against certain structural ceilings, any active role
of consumer demand in engendering retail change was in any case reckoned to be small and
unsustainable before the nineteenth century.
Only from the end of the 1970s did historians start to study the agency of consumer demand
in earnest (Bianchi 1998). Unfortunately, the horizon and terms of these initial consumer
debates were very much a continuation of normative, Cold War intellectual skirmishes. In direct
opposition to the older, influential conceptualisations of the Frankfurther Schule and radical soci-
ologists of the 1950s and ’60s – in which shrewd salesmen and an ever more persuasive adver-
tising machinery were accused of creating a hollow, materialistic society of one-dimensional,
civically unengaged citizens – the consumer now entered the ring as champion of free choice.
The (neo-)liberal political-economic context of Thatcherism and Reaganomics goes a long way
in explaining why the consumer, and the act of consumption itself, was suddenly given a crucial
empowering, even liberating role (Slater 1997, 33–62; Trentmann 2006, 1–27). If society were
to be imagined as a marketplace, then the real puppeteers could never have been the capitalist
suppliers and advertisers of goods and services, but the end-users of these commodities whose
individual consumer preferences and decisions eventually guided collective investments, histori-
cal change and the progress of the nations.
In this “consumer democracy” vision of history, the locations and activities of shopping and
retailing were discovered anew as important sites of cultural experience and meaning, rather
than places and moments that fulfilled the basic utilitarian functions of distribution and pro-
visioning. The notion that such a thing as consumer culture was less of an oxymoron than was
once thought, gained precedence in concomitant postmodern theorising. After all: in a world

31
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

where complex signs and meanings, and the continuous appropriation and aestheticisation of
everyday practices, is believed to take precedence over simple needs and wants, core societal
values and identities become entangled with or negotiated through consumption and the world
of goods (Slater and Tonkiss 2001, 6–35). Inspired by such postmodern beliefs about the self and
society, the historical reappraisal of material culture, the study of fashion cycles and the history
of shopping were only one aspect of a growing body of literature devoted to the active role of
demand-side issues. The real challenge for historians, however, became finding the source of
everything that followed: answering the gnarling, almost existential questions of how and why
we became a world of consumers, and where and when to locate the birthplace of our equally
celebrated and condemned consumer society.
Looking back with hindsight on almost forty years of debate over the active role of the
demand-side in (retail) history, it is apparent that our collective attachment to origins – our urge
for finding a consumer (r)evolution of some sort – has not only been historically misleading but
also an intellectual cul-de-sac. Speaking of the birth of a consumer society leads to historical tun-
nel vision: it was an unfortunate metaphor, as Frank Trentmann recently stressed, because ‘unlike
a baby, consumption was not set on a natural, almost universal path of growth and development’
(Trentmann 2016, 10). When our demand-side perspectives continue to broaden in time as well
as in space – taking in, for instance, the consumer variable in Renaissance Italy (fourteenth-
seventeenth centuries), Ming China (1368–1644), or for that matter Mogul India (1526–1857)
and Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) – the diversity and complexity in material culture, tastes and
lifestyles in world history urges us to become more nuanced and modest in our grand narra-
tives. But even more important is nurturing a post-colonial awareness and sensitivity for our
own historical discourses and situatedness – a point still curiously absent in most textbooks on
consumption and retail history alike. To be sure, an origins perspective blinds us intellectually:
it obscures the fact that consumer revolution narratives are fundamentally enmeshed with core
western values and persistent western narratives of modernity, progress and superiority.
To illustrate and substantiate this central historiographical claim, we will focus in the rest
of our chapter on two consumer (r)evolutions and specifically their impact on retailing and
shopping. This will be done for two periods of almost axiomatic importance in the history of
North-Western Europe – the region against which other European and non-European regions
continue to be weighed in consumer debates, and this despite our recent turn to the global.
Firstly, we will delve into The Enlightenment (c.1670–1830), which cemented our typical core
Western values and narratives of assigning freedom and liberation to consumer choice. By de-
moralising private consumer wants and stimulating material desires, North-West European
societies – England and the Low Countries especially – were set on a track towards further
commercialisation, industriousness and eventual industrialisation. The demand-side, and espe-
cially the consequent cultural constructions around consumption and the role of the consumer
in society, played a crucial role in explaining why present-day nations like England, Belgium and
The Netherlands figure prominently in historical debates on the birth of a consumer society.
However, despite a growing propensity or willingness to consume among the (urban) layers of
North-Western Europe and the concommittant development of retail circuits, our reappraisal of
recent literature and research will be of a more nuanced and less superlative kind: social inequali-
ties, rooted in an ancien-régime political-economy, remained very large and debates have often
focused more on newness in consumer habits and behaviour, rather than considering continui-
ties and path-dependencies.
Secondly, we turn to the Fin-de-Siècle World (c.1870–1914), a period that again became cru-
cially linked to core Western notions and assumptions that people should not only have the free-
dom, but also the means and possibilities to consume. Late-nineteenth-century North-Western

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 From consumer revolution to mass market

Europe undertook a feverish technological journey towards mass production of standardised

consumer goods. These were distributed, among others, through large-scale, mass retail inno-
vations, such as chain stores and department stores, which experienced their real breakthrough
in this period. Western imperialism and accompanying rapid globalisation were integral to this
move towards the consumer masses, not only for opening up consumer markets abroad, but
also for importing cheap energy and raw materials (especially grain) to North-Western Europe
(Moore 2015). By freeing the increasingly dominant industrial wage labourer – albeit still par-
tially and imperfectly – from the high costs of paying for food, industrial nations like England
and Belgium were set on the path to become true mass consumer societies. Not only were cities
and the number of urban consumers growing, people in general had more financial leeway to
indulge in consumer wants and desires above basic needs at the start of the Interbellum. Gain-
ing access to more and diverse consumer products, and crucially being “entitled” to consume,
became integral to the rise of another retail innovation, the co-operatives. Meanwhile, wide-
spread social and political mobilisation around consumer interests gradually paved the way for
North-West European welfare states.
In the light of this historical change, it is again small wonder that demand-side issues, and their
connections with retailing, figure dominantly in historical discourses on the late-nineteenth-
century. However, we will end on a sobering note, warning against all too triumphalist per-
spectives that link consumption to conquering and liberating Western consumer modernity.
We do well to remember that this period started and ended with bloodshed, warfare and influ-
ential social unrest, such as the 1870 Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution in 1917.
In a period where, on both sides of the Atlantic, the so-called robber barons were becoming
increasingly wealthy on the basis of their returns on capital and the exploitation of natural
resources, the returns for labour were – despite growing labour productivity – still very small
and not well protected by laws and collective labour agreements. The Fordist mode of turning
labourers en groupe into mass consumers would only become a fully realised, albeit unstable,
political project after WWII.

An enlightened ‘consumer revolution’?

On 12 May 1740, Jan Teding van Berkhout, son of a prominent Delft family, wrote a letter
home from Paris. Whilst there, Jan Teding had commissioned beautiful summer clothes from
one of the most famous Parisian couturiers. Writing to his brother, however, he admitted that he
would, most likely, not be in position to wear these garments upon his return in Holland because
they were ‘trop beau pour oser les porter en Hollande’ (Verhoeven 2009, 271–272). This nicely
illustrates the major importance of Paris as a fashion making metropolis in the late seventeenth
and eighteenth century (Coquery 2011). While Louis XIV failed on the battlefield, the French
fashion paradigm conquered Europe – albeit, as this anecdote demonstrates, not without appro-
priation. It also indicates how, even in the absence of stringent sumptuary legislation, consumer
practices in the Low Countries were still regulated by forces of social control and moral restraint.
In the bourgeois society of the Netherlands, a careful management of conspicuous consumption
was needed to avoid any over-ostentation. As such, this anecdote emphasises the very idea of the
Netherlands as the cradle of a new, bourgeois consumer model, one that eventually paved the
way towards our new consumer society: ‘It was in north-west of Europe, in the Netherlands and
Britain, that a more dynamic, innovative culture of consumption came to take hold in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries’ (Trentmann 2016, 53). In both of these countries, economic
growth and urbanisation paved the way for a new consumer model adapted to the needs and
mentalities of an urbanised society with strong middling sort of people, rather than courtly and

33
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

socially skewed societies. The following paragraphs will build on that claim, highlighting and dis-
cussing the changing mental and moral mindset of consumption in the late early modern period;
the related changes in European material culture and the propensity to consume, and the links
between this feverish consumer culture and changing retail structures and practices.
In the early eighteenth century, Bernard Mandeville wrote his provocative Fable of the Bees
in which he argued that the pursuit of luxury, obviously a private vice, was highly beneficial
to public welfare (De Vries 2003). Mandeville, a Dutchman who migrated to England, wrote
in marked contrast to a long-standing European tradition of the critique of luxury, which
itself continued through the eighteenth century. It was one of the seminal texts that fueled the
famous eighteenth-century luxury debate. On both sides of the English Channel, awareness
among intellectuals grew that, on an aggregate level, the individual appetite to consume – a
vice – was a powerful source of improvement and economic growth. Later in the eighteenth
century David Hume, among others, refined Mandeville’s framework by connecting luxury
to refinement and civilisation. Increasingly, as the luxury debate of the eighteenth century
progressed, private wants were considered (either positively or negatively) as a major stimulus
of industriousness and civilisation (Berg 2005, 21–45). The new luxury discourse did little but
offer the theoretical sanctioning of an already modified practice. It was not without anteced-
ents, moreover. In Renaissance Italy, another major cradle of a refined and feverish consumer
culture, splendour and magnificence were positively appropriated as reflecting virtue (Guerzoni
1999; Welch 2002), even though the moral regime of pre-modern Italy still had little in com-
mon with a modern consumerist attitude (Allerston 2007). Yet, it also coincided with a major
transformation in European luxury culture. Italy in particular has been credited with a profound
refurbishment of the home. The material renaissance was urban, favoured design above the
intrinsic value of things and was fueled by an ever-expanding world of goods that required
appropriate urban behaviour (Goldthwaite 1987, 1993; Welch 2005).
The lively luxury debate of the Enlightenment did not come as a coincidence, therefore,
but went hand in hand with a world of goods that fundamentally transformed: one that was
marked by novelty, variety and availability. Generally speaking, Europeans at the end of the
eighteenth century were surrounded by an empire of things. Their material culture was more
varied, comfortable, colourful and pleasurable. According to Jan de Vries, industrious revolution
was not only marked by an intensification of the allocation of household time to the production
and consumption of market-mediated goods and services, it also implied the transition from an
‘old luxury’ to a ‘new luxury’ model (De Vries 2008). The former was geared towards leisure
and the conspicuous consumption of elites in society; luxury consumption was morally suspect,
since it always bore the risk of endangering vested social hierarchies. In contrast, new luxury
was not necessarily preoccupied with social distinction per se, but appealed to a larger set of
values, such as comfort and pleasure. The new luxuries required taste and civilisation; they were
also cheaper and so accessible to larger groups in society than were the ostentatious old luxuries.
In his search for the origins of this new luxury model, Jan de Vries arrived in the Netherlands
where the bourgeois model of consumption described above blossomed in the seventeenth cen-
tury (Blondé and Ryckbosch 2015). This new model would come to full force in eighteenth-
century England, where Neil McKendrick and others identified the birth of a consumer society
(McKen­drick 1982b): a beneficial love triangle of social equity, economic growth and consump-
tion, facilitated by the political and moral liberty to consume freely. Historians no longer believe
in a pre-industrial consumer revolution, let alone the birth of a consumer society in eighteenth-
century England; but the very idea that the pre-industrial era somewhere witnessed a critical
transition towards a new consumer model never lost its appeal (Berg 2004, 85). What exactly
defines the essential features of the “new luxury” model is not easy to pinpoint, though novelty,

34
 From consumer revolution to mass market

variety and the speed of change (fashion sensitivity) clearly distinguished the late eighteenth-
century consumer basket from its antecedents. It did so with a series of new goods (such as hot
drinks, tobacco, toys and trinkets) as well as important changes in the design and value construc-
tion of the world of goods (Trentmann 2016, 53; Blondé 2002).
The material culture changes that came along with this ‘new luxury’ pattern, were first
mapped for the Netherlands and England (De Vries 1975; Weatherill 1988; Shammas 1990;
Overton 2004); but they were not confined to these rapidly growing economies. Increasingly,
economic historians find evidence from all over Europe attesting a broad and widely shared
consumer transition in both expanding and stagnating economies (Wijsenbeek-Olthuis 1987;
Blondé and Van Damme 2010). Jan de Vries hypothesised about the origins of an industrious
revolution, and especially a transformation in the allocation of household resources to the mar-
ket economy, to reconcile the evidence of an apparent material affluence with low real incomes
and modest economic growth. Other scholars argue that product changes and productivity gains
account for a relative fall in the price of industrial products and a consequent increase in the
consumption of consumer durables, even in countries where income and wages lagged behind
(Malanima and Pinchera 2012). Generally speaking, even with less money, eighteenth-century
town and countryside dwellers could afford and consciously enjoy more things, very often
of a so called populuxe nature (Fairchilds 1993). In short, the transition towards a new mate-
rial culture was not confined to the core regions of the Atlantic economy; rather, it applied to
Europe in general. Moreover, it did not require economic growth, which also casts doubt on the
Adam Smith’s argument for the beneficial interplay between the desires of men and economic
improvement.
This remarkable proliferation of the empire of things went hand in hand with the expansion
of retailing and retail modernisation, as was suggested by the extensive treatment of advertise-
ments and new commercial techniques such as the use of showrooms, trade cards and the
like in McKendrick’s seminal work (McKendrick 1982a). Indeed, the commercial landscape of
early modern Europe was rapidly evolving in the centuries prior to the industrial revolution.
Although figures are extremely hard to compare, almost everywhere shops grew in number,
both in absolute and relative terms. This was paralleled with a growing diversity of specialised
shops serving a varied clientele (Mui and Mui 1989; Van Aert and Van Damme 2005; van den
Heuvel and Ogilvie 2013; Mitchell 2014). For sure, fixed shops were already a common feature
in medieval towns and they were successful and complementary to markets, as is demonstrated
by the obligation for sixteenth-century Venetian shopkeepers to shut doors and take stalls in the
square during the Sensa Fair (Welch 2006, 43). Yet, as Fernand Braudel noticed in the 1970s,
the real take off of fixed retail outlets happened in the early seventeenth century (Braudel 1979,
2:52–53). Ever since, with varying degrees and intensities, one witnessed a more or less general
growth of retail outlets everywhere in Europe; a phenomenon that intensified in the period
after 1650 and paralleled the rise in the wide array of new consumer goods and colonial gro-
ceries that became available at that time. This growth was not confined to England where Mui
and Mui recorded a shop density of about one shop for every fifty-nine inhabitants in 1759,
while the London ratio stood at 1:30 (Mui and Mui 1989, 37–41). Even in the Southern Low
Countries, an area deprived of strong economic growth in the late seventeenth century, the
number of retailers expanded from 1:26 by 1690 to 1:16 in 1773 (Van Aert and Van Damme
2005, 149–150). Overall the growth in the number and variety of shops is generally recognised
as part and parcel, if not the backbone, of an early modern “retail revolution”. Indeed, generally
associated with the advent of the department store and its economies of scale, fixed prices and
price ticketing, early modernists were quick to discover modern retailing practices before the
advent of the industrial society already (Stobart and Hann 2004).

35
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

A large share of this expansion of the retail sector in the eighteenth century was closely inter-
twined with rapidly changing consumer habits and preferences in the late early modern period
(Blondé and Van Damme 2010). The changes in consumer and material culture we briefly
touched upon earlier help to explain the rapid growth of the commercial sector in various ways.
First and foremost, the attested retail densification was intimately connected with the growing
importance of imported goods in the consumption bundle. Colonial groceries such as sugar,
coffee, tea, chocolate and spices impacted enormously on the early modern consumer and the
world economy. They also affected the retailing scene, reinforcing vested trades and trade pat-
terns (Stobart 2013). In many countries these newly imported products were sold by members
of the retailer’s guilds or integrated into the supply of general stores. In no time tobacco, cof-
fee and tea conquered households of all social ranks, profoundly reconfiguring consumer pat-
terns. While in the mid-seventeenth century only a handful of tobacco sellers were recorded in
Amsterdam, by the mid-eighteenth century a little army of at least 233 tobacco shops serviced
the daily needs of Amsterdam citizens at various selling points across the urban map (Lesger
2013). In Antwerp as well, a substantial part of the growth of retail businesses can be accounted
for by the increase of imported groceries, but small-town mercers shared in the prospects of
these new consumer habits as well. The volume of tobacco sold in the small town of Maastricht,
for instance, almost doubled in thirty years’ time, from about 31,000 kilograms in 1730–34 to
56750 kilograms in 1757–62. Coffee and tea followed this trend, albeit at a slightly more modest
rate of growth. Unsurprisingly, these colonial groceries were dispatched to countryside consum-
ers as well (Steegen 2006, 267). Hence, the need to supply imported groceries to consumers
reinforced the weight of shops in society. Whether this was to the detriment of local suppliers
such as beer brewers is harder to figure out, but it seems highly likely.
Not only did the retail sector grow as a result of the inclusion of new products, the chang-
ing material culture also impacted enormously (Blondé, Van Aert, and Van Damme 2014). The
eighteenth century was characterised by the gradual replacement of expensive, durable products
possessing a high secondary market value and a potential for resale and reuse, by cheaper, less
durable and more fashion sensitive products (Blondé 2002; Stobart and Van Damme 2010).
Cheaper textiles (such as printed cottons) came to replace more expensive woollens; tapestries
and gilt leather wall hangings made way for textile and paper wall hangings, and silver and
pewter lost in importance relative to porcelain (Shammas 1994). On the daily scene, these
transitions fundamentally altered the relationship between people’s material culture stock and
the flow of their consumption. They also necessitated more frequent shop contacts, a result
of the declining durability of goods and a growing fashion sensitivity. Across the urban hier-
archy, consumers were increasingly subjected to metropolitan fashion and the fashion cycle
was moving faster as the century progressed (Berg 2006). Consumers eager to find their way
through the increasing consumer choice and the volatility of fashion cycles, had to rely upon the
advice of commercial middlemen, such as upholsterers and shopkeepers to steer their consumer
choices (Sargentson 1998; Craske 1999; Edwards 2005; Blondé and Van Damme 2010). The
latter did everything to offer a pleasurable shopping environment, an arena of polite shopping,
to their consumers. Daniel Defoe, for instance, complained how, in London there ‘never was
such painting and gilding, such sashing and looking-glasses among shopkeepers as there is now’
(quoted in Stobart and Hann 2005, 178). Undoubtedly, the majority of shops across North-
Western Europe were still sparsely furnished, with a major emphasis on the mere displaying
of the variety of the goods for sale. While metropolitan retail outlets were pulling in shoppers
with attractive sales environments and novel commercial techniques, most provincial and village
shops were simply furnished and relied upon rather ‘traditional’ sales techniques (Stobart 2007).
However, elaborate metropolitan models were not without influence in provincial towns and

36
 From consumer revolution to mass market

the commercial vocabulary of trade cards and advertisements, with a major emphasis on the
variety of goods, prices, qualities as well as the novelty of goods both betraying and enhancing a
growing consumer fever (Coquery 2004).
Such transformations also affected the balance of power in the retail landscape. As long as
furniture, silverware, clothing represented an important asset (with an high intrinsic value),
it could always be used as an alternative currency allowing people to barter or pawn (Lemire
2005). As material culture increasingly shifted from intrinsic value to design, taste and extrin-
sic attributes, the resale value of used objects was detrimentally affected. Secondary markets
were and remained firmly rooted in pre-industrial societies where they played a strategic role
in redistributing used goods across the map and the social hierarchy (Allerston 2007; Fon-
taine 2008; Stobart and Van Damme 2010). They also contributed to spreading the eighteenth-
century fashion imperative among different social groups. Overall, however, secondary markets
declined in turnover and social esteem compared to the retail circuits that specialised in produc-
ing and selling novelties (Allerston 1996; Blondé and Van Damme 2009). Eventually, the social
depreciation of reselling resulted in a geographically and socially segmented low-end market for
used goods next to a high-end market for valuable antiquities in the nineteenth century (Van
Damme 2015a). That said, the expanding world of the shopkeeper did not prevent traditional
circuits from contributing to the new consumer climate as well, as is amply shown by the role
played by peddlers in spreading consumer innovations (Fontaine 1996; Deceulaer 2006). In
short, while alternative uses and exchanges did not disappear, it was shops that profited most
from the expansion of semi-luxuries in the age of Enlightenment. Even producers were obliged
to enlarge the variety of goods on offer by including products made by others and elsewhere
into their product array (De Munck 2010; Coquery 2011).
The number of shops and the frequency of shop visits grew as a result of new material cul-
ture and changing consumer patterns in the eighteenth century. However, this happened in the
context of overall economic stability (Van Zanden 2001). How can this paradox be explained?
The answer seems to be twofold. On the one hand, the growing number of shops did not neces-
sarily imply an equally growing prosperity for shopkeepers. While much of the retail revolution
narrative is inspired by the spectacular growth of retail densities in eighteenth-century society,
part of this growth was offset by lower incomes earned by many shopkeepers. Several popular
new products – such as hot beverages, tobacco, haberdasheries, cottons and fashion shops –
required smaller amounts of capital from aspiring shopkeepers and, as a result, attracted salesmen
and women of relatively modest means. The new luxury goods recruited more and more par-
ticipants, but most buying and selling practices still depended upon very traditional ways of con-
necting with clients. In the absence of real productivity gains in retailing itself, the importance
of their direct contribution to a sustained increase in per capita incomes, and hence to economic
growth, must be questioned. Both the lower capital intensity and the cheaper location of several
new luxuries can be credited with having facilitated the entrance onto the retail market of more
modest players that also appealed to a more modest social clientele (Coquery 2011, 286–300).
Even though the aggregate income growth of the retail sector was much more modest than
employment growth, overall per capita expenditure on shopping still seems to have risen in the
eighteenth century: ‘Households reoriented their consumer behaviour to make heavy use of
shops despite their high cost, not because of major supply side reductions in the transactions
cost of retailing’ (De Vries 2008, 170). What the economic historian could frame as a transac-
tion cost problem seems to have been perceived and experienced rather as an enjoyable cultural
phenomenon. Moreover, it was a phenomenon that trained or even conditioned consumers in
becoming the sort of material pleasure seekers that underpin modern consumer economies.
Both in the metropolis and the provincial town, a pleasurable shopping environment and culture

37
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

became part and parcel of polite society (Borsay 1989; Walsh 1995, 2003; Stobart, Hann, and
Morgan 2007). In fact, shopping achieved its particular linguistic significance in this period.
Elite customers of the Au magasin de Paris, an Antwerp fashion shop, frequented its luxury
premises on a very regular basis, most of the time to buy a handful of haberdasheries or services
while expending modest sums of money only. It is clear from this that the need to spend more
money and time on the act of buying – the need for more frequent shop visits that went hand in
hand with the more fashionable and less durable consumer culture – was turned into a valuable
and pleasurably pastime: a real culture of shopping.
This shopping and consumer culture, however, did not come as a revolution; it had already
matured for centuries. From at least the end of the Middle Ages, changing sensibilities in
shopping behaviour began to influence retail practices (Keene 2006). In line with Renais-
sance notions of the personal and public display of taste and affluence, luxury consumption
was gradually un-attached from its religious and moral overtones. The daily world of shop-
ping for necessities continued to colour the world of buying and selling, but its practices were
enriched by an urban, civilised lifestyle aimed at aesthetic refinement, knowledge of taste and
being à la mode. Shopping as a public performance of collectively shared norms and values, and
as a polite pastime, became intrinsically linked to being urban and urbane (Blondé and Van
Damme 2013). Economically speaking, the practices that were fostered by this shopping culture
developed along very traditional paths of the retailing business. What mattered was variety and
choice, trust, knowledge, proximity, advice and the provision of credit (Mitchell 2014; Van
Damme 2015b). In sum, the best model into which we might fit the rapidly changing world of
retailing in early modern Europe is a cultural one and a traditional one as well – a model that
has little to do with an imagined economic revolution.

Towards mass consumption and retailing in the fin-de-siècle world

On 14 April 1910, the new department store Grand Magasins Leonhard Tietz had its grand open-
ing in the Rue Neuve, one of the major shopping streets in belle-époque Brussels.The newspaper
reporting on this major social event was overwhelmed by the enormous quantity and variety
of goods, offered in a luxurious and splendid, bright setting, which the journalist described as
kind of “Noah’s Ark” of material culture (Arnout 2015, 37–41). Journalistic reports such as this
were the rule rather than the exception for the time: whether in London, Paris, Brussels, New
York or Chicago, contemporaries in Europe and North America were impressed by the sheer
architectural monumentality of these retail structures that so heavily contrasted with the more
modest and mundane shops with which they entered into competition. Increasingly equipped
with restrooms, restaurants and cafés, department stores not only offered goods for sale, but
crucially also provided tactile entertainment: a genuine, modern and leisurely shopping experi-
ence (see the chapter by Elvins in this volume).
There are many reasons why department stores figure so prominently in consumer and retail
historiographies of the turn-of-the-century world (Crossick and Jaumain 1999; Howard 2015).
Department stores – some of which had inauspiciously and gradually evolved from drapery
shops – became icons of a late nineteenth-century consumer revolution, the shock waves of
which were soon to be felt all over the world. From their very beginnings, these cathedrals
of consumption echoed Western modernity: they became the perfect foil for contemporary
and later commentators to project both awe and anxieties about Western civilisation (see the
chapter by Fujioka in this volume). In Europe, early urban theorists like Walter Benjamin and
Georg Simmel saw them as embodiments of modern Western culture, centred around urban
shopping and a tantalising, sensory spectacle of objects; the economist Werner Sombart equated

38
 From consumer revolution to mass market

them with modern Western capitalism (Slater and Tonkiss 2001; Trentmann 2016). With the
benefit of hindsight, however, it seems fair to say that department stores were more important
as an idea or imagining of Western progress and superiority than as forces that fundamentally
revolutionised the retail landscape. At the end of the 1930s, for instance, they still monopolised
only a tiny fraction of retailing in Britain (no more than 5.5% of total retail sales). This was
not significantly different in many other Western and non-Western countries where depart-
ment stores had been heralded as shining symbols of modernisation (Haupt 2012, 272; Harada’s
chapter in this volume). The real question then becomes why it was that department stores
encapsulated and warped Western imaginations. Using department stores as a starting point, we
question how to reinterpret retailing and its connection with the consumer variable in a period
that figures so prominently in consumer and retail historiography. It focuses anew on how our
shared consumer and retail knowledge have become fundamentally enmeshed with persistent,
western narratives of modernity and with core western values, and concludes that any trium-
phalism about this period is misplaced and unwarranted.
When reconsidering consumer and retail evolutions at the end of the nineteenth-century,
it is essential to adopt a broader contextual perspective. Department stores should never be
isolated from the environment in which they emerged: they were an integral aspect of urbani-
sation in a feverish period of city building, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century,
that had radically broken open the pre-industrial urban landscape of North-Western Europe.
Beginning in Paris under the influential guidance of Baron G.E. Haussmann, new, apartment-
filled boulevards and shopping avenues began to emerge in capital cities such as Vienna, Brus-
sels and Berlin, and in many expanding metropolitan centres in America. Private, commercial
enterprise was integral and, in many ways, essential to such endeavours, since it drove up
property values and promised future owners and urban municipalities a healthy return on
investments by transforming the most congested and unsanitary inner-city neighbourhoods.
Especially after the 1870s, when a global economic downturn hit financial markets, wealthy
investors and local politicians followed each other into urban renewal and channelled massive
public and private capital into the beautification of the public domain and the modernisa-
tion of the accompanying hotel, café/restaurant, and retail sectors. Promoting Western cities
as shining stars of a fashionable and rapidly modernising leisure and consumption landscape
became integral to attracting a growing group of visitors and wealthy, suburbanising citizens
alike (Wagenaar 2001; Howard 2015).
Department stores clearly profited from and contributed to this urban “boosterism”: some
of the technological and architectural marvel and expertise that accompanied the planning and
engineering of urban renewal rubbed off on the outsides and insides of department stores. Built
out of iron and sometimes with spectacular glass facades, connected to electric lightning, gas and
water pipes, modern sewage systems, and equipped with new escalators, these buildings were
themselves seen as an exhibition of what Western “superiority” and industrial progress were
able to accomplish at the turn of the century. Moreover, just as the impressive arcades and cov-
ered market hall buildings, which for similar reasons underwent an upsurge from the last quarter
of the nineteenth-century, department stores materialised a radical symbolic break with the past.
From a physical point of view, such a break with the filth and ugliness of days gone by was quite
genuine, and Romantic observers woefully lamented the destruction of picturesque streets and
structures that had to make room for modern city-making. Outside North-Western Europe as
well, in cities as diverse as Shanghai, Cairo, Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, Haussman-
nisation and the arrival of Paris- and US-styled department stores, not only signalled the foreign
penetration of Western capital and imperialistic efforts, but was also seen quite literally as a
physical tabula rasa over a “horrendous” and “barbarous” non-Western past (Hazel Hahn 2015).

39
Figure 3.1 Exterior of La Maison Tietz, a grand department store in fin-de-siècle Antwerp, Belgium
Source: Courtesy of Collection Janssens.
 From consumer revolution to mass market

Figure 3.2 Interior of La Maison Tietz, Antwerp, Belgium

Source: Courtesy of Collection Janssens.

However, from the point of view of an already long-running consumer and retail continuity
in North-Western European cities, the department store-myth – the idea of it being connected
to Western progress and modernisation – begins to crumble when placed in proper retail per-
spective. Department stores were not only applauded for their architectural and technological
prowess, but also for allegedly opening up the market for an unparalleled cornucopia of material
plenty and desires: haberdashery, furniture, clothing, glass, china – they were all organised in
different sections of the department store. In reality, however, this was not mass consumption,
since most of the products that department stores sold were rather highly priced and aimed at an
upper market clientele. True, the sheer diversity and variety of goods on offer could never be
matched by the type of much smaller eighteenth-century fashion shops and à la mode magazins
described above. Yet, these fashion shops had promoted themselves by stressing diversity and
variety of supply, and effectively offered cheaper semi-luxuries to a much wider segment of
people than before – very similar to what department stores were doing a century later (Walsh
1999).
It can also be seriously questioned if department stores were really as liberating for urban
consumers as often has been claimed. In particular, their importance in the life of shopping
women – providing a civilised safe haven from the vulgarity of the street and marketplace – has
been much exaggerated. Emile Zola, most famously, focused in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) on
the inner psyche of a young, fragile country girl from Normandy, Denise Baudu, who becomes
completely intoxicated and seduced by the machinery of a Parisian department store. The topos
lingered on and became stock material for typical masculine anxieties and phantasies about
women (Tiersten 2001, 15–54). If Zola’s text could at least be interpreted as a socially heartfelt
critique of the working conditions in department stores, others had a harder time keeping in
check their male, erotic imaginations around consuming women, with a sex scene in the bedding

41
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

department of a Swedish store being the questionable climax of Det stora varuhuset (1926) by
Sigfrid Siwertz (Trentmann 2016, 216). In the real world, shopping women in North-Western
European cities had been a common and unremarkable sight for centuries; much of the late
nineteenth-century moral panic around kleptomaniac or insatiable, spend-crazy female shoppers
should in fact be read in reverse. Far from being an adequate description of the urban world, they
tell us more how the puritan and curtailed Victorian mind filtered department stores and female
shopping in the imagination. They can be placed in the same category as other conservative or
well-meant paternalistic reactions against the “New Woman”, who was gradually emancipating
herself in the social, economic and political male-dominated arenas of society (Rappaport 2001).
The point where contemporaries and generations of historians did get it right about depart-
ment stores is in their use of relative innovative marketing and business techniques. Department
stores deployed efficient and cost-cutting business strategies, in part by acting as wholesalers or by
directly contracting producers, while in the meantime also importing some of the bad working
conditions that had been pioneered in the industrial sector: long hours, low wages, authoritarian
rule and organisation, etc. Goods were ticketed, prices fixed, keen prices advertised, end of season
sales promoted and a choice offered between paying ready money for lower prices or via more
expensive forms of product instalment credit. Lower profit margins per item sold were compen-
sated by higher turnover which also facilitated a more direct interplay with fashion cycles and
warranted large advertising budgets bent on luring as many customers as possible into the stores
(Alexander and Akehurst 1998; Howard, 2015 – see also the chapter by Elvins in this volume).
In many of these retail innovations, however, the department store was not a stand-alone in
the consumer landscape of the nineteenth-century city (Lesger and Furnée 2014). The break-
through of the department store was built on a whole range of earlier retail innovations pio-
neered in shops and previous large-scale retail formats such as the sixteenth-century panden,
seventeenth-century shopping galleries and early nineteenth-century bazaars (Vermeylen 2003,
19–28; Walsh 2003, 52–79; Stobart 2014, 26–27). More importantly, other emerging late-
nineteenth-century retail formats – most conspicuously the retail chain and co-operative – used
similar business innovations, arguably to much wider effect. Retail chains and co-operatives
certainly started to attract and reach bigger segments of society than the belle-époque department
store (Alexander, Shaw, and Hodson 2003).
However, with the advent of the retail chain and co-operative, urban consumer landscapes
did not change overnight. Almost everywhere the number of shopkeepers followed urban pop-
ulation growth (bakeries, for instance, are a good case in point) and even old retail circuits, such
as the peddlers, successfully defended their position in the changing consumer and retail market
of the fin-de-siècle world. Street vending as well as open-air markets proved extremely resilient
in fulfilling the basic needs and wants of the masses (Stobart and Van Damme 2016; Calaresu
and Van den Heuvel 2016). Yet, both the retail chain and the co-operative, much more as the
department store, can be seen as formats linked to burgeoning mass market aspirations and pro-
found social transformations in the urban field.With the increase of urban population, working-
class demand for cheap food and standardised goods (shoes, clothing, etc.) was on the rise. Often
growing organically out of small food shops, grocers, chemists, and shops attending to, for
instance, the sale of cheaply manufactured prêt-à-porter, the retail chain or multiple retailer, tried
to find a rational solution to what had become a growing problem in the expanding North-
Western European cities around 1870, namely provisioning for basic, day-to-day needs at much
lower prices than before (Stobart 2008, 138–143). Moreover, with the final breakthrough of
industrial modes of production, consumer trust had to be earned for selling mass-produced
items, including hitherto unknown items such as meat extracts, margarine, conserves, canned
food and so on.

42
 From consumer revolution to mass market

Figure 3.3  A typical narrow street near the centre of Antwerp, Belgium, c.1893. On the right, street sellers
have arranged merchandise on the pavement in large reed baskets
Source: Courtesy of Collection Janssens.

Although retail chains were not solely, nor even firstly devoted to selling food, distrib-
uting cheap food and manufactured foodstuffs became central to the political economy of
industrialising Europe and North America, since this would cut directly into the high cost
of living for the expanding and still badly paid labour force (Atkins and Oddy 2008). When,
due to agricultural mechanisation and innovations in rail transport and steam shipping, cheap
grain – and soon afterwards fruit, vegetables and frozen meat – began to pour into European
ports from the 1870s onwards, the multiple retailer followed suit by branching out their
operations on both the local and supra-local levels (see the chapter by Kruger in this vol-
ume). Soon, retail chains, addressing their customers with recognisable shop architecture,
brands and names (Sainsbury’s is a long-lived example in Britain), operated complex net-
works of logistics and distribution which allowed for unprecedented retail coverage, econo-
mies of scale, and in the end cheaper prices and a trustworthy retail format for everybody.
Co-operatives started developing and multiplying along similar lines, sometimes producing
their own food to secure quality and trustworthiness of sale in an industrialising product
market. They differed, however, from the more commercially oriented multiple retailers
by being built on dominant political-ideological concerns about the material improvement
of the labouring classes. Customers had to become a member of the co-operative and com-
mercial profits of the retail operation could eventually be used for schemes of social and

43
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

Figure 3.4 A traditional shop selling dried fish displayed on the shop front and on trestles in the street;
next door, a more modern looking tobacconist has neatly arranged his merchandise behind a
glazed window. Antwerp, Belgium, c.1893
Source: Courtesy of Collection Janssens.

moral betterment (Furlough and Strikwerda 1999; see also the chapter by Hilson et al. in
this volume).
By focusing on the co-operative movement, among others, the fin-de-siècle world has rightly
been recognised for putting consumer rights and the entitlement to consume high on the social
and political agenda. The idea that better-paid labourers could be made into consumers became
integral to the Fordist mode of production; as was the Taylorian idea that a more structured and
better organised working schedule could both improve labour productivity and create leisure
time for the employed (Tomka 2013, 192–262). For most North-West European and North
American countries, however, the actual implementation and legal realisation of these ideas
would only come after the horrors of the World Wars and the setbacks of the Great Depres-
sion, which made social restructuring mandatory. In Belgium, for instance, new social laws
were being issued in the last two decades of the nineteenth century under pressure of, among
others, the rising Socialist Party, but these only remedied the most grievous ills of the industrial
labour model (abolishment of child labour and required schooling, wage protection by abolish-
ing truck systems, and so on). Of arguably greater importance in placing the consumer in the
centre of the political arena in this period were the growing consumer movements taking the
form of both concerned ‘leagues’ of housewives and full-blown urban protest and social mobi-
lisation around essential consumer goods and services, like gas and water (Chatriot, Chessel,
and Hilton 2004; Taylor and Trentmann 2011). In their attention for public safety and health,
however, the initiatives of concerned consumer-citizens stayed very much in tune with typical

44
 From consumer revolution to mass market

turn-of-the-century bourgeois prerogatives and sensibilities. Mass mobilisation around improve-

ments in the purchasing power of the labouring classes was in general not part of the agenda.
All in all, the rise of new retail formats at the end of the nineteenth century did not revolu-
tionise the retail world. Retailers proved to be innovative in adapting to larger changes in the
fin-de-siècle world; from the perspective of the urban consumer, however, not that much funda-
mentally changed. Although the building of new department stores, and to a lesser extent the
new arcades and market halls, was accompanied by physical destruction and uprooting of existing
streets and neighbourhoods, these core symbols of nineteenth-century consumerism should not,
in the end, be understood as having invented urban shopping as a leisurely and civilised pastime;
they merely coloured its flamboyant, belle-époque outlook. Catering for rising urban consumer
demand had a big impact on the activities of especially multiple retailing and the co-operative
movement, yet here as well claims about the advent of an age of mass consumerism should be
nuanced. Despite unquestionable improvements in the living standards of the expanding mid-
dle classes, North-Western Europe and North America around 1900 remained highly socially
polarised and divided between labour and capital. Mass markets did not come with an impressive
treats-for-all consumer party before wartime: avoiding hunger and making hard choices around
proper clothing and the home was the best most labouring people could aspire for.

Conclusion
While major narratives about Western retail and consumer revolutions were severely attacked
in the past decades, they continue to govern our interpretations of late early modern and
nineteenth-century transformations in buying and selling practices. And while, quite often,
the connections between the changing worlds of retailing and consumption are intuitively
­presupposed – as is exemplified for instance in the abundant literature on advertising – studies
that really interconnect changes in consumption and distribution are few. By focusing upon two
periods of critical transformation in material culture of North-Western Europe, consumption
and retailing, this chapter explored the possibilities of bringing together these research traditions.
Other regions and periods might readily serve this purpose as well, although they remain under-
represented and under-theorised in overall historiography.
Recent research has done a good job in downplaying the revolutionary character of con-
sumer and retail changes. After all, economic growth was slow and even supposedly modern
late nineteenth-century retailing took place in the context of a socially skewed society, targeting
urban elites and the middle classes, rather than the mass market consumer. Hence, it probably
does not come as a surprise that linear stage models, in which the rise of the department stores
was seen as the logical and necessary outcome of economic modernisation and urbanisation,
were quickly abandoned. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries different com-
mercial circuits coexisted, competed but also complemented each other. Shopkeepers, as is
clear by now, were not only victims of the competition of department stores: to a certain extent
they also benefited by intercepting customers frequenting these same department stores. And
while street vending was considered an obsolete and ill-trusted model, it continued to play its
role well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. The same argument can be made
about basic open-air markets, which often proved to be more attractive and successful as the
newly constructed, but sometimes cumbersome covered market buildings. Without necessarily
downplaying the cultural and societal impact of these eye-catching nineteenth-century retail
innovations and enterprises, at the start of the twentieth century, the lion’s share of buying and
selling across Europe developed in rather common, “traditional” retail outlets, often using well-
known, day-to-day retailing methods.

45
 Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme

However, by stressing deep-historical lines of continuity and downplaying triumphant West-

ern modernisation theses, it would be easy to miss one crucial and very important long-term
transformation. Strikingly enough, both in the early modern period and the nineteenth century
alike, shopping and retailing were clearly on the rise, and their development was determined to
a large extent by consumer and material culture changes that necessitated more frequent shop-
ping activities, preferably in an enjoyable and civilised (urban) context. Despite clear and obvious
innovations in doing retail business, common traditional sales qualities – such as the personal
and informative relationship between buyer and seller – continued to dominate. In fact, on an
aggregate level, a large part of the retail growth and diversification happened despite the absence
of significant productivity gains in retailing practices. People spent more time and money on
shopping, without necessarily enriching the individual shopkeeper. In the nineteenth century as
well, supply side cost reductions in the production and transport of goods ultimately turned the
retailing moment into a challenging economic bottleneck. Remarkably enough, however, shop-
ping was not considered an increasing social cost, but instead became framed as a civilised and
pleasurable part of an urban, bourgeois lifestyle. Indeed, the early modern consumer changes,
such as the growing fashion sensitivity of the material culture, necessitated more frequent shop
visits. Yet, the need to go out for shopping (and spend more money on the act of shopping)
was captured and appropriated by turning it into an enjoyable and pleasurable pastime and lei-
sure activity. Hence, shopping activities were increasingly part of an evolving bourgeois mind-
set through the deployment of a genteel shopping environment and vocabulary. The arcades,
covered market halls and department stores – as iconic cathedrals of consumption – were the
elaborated outcome of a process that set in well before the industrial revolution took off. In the
metropolitan environment, at least, the retail revolution was foremost a cultural revolution –
albeit in the first place one for the well-to-do and bourgeois.

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 4
RETAIL DEVELOPMENT
AND URBAN FORM IN THE
UNITED STATES DURING
THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Richard Longstreth

Introduction
A succession of sweeping changes has occurred in the form and location of facilities for retail
distribution in the United States between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries.
By the 1850s, districts primarily devoted to retail activities and buildings expressly tailored to
those functions had emerged in cities and towns throughout settled areas of the nation. These
commercial districts were key defining components of urban form, identity and life. Concen-
trated shopping areas were also a major force in the overall trend towards centralisation, which
began to affect the American landscape in earnest after the Revolution continued as the domi-
nant pattern of settlement well into the twentieth century. At the same time, the particulars of
retail development were in a constant state of flux, with frequent changes made in the form,
scale, materials, size and character of retail architecture. The location of retail districts was also
subject to shifts, albeit at a more gradual pace.
The rate of change accelerated during the twentieth century, not just in the design of facili-
ties, but also in their locations within the urban matrix. Retail decentralisation became well-
established during the 1920s and gained momentum over the next two decades. By the 1950s,
this tendency became dominant. Decentralisation sometimes assumed forms similar to those
that characterised downtown, with miniature satellite retail centres. However, new forms of
development began to be established early on with lone-wolf stores and shopping centres.These
fundamentally new kinds of outlets were foremost tailored to motorists; driving distance became
a major determinant of location; and ever-increasing amounts of land were allocated to park-
ing space. Both kinds of development contributed to the emergence of the regional shopping
mall during the 1950s and, with it, an unprecedented level of planning in an effort to create
new metropolitan centres that functioned as equivalents to downtown. By the 1960s, increasing
concerted initiatives were launched to rejuvenate the city centre, adapting lessons learned from
the regional mall. There have also been an array of specialised developments, ranging from new
festival market places to preserved main streets, as well as mixed-use projects that have brought
a new residential market to the urban core.

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 Retail development and urban form in the United States

Emergence of retail districts, 1785–1840

The development of an architecture in the United States purposefully configured to accommo-
date retail functions was a direct outgrowth of the large-scale rise of cities as the major instru-
ments for manufacturing, financial transactions and the distribution of goods and services – a
phenomenon that did not coalesce until after independence. Cities existed prior to the revolu-
tion, most notably Philadelphia, which was among the largest population centres in the British
Empire in 1770. But limits of trade and the amassing of capital precluded the emergence of
much in the way of a specialised commercial infrastructure (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 Commercial buildings, 100 block of Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, mostly late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. The rapid growth of major cities after the Revolution led to the emergence
of centralised commercial districts. Located along what was becoming a primary retail street by the
1840s, this group of buildings was a typical mix of houses converted wholly or in part to business
purposes and a scattering of only slightly larger purpose-built commercial edifices. Owing to this
block’s location near the waterfront, warehouses occupy the lots further to the east (right).
Source: Quarter plate daguerrotype by William Young McAllister, 1842. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division (LC-USZ62-128556).

51
 Richard Longstreth

Even in Philadelphia, outlets for selling were generally mixed with spaces for warehous-
ing, production and living. Political and economic independence began to alter the situation.
The process was greatly accelerated by the rise of large-scale manufacturing that occurred in
the decades that followed. Concentrated populations were essential for most, if not all, enter-
prises of mass production. Such places were no less essential for the financial and other services
that enabled such work. Finally, cities fostered consumption on a scale that made the mass-
manufacturing of goods profitable. As a result city building occurred in the US with an intensity
unimaginable in the colonial period. Established seaports expanded exponentially; major new
coastal centres such as Baltimore and Savannah emerged; and an array of new cities grew along
the Great Lakes (including Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit) and major rivers (including Pitts-
burgh, Cincinnati, Louisville and St Louis). For every settlement that grew into a major centre,
myriad others were founded in the hopes of achieving a comparable scale. Cities in embryo
were the primary agents of transforming the vast frontier of the new republic.
Within this framework, the design of buildings primarily to accommodate retail functions
developed slowly and in incremental stages. Houses that had been fully converted to revenue-
generating functions comprised a significant portion of commercial buildings during the early
nineteenth century. Many purpose-built examples retained the basic form of their colonial pre-
decessors, which were dwellings with at least part of the main floor allocated to selling wares.
In a large city such as Philadelphia or New York, these buildings were typically 3.5 stories tall
and 20–25 feet wide. One major change occurred at street level, where large shop windows or
a more-or-less open front framed by granite piers and lintels, allowing for extensive display of
goods and for easy access to the premises. A then-novel practice of what was termed window
shopping began as early as the 1830s and would become a basic staple of urban life over the
decades that followed. Inside new stores, the main floor was primarily devoted to selling, while
upper levels accommodated support functions, including storage, and, perhaps, one or more
additional commercial tenants. Addressing the needs to purvey specialised, manufactured goods,
as opposed to the traditional range of artisan wares produced on the premises, and the growing
desire among merchants to live away from ever more crowded, noisy, and unsanitary commercial
districts contributed to the shift. Steadily rising land values in such places also entailed the need
for quarters to generate as much revenue as possible.
During the early nineteenth century, too, retail and wholesale functions became increasingly
segregated in their own, respective districts. Stores that catered to the urban elite took quarters
in proximity to one another on blocks of what became the premier shopping street, such as
certain blocks of Broadway in New York or Market and Chestnut streets in Philadelphia. The
clustering of retail operations was in many cases fostered by the presence of a public market,
which since colonial times had been the principal way of providing sizable communities with a
regular supply of fresh food. Subject to municipal regulations, these public complexes attracted
an array of other merchants to situate nearby. The most common form was an open-air shed,
which provided basic shelter from the elements while affording ample circulation for both air
and people. Market sheds could extend for several blocks, aligned in a linear fashion, with a
head house accommodating various government or other civic functions. The 1841 Public
Market in Charleston, South Carolina, is a primary remaining example from the antebellum
period. Well before then, Faneuil Hall (popularly known as Quincy) Market (1823–26) pio-
neered the concept in the United States of fully enclosing food vendors’ stalls so that the sale of
food was completely separated from the street. The project was not only of unprecedented size,
it was part of a major expansion plan that included two massive flanking ranges of buildings that
housed stores and other commercial functions – all resting on newly filled land that extended
Boston’s burgeoning city centre.

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 Retail development and urban form in the United States

If the public market was a standard fixture for settlements of some significance, the com-
mercial arcade, another early attempt to cluster compatible outlets, proved a short-lived phe-
nomenon. Inspired directly from examples of recent vintage in England, these buildings were
intended to provide a safe and respectable haven for women shoppers to peruse a range of select
shops away from the dirt, noise, and crowds of the street. In most cases they connected two
thoroughfares, and thus provided a natural shortcut for perambulating consumers. Typically
the speculative investors who initiated the project screened prospective tenants to ensure a mix
that would appeal only to the well-heeled. The largest example was in Philadelphia (1824–26),
which was intended to create a new retail centre, but failed to connect Chestnut with another
major street. It also failed to attract a critical mass of merchants and proved a financial disaster.
But even better situated arcades of the period, such as the one that remains in Providence,
Rhode Island (1827–28) fared little better. For all its promise, the commercial arcade had an
inconsequential impact on retail development through the mid-nineteenth century.

Maturation of retail districts, 1840–1890

The basic pattern of narrow-fronted specialty stores forming a dense cluster of retail activity
that developed during the early nineteenth century did not appreciably change in the decades
that followed. Such places often grew in extent. Sometimes shopping districts moved along an
established axis, as they did westward on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street. Occasionally circum-
stances fostered the creation of a new primary shopping thoroughfare, as occurred in Chicago
with the emergence of State Street after the Great Fire of 1871. If the overall pattern remained
constant dramatic increases occurred in size and scale beginning in the 1840s. four-, five-, even
six-story buildings became the standard in the largest cities as a response to soaring land values
in prime commercial areas.The increase in height often fostered enlarging the footprint. A large
commercial building, with stores at ground level and offices or other functions above, could
extend at least several times the street frontage common to work of earlier decades. The height
of the principal story increased to as much as 15 feet and the average height of upper stories
grew as well so a building of five floors from 1850 could be twice as tall as one of 3.5 stories
from two decades earlier. Finally changes occurred in the character of store buildings, reflecting
the rise in a taste for ornamental embellishment generally. As a result the chaste façade treat-
ment common to Neoclassical architecture gave way of elaborate decorative treatments, where
carved stone and frequently cast iron were used to create palatial allusions.When store buildings
of the 1820s and 1830s lay close to successors of two decades later, the contrast was pronounced
indeed (Figure 4.2).
The mid-nineteenth century also gave rise to a new building type, the palatial dry goods
emporium. First developed by Alexander T. Stewart for the store (1845–46) that bore his name
on Broadway just above City Hall Park in New York, this retail outlet exuded luxury on a scale
more associated with aristocratic European gathering places than with elite shops in the United
States. The array and presentation of merchandise was as extravagant as the architecture. Yet
despite all the sumptuous surroundings, the huge scale of the building was geared to high volume
sales, and thus its clientele was of necessity broader than the well-to-do patrons of elite specialty
stores. Stewart’s “Marble Palace” proved a pathbreaking success. Four years after it opened the
store was substantially enlarged and aggrandisements continued even though Stewart opened a
huge second store farther north on Broadway in 1862 and substantially expanded it seven years
later. Stewart’s became a model for Lord & Taylor (1867–70), Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn
(1860s–1870s) and the transformation of R.H. Macy during the 1870s and 1880s. Marshall
Field pursued this path following the great Chicago fire of 1871 when he commissioned a

53
 Richard Longstreth

Figure 4.2 Astor stores and other commercial buildings, Broadway, New York, ca. 1850s and before.
During the mid-nineteenth century, large urban centres expanded into new territory, where
the landscape consisted primarily of purpose-built commercial buildings. New York pioneered
in building sizable dry goods houses such as the Astor stores, which dominated their immediate
areas. Neighbouring buildings were more modest in dimension and scale, but, at least in New
York, often rose to five stories.
Source: Albumen print, stereograph by George Stacy, 1860. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
(LC-DIG-stereo-1s04894).

huge emporium on State Street. As the idea spread so the spectrum of merchandise grew to
encompass a broad range of goods targeted to affluent and middle-class consumers alike – a shift
that often led such emporia to be referred to as department stores rather than simply dry goods
houses. By 1890 such establishments existed in many cities across the United States.The depart-
ment store was in fact becoming a principal defining component of a city and a major force
in the distribution of goods, challenging the role of specialty stores and making inroads on the
dominance of wholesaling in the distribution of goods (Figure 4.3).
The ongoing growth of retail districts, with department stores now the key destinations,
was predicated on an ever-growing network of public transportations line, employing horse-
cars, cable cars, and by the end of the period, electric streetcars. These private-sector ventures
enabled large numbers of households with disposable income to reside increasing farther
afield from the urban core while still accessing its services with relative ease. Like spokes in a
wheel, car lines emanated from one or a few key points downtown – places that were con-
sidered optimal for retail development. As a result the shopping districts of the Gilded Age
remained fairly compact, seldom extending more than half a dozen blocks – enough space
to accommodate a density of outlets, yet sufficiently small to encourage perambulation from
one block to another.
A parallel trend towards giantism occurred in the development of public markets during the
second half of the nineteenth century. Enormous central markets were created in strategic loca-
tions in Washington, DC (1872–75) and a number of other cities. Campaigns to build complexes
that entailed both retail and wholesale operations and could extend for several city blocks were
undertaken to stimulate high volume turnover among swelling urban populations and the ability
of railroads to transport large amounts of fresh food expeditiously to a single location.

54
 Retail development and urban form in the United States

Figure 4.3 Marshall Field & Company department store, 1902–14, D. H. Burnham & Company, archi-
tects (on left) and other commercial buildings, State Street, Chicago. The scale of commercial
development sharply increased once again during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries with the advent of multi-story, steel-frame buildings. Though home to a spectrum
of business activities, State Street had become Chicago’s premier retail corridor, and indeed
one of the greatest concentrations of stores in the United States. Most prominent in prestige,
as well as in size, was Marshall Field’s mammoth pile, portions of which were still under con-
struction when this photograph was taken. Further south on the same side of State Street can
be seen two rivals, Mandel Brothers and Carson Pirie Scott.
Source: Photograph by Detroit Publishing Company, 1907. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
(LC-DIG-det-4a25229).

Coalescence of the downtown retail centre, 1890–1930

At the end of the nineteenth and during the first three decades of the twentieth centuries the
centralisation process that began nearly 100 years earlier culminated, giving retail functions in
the urban core hegemony. Not only did the urban population continue to swell, inter-urban
rail service helped turn major cities into regional hubs for shoppers. Widespread use of the
tele­phone by the 1920s, and increasingly sophisticated delivery systems, enabled many patrons
to secure goods without making a trip downtown. To serve this burgeoning clientele stores
of every description lay in proximity to one another and to rail lines. Most stores remained
concentrated along a single corridor such as Washington Street in Boston, Market Street in
Philadelphia, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, State Street in Chicago and Broadway in Los Ange-
les; or formed dense clusters, as occurred in Detroit and San Francisco. Among large cities,
only New York, by virtue of its immense in-town consumer population, deviated from this

55
 Richard Longstreth

pattern, with primary centres scattered along the Ladies Mile (Sixth Avenue), Herald Square
and, later, Fifth Avenue.
Department stores anchored these districts by the late nineteenth century, when the idea
of a giant, multi-story emporium that had originated decades earlier became a widespread
trend coast to coast. Pioneering department stores in their respective communities such as
J.L. Hudson in Detroit and Jordan March in Boston were joined by many others in cities
of all sizes, purveying a wide range of merchandise and services. By the early twentieth
century, retailing had eclipsed wholesaling in prestige and often in profits, fueled by the
ever-swelling ranks of middle-class consumers, who could purchase most of the goods they
desired under one roof.
A new standard for the department store was set in the 1900s with the phased rebuilding
of facilities for Marshall Field’s in Chicago and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, both of them
encompassing entire city blocks and rising twelve stories above the street. The buildings offered
magisterial, even palatial, settings that manifested their respective companies’ prestige and role
as an authority on consumer goods. They also provided centres for entertainment, relaxation
and cultural stimulation, with dining facilities, lounges, auditoria, exhibition galleries and even
concert halls. The great department store became a defining element of American urbanism, a
yardstick by which cities of all sizes measured their progress and potential.
The trend to build ever-larger, more-encompassing stores reached a feverish pitch during
the 1920s. In city after city, establishments that had been relatively modest in scope, focusing
on apparel and other dry goods, for example, broadened to include hardware, furniture, musi-
cal instruments, radios, sporting equipment, luggage, silverware, china, books and paintings
and prints, and an array of services from fur storage to upholstery. Major cities could boast
a half-dozen or more such emporia. An unstated, but widely recognised hierarchy existed
among them, ranging from the most fashion-oriented and prestigious to those best known
for the bargains they offered. This competition and diversification offered consumers a wide
range of choices. People of moderate means could occasionally splurge at a leading store such
as Marshall Field’s, while the well-to-do might hunt for savings at lower-priced emporia such
as Lit Brothers in Philadelphia or the Fair Store in Chicago. Smaller cities had fewer depart-
ment stores, but the differences were primarily ones of scale rather than the basic patterns of
design and operation.
If they dominated the trade, the grand emporia hardly enjoyed a monopoly on retail func-
tions. Specialty stores, while deeply affected by their giant competitors, remained viable com-
ponents of the downtown retail mix, and some rebounded to become significant draws in their
own right by the 1920s. During that decade, many furniture stores such as Barker Brothers in
Los Angeles expanded to the point where they offered a greater selection than department
stores and did so in new buildings that were almost as large.Women’s apparel stores also enjoyed
resurgence, both with companies that catered to a large middle-income market and others that
purveyed high-end fashions. In the latter category, major, departmentalised outlets such as San
Francisco’s I. Magnin, Dallas’s Neiman-Marcus or New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue became closely
associated in the public mind with the big department stores themselves.
Most department stores were locally owned. However, national chain stores also became
a significant presence in urban centres during the 1920s as part of the larger phenomenon of
national branding and the creation of national markets. The largest of these were variety stores,
such as F.W. Woolworth, but many others specialised in clothing, shoes, pharmaceuticals and
other frequently purchased goods. Most such establishments stocked low-priced merchandise
targeted to moderate-income households. Their proliferation adversely affected some of the

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 Retail development and urban form in the United States

lower-end department stores, but the chain phenomenon as a whole, with its fast growth and
high profit margins, became a source of nervousness even among owners of prestigious depart-
ment stores.
The effect of retail growth during the first three decades of the twentieth century was a
substantial increase in downtown density, with larger and often taller store buildings. In some
cases, too, the business district made conspicuous territorial increases, as it did along both Broad-
way and Seventh Street in Los Angles and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland. In a few instances, this
extension took the form of new, perceptually discrete nodes such as North Michigan Avenue in
Chicago or Union Square in San Francisco.
The increase in commercial density during the 1920s unfolded in tension with the rapid
ascendancy of motor vehicles. On one hand, trucking allowed for more efficient distribution
of goods. On the other hand, automobiles soon clogged downtown streets. The structure of
the urban core in general and the concentration of retail outlets in particular had been possible
because of the network of streetcar lines (and high-speed rail transit lines in New York and Chi-
cago) that converged on the city centre.The desirability of a given downtown location for retail
purposes was predicated on its proximity to the most important of these public transit routes.
Increasing use of automobiles, especially among affluent female shoppers, became a substantial
problem by mid-decade both because of traffic congestion and a scarcity of parking. In cities
from Syracuse to Los Angeles, planners, politicians and downtown commercial interests began to
see the traffic problem as a crisis of major proportions. Efforts directed at traffic regulation and
initiatives to create offstreet parking facilities abounded in cities nationwide, but the problem
was never resolved until consumer trips to the urban core began to decline markedly in the
1960s and 1970s.

Development of outlying retail nodes, 1900–1940

Establishments purveying basic goods and services for nearby residents could be found in out-
lying sections of cities throughout the nineteenth century, but it generally was not until the
latter decades of that century that they began to form nodal centres and not until the 1920s
that the largest of such places began to compete with downtown. The increasing lateral spread
of the residential districts that fueled this development was enabled by horsecar and, especially,
electric streetcar lines that allowed an easy commute to the urban core. Major stops along those
lines often gave rise to the most concentrated outlying commercial development, with typically
one- and two-story “taxpayer” buildings forming a strip of several blocks. The decentralisation
of many industrial functions and, with them, blue-collar households, likewise spurred new com-
mercial nodes for people with neither time nor money to go far afield to shop. After World War
I, a new intensity of growth occurred in outlying centres. In Chicago, for example, some of the
largest-scale developments arose in middle-class districts such as Englewood and Uptown, boast-
ing multi-story office buildings, major department stores, and immense movie palaces. Similar
developments could be found in some prosperous working-class areas, such as along Chicago’s
Milwaukee Avenue and Milwaukee’s Mitchell Avenue. Chain stores such as Woolworth’s became
an increasing presence in outlying centres of many sizes, proliferating during the 1920s and
again in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Increasing reliance on automobiles for middle-class consumers spurred arterial development
where stores could be sited specifically to attract the motorist. Among the most celebrated pro-
jects of this sort took place along Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard, where two prominent nodes
began to emerge during the late 1920s and boomed after the mid-1930s. Both sported high-end

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branches of downtown-based stores catering to a well-heeled clientele. Lacking streetcar lines,

Wilshire was conducive to smooth traffic flow, which was further facilitated by back-lot park-
ing areas that served many of the stores. Known as the Miracle Mile, the westernmost of these
developments also departed from precedent by anticipating residential growth rather than fol-
lowing it.
The prestigious branch stores found along the Wilshire corridor were indicative of a broader,
if not yet widespread, trend among leading downtown retailers, some of whom began to erect
outlets in high-end suburban centres around Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, among
other cities. The Depression ended such expansion, but it resumed on a more modest scale with
economic recovery and became a major thrust in retail development after World War II. By 1940,
then, the biggest cities boasted a range of miniature “downtowns”, some decidedly urban in form,
others noticeably less so – a galaxy of nodes that were beginning to compete with the retail core
for a significant range of the consumer public.

Departures from the urban norm, 1920–1940

If the Wilshire Boulevard projects embodied pathbreaking adaptation of urban form to accom-
modate motorists, many other developments of the interwar decades represented more radi-
cal departures. When Sears Roebuck entered the retail field in 1925, it located most of its
full-fledged department stores along major thoroughfares. However, it selected sites that were
isolated from existing retail clusters of any size yet proximate to blue-collar residential areas,
enabling easy access by motorists of moderate means. The inexpensive land chosen allowed
architects to design laterally organised stores rather than the traditional multi-storied ones and
to allocate at least half the property to offstreet parking.
For well-heeled patrons, Kansas City developer J.C. Nichols built the Country Club Plaza
(begun 1922), which became the key conceptual basis for later shopping centres. Eventually
occupying over a dozen blocks with more than two hundred stores and services, the complex
boasted wide streets; scattered, offstreet parking; and buildings of no higher than two stories.
Nichols’s company owned and managed all the property, carefully selecting tenants so that each
would complement the others. No less important, key stores were strategically placed to diffuse
pedestrian and vehicular traffic, thus boosting the number of prime locations. Control was also
exercised over hours of operation, signs, and window displays. Holidays were celebrated with
street embellishments and special events. Nichols envisioned the Plaza not as competition with
downtown stores, but to function as a high-end enclave catering to the fashionable residential
tracts he was developing nearby. In configuration and appearance, the Plaza was the antithesis
of the urban norm, exuding the intimate charm of an idealised, pre-industrial town, albeit one
overtly tailored to the automobile.
Smaller versions of the Country Club Plaza sprouted up in a number of posh suburbs,
including Cleveland’s Shaker Heights and Dallas’s Highland Park. However, the Plaza model
(single ownership and management; planned tenant mix targeted to a specific market) was
most widely applied to another commercial type, known as the neighbourhood shopping
centre. These projects generally encompassed no more than twenty tenants purveying basic
goods and services gathered into a single, linear building. A major prototype for such projects
was the Park and Shop in Washington, DC (1930), which also employed the then unorthodox
arrangement of stores facing a front car lot. This arrangement became popular in Washing-
ton during the 1930s and proliferated nationwide during the post-World War II era. The
building’s configuration was adapted from a southern California phenomenon, known as

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the drive-in market, which began in the mid-1920s and became a ubiquitous fixture in the
regional landscape within a few years.
Another novel aspect of the drive-in was having a spectrum of food products sold under one
roof in a setting that catered to motorists. This latter concept was subsequently adapted for the
supermarket. Led by the Los Angeles-based Ralphs Grocery Company, the supermarket revolu-
tionised the nature of retail space, allowing customers to select goods on their own and pay for
all of them at a single checkout area. With small profit margins, the supermarket concept was
predicated on rapid inventory turnover and volume sales, which, in turn, requited ample facili-
ties for unloading goods from delivery trucks and for loading purchases into customers’ automo-
biles. Capacious docking and parking areas thus formed an integral component of Ralphs stores
beginning in 1929. Supermarkets could be found in many cities a decade later, although few
matched the size or the dramatic atmosphere of Ralphs stores until after World War II, when the
type became the primary vehicle of food distribution nationally. The spatial demands of a large
supermarket resulted in many being built as stand-alone projects, close to, but somewhat apart
from, retail nodes. By the late 1930s, however, some supermarkets became catalysts for adjacent
commercial development in peripheral locations where open land remained abundant. Either
way, the supermarket stood as a landmark amid the burgeoning suburban commercial strip.

Decentralisation boom, 1945–1970

The post-World War II period saw the most radical and widespread changes in American urban
structure, to which retail development was a major contributor. A huge, new, and mobile mass
market comprised of both white- and prosperous blue-collar households, coupled with an acute
housing shortage and ever-intensifying decentralisation of jobs spawned an unprecedented
boom in residential construction well beyond established urban areas. This epic population shift
led to a proliferation of new retail developments, many of them drawing from the innovations of
the interwar decades. Branches of leading downtown stores could be found in these peripheral
areas coast to coast by the mid-1950s.While many businesses, including supermarket companies,
opted for stand-alone buildings along major arteries, the benefits of a group of retail outlets in
a complex managed as a unified operation became ever more apparent. While it had remained
somewhat of a novelty before World War II, the shopping centre became a staple of retail growth
thereafter. Neighbourhood shopping centres grew to be commonplace along major commercial
arteries, and larger complexes, anchored by a variety store and/or a junior department store
chain unit such as J.C. Penney, proliferated by the early 1950s. Many shopping centres were built
by the developers of large, adjacent housing tracts, but many others were created independently
to draw from a multitude of new residential areas. The growing dependence on automobiles for
transportation led to ever more space devoted to parking, with three or four times the square
footage occupied by stores consumed by asphalt. The traditional configuration of buildings set
at the front property line and abutting one another gave way to a sprawling arterial landscape in
which open space predominated. Such widespread accommodation of motor vehicles created a
wholly new spatial order.
The scattering of retail outlets also prompted efforts to create new, very large complexes that
would in effect re-centralise shopping into a few satellite nodes, each approximately equiva-
lent in function to downtown. Major department store companies were the primary agents
of change in this realm. A large branch department store did not always work well in isola-
tion. By grouping it with forty or fifty other stores, all carefully selected to complement rather
than compete with the “parent” establishment, department store executives believed they could

59
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regain the hegemony they had until recently enjoyed from their downtown operations alone.
Pioneering developments completed prior to the Korean War included Northgate (1948–50)
in Seattle, Shopper’s World (1948–51) west of Boston (both built by Allied Stores), Lakewood
Center (1950–52) in Los Angeles County (May Company) and Stonestown (1950–52) in San
Francisco (Emporium Capwell). With the return of peace came a flurry of sequels undertaken
by numerous leading retailers, including J.L. Hudson in Detroit, R.H. Macy in New York and
San Francisco, Marshall Field’s in Chicago and the Dayton Company in Minneapolis. These
regional shopping centres, as they were known, revolutionised retail practices and the retail
landscape over the next quarter century.
Regional shopping centres not only were much larger than any previous outlying retail
development, they contained a spectrum of stores that allowed consumers to purchase most
goods and services they used all in a single complex, in effect becoming a surrogate for
the great downtown department stores themselves. These new loci of trade also assumed a
configuration that was fundamentally different from other retail facilities, including most
smaller shopping centres. Instead of fronting the street or a parking lot, stores were clustered
along one or more pedestrianways, with parking encircling the compound. The thinking
behind this layout was to minimise walking distance from car to stores and to place shop-
pers in a novel and appealing environment where they would be inclined to meander, stay
for longer periods, and patronise more stores than they may have initially intended. Embel-
lishment of the mall through landscaping, fountains, sculpture, and other features gave each
regional centre a clear identity, while having stores line both sides of these spaces trimmed
the distance from end to end to half of what would be using a conventional shopping centre
layout (Figure 4.4).
The design of regional malls underwent ongoing modifications between the mid-1950s and
the mid-1970s. Beginning with the Dayton Company’s Southdale (1953–56) outside Minne-
apolis, pedestrian spaces were fully enclosed, providing shelter from adverse weather and relief
from climatic extremes. Southdale was also a pioneer in having two department store anchors,
and during the 1960s, regional centres with three or even four department stores became the
new industry standard. Gerald Hines’s Galleria (1969–71) in the Post Oak district of Houston
introduced the atrium configuration, with several tiers of shopping floors topped by a glazed
roof. This variation of the great nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Europe soon became a
hallmark of the most ambitious regional centres. While department stores remained at the core
of these complexes, real estate developers began to make such work a specialty during the
mid-1950s, emerging as the driving force in both conceptualisation and realisation. One of the
leaders, James Rouse, played a major role in advancing enclosed malls, while at the Galleria,
Hines consummated the idea of the regional mall as an integral part of a large-scale, mixed-use
commercial centre.
Department store executives and real estate developers alike sought to locate their regional
malls so as to preclude competition nearby, in some cases buying up large parcels of surround-
ing land for residential, office, and/or institutional development. In many cases the regional
mall remained somewhat isolated rather than serving as a catalyst for new business growth on a
large scale.Yet elsewhere, competing centres were erected nearby, and in a number of cases, the
regional mall eventually became part of a large node of commerce. Finally, a few regional malls
spurred major new, multi-functional business centres, as occurred at Tyson’s Corner, southwest
of Washington, DC, and Buckhead, north of Atlanta.

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 Retail development and urban form in the United States

Figure 4.4 Cross County Center, Central Park Avenue and Cross County Parkway, Yonkers, New
York, 1947–52, Sol G. Atlas, developer, Lathrop Douglass, architect. View of pedestrian
mall, looking south towards Gimbel Brothers department store, added to complex 1953–
55. Cross County Center was a pioneering development of a new kind of retail centre
during the post-World War II years. What became known as the regional shopping mall
was intended to compete with the traditional urban core in the array and quality of goods
and services to be found there. Unlike downtowns, the complex was under single owner-
ship and operated by a single management. Its configuration, with stores facing one or
more pedestrianways – all surrounded by acres of surface parking, was an equally radical
departure from convention.
Source: Photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner, 1959. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
(LC-G613-73745).

Decline and renewal of downtown retail districts, 1930–1985

While retail activity dispersed with metropolitan growth, central cities continued to provide
important shopping options through the mid-twentieth century. Stores in the urban core
were hard hit by the Depression, and growth in this sector never again reached the levels it
had earlier in the century. Constructing new stores was the exception rather than the rule
once the economy started to recover. The postwar years, on the other hand, held promise of a
full rebound. Huge department stores and ambitious additions to existing ones were built in
some major urban centres, including those of Houston, Kansas City, Boston, Pittsburgh and
Atlanta, as well as in many smaller ones. Chain companies also embarked on big downtown
expansion campaigns. Led by F.W. Woolworth, variety stores opened new, multi-story plants
carrying a far greater breadth of merchandise than in previous decades, in effect competing

61
 Richard Longstreth

with the lower-end department stores. Junior department stores, most notably J.C. Penney,
also enlarged their holdings to emerge as rivals to the traditional downtown establishments.
Many chain companies specialising in apparel for both men and women opened new plants
as well. In a number of small-to-medium-sized cities – Savannah, Georgia; Richmond, Vir-
ginia; and Rochester, New York, for example – chains became primary agents in the renewal
of downtown shopping districts into the 1960s, boasting some of the most modern as well as
some of the largest emporia.
For every new store constructed after 1930, dozens of others undertook remodelling, often
more than once. Updating retail facilities had long been a common practice, but many remod-
elings of the 1930s and postwar years encompassed sweeping changes indoors and out, creat-
ing what seemed like an entirely new facility. Facades were re-sheathed, while sales areas were
transformed by innovations in lighting and display as well as dramatic new decorative schemes.
Air conditioning use increased during the 1930s and became widespread by the 1950s. This
development, combined with new forms of artificial illumination, obviated the longstanding
need for natural light. Aside from street-front display windows, stores were now optimally sealed
boxes, with centralised selling spaces surrounded by storage, a change that markedly affected
exterior treatment and the character of the shopping area as a whole. The remodelling boom
assumed new proportions after World War II, when changes made as little as a decade earlier gave
way to new designs. By the mid-1950s, retailers increasingly made use of thin, lightweight metal
veneers that could be affixed to existing fronts, greatly reducing construction costs and further-
ing the tendency to make vintage buildings appear brand new. By the 1960s, downtown com-
mercial districts bore scant resemblance to their state in 1930 or even 1950, despite the fact that
wholly new buildings remained relatively few. The primary exceptions to this shift were many
of the grand department stores, which kept exterior remodelling to a minimum while frequently
modernising their interiors.
As early as the mid-1950s, many advocates of downtown commerce charged that spruc-
ing up individual buildings and orchestrating business promotional campaigns were insuf-
ficient if the core was to compete successfully with outlying retail centres. One solution
that attracted widespread interest was to create a pedestrian way along the main retail street,
echoing the still new phenomenon of the regional mall. The idea actually first surfaced
during World War II, but no such plan was implemented until municipal officials cleared
the way for a redevelopment of downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1958. The architect,
Victor Gruen, who was by then a leading figure in the design of regional malls, argued that
a street mall, in itself, could not transform the urban core. Rather, the mall should be part
of a downtown circulation plan that included new traffic circulation routes and extensive
offstreet parking facilities. He was able to realise much of this more comprehensive approach
to revitalisation in Fresno, California, several years later. Many retailers nationwide remained
skeptical of such costly projects; however, continuing declines in their downtown businesses
made them more amenable to the idea. By the 1970s, street malls and street conversions lim-
iting motorised traffic to public transportation, often without the supporting infrastructural
changes Gruen advocated, took root in some major cities such as Boston and Philadelphia;
a host of smaller ones, from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Louisville, Kentucky; and in many
town centres as well.
More radical interventions in downtown retail districts were seldom condoned by
affected merchants and property owners until the 1970s and 1980s when the decline of
those districts became pronounced. Ambitious schemes emerged for large new retail facili-
ties, office towers, and parking garages covering several blocks and sometimes including

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skywalks or enclosed streets. Examples of this approach include The Center in Worcester,
Massachusetts (1966–72) or multi-story arcades as at The Gallery in Philadelphia (1974–77)
and the St Louis Galleria (1982–85). These interventions ranked among the most decisive
and conspicuous changes to the commercial core since the 1920s. Most of the initial efforts
to revive a moribund shopping quarter fell short of expectations, and in some cases they
have either been substantially altered or demolished. Several projects begun a decade or
more later, most notably Circle Centre in Indianapolis (1988–95) and Providence Place
in Providence, Rhode Island (1994–1999), that focus on retailing and entertainment have
enjoyed greater success.
Another substantial impetus of revitalisation has been the festival marketplace, pioneered by
developer James Rouse’s Quincy Market in Boston (1976–78).With years of experience in cre-
ating regional shopping malls, Rouse adapted lessons in management and marketing to a much
smaller-scale operation comprised of dozens of specialty shops and food vendors. Housed in a
historic complex and oriented to outdoor pedestrian spaces, the scheme was heralded as a wel-
come antidote for the vast, enclosed mall. Efforts to replicate the concept have met with mixed
results. A major variant, San Diego’s Horton Plaza (1977–85), on the other hand, offered a high-
density and visually stimulating, open-air environment loosely inspired by old town centres in
southern Europe, and was connected to large, new retail and office facilities that has provided a
catalyst for greater downtown development.

Retail showdown, 1985–2016

Sweeping changes have occurred in virtually every sphere of retailing over the past three
decades, many of which have had a profound effect on urban development. The takeover
of most downtown-based department store companies by what has become a small number
of major corporations has left shopping districts and shopping centres alike with only one
such emporium and, perhaps, a unit of a national chain such as Sears or J.C. Penney. Many
regional malls have experienced a decline paralleling that of the urban core decades earlier.
A number of these sprawling complexes have been demolished for other configurations of
retail outlets or other functions altogether. Some have enjoyed continued success by greatly
enlarging their plants or spawning complementary development nearby. At the same time,
an array of competing shopping centre forms have emerged, most notably those housing
outlet stores and others warehouse-type facilities for electronics, clothing, general merchan-
dise, home supplies, and the like. Discount stores, led by Walmart, have diversified to the
point where they supply many people with most of the goods they need. At the other end
of the spectrum, developers adopting New Urbanist design principles have created shop-
ping and entertainment complexes that evoke a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century
town centre. Following the New Urbanist precept of developing communities that are
primarily oriented to pedestrians, with buildings oriented to the street and arranged in a
density common to many communities prior to use of the automobile, a number of new
retail centres have been designed as latter-day Main Streets, with a central artery (pedestrian
and vehicular) lined by buildings that appear to have been constructed as different projects
over time. Most such developments, however, are not integral parts of a tightly knit commu-
nity, but rather are stand-alone centres surrounded by extensive parking areas. Irrespective
of their complexion, retail centres have been even more affected by the rise in online and
catalogue purchases. Online and catalogue purchases have begun to cut significantly into
sales by many forms of retail outlets.

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 Richard Longstreth

Yet strands of continuity can be found amid a sea of change. Without significant physical
alterations, some downtown retail districts, including those in New York, Chicago, Seattle
and San Francisco, remain magnets of trade. Many neighbourhood retail centres survive in
sound condition or have been successfully revived. The Main Street commercial corridors
of towns nationwide have enjoyed a spirited comeback, sometimes serving their longstand-
ing role as centres of community and in other cases assuming a niche role for outsiders.
Specialty emporia of varied kinds – from hardware stores to ones purveying top-of-the-line
apparel – remain in demand, as does the corner convenience store. If more people prefer to
shop without leaving their homes than ever before, many others enjoy the opportunity to
peruse goods firsthand and to enjoy the visual and even social stimulus of the marketplace.
The multi-faceted physical world of retailing remains an integral part of life in American
communities.

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 5
THE FUTURE OF RETAILING*
From physical to digital
Fiona Ellis-Chadwick

Introduction
In 1995, few retailers considered the Internet sufficiently important to the future of their busi-
nesses to even register a domain name. Between 2000 and 2005, some traditional high street
retail businesses were encouraged to experiment with the Internet as a retail channel to market
(Doherty & Ellis-Chadwick, 2010). In contrast, by the end of this 5-year period, Amazon, the
US online retailer, had not only established that it could operate its business on a large scale,
delivering books across the US and entering European markets with country specific domains
(e.g. www.amazon.co.uk), but had also developed an innovative and tax efficient business model
that provided a solid foundation for future growth. Meanwhile, the rate of adoption by tradi-
tional physical high street retailers continued slowly, with few offering consumers the opportu-
nity to spend online. This lack of progress left the door wide open for online retailers to hone
their skills, build extensive online trading platforms and find ways to entice new customers to
spend online. History may prove this period of experimentation to be pivotal to the future
development of our towns and cities because what happened in the next few years changed how
we shop, when we buy and importantly who we buy from. Early predictions of the Internet
closing the High Street may yet become a reality as more trade moves online and the number
of physical retail outlets continues to decline. More optimistically, the resilience of many retail
businesses and the desire of humans to congregate and share their experiences in physical places
may prevail and lead to a post-digital era of retailing that benefits from the advantages of the
integration of digital and physical.
This chapter takes us on a journey through the development of online retailing from the
first commercial sales via the Internet, through the growth of online shopping from consumer
and retailers perspectives, to the future implications for high streets in towns and cities around
the world.

Building a road to the future: the information superhighway

The Internet emerged from the interweaving of computer and telecommunication technolo-
gies and in less than four decades has been transformed from an obscure piece of technology of
interest to defence scientists and a few academics into a communications and trading network

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used by businesses and consumers around the globe. However, it is important to note that the
Internet was not designed for commerce. Its military origins demanded that it be robust enough
to withstand nuclear attack, which meant that it had to be able to operate without central
authority, meaning that computers can be added and removed without disrupting the network’s
performance. Its key strengths were derived from being able to facilitate global communication
(using a multiplicity of interactive communication formats: text, graphic, verbal and audio) and
access to a global reservoir of information.
These qualities attracted the attention of computer users around the world. The digital
medium added new dimensions to the concept of communication (Palmer, 1995) allowing users
to interact on a one-to-one (electronic mail), one-to-many (company Websites) or many-to-
many (Internet Relay Chat) basis. The facilities offered meant there were calls for the Internet
to become more commercial and not just serve academic and research institutes (Coursey, 1992).
With the benefit of hindsight, it is important to reflect on the impact of these fundamental
qualities of Internet technology and emergent business models and to consider the extent to
which these benefits, once unleashed in the commercial arena, have enabled the creation of a
global trading environment that is difficult to govern and control.
In 1989, the Internet was commercially liberated (Zakon, 1994) and trading online took on
a new dimension, encouraging many newcomers to get connected, especially business users
eager to exploit this new communication medium. In 1991, Berners-Lee et al. (1994) and his
colleagues at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory) developed the World Wide Web
(WWW) based on hypertext to simplify and extend access to networked computing around
the globe (Nelson, 1991). The WWW was predicted to become the predominant method of
accessing the Internet (Krol, 1994) and part of its success is attributed to the graphical browsers
that gave WWW users easier access to audio, graphic, video and text documents on computers
around the world. For retailing, the graphical user interface of the World Wide Web made it
easier for everyone with a computer to get online.Whilst there were still technical requirements
involved, once connected users could search for content, join online service provider platforms
and begin to engage with a whole new range of online activities.
CompuServe, was the first major commercial online service provider in the USA, pre-dat-
ing the WWW; it offered a gateway to get online and provided chat, forums gaming, and other
consumer facing services (Wikipedia, 2018). In the UK, CompuServe led the way for major
retail brands to get online, including W.H. Smiths (selling books and CDs), Tesco (flowers and
wine),Virgin (music videos and computer games). Great Universal Stores started selling sports-
wear ranges and had a great advantage over other retailers as they had a sophisticated and well-
established delivery network through its catalogue home shopping business (Cope, 1995).
In 1993, Bob McCool and Marc Andreessen, wrote the client application Mosaic (the first
Web browser), which made the WWW accessible to a range of new users by removing the
need for the technical expertise previously required (McGarty & Haywood, 1995; Verity,
1995). The capabilities of Web browsers improved and Mosaic was superseded by the new
Netscape browser, which was distributed at no charge to Internet users around the globe at a
time when it was relatively unknown for a company to give away its main product. However,
whilst Mosaic, Netscape and others have long since been superseded by Google Chrome, the
radical new business model of giving product freely arguably paved the way for emerging digital
brands to exploit the future potential of digital markets.
The web, web browsers and search engines (all made freely available to anyone with a dial
up Internet connection) were fundamental to the growth of online retailing and shopping. By
1995, the information superhighway was starting to attract global attention from businesses and
shoppers alike and, as demand grew and the numbers of Internet users expanded exponentially

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year-on-year (Ovum Reports, 1996), so too did the number of commercial websites offering a
range of information-based and interactive services (Pyle, 1996).
More serious attempts to trade online began to emerge towards the end of the 1990s
when innovative, technically savvy companies responded to the opportunities and challenges
posed by the Internet to develop sophisticated websites to serve customers in their homes.
Many multiple retailers developed their own independent websites, selling goods ranging
from books and computers to the full range of groceries. Often these sites were grouped
together to form electronic malls. Barclay Square was a UK example, which made the claim
to be ‘a prime site for large multiples, medium sized retail chains and smaller independents
and specialist shops, in fact anyone who wants an upmarket and rapidly growing retail loca-
tion’ (Barclay, 1995). These electronic malls attempted to follow the format of physical malls
by grouping together an assortment of retailers in one virtual location. This strategy was not
particularly successful as real-world advantages to the consumer of single destination shop-
ping were lost in the virtual world (Classe, 1996). Other specialty malls that grouped suppliers
offering goods from a single product class began to emerge, but they too failed to achieve
significant success, as this time it was the retailers that derived little advantage from making
it easy to allow consumers to comparison shop. So, the most successful websites seemed to
be those developed by individual retailers. Blackwell’s Bookshops was the first UK retailer
to announce profitable online trading with their global online bookshop, but this type of
evidence was limited and online retail business performance was generally disappointing
(Economist, 1997; Poon & Swatman, 1999).
Going into the new millennium, new entrants to the online market place were capturing
global attention. Amazon.com, trading exclusively via the Internet with operational support
from a large warehouse in Seattle, offered customers continuous access to a wide assortment of
books and associated products, and speculation increased about the Internet’s ability to rapidly
promote such businesses to a position of dominance in global retail markets by using a virtual
retail space free from restrictions of time and space ( Jones & Biasiotto, 1999).
Retailers in the UK perhaps felt less inclined to be concerned about these new entrants as
the cost of access for the average UK consumer adopting the Internet was higher than in the US.
However, about this time, British Telecom introduced new pricing tariffs offering discounts to
customers based on total expenditure across a range of services.This change altered the charging
structure for operators using lo-call numbers, such as 0345. According to the telecommunica-
tions regulatory body OFTEL this change gave service providers the opportunity to develop
longer-term relationships with their customers through the offer of the new tariff low-cost calls
(OFTEL, 1998). Dixons plc seized on this opportunity and began offering free Internet access
to their customers and Dixons Freeserve soon claimed to be the UK’s largest Internet service
provider with over 1.5 million users (Nuttall, 1999). Many other organisations launched similar
offers (e.g. Tesco, Barclays Bank, British Telecom, Games Workshop), providing users with free
email addresses, Web space and a bundle of other free offers. In this way many retailers diluted
their efforts by offering Internet services rather than concentrating on building their capacity
to sell online. Many retailers appeared to be attempting to derive competitive advantage by
creating Web portals whereby the main aim, according to Watson (1998, p. 14) was to ‘get the
suckers under the tent and keep them there’. This perhaps suggests that retailers were attempt-
ing to emulate off-line business models and more traditional strategic thinking to guide their
online activities, developing websites that attempted to keep customers inside their websites in
much the same way as they are encouraged to remain within a physical retail store.This inward-
looking approach gave free reign to online retailers that enjoyed trading in an environment with
very limited competition.

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The increased level of activity online grabbed the interest of academics who started to explore
the likely impacts that this exciting, new digital technology would have on retailing in the future.
For example, Burke (1997) questioned the extent to which the virtual world would change the
principles of retailing and asked whether it would ultimately displace existing retail formats or
serve as a natural complement to current marketing practices. Similarly, Malone et al. (1987)
raised the possibility that manufacturers would target their consumers directly and, in so doing,
simply cut the retailer, as the “middle man”, out of the equation. It was argued that this form
of ‘Pirating the Value Chain’ (Ghosh, 1998, p. 126) might change the balance of power within
electronic channels of retail sectors. Other commentators went beyond raising questions about
the Internet’s likely impact on retailing to make fairly specific predictions. Many commentators
were extremely optimistic about how quickly and enthusiastically the consumer would adopt
this new channel. Pavitt (1997) believed that ‘by the year 2005 it [the Internet] would capture
between 8% and 30% of the UK retail market’, whilst, over a similar time frame, ‘high street
stores face an estimated loss of 20% of their business to electronic shopping’ (Angelides, 1997).
The reality was very different. Fast forward 10 years to the mid-2010s and it is possible to
assess the extent to which the early predictions have proved to be credible. Although the rate
of Internet adoption amongst retailers might not have been as rapid as originally envisaged, as
Pentina et al. (2009) note, the key question for both marketing scholars and practitioners is no
longer whether but when an incumbent retailer should adopt an online channel. The fact that,
with the benefit of hindsight, many of the original predictions have proven to be rather optimis-
tic, has not quenched the enthusiasm of Internet watchers for trying to predict the future trajec-
tory of online shopping. Estimates by the IMRG (Interactive Media Retail Group) indicate that
in 2005 online sales were about £12 billion and the equivalent total retail sales £245 billion
(Figure 5.1), giving online sales figure of just under 5%; by 2020 they predict that online sales
will account for approaching 45% of all retail sales.
By 2005, the information superhighway was firmly established as a new route to market.
Online retailers were freely growing their capacity to serve an ever-expanding online market
place whilst long-established high street brands were on the one hand experimenting with how
they could entice shoppers to use their online services and on the other sitting on their hands
and watching the growth of a phenomenon that projections suggested would put them out of
business by 2020.

Consumers learn to navigate and shop the web

While retailers were wrestling with how to get online, deciding which services to offer and
working out how to get their goods the last mile to the customer, consumers were getting an
education that would empower them as future online shoppers. From the academic perspec-
tive, there has been a disproportionate amount of the research into the uptake and adoption of
retail websites from the customer perspective. This very significant body of research has sought
to understand better the behaviour of potential consumers and in particular the likelihood that
they will purchase from retail websites. The bulk of these studies have applied variants of models
such as the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) or
the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to provide insights into the factors that influence a
consumer’s intention to shop online (Celik & Yilmaz, 2011; Crespo & del Bosque, 2010; Dennis
et al., 2009; Lin, 2008). A wealth of related, customer-oriented studies has now also been con-
ducted that explore the factors that affect a variety of dependent variables other than intention
to shop online. For example, such studies have evaluated how a range of independent variables –
such as website design, convenience, usability, reliability and security and service quality – impact

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 400 400
UK Retail, e-Retail Sales Values & Store Numbers, 2000–2018

£ Billions
Thousands
350 350

300 300

250 250

200 200

150 150

100 100

50 50

0 0
2001 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2002 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Total retail sales £BN Source: ONS e-Retail spend £BN Source: IMRG
Retail stores ‘000s Source: CRR

Figure 5.1 Retail profitability: UK retail and e-retail sales values and store numbers, 2000–2018
 Fiona Ellis-Chadwick

on an variety of dependent variables, such as customer loyalty, customer retention and overall
customer satisfaction (Christodoulides & Michaelidou, 2010; Goode & Harris 2007; Kassim &
Asiah Abdullah, 2010; Zhang et al., 2011). From the customer perspective, researchers have also
focused on identifying those risk factors that are most likely to deter consumers from shopping
online, highlighting issues such as risk of information misuse, distrust of payment systems, need
to see product prior to purchase, and risk of failure to gain product benefits (Glover & Benbasat,
2010; Iglesias-Pradas et al., 2013).
Despite the potential barriers, consumer demand for online shopping has been a key factor in
driving widespread adoption of the Internet by retailers. Partly due to online retailing offering
an experience that is totally different from fixed location retailing (Westland & Au, 1997) shop-
pers can buy where and when they like because online stores are always open. In the early days,
learning how to find the best bargains was part of the set of skills needed to become a competent
online shopper. Price and comparison shopping across a number of sites made it easier and more
convenient to locate the best deals. Indeed, early experience in the US has shown that more and
more consumers used the web for research in the early stages of the buying decision-making
process. Rather than buying direct on the web, many subsequently purchased the product in
store or by ordering via telephone or fax (Ernst & Young, 1999). Developing this skill set has
continued to empower consumers and now the majority of pre-purchase information searching
is done online. Typically, 80% of online shoppers will google (i.e. use a search engine) to find the
products they want to buy, then over half will then read online reviews (product and levels of
service) before making their buying decision.
Specific events in the digital shopping calendar leverage advantage by understanding the
online shopper’s desire to find a bargain. Black Friday, introduced to the UK by Amazon in
2010, grabbed the attention of online shoppers and since then has grown into an event which
kick-starts the online Christmas shopping bonanza. This promotional event – the origins of
which are attributed to the Philadelphia Police Department in the 1950s, which gave this name
to the day after Thanksgiving due to the mayhem that happened as shoppers flocked to the
high street sales – is closely followed by another online event: Cyber Monday. These two online
promotional events challenge the volume of sales in the physical high street and have begun to
affect performance in the highly valuable fourth quarter of the year, which many retailers rely
on to secure their positive returns for the whole of the trading year.
During the last two decades, as consumers have been learning how to shop online, their
skills have become more sophisticated and as a result their decision-making more complex.
This changing consumer behaviour has not gone unnoticed by savvy online retailers, which are
becoming increasingly creative with how they use digital media as a continuous communica-
tion channel, tapping into every potential purchasing opportunity. In the UK, Germany, the
Netherlands, the US and many other countries, a high proportion of customers use multiple
channels when making purchase decisions, quite often combining online research with physical
store visits (Hart et al., 2017). Research found that, on a typical visit to a town centre, consumers
can refer to multiple digital touchpoints before and during their shopping journeys (Hart et al.,
2017; Stocchi et al., 2016). Many shoppers are able to encounter multiple digital touchpoints
on their journey to making a purchase decision; their path to purchase can mean that they not
only encounter all of the traditional (pre-Internet) purchasing cues and search online, but are
also able to assimilate a range of new digitally enhanced cues during their shopping journeys
(Fulgoni, 2014).
Before we leave the consumers and their learning journey it is important to recognise that
not all consumers are the same. We can group variables into two distinct sub-categories: classifi-
cation variables and character variables. Classification variables are those personal attributes that

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tend to remain static throughout an individual’s lifetime or evolve slowly over time – e.g., age,
education, socio-economic groupings. These variables are particularly useful for retailers as they
can help to identify particular consumers and target groups. Character variables are less straight-
forward to understand and identify for marketing purposes as they comprise any attributes of
a consumer’s perceptions, beliefs and attitudes, which might influence online behaviour – e.g.
innovativeness, enjoyment, skills and experience and emotions. Character variables are also more
likely to develop, change and be significantly modified over time by online shopping experi-
ences. For example, if a consumer has negative beliefs about, say, privacy and security of online
transactions, perhaps due to lack of computer skills, these beliefs are likely to shape negative
attitudes towards the Internet and reduce the intention to shop online. Conversely, if a consumer
believes the Internet is easy to use, they are more likely to have a positive attitude towards the
idea of online shopping and ultimately have an increased intention to shop online. Each stance
may be continually reinforced by positive or negative feedback from online shopping experi-
ences (Doherty & Ellis-Chadwick, 2010).
Ultimately, those retail businesses that have ignored or failed to understand how con-
sumers make use of digital channels are at best playing catch up or at worst have gone out
of business (Doherty & Ellis-Chadwick, 2009). A very good example of how developing
an understanding of consumer needs and wants can boost online performance comes from
ASOS. ASOS identified the value of social media and used it to create competitive advan-
tage by pioneering online social shopping, where customers use online social network sites
to share product ideas before they buy. ASOS used social media to build a community of
“fashionistas” who are prepared to share their views and opinions on what to wear via Face-
book, Twitter and Google plus, giving its young shoppers fashion inspiration. With a target
audience of over 12 million followers on social media sites, the company has made significant
inroads to developing its own community of fashion buyers. ASOS learned how to deploy
digital technology in response to online consumer behaviour and used this knowledge to
build an online brand that is one of the most successful online fashion retailers the UK. ASOS
offers tens of thousands of branded and own-label fashion items to millions of 20-something
men and women around the globe; in 2017 its market valuation was greater than Marks &
Spencer, the UK’s largest seller of clothing. Nick Robertson and Quinten Griffiths created
their business idea while watching the US television series Friends. They decided to create a
web retail business that would sell items seen by television viewers, hence the name As Seen
on Screen (ASOS). They started selling clothing worn by celebrities, but soon the company
began developing its own brand. This focus enabled the company to start to build a reputation
that was attractive to young fashion buyers. By developing a unique position in the market,
which was particularly attractive to generation web (the millennials – eighteen to thirty some-
things), and by deploying superior technical capabilities, the brand has grown significantly in
the UK and internationally.
During the last 25 years, shoppers have developed new skills that have enabled them to buy
in complex trading environments. Whilst there are different shopper profiles and motivations to
shop (or not) online, the global spend online is growing and the retailers that are succeeding are
those which have spent time developing digital resources and capabilities.

Retailers take tentative steps onto the digital high street

As the story of online retailing unfolds it is becoming more and more apparent that this mode of
purchasing is set to continue to grow: consumers are becoming highly adept at shopping online
and some retailers very accomplished at meeting and driving consumer demand online.The key

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questions to consider, therefore, are which retailers are succeeding and what might this mean for
the future shape and function of our towns and cities?
Arguably, there have be some significant opportunities missed during that last three decades,
which may well have altered the balance of power between off line and online retail brands.
Earlier in the chapter, it was suggested that, if retailers missed the opportunity to go online at the
first feasible opportunity, then they were likely to go out of business. We can now delve a little
deeper into the extent to which being an early adopter of e-commerce increases the likelihood
of a physical retailer still being in business in the future and also whether being an early adopter
of e-commerce puts a retailer in an advantageous position when it comes to deploying wider
range e-commerce functionalities.
Over the last 25 years, the number of high street retail brands in the UK has fallen steadily.
Much of this reduction can be explained simply in terms of retailers going out of business, but
there has also been some evidence of merger and take-over activity over this period. In terms
of their broad levels of Internet activity, the number of retailers that have either done nothing
or no more than simply register a domain name has fallen sharply, with the majority of major
brands owning their own domains. A longitudinal study by Ellis-Chadwick and Doherty (2018),
looking at the uptake of online retailing by leading brands in the UK revealed that the number
of retailers actively using the Internet as a sales medium had risen dramatically from just 3% in
1997 to 62% by 2013 (Figure 5.2).This shift in levels of adoption of the Internet as a channel to
market has potentially had a profound effect on the growth of online shopping. In 1997, there
was a very limited choice of products for an online shopper and limited competition around
pricing and service; in other words, the digital retail landscape was quite desolate. However, most
well-known high street brands have now developed sophisticated online stores and in doing so
significantly increased the opportunity to shop via the Internet. According to Ellis-Chadwick
and Doherty (2018), 2013 appears to have been a tipping point in the UK at least: after this year,
it became important for retailers to develop a digital presence.
The ‘live, but no sales’ is an interesting category, as it represents those retailers that had
invested in a customer-facing website to provide some combination of product and promotional
information and/or direct communication, but had decided not to offer their customers the
opportunity to purchase goods and services online. In all three samples this category is promi-
nent and formed the largest single category in 2005, accounting for 27% of the sample.This was
just the point in time when Amazon, ASOS and other online retailers were really beginning to
grow their online operations and target markets. It is useful, therefore, to dig below the surface
and explore the specific types of functionalities that retailers have been offering through their
websites and compare these with the provision of online sales. As seen in Figure 5.3, the provi-
sion of product information was by far the most commonly adopted piece of functionality to
be adopted by retailers on their websites across all three dates, followed fairly closely by the
provision of email facilities to allow customers to communicate directly with staff members. It
is interesting to note that, whilst the numbers of retailers providing promotional information
relating to money offs, discounts, bonus buys, sales etc., rose from 1997 to 2005, it then dropped
noticeably by 2013. The most obvious explanation for this is that, because many retailers were
by then attempting to target their customers with tailored promotional information, via email
or other forms of social media (Ellis-Chadwick & Doherty, 2012), there was less need to post
promotional information online. Whilst the facility to order goods and services started from
the lowest base, it grew steadily and it now threatens to catch up with the provision of product
information in the years to come.
That said, retailers just starting to sell online in 2006 onwards were playing catch up not only
with their peers, but also with the online-only retailers. Further analysis revealed that in 1997

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No Internet activity Registered domain Live site, but no sales

Live site, with sales

36
74

225

180

213
763 335
184

135
210
69
1997 2005 2013

Figure 5.2 The changing face of online retailing

500
450
400
Number of Retailers

350
300 Product Information

250 Email communication

200 Promotional communication
150 Online sales
100
50
0
1997 2005 2013

Figure 5.3 The uptake of basic online functionalities

that the vast majority of retailers (763 cases or 69%) had not even registered a domain name, let
alone started to develop an active website. Secondly, there was a highly significant association
between retail category and the level of Internet activity experienced by the retailers operat-
ing in that category. Table 5.1 shows where the actual number of cases in a specific cell (bold
number) in the contingency table differs markedly from the number that would be expected
(in parentheses) if there had been a uniform uptake across all categories. More specifically, it
can be seen that, in 1997, there was a higher than expected chance of a retailer operating in the
mail order, home furnishing or leisure and entertainment sectors having already developed an
active Internet presence, possibly including sales. In the case of mail order, the reason for this is

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Table 5.1 The Adoption of E-commerce by Retail Category (in 1997)

No Domain Not live Live or Sales Totals

Clothing & Accessories 161 (163.3) 53 (48.2) 21 (23.5) 235

Food & Consumables 54 (64.6) 28 (19.1) 11 (9.3) 93
Health & Beauty 80 (67.4) 11 (19.9) 6 (9.7) 97
Home Furnishings 92 (104.9) 39 (30.9) 20 (15.1) 151
Leisure & Entertainment 102 (112.6) 35 (33.2) 25 (16.2) 162
Mail Order 68 (82.7) 32 (24.4) 19 (11.9) 119
Mixed Offering 80 (75.0) 22 (22.1) 6 (10.8) 108
Specialist Retailers 126 (92.4) 5 (27.3) 2 (13.3) 133
Grand Total 763 225 110 1098

Table 5.2 The Adoption of the Internet by Retail Category (in 2005)

No Domain Not live Live (no sales) Sales Totals

Clothing & Accessories 43 (46.2) 43 (40.4) 43 (46.8) 44 (39.6) 173

Food & Consumables 24 (17.3) 9 (15.2) 24 (17.6) 8 (14.9) 65
Health & Beauty 23 (20.8) 27 (18.2) 21 (21.1) 7 (17.8) 78
Home Furnishings 16 (25.9) 20 (22.7) 39 (26.3) 22 (22.2) 97
Leisure & Entertainment 22 (29.6) 32 (25.7) 21 (29.8) 35 (25.2) 110
Mail Order 21 (28.0) 11 (24.5) 29 (28.4) 44 (24.0) 105
Mixed Offering 18 (19.2) 15 (16.8) 24 (19.5) 15 (16.5) 72
Specialist Retailers 43 (23.2) 27 (20.3) 12 (23.5) 5 (19.9) 87
Grand Total 210 184 213 180 787

the operational advantages of existing logistics systems that could handle both distribution and
return of goods delivered to the end consumer.
By 2005, the number of retailers without a registered domain had reduced very markedly,
whilst the number hosting a live website, either with or without full sales capabilities, had risen
very significantly (Table 5.2). Again, the data suggest that it was retailers operating in the mail
order or leisure & entertainment sectors that were most likely to have developed a full web
presence, whilst specialist retailers and those organisations operating in the health and beauty
sector were least likely to have taken the plunge to sell online. Eight years later, in 2013, the vast
majority of those retailers still in business (62.2%) were by then offering their customers the
opportunity to purchase products directly online, although it was still retailers operating in the
mail order or leisure and entertainment sectors that were most likely to have developed a full
web presence (Table 5.3).
One of the most significant elements of this study was that it allowed analysis of the relation-
ship between the level of online activity in which retailers were engaged at a particular point in
time and their trading status at later times. Unsurprisingly, those retailers that had no discernible
activity in 1997 were the least likely to still be trading in 2005, whilst those organisations that had
developed an active website, with or without sales, were most likely to still be trading in 2005.
Similar trends continued into the following period. There are at least two plausible interpreta-
tions to these patterns. First, it could be that retailers who were already struggling to survive did
not want the distraction of engaging in a completely new strategy. Alternatively, it could be that

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Table 5.3 The Adoption of the Internet by Retail Category (in 2013)

Domain or Live (no sales) Sales Totals

Clothing & Accessories 26 (48.61) 99 (79.83) 125

Food & Consumables 24 (12.59) 10 (20.67) 34
Health & Beauty 30 (20.40) 22 (33.50) 52
Home Furnishings 24 (27.78) 45 (45.62) 69
Leisure & Entertainment 15 (27.34) 55 (44.90) 70
Mail Order 20 (32.12) 60 (52.74) 80
Mixed Offering 18 (16.49) 27 (27.09) 45
Specialist Retailers 47 (18.66) 17 (30.65) 64
Grand Total 204 335 539

those organisations that were active and early adopters of the Internet either got some direct
benefits that helped them survive or saw Internet use as a catalyst for rethinking their strategy,
which indirectly helped them survive (Bordonaba-Juste et al., 2012; Lee & Grewal, 2004).

The future of the high street

In 1994, shoppers took the first tentative steps to buy online; since then tens of thousands of
physical shops have disappeared from retail centres across the UK and other parts of the world.
In response, towns and city planners have worked hard to reconfigure places in order to provide
the kind of experiences that shoppers want. But where is all this heading? Will in-store and con-
sumer technology transform retailing forever? Will voice-enabled assistants execute our every
wish, with absolute precision removing the need for physical shops altogether? Or will retailers
take a turn back in history, going for the total physical experience with high levels of customer
service and quality products, enabling them to head the vanguard into the future? Realistically,
predictions of the future can be exaggerations of past events, extrapolated into a distance point
in time or little more than “finger in the air” musings of an idealist vision of the world we
might inhabit. What will happen is probably somewhere in between. This chapter has looked at
the growth and impact of online retailing from different perspectives, including consumers and
retailers, and sought to address some of the key questions of the digital age.
Is the physical high street about to disappear? This is unlikely. However, retailing is going
through significant change, and the places that thrive in the future are going to be those that
have attracted and retained the most digitally capable retail brands, which in turn have devel-
oped the capacity to trade through multiple channels. Fulgoni (2014) identified priorities for
retail businesses wanting to trade online: eliminate silos and create seamless experiences for
consumers all the way along the path to purchase; increase opportunities to digitally interact;
analyse and measure consumer behaviour at all touchpoints in order to develop deep and
insightful understanding in what is driving shoppers’ choices and purchase decisions. But these
are priorities that may require significant changes to the way a business operates and, in some
cases, it is too late to make the necessary changes to be able to compete effectively with those
businesses that have spent the last 20 years learning how to operate online. Research suggests
that, in the next 5 years, the retailers that survive are going to be those that have developed
digital capabilities and resources, that understand their customers in much greater detail than in
the past, and are able to provide products and services that are highly differentiated.

77
 Fiona Ellis-Chadwick

Note
* This chapter is dedicated to Professor Neil F. Doherty.

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 6
BARGAIN HUNT? SELLING
SECOND-HAND, c.1600
TO THE PRESENT
Sara Pennell

Introduction
Let us start with an object: a desk bookcase, a rather flamboyant example of japanned style deco-
ration, on a pine carcase dated to around 1700–1720, which is on display in the so-called pre-
Revolutionary room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). It is a good place to start
this chapter, because by sheer dint of their longevity, most museum objects have a pre-history
of not being museum objects, and so are inevitably ‘used’ goods, travelling through conduits of
retailing, gifting and exchange in which the not-brand-new predominate. Indeed, in its prior
life, well before it became museum artefact, the desk bookcase was explicitly sold as a piece of
second-hand furniture, by one of the modes of retail that looms large in these second-hand
circuits. The bookcase was put up for sale by auction (or vendue, as they were called in colonial
America), with other household “sundry” goods sometime in the spring of 1754 as a conse-
quence of its owner’s alleged suicide in October 1753 (Westerfield, 1920; Gottesman, 1938;
Hartigan O’Connor, 2011: 156–159). Sir Danvers Osborne (1715–53) had, but days before he
was found strangled, possibly by his own hand and certainly by his own handkerchief, been
invested with the powers of governor, with a remit to clear up a city administration riven with
corruption. But this is not a chapter about colonial dark deeds: it is the bookcase which had an
after-life (much more so than Osborne), being sold onto Osborne’s successor (and, in the minds
of some, his nemesis), Lieutenant Governor James De Lancey at the vendue. For the subsequent
180-odd years, the desk bookcase remained the possession of the De Lancey-Verplanck family,
who finally donated it to the museum in 1939 (details from Metropolitan Museum of Art online
catalogue) (Figure 6.1).
Even before Osborne shipped the desk bookcase to New York, it is quite possible that it was
already what would pass in modern parlance as “pre-loved”. Given its Augustan style and the
fact that Osborne was only born in 1715, it is likely to have either been a piece he inherited
from his own family, or that Osborne had himself purchased at one of the many household
auctions already running in London and advertised in the daily and weekly press or from one
of the many retailer-makers, operating as upholders, cabinet makers, sworn appraisers and/
or undertakers; or from an upholsterer like Mr Rickett, whose late eighteenth-century trade
card depicts some of the “modern” styles of furniture he dealt in new and second-hand as an
‘upholder, cabinetmaker, sworn appraiser and undertaker’ (Rickett, u.d.). Today, if ever made

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Figure 6.1 Osborne desk bookcase, c.1700–1720
Source: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
 Sara Pennell

available on the open market, the bookcase desk would be classed as an “antique”, subject to a
specific sort of marketing and trade which itself was unknown for furniture in the eighteenth
century, but which is now inhabited by exclusive dealers and fine art auctioneers who can claim
direct ancestry with the early Georgian brokers and jacks-of-all-trade gavel-wielders, one of
whom might have sold Osborne his bookcase.
In this chapter, the focus will be on the evolution of some of these modes of selling second-
hand that Osborne’s desk bookcase might have been subject to, and the conditions which
created and sustained the markets for such retailing across four centuries, from part-exchange
to specialised dealing to auctioneering. As a historian of material culture across the long eight-
eenth century, I dwell a little longer on developments from between c.1660–1850, but not
only because of that: this is the period upon which much extant scholarship also focuses. By
starting with an object which now resides in a museum, I want to unpick the enduring but
unwarranted connection between second-hand retailing and those “economies of makeshifts”
characteristic of the least well-off and supposedly least market-integrated in societies. For much
of the four centuries surveyed here, selling second-hand did not mark one out as a Fagin but
rather more as the self-confident provincial auctioneer in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2),
Borthrop Trumbull; or one of the many dealers and salesmen with capital enough to produce a
trade card or advertise in the metropolitan or provincial press. The goods sold by these retailers
were not by default shabby or outmoded, either: they could as easily be “elegant”, “as new” and
“ingenious” goods bookcases to barouches, laundry coppers to Trumbull’s ‘very recherchy . . .
trifles’ (Eliot, 1992: 653).

Selling second-hand: historiographies

That markets for second-hand goods existed historically is much acknowledged, but inexplica-
bly understudied. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the enduring appeal of the used has been especially
overshadowed within historiographies of consumer, production and commercial revolution of
the last five or so centuries, by the lustre of the new. It is the novel, not the pre-loved and
familiar, which catches the scholarly light, even though it is abundantly clear that the condi-
tions for mass production and marketing of many such new objects did not exist until the later
eighteenth, indeed the nineteenth century (Van Damme and Vermoesen, 2009: 275). Osborne’s
desk is a (book)case in point: in the English American colonies domestic manufacturing was
minimal and discouraged for a good part of the eighteenth century, so as not to jeopardise
the market opportunities offered up by trans-Atlantic trade, ‘the principal Cornucopia of Great
Britain’s wealth’, as one mid-eighteenth-century trade commentator gushed (cited Breen, 2004:
86). Even if tastes for such goods were stimulated across a wide social spectrum, whether by the
capricious rotations of a fashion cycle, or the siren call of emulation or the wish for comfort,
second-hand retailing was essential to satisfying such tastes, in the absence of an unlimited sup-
ply of newly manufactured goods.
Ignoring just how ubiquitous second-hand circulation was has also meant that more modern
adherence to practices of material waste and inbuilt obsolescence has leached into our expecta-
tions of what happened to goods and possessions, once their initial lustre had worn off. This is
particularly problematic for the period before 1800, since, as Laurence Fontaine has argued, ‘the
values extolling the new and the need for replacement to keep pace with fashion were late to
gain precedence over those of conservation and tradition’ (Fontaine, 2008a: 2). Material steward-
ship and an abhorrence of waste loomed large in pre-modern societies, and we cannot simply
look at pre-modern consumption choices through late twentieth and early twenty-first century
lenses. Consuming in the pre-capitalist economy demanded (for all but those at the apex of

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societies) moderation and decorum, and the promotion of thrift and good housewifery, rather
than an out-and-out thirst for the new (McCants, 1995: 194).
What then explains the tendency to bracket second-hand retailing as part of the “informal
economy” of any given society, to see it as a marginal rather than central economic practice, a
function of need rather than of desire? Some forms of second-hand circulation, such as pre-
and post-mortem bequests, gifting and barter-exchange, undoubtedly complicate and blur the
boundaries of a neoclassical economic understanding of the “market”, but that market itself has
a dubious historical pedigree. Perhaps more significant has been the scholarly attention paid to
clothing and other textiles as circulating material through the licit and illicit conduits used to
keep poor households afloat and mouths fed. Areas like Rosemary and Petticoat Lanes in late
seventeenth-century London and the markets of Temple and Notre Dame in pre- and post-
Revolutionary Paris, where no questions would be asked of clothing and linens bought and
offered for resale, and the “brokers” who fenced and found buyers for stolen petticoats, waist-
coats and greatcoats, have dominated accounts of second-hand dealing in certain regions (e.g.
Lemire, 1991; Roche, 1997; Charpy, 2008; Barahona and Sánchez, 2012).
This is, of course, too extreme. As Ilja Van Damme has argued, to see second-hand retailing
as a matter of binary and opposing markets, articulating ‘a rigid dichotomy between antique
collecting for the rich and economic necessity for the poor’, is to overlook much, not least
‘the complex consumer motivations of the middling sorts, and the continuous distribution of
second-hand goods, that were neither “bad” nor “luxurious”’ (Van Damme, 2010: 86). Selling
second-hand produced particular forms of retailer, retail spaces and processes, that were neither
“informal”, if we take that word to mean without regulation or some notion of professional
identity, nor marginal to the local or regional economies in which they operated (Deceulaer,
2008). From sixteenth-century “criers” and “uitropers” whose business it was to “cry” or adver-
tise the sales of used goods, to the auctioneers, vendue-masters, brokers and general and spe-
cialist dealers whose names are scattered across the pages of eighteenth- to twentieth-century
European and American newsprint, trade cards and occupational directories, there were distinct
and, at times, highly profitable careers to be had in selling second-hand, just as the environs in
which second-hand retailing occurred could be fashionable and exclusive – more Pall Mall than
Petticoat Lane.
Osborne’s desk bookcase also demonstrates that used goods are not always marginal in a
second sense: they do not have to be broken, damaged or worn, but could be “as new”. Even
out with the specialist markets for used books, artworks and specific types of antiquities such as
coins, medals and sculpture which began to develop across Europe in the seventeenth century,
the appetite for “neat” used furniture and soft furnishings as well as for coaches, stock-in-trade
and tools in good working condition or of “as new” appearance and feel was met by retailers
and circuits that dealt mostly if not exclusively in hardly worn or well-maintained and cared-for
goods. These supply chains were, in turn, not just fed by picking over the estates of the needy
bankrupt or destitute deceased. Goods flowed into these circuits as fashions shifted and people
moved, married or “left off trade”. Indeed, the costs and logistics of carrying bulky goods over
even short distances fed directly into the disposal of household goods as a preliminary to mov-
ing house. That is why in 1834 Thomas and Jane Carlyle, having decided to move to London to
further Thomas’s career as an essayist, planned to rent out their Scottish house and ‘to sell off all
the furniture but what will equip a very modest house in the Suburbs of London’ (Carlyle Letters
Online, lt-18340225-TC-JAC-01).
Even when sales of goods were necessary because of indebtedness or hard times, those
implicated were as likely to be Spanish monarchs, as they were impoverished madrileños: the
need for hard cash could strike the wealthy no less than the indigent. The fact that goods

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in the second-hand goods sales in Antwerp and its surroundings studied by Ilja Van Damme
sold for prices ranging from fewer than 50 to more than 1,000 guilders, suggests that not
only was there a very socio-economically diverse clientele eager to buy such goods, but that
such goods came from no less diverse sources (Alvarez, 2007; Van Damme, 2009: 111). Buy-
ers of second-hand goods were indeed socially diverse and discerning, with their purchases
intended not just for servants’ garrets or impoverished hovels, but for furnishing key rooms in
gentry and aristocratic households. Jean Scott Hay (1629–88), countess of Tweeddale’s letter,
sent from their Scottish seat, Yester Castle to her husband, John Hay (1626–97), the second
earl, in London in the 1670s, about sourcing ‘a damask bed & if you could get a second-hand
one were not soiled and fashionable, you might buy it if it be either a blew or crimson’, tells
us two things: that such textiles were widely available second-hand in later Stuart London;
and that members of the aristocracy had no qualms about buying via this route (Tweeddale
Papers, [1674]: fol. 84r). As Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery have shown in recent work on
the processes of furnishing, re-arranging and dismantling the country house interior, pro-
viding access to select, well-chosen second-hand items for such clientele and also disposing
of such goods for them or their descendants, was the remit of highly respectable business-
men, working as upholsterers, furniture dealers and society auctioneers, in the mould of
James Christie (1730–1803) and precursors to the superstar fin-de-siècle antique dealers-cum-
interior designers, like the Duveens of London, Georges Hoentschel at Maison Leys in Paris
and the Syphers in New York, serving clients trans-continentally and transatlantically (Sypher,
1992; Herrmann, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Kisluk-Grosheide, Krohn, and Leben, 2013; Stobart
and Rothery, 2016).
The concentration in much of the extant literature on second-hand circulation on clothing,
and to a lesser extent, household textiles more generally, may also have skewed approaches to
other goods and materials in the second-hand sphere.The development of specific forms of sec-
ond-hand trading in horses, books and manuscripts, and fine art and antiquities gleaned from the
Grand Tour, already suggests that we need to be careful in seeing in the modes and mechanisms
for selling textiles and clothing second-hand a universal model of second-hand retailing more
generally. As the anthropologists Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe note ‘we need to ask in
which conditions particular goods might be acquired through the second-hand market, where,
how, by whom and for whom’ (Gregson and Crewe, 2003: 6). Shifts in fashion and aesthetics, as
well as the adaptability of the materials – textiles, especially linens, were not only reusable but
recyclable as rags to the paper trade – may have made textiles recirculation faster, with quicker
rewards for participants, and without much (or indeed any) capital outlay. After all, clothes and
household linens needed but chests to store them, while furniture took up valuable floor space,
and coaches yards or stabling.
The specialised conduits for those goods in which producer/production quality, provenance
and antiquity or patina were emerging as connoisseurial virtues in the eyes of potential buy-
ers, also had features which were by no means common to all forms of second-hand retail. The
second-hand selling of books and fine art emerged in key European centres in the late seven-
teenth century, notably Amsterdam, the Hague and London, with specific formats for selling
(the bidding auction rather than the fixed-price sale), and networks for circulation, focused on
gentry and elite male-dominated groups, specialist dealers and auctioneers, and the emergence
of self-generated value systems for the commodities involved, that depended in part on building
and sustaining an informed community of connoisseurs for circulation (Harris, Mandelbrote,
and Myers, 2001; di Marchi, 2004; Cowan, 2006).
Finally, we need to think about the geographies covered by extant research, since many schol-
ars have fixed their gazes on continental second-hand trading, rather than extra-European or

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even global circuits, with sixteenth-century Italian cities, the Low Countries in the seventeenth-
and eighteenth centuries and early modern Paris and its environs attracting important studies.
The most recent collection of essays on the subject cast its net wider, to include studies of Scan-
dinavia, the colonial South African Cape and imperial British India (Stobart and Van Damme,
2010b; see also Finn, 2010).We nonetheless still lack studies which attempt comparative analyses
of how different types of second-hand circuit endured and thrived in some regions but not
others; and which explore the legacies of second-hand selling across north America, Africa and
the Indian sub-continent (especially given the centrality of second-hand trading and materials
recycling in these latter regions today). The roots of the now-global second-hand trade – where
decommissioned British railway carriages find a new lease of life on Indian tracks, to use a
perhaps extreme example – is just no less a significant part of that tentacular, cross-continental
material flow of costly silks, ceramics and comestibles that historians have become increasingly
enamoured of tracing in the past decade.

Conduits and occupations in used goods retailing

Peruse any domestic account book from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and you
would be wrong to assume that all the goods listed as purchases were new-made. Alongside
new items and expenditures on maintenance of existing items – retinning pots, replumping
mattresses and mending shoes – there are almost always second-hand purchases. Sometimes
these latter entries might hint at the seller (a neighbour, a broker, a shopkeeper) or the locus of
purchase (a sale, a shop, the local fair), but, as Fontaine has bewailed, the widespread invisibility of
second-hand exchange (for much of early modern Europe at least), where the exchange could
be barter, part-exchange or a form of gifting, makes quantifying and qualifying the types and
locations of, and values assigned to such exchange like connecting a particularly random, widely
scattered set of dots (Fontaine, 2008a: 11). Thanks to particular archival survivals, in this section
some of these dots will be brought into sharper focus.

Guilds and state operations

Some of this survival is down to the ways in which the form of corporate governance and nature
of economic controls meant that the conduits for second-hand retail were formal components
of highly regulated commodity markets. Specialised trade guilds to oversee and control retail
practices in a wide range of used goods operated in Italian city-states like Venice and Flor-
ence; across early modern Spain, in cities like Barcelona and Madrid, Low Countries’ villages
(for example Erdemobogen, in modern Belgium) and mercantile entrepots (Antwerp; Bruges).
These corporate organisations and the spaces in which they operated, were either government-
run or held state/crown monopolies: Stockholm’s city Auction House was established in 1674
and its monopoly confirmed by the crown in 1772 (Lilja, Murhem, and Ulvaeng, 2009). In
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, the royal court itself was both organiser of and sub-
ject to auction sales of their collections, to enable the extensive post mortem testaments of dead
monarchs to be carried out (Alvarez, 2007).
The useful archival paper trails left by these institutions enable historians to map the eco-
nomic value of second-hand trading in such markets, as well as the variety of goods traded in this
way, the customer bases involved, and the shape of and challenges to such trade over time. They
record the apprenticing and training of officers with expertise in appraising, crying and direct-
ing sales developed cadres of specialists, and with political and economic influence to boot; the
leading members of Antwerp’s Oudekleerkopers [literally, “old clothing buyers”], controlled the

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city’s Friday Market, with its zones for different types of second-hand good, and also leased the
majority of real estate around it (Van Damme, 2009). There are also records of the policing and
licensing activities that empowered these bodies to manage the quality of goods being sold by
their members and proscribe or limit the sale of such goods by non-members, as well as control
the profile of their membership.
By contrast, England’s archives afford very little evidence of either regulation or geographi-
cal zoning of particular types of second-hand trading beyond the City of London, and beyond
the fifteenth century, until the passing of the 1777 Auction Duty Act (Ohashi, 2007; Staples,
2015: 298). Although second-hand clothing and other textiles were traded by “fripperers” in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the City of London appointed an “outroper” or
official crier, to “cry” sales of goods, there is however little other evidence until the late sev-
enteenth century of how such sales were run, whether they involved new or used (or both)
commodities, and what sort of goods were sold via them (although we know wine and shipping
was being sold by auction in the fifteenth century). The Upholders’ Company, the notional
occupational “home” of upholsterers, was in decline by the end of the seventeenth century,
with only a modest bureaucratic reach: a poor cousin to the Oudekleerkopers or the Venetian arte
degli strazzaruoli (Allerston, 1996: 20; Staples, 2010).

Intermingled commerce
In a striking phrase, Manuel Charpy argues that, in pre-1900 Europe, the second-hand simply
‘melted into all other aspects of economic life’ (Charpy, 2008: 147). In some locales, there were
restrictions on who could sell “new” goods and who could sell second-hand, as in eighteenth-
century Antwerp and Stockholm, and early nineteenth-century America. Elsewhere, however, it
was very common for artisans retailing their own wares and specialist shopkeepers selling more
generally, to hold a small stock of used items alongside new goods (Allerston, 1996: 4).The 1667
inventory of the widow of a Norwich (England) pewterer, Anne Beart, contained a listing of
‘one old copper’ alongside the pewter, iron and other domestic metalwares in the shop stock
valuation, while in early eighteenth-century Oxford, a visit to John Airey, tinsmith’s workshop
would have furnished a ‘second-hand grate’ (Beart, 1667; Airey, 1715). By the eighteenth cen-
tury, this intermingling of old and new was advertised quite clearly on the trade cards of a broad
spectrum of makers and retailers, like the clock- and watchmaker Thomas Denton of Abing-
don (England), advertising exchange of “old for new” alongside the options of buying new or
second-hand on his mid-eighteenth-century trade card (Figure 6.2).
Beart and Airey probably came by their second-hand stock through two routes: buying in
“left-off ” or used goods, or from customers part-exchanging old wares for new. In communities
and markets where specie was in short supply or retained for its own value, and where second-
hand goods could be useful supplementary shop stock, part-exchange was an accustomed form
of retail transaction, and not just for metalwares. Thomas Mort, a sixty-something bachelor,
living in north-west England in the early eighteenth century, recorded his “exchanging” on
many types of good alongside pewter and kitchen metalwares, from shoes with his cobbler to
books with his bookseller (Mort, 1703–25). Although Clive Edwards has suggested (for fur-
niture) that this was to benefit clients, those on both sides of the counter could profit from
this exchange, with artisans gleaning materials and parts to reuse in repairs and to recycle into
new goods (Edwards, 2009: 48; Stobart, 2009, 140–141). When Jane Carlyle wanted to buy a
second-hand sofa for Cheyne Row in 1843, she baulked at the dealer’s original price of £4
10 shillings. By supplying her own cushions and giving him ‘the old green curtains. . . [which]
were become beastly and what was better superfluous’, she managed to reduce the price down

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Figure 6.2 Trade card of Thomas Denton of Abingdon, clockmaker [no date]

Source: Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

to just one pound. Although we do not know the dealer’s reckoning about this exchange, it was
presumably worth his while; Henry Mayhew’s account, in London Labour and the London Poor, of
what second-hand curtains could be turned to by industrious hands suggests that the ‘beastly’
fabric probably became the cover for someone else’s second-hand sofa (Carlyle Letters Online:
t-18430827-JWC-TC-01; Mayhew, 1968: II, 14).

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Specialists: upholders, upholsterers, auctioneers

The specialist second-hand trader, like his maker-retailer counterpart, cannot be tied to just
one stereotype, even though such stereotypes prevailed in literary and visual satires right across
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, across Europe and north America. The anti-semitic
portrait of the second-hand clothes dealer or fence was a well-worn idiom long before Dickens
came to write Oliver Twist in 1837–9, or Mayhew his lengthy section on Jewish clothes dealers
in London Labour and the London Poor. But those who sold clothes “plain” and “rich”, new and
second-hand, were not always marginal characters and certainly not always Jewish. Instead, they
were often sufficiently well-set-up to have an address at which to advertise their services; and
confident enough of their reputations to advertise as “honest” traders (Figure 6.3).
To be an effective middleman in the (legitimate) dealing of used goods, be they clothes or
chests of drawers, substantial expertise – in materials, methods of manufacture, current prices –
was the entrée to the trade. This surely helps explain the frequency (in England at least), with
which retailing artisans such as upholders (who traditionally supplied and sold bedding) and
upholsterers (soft furnishings and upholstered furniture), were often also, or became exclusively,
associated with selling second-hand domestic textiles and furnishings. Such trades were also
often called upon to appraise such items when householders died, because such goods were
amongst the most valuable chattels, after plate and cash. These complementary aspects of the
trade melded together in the career of one John Taylor, who started out as an upholsterer and
“house-broker” in Cow-foot Hill, New York City in 1768, then moved in the same year to
“Newfoundland” in the city, to pursue upholstery, before advertising his expertise and business
acumen as ‘cabinet-maker, upholsterer and auctioneer’ in 1772, adding that his pedigree in this
line of work was substantial:

The buying and selling of all the above recited articles has been his sole study for sev-
enteen years, viz. eight of them under his father, and nine for himself; and farther is at
this juncture a sworn exchange broker and appraisor, of the City of London.
(New York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury, 4 June 1770:
see also Gottesman, 1938: 139–140 )

The link between undertaking, upholstery and appraising, in particular, speaks to a compli-
cated web of supply, from the mourning textiles and hatchments accompanying death, to the
valuation and then, often, buying in, of estate goods: all trapping seen to good effect in the
mid-eighteenth-century trade card of Charles Grange and Son, upholders and appraisers ‘at
the Royal Bed’ in Snow Hill, who confidently offered ‘funerals furnish’d’ (Grange, u.d.). There
was also a small degree of authority vested in (and fees which accrued to) so-called sworn
appraisers, who swore under oath to undertake the inventory and valuation of goods and chattels
at death for the purposes of probate. Licensing increased this sense of distinction: the exclusive
licence granted to vendue-masters in Charleston (South Carolina) and calls for such licensing
in early eighteenth-century Philadelphia suggests that even in these frontier states, auctioneers
were expected to be men of standing (Hart, u.d.: 14). In England, even though the 1777 Auction
Duty Act did not automatically separate out auctioneering as a distinct profession, the licensing
requirement did increasingly serve to distinguish the auctioneer from the general second-hand
trader (Ohashi, 2013: 193).
Although selling by auction is an ancient practice, used throughout the Roman empire for
new commodities, captured war booty and indeed captive people, of all the specialist modes of
selling second-hand, the rise of the auction as a European conduit for selling second-hand from

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Figure 6.3 Thomas Mayhew, “Petticoat Lane”
Source: Courtesy of Wellcome Images.
 Sara Pennell

at least the sixteenth century onwards is perhaps the most notable (Morcillo, 2013). Auctioneer-
ing was not only a specialist type of dealing but also of selling, in which prices were not set but
agreed during the selling process, in concert and competition with other potential buyers. This
distinguished the auction from what (in England) were usually termed “open” or “hand” sales in
which goods were ready-priced, and bargains struck between seller and buyer without compe-
tition. Thus, the London newspaper, the Daily Post of Monday 28 May 1733 contains one sale
notice of the stock-in-trade of a cabinetmaker, ‘the lowest price being fix’d’, followed by several
for household sales explicitly to be conducted ‘by Auction’ (Daily Post, 1733: 2).
Despite the long history of the auction, it is clear that across the seventeenth century it
became a more widely adopted mode of selling, especially in regions like the Low Coun-
tries and (probably influenced by Dutch migrants and by trading connections) England, and,
their respective colonies, especially the Dutch African Cape and the American eastern seaboard
colonies from the Carolinas to New England. While the origins of the high-value end of this
trade – in artworks and antiquarian books – has been the focus of attention by art historians
and economic historians alike, the experience of the auction was by no means limited to the
elites who sought Dutch masters or old Roman coins (Cowan, 2006: 26; Warren and Turpin,
2007). The inhabitants of the villages of Alost/Aalst (north-west of Brussels) and Troutbeck in
the English Lake District, and colonial port towns like Charleston and Kingston ( Jamaica), knew
how to buy at auction, just as well as any genteel habitué of Christie’s Great Rooms on Pall Mall
(Van Damme and Vermoesen, 2009; Pennell, 2010).
Indeed, auctioning goods was a mode of selling that specifically suited non-urban environ-
ments where other retail opportunities might be a day’s horse- or carriage-ride away, since it
needed no fixed premises. As Edward Bird’s 1812 painting, ‘The country auction’ (oil on panel,
1812, private collection, currently on loan to the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gal-
lery, San Marino, CA), suggests, with its auctioneer set up under the shade of a large tree amidst
a throng of keen village bidders, his lots scattered around him, it could be done outside, with
a barrel or furniture lot as a makeshift rostrum, or in the house of the deceased or bankrupt
owner, or wherever the goods to be sold might be. The auctioneer starting out needed no great
capital to launch himself, other than the knowledge of prices and an awareness of the markets
to be served: hence the symbiosis with the upholstery and upholding trades. As R. Campbell,
writing in 1747, noted of sworn appraisers, whom he explicitly associated with dealing in “old
goods”, ‘the trade is learned by experience’ and ‘requires a universal knowledge in the nature of
all household Utensils’ (Campbell, 1747: 175).
It should already be clear that different market conditions and settings made for different
types of auctioneering. As Emma Hart’s research into the colonial American vendue suggests,
the exigencies of trans-Atlantic trading relations and wartime disruptions between the 1760s
and 1820s meant that the auction sale was the primum mobile of much eastern seaboard trade in
both new and second-hand commodities. A Briton or Dutchman attending an American ven-
due might have found much that was familiar, but while auctioneering in London, Amsterdam
and Paris was already a respectable profession by 1800, in pre- and post-Revolutionary Charles-
ton, New York and Philadelphia the vendue was a “sell ’em fast, sell ’em low” phenomenon that
threatened to undermine the colonies’ and the Republic’s precarious economy (Hart, u.d.; Har-
tigan O’Connor, 2011). In rural England and especially Scotland, where the country roup or
household sale was as much a social as it was a selling occasion, such sales mixed disposal of real
with chattel estate, and domestic with agricultural livestock, equipment and harvested crops; it
was only in the later nineteenth century that estate auctioneers specialising in land sales and
some agricultural goods emerged as distinct from chattel auctioneers (Walton, 1984; Pennell,
2010).

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At the margins? Brokers, general dealers, marine stores and

street sellers
If the fast-talking, dapper auctioneer might sit at one (respectable) end of the spectrum of
second-hand retailers, the “general dealer” in a small-shop or street-seller out of doors, occupied
the other, more down-at-heel end. The shabby general dealers – epitomised by Dickens and
by Mayhew in mid-Victorian London, is well-known not just via literary portraits, but also
because of the archival traces they left through their appearances in legal records, as accessories
or defendants in cases of theft and fencing stolen goods, the targets of institutional regulations to
prohibit marginal trading, or in satirical or romanticised genre depictions of street-selling. Look-
ing beyond the exceptional situations in which these second-hand traders found themselves
immortalised in the archives, however, and we see a trade perfectly suited to the socio-economic
ecologies of larger towns and cities, places where hard cash was often in the shortest supply.This
was also not just buying and selling fuelled by textiles and clothing alone, even though they
were often amongst the most frequently “dealt” goods. Using part-exchange, barter and credit,
dealers provided routes by which almost all types of household and personal goods, as well as
tools and stock became fungible currency: old clothes were exchanged for new (or nearly new)
ceramics, broken ceramics for new spoons, and handkerchiefs for gin. In an Old Bailey theft case
from 1742, Robert Delany and George Campbell were indicted for stealing a variety of shoes,
gloves and other clothing, that were alleged to have come into the hands of one of their wives,
‘an earthenware woman’, who took them as exchange for her wares (Old Bailey Online, 1742).
Material circulations such as these are inevitably characterised as shady because they often
took place in the street, on doorsteps or in pubs.Yet we cannot know how many such transactions
took place that were not based on dishonestly procured goods: probably a great many, as T.H.
Breen suggests, oiling the ‘enterprises . . . of marginal although honest men and women’ (Breen,
2004: 104). Street-selling second-hand goods was also a highly organised and complex mode of
retailing. Henry Mayhew’s magisterial account of the varieties of and distinctions between who
sold what second-hand and where on London’s streets, points to it being highly segmented and
specialised – brush-sellers, telescope dealers and old metal men – and also seasonal; sellers might
move between a “shop” premises and the street to maximise selling opportunities as the seasons
and supplies allowed. Mayhew also records the precise commercial grasp many such sellers had
of the products they sold, the people they could sell to, the (slim) profits to be made and when
best to make them (Mayhew, 1968: II 5–47). Recent work on “survival strategies” amongst the
poor have stressed the flexible and fluid use of material goods in this way, as resources to hold
onto, or to lend, pledge or exchange, as and when economic security shaded into precarity. But
surely such transactions and behaviours were only possible because of a pre-existent robust mar-
ket in used goods and materials. To be sure, these traders were themselves often only a few steps
from pauperism, as Joseph Samuel acknowledged, when called on to give evidence in an Old
Bailey case of arson in 1790: ‘[I am] a general dealer, when I can find nothing else’ (Old Bailey
Online, 1790). Nonetheless, this was not marginal but mainstream commercial activity and an
essential cog in the operation of many western economies late into the nineteenth century, and
in developing economies today (Carbonell, 2000; Fontaine, 2014: 14, 16).

Spaces and strategies of second-hand selling

Second-hand retailing is not easily tied down to one type of space: a Charleston vendue house on
the newly built late eighteenth-century Vendue Range, a London street or Venetian square, the
country seat of an English aristocratic family or beneath a tree outside an English cottage – all

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could be sites for second-hand buying and selling, and all are far removed from the stereotypi-
cal dealer’s backstreet shop (Hart, u.d.; Welch, 2005: 194–197; MacArthur and Stobart, 2010:
185–192). Few of these sites could claim clientele in common, but certain types of second-hand
selling – general household auctions in particular – could bring together miscellaneous potential
buyers, from other dealers looking to replenish stock, to those with an eye to what has been
labelled “clever” consuming: buying goods that were ‘nearly fashionable’ at competitive prices
(Stobart, 2006: 235).
A successful second-hand transaction needed the right conditions to happen, and this was
nowhere more true than in the emergence of the auction house as a specific site to cultivate brisk
bidding up of the lots. Successful eighteenth-century London auctioneers like Aaron Lambe (d.
1777) and James Christie moved on (and up) from in situ estate sales to being proprietors of their
own establishments, usually moving westward across London. Although Lambe was the first
auctioneer to set up shop in Pall Mall, Christie’s Great Rooms, established there in 1766–8, fea-
tured as a specifically fashionable place of resort, in Regency London.The design, with a soaring
clerestory, was (as Christie himself noted in an advertorial of 1768), intended through its ‘repose
of light . . . magnitude and desirable situation’ to show off the artworks and furniture coming
under the hammer to the best advantage, and to provide for the comfort and convenience of
the auction-goers who came to socialise as well as possibly buy (Wall, 1997: 4–6).These features
are certainly made much of in Thomas Rowlandson’s and Augustus Pugin’s early nineteenth-
century aquatint of the space (Ackermann, 1808–10: volume 1).
But the preparation of the audience began well before auction-goers took up their seats on
the day of sale. Auctioneers used all of the techniques available to an expanding commercial
network to whet the appetites of potential buyers.They advertised through newspapers in major
centres and via street criers and placards in smaller towns and the countryside; they printed
catalogues for free collection at sites like local inns and booksellers; and they purchased tobacco,
beer and wine to loosen inhibitions and purse strings on the day of sale (or used an inn or cof-
fee house as the venue, with refreshments on tap). Pre-sale viewing gave potential purchasers
the chance to examine and evaluate the lots, as well as decide upon the price one might bid to,
while catalogues disseminated the details of what was on offer well beyond the immediate local-
ity. For important country house or city sales, these catalogues found their way over county and
state boundaries, and may even have made it overseas (MacArthur and Stobart, 2010: 178–182;
Pennell, 2010: 42–44).
Aesthetics and the pursuit of shopping as a practice of politeness surely fed into other forms
of second-hand buying, too. Shopkeepers no doubt worked hard to make saleable second-hand
wares appealing, through cleaning, small repairs and presentation. In 1703, the father of clergy-
man Thomas Brockbank voiced what was probably a widely held belief, cautioning that his son
should beware buying from dealers or sales what “may seem new”, because appearances at the
sale might be deceptive, and the goods rather more worn than at first glance suggested (Trappes-
Lomax, 1930: 258). The use of terms such as “hardly worn” and “as new” in advertisements for
those selling second-hand goods, or in descriptions of auction lots, offered up items that would
pass as new purchases, but at temptingly proportionate prices, just as using descriptors such as
“fine” and “genteel” flattered readers that they too might be just the sort of new, discriminating
owner for whom these items were intended (MacArthur and Stobart, 2010: 183–184).
Beyond the auction, how second-hand retailers presented goods to appeal to potential buyers
is not easy to recover, outside of the modes of print advertising already encountered: trade cards
and newspaper advertisements.These formats nonetheless tell us that those advertising felt com-
fortable with conveying the availability of old alongside new; and were prepared to offer incen-
tives to potential sellers of such goods. Samuel Foyster, operating ‘at the Indian Queen’, in the

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well-known second-hand textiles district around Monmouth Street and Seven Dials (London)
made a point of specifying that he bought and sold ‘all manner of rich and plain second hand
Cloathes, pistols, swords & watches’ on his trade card, as well as offering to pay the messenger
who brought any such items to him for valuation (Foyster, mid-eighteenth century).
Foyster’s offer, and others like it, speak to the competitiveness of the Georgian market in
which he operated.Those with goods to sell or exchange in a crowded metropolis like sixteenth-
century Venice or eighteenth-century London had many options for their business, and no
doubt sought out those retailers offering up added extras like free collection, or home visits for
valuations. Across the eighteenth century, these incentives put pressure on established sellers to
change their practices; the Antwerp Oudekleerkopers extended their activities beyond the bounds
of the Friday Market in the late eighteenth century, in order to compete with the rising number
of non-guild sales being organised beyond the city walls, suggesting that for those in the hin-
terlands of Antwerp, locally organised sales were as productive (and well-stocked) as those held
centrally (Van Damme, 2009: 111–112). From the perspective of the buyer, quality, cleanliness
and convenience were the desirable attributes of second-hand wares which retailers needed
to place front and centre in their strategies for both securing stock and selling it. Auctioneers
and dealers who could regularly offer up good quality furniture and textiles from respectable
bug-free households (an increasingly visible concern by the end of the eighteenth century) on a
regular basis at accessible venues, won out over those who could not (Pennell, 2014).

Separating the ‘valued from the valueless’? Changing chronologies

and practices
So, at what point did selling “second-hand” become more about junk disposal and charitable
ridding, than about “clever” consumption? The enduring association of second-hand retailing
with the soiled and sub-standard took root in what were clearly changing market conditions
in much of Europe and post-revolutionary America from the late eighteenth century onwards.
This was a period of apparent bifurcation in the markets for second-hand goods, in which
specialist dealing in fine and decorative arts, fuelled by wealthy private collectors like the Roth-
schilds and Rockefellers, and public museums like the Victoria and Albert and Metropolitan,
laboured to conceal the used nature of the goods dealt in a connoisseurial fog of patina and
“taste” (Stobart and Van Damme, 2010a: 4–5; Van Damme, 2010). Dealing in ‘cast-offs and
rubbish’, the stuff of Victorian rag and bottle stores in London and the booty of the Parisian
chiffonier, was only somewhat less romanticised in paintings like Edouard Manet’s 1869 Le Chif-
fonier (oil on canvas: the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, F. 1968.09.P), although such
lives were hard-won from the detritus, dust and even worse.
Several factors drove this change. First, we must acknowledge the shifting sands of con-
sumer choice and material innovation. The advent of so-called “semi-durable” materials such
as ceramics and cottons meant that the resale values of goods made from them depreciated more
quickly, while the ‘lure of the new’ finally muted strictures that had traditionally counselled
material stewardship and reuse as moral virtues (Van Damme, 2009: 116). This was an age in
which rising industrial production across Europe was as yet unfettered by environmental or
ecological concerns, and as yet untarnished by concerns about the health effects of new materi-
als, new manufacturing techniques or novel, fashion-driven behaviours.
However, while the decline in the appeal of some categories of second-hand good – nota-
bly household textiles and clothing – is clear in the text of advertisements for household sales
as well as in accounts of the grubby, shabby milieu of the old clothes dealers and street sellers,
the reasons behind this decline cannot be applied to all second-hand objects. Concerns about

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hygiene and the transmission of diseases via clothing, bedding and curtains certainly curtailed
second-hand dealing at the more respectable end of this market, but such concerns were less
crucial within the market for second-hand furniture, for example. Although they too describe
this market as one also undergoing “polarization”, Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby note
that within the furniture trade in mid-Victorian England, patina and the solid construction of
some older furniture were highly valued and marked it out for discerning middling buyers, in
contrast to the shoddy or shiny furnishings of ‘fateful newness’ favoured by the less well-off
and (more pointedly) the less well-educated in aesthetic matters (Edwards and Ponsonby, 2010:
99–102, 104–105). Indeed, even amongst the poor clientele of London’s Petticoat Lane, good
quality second-hand items (if affordable) were purchased over new shoddy ware; to deceive such
buyers, not just cheap new furniture, but also musical instruments and metalwares were “duffed”
to make them seem “second-hand”, a strange inversion of the previous century’s preference for
used goods to seem “as new”. Middling and even poor consumers were still in the market for
solid second-hand goods, both for necessary purchases like bedsteads, tables and metal kitch-
enwares (the second-hand market for which did not dwindle until World War I in Europe and
the collection of metals for wartime matériel ); and for “curios” and collectibles, to furnish their
parlour mantelshelves (Westgarth, 2013).
Rather than “bifurcation” and “polarization” of second-hand circuits across the nineteenth
century and into the twentieth, we might instead be looking at temporary disruption and
segmentation within some types of second-hand commodity and retailing organisation; and
changes of scale of operation in others. As Henry Mayhew observed in London, what had
found a ready market some years earlier (glass and crockery, small woodenwares such as knife
boxes and tea caddies), could no longer make money because of the ready availability of cheap
new products; other goods (stuffed birds, small telescopes), were simply no longer desirable. By
contrast, used clothes and textiles constituted such a large proportion of the second-hand trade
at the time that two used clothes exchanges were set up in Spitalfields in the late 1840s; and
a substantial export trade-in used clothes and textiles to Ireland and the continent (especially
the Netherlands) transacted. The specific regional variation in what one might find in what
Mayhew called ‘marine stores’, general dealers’ shops, suggests that even amongst poor labour-
ing communities, the second-hand offer was highly attuned to the demands of the local market
(Mayhew, 1968: II: 25–28).
As yet, few scholars have written about the period between the middle of the nineteenth
century and the mid-twentieth century, from which point on social scientists and anthropolo-
gists have turned their attention to contemporary practices of buying and selling second-hand,
and environmental historians have started to take stock of past resource uses and abuses. But this
is perhaps the most crucial period of change in how second-hand goods were sourced, marketed
and retailed, an age in which the novelty of the shiny spectacle of the department store as pur-
veyor of novel marvels to the middle classes, and the cheap and cheerful aesthetic of the retail
bazaar for the less well-off, surely wore off. Since at least the end of World War I, during the
economic downturns of the 1920s and 1930s, anxieties fuelled by periods of recession-driven
austerity as well as engagement with newly debated notions of environmental and civic respon-
sibility, particularly around the disposal of waste, reshaped attitudes to consuming the already
used (e.g. Strasser, 1999; Gregson and Crewe, 2003; Cooper, 2010).
It was in this period too, that the moral indigestibility of untrammelled consumption began
to be offset by attempts to channel disposal and sales of second-hand goods towards what Jen-
nifer le Zotte has called ‘philanthropic capitalism’ (Le Zotte, 2013). Church jumble sales and
charity bazaars raised money as a source of welfare for local communities or sometimes for
more distant or elevated ends (supporting missionaries or the victims of natural disasters), and

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became a model for later, more permanent forms of charitable second-hand collection and retail
(Richmond, 2010). In fin-de-siècle America, Goodwill stores grew out of a Methodist campaign
in Boston in 1902 to provide employment and resources to the poor and needy through the
mending and distribution of used goods collected from wealthier householders. In Britain, the
modern charity shop, the twentieth-century successor to Victorian ventures like the Salvation
Army’s clothes collections for the poor, first opened its doors in 1947–8, when Oxfam used
a storefront in Oxford to dispose of excess donations gathered for sending to postwar Greece.
These collection and retail institutions dominated the Anglo-American second-hand trade in
non-luxury clothing, furniture and books, amongst many other items, until the advent of the
two online sites which have come to dominate second-hand trading in the twenty-first century,
eBay and Craigslist, both founded in 1995. In Britain alone, charity shops still account for over
£270 million in revenue to the charities they support, while a 2014 report on the involvement
of British households in charities identified purchasing from a charity shop as the most frequent
type of engagement with a charitable organisation (Charity Retail Association, u.d.; Glennie
and Whillans-Welldrake, 2014: 15).
New commodities in the twentieth century also created opportunities for furthering special-
ist second-hand trading and information circuits around second-hand goods. The rising own-
ership of cars in interwar America and post-1945 Europe brought with it opportunities for a
second-hand market that shared some features of pre-modern practices (part-exchange, the sell-
ing of old alongside new stock in car showrooms), but which also created specialist retailers and
new cultural stereotypes. Second-hand car sales outstripped new-car sales in America as early as
1927, providing the stimulus for sales outside of the networks run by the big car companies such
as Ford and Packard (Gelber, 2008). It also fuelled a new archetype of the disingenuous dealer,
in the cultural trope of the used car salesman (used on a Democratic campaign poster to such
devastating effect to question the ethical standing of the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon,
in the 1960 American presidential election).
Cars, like coaches before them, also enabled owners to be sellers themselves, cutting out the
dealer-middleman altogether.This type of person-to-person transaction was not entirely new, of
course, but it developed quickly in this period, fuelled not only by improved transportation and
mail networks, but also by the lengthening classified columns of provincial news organs across
nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain and America, and new specialist classified periodicals.
The British weekly paper, Exchange and Mart, launched by lawyer-turned-publisher Edward Cox
in 1868, grew out of a segment of the upmarket mid-Victorian women’s magazine, The Queen,
which gave column space for readers to advertise goods that they had for sale or exchange. The
paper, to which modern online person-to-person market places for second-hand goods such as
Gumtree, Craigslist and eBay, owe their modus operandi, continued in hard and then electronic
formats for over a century, finally closing in 2005 (Brake and Demoor, 2009: 149–150).

Conclusion
Certainly the marketplace for second-hand goods looks very different now to that of the seven-
teenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and we have the advent of the Internet and social
media to thank for that. But while environmental concerns and recalibration of the second-hand
as “retro”, “vintage” and (my favourite American euphemism) “gently used” have made buying
such goods ethically and aesthetically valid for generations whose parents and grandparents
before them would have shunned them, many methods of selling and distributing second-hand
goods have deep roots in the past four centuries, from the thrill of winning with that last-minute
bid on eBay, to the eagle-eyed hunt at the car boot sale and marchés aux puces. The Victorian rag

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and bottle storeman would claim the house clearance “man and van” as his direct descendant,
while the charity shop is but a cleaner version of the marine store, albeit with an admittedly
different economic agenda. The second-hand trade in goods and materials and its diversified
wholesale and retail conduits, from artworks to worn-through clothing waste, has never ceased
to be economically and culturally central across the developed and developing world – under-
standing the complexity and evolution of its histories, never more important.

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 PART II

Spaces and places

 7
MARKETS AND MARKET HALLS
Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón and Sergi Garriga

Introduction
In medieval and pre-modern cities, markets were the central nodes of the social metabolism,
the link to the rural hinterland and the fundamental mechanism of food supply. Underpinned
by ancient privileges, they were at the heart of ‘economic forces’. They were also well-regulated
spaces, subject to inspection, to ensure tax revenues and proper exchanges. According to Brau-
del – quoting Adam Smith – ‘intermittent or continuous, these elementary markets between the
countryside and the city, by their number and their continuous repetition, represent the biggest
of all known exchanges’ (Braudel, 1979: 9–10). It’s not surprising that so many historians have
seen the market as the city’s driving force, its raison d’être.
Retail historians have been interested in the renewal of markets in Western cities. This is a
process that began in the late eighteenth century as a transitional period. Covered markets were
built as an intermediate step in the sequence of successive substitutions of old forms of com-
merce by other increasingly more efficient ones and by more modern forms of consumption,
as today’s peripheral shopping centres. From this perspective, urban markets have been seen as
an anachronism doomed to disappear (Stobart and Van Damme, 2016: 363). Nevertheless, their
extraordinary resilience and often their resurgence in recent decades as outdoor markets or as
market halls, proves their history has not come to a complete close. The city food market as an
elementary expression of retailing has been and continues to be present in all cultures. Its forms
have changed according to historical and geographical contexts, the dimensions and layout of
the city, its ties to outlying rural areas, and the model of urban food supply. Conditioned by
commercial policies and regulations, city food markets generally continue to form part of the
urban retailing mix. For this reason, they provide a good observatory of retailing history and its
evolution over time.

From the traditional market to the market hall as a facility

Markets have been the driving force behind the configuration of European cities. The rebirth
of the medieval city was formerly attributed to mercantile activity and long-distance trade
(Pirenne, 1952). Today, however, it is thought that modest trade carried out in markets by local
farmers boosted the long-cycle growth of medieval Europe (Bois, 1989; Guerreau, 1990; Ver-
hulst, 1991). Large-scale trade and the birth of capitalism came into effect at a later date.
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Markets often contributed to shaping the urban morphology of the medieval and pre-
modern city. Originally held weekly, markets became a daily affair in larger centres. Classical
analyses of the morphological evolution of European cities clearly confirm the degree to which
these commercial activities formed the backbone of the urban space (Ganshof, 1943; Lavedan
and Hugueney, 1974; Conzen 1960 and 1962: 383–414; Carter, 1983). Municipal governments,
firmly established since the thirteenth century, focused primarily on assuring good urban pro-
visioning. They reorganised the markets that outgrew their traditional premises, distributing
the various products on streets and squares, while endowing some of these spaces with covered
depots: granaries or halles for the storage of grain, or covered pavilions for butchers and fishmon-
gers, some of which were large-scale buildings such as the fifteenth-century Ghent Meat Market
(Pevsner, 1976: chap. 15; Kostof, 1992: 92–102). Market and city hall were so closely bound that
they could come to form a single body. In the large municipal edifices of Flemish or Italian cit-
ies, a ground floor with arcades was left completely open to the market square space. This was
where the most perishable articles were stored, such as butter, eggs and poultry, while municipal
employees collected the sales fees.The upper floor was used as a city council meeting hall (as was
the case of the Halles of Bruges, twelfth-fifteenth centuries, the Palazzo del Broletto in several
of Lombardy’s towns and cities and the Palazzo della Regione in Padua). The numerous and
more modest market houses of some British market-cities, which continued to be built until
the middle of the nineteenth century, followed the same pattern (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999).
The combination of limited urban growth and institutional continuity from the end of the
Middle Ages to the eighteenth century contributed in most cities to a long period of stability
in urban structures and, consequently, in food market systems (Calabi, 2004). Subsequently, the
agricultural revolution and improvements in regional transport and in international trade and
the correlative population explosion increased the demand for food and for many other manu-
factured products such as clothing, kitchen utensils and other household items sold in markets.
All this meant greater congestion and overcrowding in market streets and squares: more people,
more stalls, more vehicles and more animals packed the public space. The traditional outdoor
market became a source of great tension, especially in England and France.
Urban markets and their surroundings attracted peddlers, petty thieves and crowds of revel-
lers. By the eighteenth century, there was a new enlightened perception of public space that
looked unfavourably upon traditional open-air markets, characterised by blasphemy, taverns
and the non-payment of municipal sales taxes. The market was viewed as ‘a place of disorder
and chaos and a magnet for the worst elements in society’, a focal point of ungovernable street
culture (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999: 10–19).
Old outdoor markets also stood at the heart of social tensions, mainly involving subsistence
riots (Rudé, 1970).These riots, associated with agricultural crises and with the ‘moral economy’
of the poor, were sometimes tolerated by municipal magistrates as an indirect way of preventing
dishonest business practices and of lowering food prices (Thompson, 1971;Wells, 1987). Indeed,
many of the first European market halls emerged after political uprisings associated with protests
against the high cost of food.
In the closing decades of eighteenth century in the UK, we find the first examples of markets
separated from the street.This represents the first major conceptual step towards the invention of
the covered market as an architectural form. This period was characterised by great typological
diversity. After 1750, new markets continued to be built for mixed uses in the long-established
shed form, however, they began to incorporate some original designs such as arcades or circular
shapes. After 1800, the pioneering enclosed market prevailed. From the latter half of the eight-
eenth century in the United States, long sheds that were open and extendable became very

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popular thanks to the influence of British markets and as a result of their location in the com-
munal space, in the middle of wide streets.The most famous example was the Philadelphia High
Street Market built in 1785. Long markets with mixed use, with council offices on the ground
floor, were less common, although their size and urban personality surpassed those of all the
markets hitherto built in the former British colonies (Tangires, 2003 30–347).
Thus, markets were enclosed in order to free streets and squares from the invasion of buyers
and sellers, and to get obstacles out of the way and out of sight, in accordance with an enlight-
ened ideal of ‘transparency’. Stalls were neatly set out, circulation was facilitated and hygiene
was assured, all for the purpose of stricter controls and inspections (Foucault, 1977: 17 and ff.;
Bentham, 1995: 29–95).
The abolition of feudal rights led to stricter controls of markets on behalf of municipal bod-
ies who wanted to ensure ‘urban order’, tax collection and in particular provisioning, subject to
recurrent crises. In the case of France, the disentailment of assets belonging to the Church and
the émigré nobility gave new markets the opportunity to occupy confiscated plots of land. The
end of feudal privileges, and the availability of urban land after the triumph of the Revolution,
paved the way for the Napoleonic reorganisation of the Parisian market system, following more
‘rational’ and ‘informed’ bourgeois models of respectability and order.
The idea of providing Paris with a coherent homogeneous system of market halls arose in
1808 during the Napoleonic Empire. Frochot, the Prefect of the Seine, declared:

It is essential that public markets begin to provide solid shelter to stallholders, cus-
tomers and purveyors in a regular fashion, that they be greater in number, larger and
healthier . . . and be established as far away as possible from private houses.,

Figure 7.1 Birds-eye view of Les Halles, París

Source: Félix Narjoux, Paris. Monuments élevés par la Ville, 1850–1880, volume II, Paris, 1883, engraving IV.

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Five large free-standing market halls were built (Saint-Honoré, Saint-Martin, Saint-Germain,
Saint-Jean and Les Carmes) as was the wonderful cast-iron dome of the wheat market, the
Halle au Blé, erected between 1802 and 1811 (Lemoine, 1980: chap. 4, 42). As early as 1813,
the civil engineer responsible for public works in Paris, Bruyère, had presented the Minister for
Home Affairs with his Collection des marchés de Paris avec projets with the overall plan for the city’s
markets. It included 127 drawings of markets, among them his Grande Halle design. In 1823
he specifically devoted the fourth volume of his Parisian publication Recueil to the subject of
markets (Bruyère, 1813).
The centralised organisation of the French State, under the supervision of the Conseil des
Bâtiments Civils, also favoured the adoption of a homogeneous system for managing and assign-
ing land uses and of a programmed method for assessing needs and for distributing and building
spaces that signalled institutional and technical modernity.This gave rise to the so-called “city of
facilities” (Foucault, 1977; Teyssot, 1977a; Lepetit, 1988: 255–265) and between 1801 and 1851
the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils revised 253 projects for new markets, enlargements and repairs
across the whole country. Market buildings, grain exchanges and slaughterhouses were registered
as facilities alongside prefectures, hospitals, state-run schools, law establishments, prisons, police
stations, theatres, concert halls and museums.

The great age of market halls

New criteria, such as order and functional rationalisation, were expressed in the new facilities
and were manifested in the market halls’ internal organisation: ‘the sales cell, geometrically iden-
tical for all . . . the space of circulation, which must be as consistent and operative as possible, the
sales area and the general layout, that responds to the desire to classify and control’ (Lemoine,
1980: 32).The idea was also to ensure that markets had improved hygienic conditions and higher
levels of respectability: the market thereby became a facility and a school for manners, an ideal
that pervaded Europe throughout the century (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999: 47; Thompson,
1997).
New British market halls were even more innovative than French ones. As from 1820, large
market buildings were designed to be totally covered and enclosed structures in the form of
semi-detached elongated naves, while smaller markets had single naves. The fact that they were
completely closed to the outside, their height and the lightness and transparency of their struc-
tures – achieved through the use of iron and glass – entailed a genuine typological reinvention
of markets. The first monumental example of the new type was Saint John’s Market, built in
Liverpool in 1822. The introduction of iron pillars preceded the use of this material by Charles
Fowler in London’s Covent Garden Market (1828–1830) and in the famous Hungerford Fish
Market in 1835 (Stamp, 1986). The iron structure would not become the standard for retail
markets in other British cities until ten years later when it first appeared at Birkenhead Market,
designed by the civil engineers Fox and Henderson. At that time, it was the largest metal struc-
ture in the world.
The nineteenth century was indeed the golden age of British markets, particularly in the
period of intensive construction between 1821 and 1890, dominated by the new type of large
free-standing and completely covered market (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999). Almost two-thirds
of all these structures were erected during this 70-year period, including some of the most
original from a construction standpoint. By 1850, the United Kingdom was the first European
country to welcome this new type of structure, which soon became consolidated. A significant
feature characterising British markets was the complete dissociation between the buildings’

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interior metal structures and their façades. These were huge frameworks with their own styles,
initially Neoclassical and later increasingly eclectic.
In the rest of Europe, the renewal and spread of new market models advanced at a fast pace.
Solutions varied considerably across the continent and within each country propagation was
not uniform. In Great Britain, the dissemination of new market halls had hardly any effect on
Scotland or the east of England. The case of London is even more surprising. The world’s most
dynamic and innovative city lacked a system of covered retail markets. The biggest metropolis
on earth depended exclusively on itinerant vending for its provisioning. Between 1850 and
1939, London’s street markets grew significantly, with both rapidly increasing numbers of facili-
ties and a steady increase in the number of stalls overall (Kelley, 2016). Its main market halls
became wholesale markets, like Covent Garden, Billingsgate or Smithfield (Schmiechen, 2015).
The great renewal of British markets was galvanised by industrial cities in the north and west,
areas of great urban and industrial growth. City councils usually built a large, single market in a
central location (sometimes replacing the old pre-industrial open-air market). While the metal-
structured interior was light and unencumbered – allowing for an orderly display of products
and the circulation of shoppers – the exterior was grand and monumental.
In the United States, in the first half of the nineteenth century, public markets were con-
sidered essential to the economic survival of a growing urban population. The new country’s
municipal councils provided public space and broader streets for the markets, constructed mar-
ket buildings, established specific rules of commercial conduct and appointed civil servants
to enforce those rules and to supervise the markets’ correct functioning. Most of the markets
were simple free-standing sheds in the middle of a street or a square, as was common since the
colonial period. Sometimes, however, they were very costly structures as in the case of Boston’s
sumptuous Faneuil Hall, built between 1823 and 1826 (Tangires, 2003). In order to supply the
biggest US city, New York, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a large system of markets
was developed which polarised a considerable part of food retailing. In the 1830s the city, which
had just over 200,000 inhabitants, boasted thirteen market halls dotted across the urban space
(Baics, 2012, 2016).
Back in Europe, before 1850 there was already an initial dissemination of French-influenced
covered models. This was the case in the Savoy region, where Turin endowed itself with a
considerable set of market halls of Neoclassical tradition. In Spain, the Encarnación Market in
Seville, the Central de Abastos Market in Cádiz, the San Ildefonso Market in Madrid and the
Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona also adopted the Napoleonic French model. The disentail-
ment of religious properties in 1836 was a key moment, making land available to the councils of
these cities to build the new structures. In Belgium, the Madeleine Market in Brussels and the
markets in other cities such as Antwerp, Ghent or Mechelen were more innovative, introducing
metal structures in the middle of the century. In Germany, a covered market was built in Ham-
burg in around 1850 with a partly metal structure.
Within this context, the construction of Baltard’s Les Halles in Paris in the early days of the
Second Empire entailed a radical change in the architecture of European markets. Les Halles in
Paris became the epicentre of the great cycle of dissemination of covered iron markets. After a
great debate in 1853, the architectural solutions put forward favoured lightness and transparency
and these proved to be an instant success. Each of the ten cubic pavilions of metal and glass
boasted a large central area that organised the space. The glass face and the light ceramic finish
of the façades revealed the rhythm of the structure’s metal pillars and became a model of con-
structional simplicity and elegance that lent itself to mass dissemination due to its industrialised
nature (Lemoine, 1986: 166).

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The decisive public intervention in Paris would not only translate into the imposing central
markets of Les Halles but also into a complete system of thirty-two neighbourhood markets
that applied the same construction criteria. What is more, several hundred others were built in
France’s leading provincial cities. Although the repetition of this model was criticised by French
architects, the industrial replication of building elements and the ease of assembly favoured its
national dissemination and even its export to such places as Romania, Algeria and South Ameri-
can countries. French technical experts and iron building contractors erected markets in Bucha-
rest, while the burgeoning cities of South America were also centres of dissemination of the new
French-made iron markets (Leun, 2016: 29; Lortie, 1995). If we turn to the monographs and
articles published in technical journals, we find that the markets built in French cities received a
greater number of references, and Les Halles was certainly the most prominent of them all, fol-
lowed closely by British markets (Baltard and Callet, 1863; Baltard, 1873; Osthoff and Schmitt,
1909; Risch, 1867; Hennicke, 1881; Guàrdia and Oyón, 2015).

The dissemination of the model

The intensity of the dissemination process also highlights the singularities of the various national
and local contexts. In Germany, after early experiences of iron markets in Hamburg and Munich,
the Stuttgart Market was opened in 1865, that of Frankfurt in 1879 and between 1885 and 1908
many other German cities endowed themselves with markets. In 1909 a total of forty markets
in twenty-one cities were mentioned (Osthoff and Schmitt, 1909). Each city usually had a single
market, although some cities like Strasbourg, Cologne and Dresden built two or more markets –
a central one and one or at most two neighbourhood markets. The case of Berlin, which built a
large and well-coordinated system of markets as of 1886, is exceptional (Lohmeier, 1999; Paflik-
Huber, 2015). In Vienna, discussion on the renewal of the markets began in the 1850s, but no
covered iron markets were completed there until 1865 (Haiko, 2015).
Market halls in Scandinavian cities were built rather late. Initiatives in Denmark began at
an earlier date but only a few halls materialised and they were not very successful (Toftgaard,
2016). In the mid-1870s, works began on the market at the port of Bergen and the Fiskehallen
in Gothenburg. Most of the markets there, however, like the nine market buildings erected in
Stockholm (1882–1914) or the Dock Market in Helsinki, did not go into operation until the
following decade (Omilanowska, 2015; Nordin, 2009). Helsinki had built four market halls just
before the outbreak of WWI. Warsaw had a central market and three neighbourhood markets.
Gdansk had several markets as well. In Wroclaw, in the German orbit, two market halls were
built, one of them in 1908, with an innovative structure of parabolic arches made of reinforced
concrete. Many other cities joined this wave of new markets:Vilnius, Riga, Katowice, Chorzow,
Kiev, Odessa, Sofia, Ploesti, Ljubljana, Turku, Tampere and Oulu (Omilanowska, 2015). In 1869,
Bucharest celebrated its recently acquired status as a capital with its first market project, the
Halele Centrale, built by a French company. Zurich’s Fleischmarkethalle opened that same year.
In the Russian Empire and in Balkan Europe, the introduction of new iron market halls run
parallel to a process of renewal and expansion of the commercial structures of Oriental tradi-
tion. Saint Petersburg, the most westernised of Russian cities, began to erect its first iron markets
at a very early date, in 1863. Moscow, however, which opened the Nikiforov Market in 1877,
built the big torgovie riadi following the local tradition over the course of the nineteenth century.
The torgovie riadi were also predominant in other large cities in the Russian Empire like Odessa.
The Russian case shows how the centralisation of decisions prevented many initiatives and how
important the degree of municipal autonomy and decision-making power was.

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Figure 7.2 Interior view of the market hall in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland, with concrete arches, 1906–1908
Source: Author’s own photograph.
 Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón, and Sergi Garriga

In Italy, the first important iron markets – such as the three markets of Turin and the first
two markets of Milan – were built in the 1860s (De Pieri, 2015). The original market system
of Florence began to operate between 1869 and 1876. In Spain, Madrid’s two markets – the
Cebada Market and the Mostense Market which opened in 1875 – were built with imported
French materials. In most cities, however, and especially in the most industrial ones like Bar-
celona, markets were designed by local experts and built by local industries. Some ninety iron
markets have been documented between 1870 and 1920 (Castañer, 2015). As in other countries
of Latin Europe, cities, both large and small, continued to build markets during the first third
of the twentieth century. There are many examples of this: the Colón Market (1914–1916) and
the Central Market (1914–1929) in Valencia, the Salamanca Market in Málaga (1923–1925), the
market in Alicante (1914–1921), La Ribera Market (1929) in Bilbao, and the Olavide Market
(1931) in Madrid, as well as many more in towns, such as the market in Sabadell (1927–1930)
or the one in Sant Feliu de Guíxols (1928–1930) in Catalonia.
The centre-periphery dissemination of typological and technological solutions may at first
seem to be an imitation phenomenon. However, the construction and proper upkeep of pub-
lic markets also depended on the level of consolidation of a food market on a national level,
transport networks, the development of new forms of distribution, the strength and diversity
of regional agricultural production, the degree of involvement of municipal authorities in the
building and governance of markets, and on the pattern of urban development adopted in each
city. The new market halls had the role of increasing the transparency of exchanges and of con-
taining the prices of perishable seasonal foods from local, regional and national areas.
In the United Kingdom, the towns most influenced by the phenomenon of market halls
were industrial cities, areas of great urban and industrial growth that generated a huge demand
for food for the working classes and which had an intensive agricultural and livestock output
based on meat, dairy products and vegetables. Half a century later, the map of cities with markets
in Spain resembled that of Britain: all the country’s most industrialised cities and regions built
covered markets (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Asturias) as it was also the case of the urban
centres of intensive farming areas (Valencia and Murcia). In both cases, the construction of the
railway network was a driving force that brought new horizons to small market towns, hitherto
confined to local supply areas. On a regional level, the railway played a very selective role in
Britain: some markets saw how their field of influence greatly increased when they became
railway junctions (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999: 158–159, 163–166) while the sphere of influ-
ence of other smaller markets remained as it had been since the pre-industrial era. In each city
across England, the fate of the market varied depending on its type of management – municipal
or private – and the efficiency of said management. According to some comparative studies, the
way in which each city was governed appears to be decisive not only with respect to the fate
of its markets but also in terms of the evolution of the particular food retail mix of the whole
city (Mitchell, 2011).
The period of great expansion of markets in many continental European cities in the clos-
ing decades of the nineteenth century coincided with the onset of the decline in pioneering
countries, such as the United Kingdom, the United States or France. This decline was espe-
cially notable in the UK. Between 1910 and 1920, no new markets were built and very few
were erected up to 1950. New urban developments were increasingly dispersed and difficult
for markets to supply. The distances to and from markets in these suburban areas, dotted with
detached and semi-detached houses, grew greatly and the area that could be served on foot
was too large to make such a service profitable. These low density urban sprawls were much
more suited to popular grocery stores or to shopping parades, just as had been the case in many
North-­American cities since the mid-nineteenth century (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999: 95,

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101, 185–187). This kind of urban growth, however, was just one more factor contributing to
the decline of markets. Other fundamental factors gradually undermined the municipal markets.
The public market system in these countries flourished when the economic structure of the
production and consumption of food was highly local or regional. When the railway transport
network and new tinning and freezing systems of some fresh foods placed many national agri-
cultural products on the market, only an interventionist public ownership and management of
markets could maintain, in the long run, the distribution of foods in stalls in the face of the
steadily growing competition of grocery businesses in cities and, later, of the national commer-
cialisation chains and co-operatives.
The case of the United States shows that the more liberalising policies actually progressed to
the detriment of the market halls. After the first half of the nineteenth century, in which public
markets underwent great development, local and state governments opted for the liberalisation
of fresh food commerce. Many cities, for example, had allowed butchers to run their own estab-
lishments outside public markets. Large-scale corporate privileges were granted to merchants
and investors who wished to manage big food stores, which were often equipped with the latest
innovations in building, lighting, refrigeration and ventilation. Moreover, the railway allowed
wholesale commission agents to establish direct ties with producers outside the framework of
the markets (Tangires, 2003 201–205). The privatisation movement flourished in a period of
great economic and urban growth and of debilitation and even corruption of the local authori-
ties. The competition of big private stores and grocery stores in residential neighbourhoods
meant that municipal markets reached crisis point.
In the case of the United Kingdom, reduced public intervention, more open and liberal-
ised exchanges and the scale and dynamic nature of the economy were also essential. We can
observe an early predominance of wholesale intermediaries that were directly or indirectly
connected with big co-operatives or the thriving food distribution chains that sold products
such as imported meat and fish and, increasingly, fruit, vegetables (potatoes in particular), eggs
and dairy products. In 1914, the co-operatives and the food distribution chains accounted for
one-fifth of the total food sales, and by the end of World War II, they were making one-third of
the total sales (Schmiechen and Carls, 1999: chap. 19, 128; Benson and Shaw, 1992: 200; Scola,
1975, 1992; Hodson, 1999).
In France, in the late nineteenth century, we also observe a weakening of the market halls
due to the decline of traditional agriculture and to new forms of commercialisation of agri-
cultural products with the intervention of wholesalers and co-operatives. The decline of the
markets was accentuated by the war of 1914–1918 and diminishing public budgets that affected
their proper upkeep and renewal. Outdoor markets, which had never disappeared, did not call
for major investments or facilities and they adapted themselves more flexibly to needs. Around
1890, Julien Guadet commented that in Paris, while some old markets held under tarpaulins
continued to function, many of the new and costly market halls had to close down (Bailly and
Laurent, 1998: 45).
Focusing exclusively on market halls gives a distorted view of market systems. In fact, many
European urban centres never came to have market halls, or these often coexisted with open-
air markets of long-standing tradition. Some big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam con-
tinued to function with outdoor markets alone, in stark contrast to neighbouring Belgium.
London depended primarily on kerb markets and on itinerant vendors, while its principal
markets became big wholesale centres. Open-air markets are a phenomenon that never disap-
peared, their continued existence and recurrent resurgence are historical constants, as Nordin
showed in his brilliant study of this type of market in Stockholm and other European cities
(Nordin, 2009).

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 Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón, and Sergi Garriga

Wholesale markets and new commercial formats

The progressive increase of wholesaling contributed decisively to the specialisation of crops and,
at the same time, to the progressive erosion of neighbourhood market halls. While in smaller
towns local farmers continued to sell directly to consumers at local markets, the expansion of big
cities made this direct relationship more difficult.The new scale of business, the railway network
and, subsequently, refrigeration facilitated the intervention of intermediaries. As it emerged,
wholesaling widened its radius of supply and facilitated the growing import of some foods
that had been obtained locally until then. These activities required large market halls. Although
wholesaling was distributed among the various markets, a large central market, or central mar-
kets for the various products (fruit and vegetables, fish, meat, flowers) usually predominated.The
presence of multiple products at these large markets assured greater transparency and a fluid
regulation of prices thanks to supply and demand. As intermediaries and wholesalers had more
resources, they went about displacing producers and retailers from the leading markets. This
was the case of Covent Garden and Les Halles. The fact is, however, that even around 1910 it
was common in Europe for wholesaling to co-exist with retailing in the central markets (King,
1913). In Vienna, the new meat market of 1898–1899 was expanded with the Viktualienhalle in
1904–1906, which had wholesale and retail stalls as well as space for farmers.
Nonetheless, exclusively wholesale markets started to become the norm in leading urban
centres. In Rome, where the wholesale fruit and vegetable market – having been located in
various different open spaces in the city – had been the subject of debate for decades, a munici-
pal government formed by Republicans and Socialists approved the project for the new central
markets in 1910. These markets were connected with the Rome-Ostia railway and had a sec-
tion devoted to fruit and vegetables and another section for fish, lamb, chicken, eggs and other
foodstuffs (Stemperini, 2009). They formed part of a policy aimed to establish tight municipal
control of distribution and to allow the setting of food prices. The farmer’s lobby often exerted
pressure in a demand for markets in proper conditions, as may be seen in the case of Rome. In
Barcelona, the farmers’ management association was the foremost advocate of organising the
wholesaling of fruit and vegetables in order to increase the transparency of exchanges and to
favour the establishment of prices with a view to curbing the intermediaries’ high margins to
the benefit of producers and consumers. This reasoning was common in the press of the period
as may be seen, for example, in the case of the Budapest market, which published a daily bulle-
tin giving the wholesale price of the various articles and a weekly bulletin giving the retail prices
(King, 1913: 109). In Barcelona, it was only the severe subsistence crisis – caused by WWI
inflation and the postwar period – that led El Born Market, the first cast-iron market built in
1876, to be provisionally turned into a wholesale fruit and vegetable market in 1921 (Guàrdia
and Oyón, 2017). In Madrid, a modern central fruit and vegetable market with a concrete
structure, served by the railway, opened in 1935.
In the early twentieth century, the regulation of the growing wholesale business became a
widespread process. Germany was the pioneer of a new generation of concrete wholesale mar-
kets, which were usually located in places accessible by railway, river transport and road, with
loading docks to facilitate the handling, processing and distribution of agricultural products, and
sometimes with refrigerated spaces for storing fresh products. These were called “terminal mar-
kets” because accessibility and connection to transport infrastructures were more important than
central locations near big urban retail markets. Both in Germany and the United States, road
transport and loading docks for lorries gradually became the norm in the interwar period. In
Germany, concrete structures were developed to achieve greater spans and increasingly light-
filled covered spaces. The foremost examples were Frankfurt’s huge concrete wholesale market,

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which opened in 1928, and the Leipzig Wholesale Market, which opened one year later. The
wholesale markets did not confine themselves to supplying their own populations but rather they
became large redistribution centres serving a broader territory. Moreover, their growth dimin-
ished the importance of retail markets and especially neighbourhood markets as they served the
city’s entire food commerce fabric. In 1913, Willy Levin, a magistrate in Frankfurt – a city of
global fame since the end of the nineteenth century thanks to the Social Democratic governance
of its mayor Franz Adickes in such fields as planning, housing and transport – placed his confi-
dence in the trend towards the centralisation of markets in large cities, their capacity to regulate
prices by bringing together producers and wholesalers, and the trend of food retailing ‘to leave the
market halls for the stores’. At the same time, the neighbourhood or district market halls declined
and municipal involvement in this respect was not worth the trouble (Levin, 1913: 159).
At the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States, after a long period of com-
plete deregulation and at a point when public markets were most compromised, a phase of
firm public intervention was paradoxically initiated. In 1894, reform groups had organised the
National Municipal League, whose agenda included the renewal of the markets. Just as hap-
pened in the same period for Japan (Harada, 2016), the European markets were studied in depth
and even became the subject of a set of consular reports published in 1910 (Tangires, 2015;
Guàrdia and Oyón, 2015).
In 1913, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) formed a federal Markets Office in order
to establish a model of a market system with more economical and more efficient food com-
mercialisation facilities for the interested cities. This was the necessary response to the country’s
new economic era, as was stated in an article from that same year:

Hitherto the United States has occupied a position of unique advantage. We have
had such abundant resources that, after taking care of our wants, we have been able
to supply the markets of the Old World with enormous quantities of foodstuffs. This
abundance has relieved us of the necessity of economical distribution in the home
territory. Within the last ten years there has been a remarkable change in conditions.
Our cultivated land has increased thirty percent while consumption has increased sixty
percent. Three million more men are earning enough to enable them to buy meat,
but there has been a heavy decrease of meat producing cattle on American farms.
Municipalities are therefore confronted with the duty of meeting these changed con-
ditions. The most effective means of solving the problem lies in the organization of
publicly controlled markets that will afford economical facilities for distribution.
(Black, 1913)

The aim was to adapt to needs, urban changes and intense population movements. The USDA
promoted three basic types of markets: two types of retail markets and terminal markets. First
came the market halls, built following hygienic and functional criteria for consolidated urban
centres. Secondly, there would be kerb markets, that is, open-air farmers’ markets, which would
be appropriate for smaller centres because they did not demand major initial investments, they
were easy to set up, they were highly flexible and they were very popular during WWI. In many
cases they were set up on vacant lots, allowing an aisle to be formed between two rows of vans
or lorries parked with their rear ends facing shoppers. The most innovative type, however, was
unquestionably that of the terminal markets. As in Germany, the goal was primarily to assure
good municipal control and economic rationalisation by means of public wholesale terminal
markets, accessible by rail, river or sea, and if possible, conditioned for quick inspection and load-
ing and unloading. They were equipped with spacious halls containing sections for each of the

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 Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón, and Sergi Garriga

products, which were connected by freight lifts with refrigerated basements. The most notable
cases were those proposed for New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Although this process ran out of steam in the 1920s, the policies put forward to contain
food prices and reduce agricultural surpluses specific to the Great Depression increased interest
in municipal markets. Criticism of municipal intervention and praise of free enterprise were
not lacking. In a context of tough competition, ‘market managers had to adopt more effective
business techniques if the public markets were to survive’ (Mayo, 1991: 54). Moreover, as US
cities became more suburban, the centrally located urban plots where the old public markets
stood came to be increasingly coveted. Even though the public markets were profitable, their
profit margins were smaller than those of other businesses that aspired to these central locations.
Likewise, between 1914 and 1945, new food commerce formats in the United States were
intensely developed, ranging from the first self-service grocery stores to big supermarket chains
that can supply large quantities of foods at low prices. The market halls unavoidably lost price
competitiveness, failing to achieve one of their goals within the overall field of food commer-
cialisation. The growing importance of big food companies also entailed a transition from the
bulk sale of products to the sale of packaged articles and the responsibility of quality assurance
fell on the brand rather than on the sales establishment. The rise of national corporations that
specialised in food processing took advantage of the mass-distribution possibilities provided
by the railroad network and refrigeration technology and led to the decline of public markets.
When the national distribution of perishable foods became possible with refrigerated rail car,
the corporate system of food distribution ‘increasingly replaced more localized public markets’
(Mayo, 1991: 55).
The idea of the public market as an answer to the need for food retailing came to be dis-
placed by chain grocery stores and subsequently by supermarkets. This was a fundamental dis-
placement in the political economy of food retailing. The rise and fall of public markets reflects
the transition of the American political economy from a local mercantilism to a corporatism of
national scope.The evolution undergone by the public markets in the United States would have
a big influence on Europe and on the rest of the world in the last half of the twentieth century.

The persistence of an “anachronism”

Between 1945 and 1973, a period characterised by ‘increasingly global agrobusiness corpora-
tions and their role creating agrofood complexes’, supermarkets and big food distribution chains
had a huge effect on public markets (Bernstein, 2015; Friedman and McMichael, 1989). First
they prevailed in the United States, afterwards in Northern Europe and then progressively in
other European and extra-European countries. Although this was not confined to a mere trans-
fer process and the forms and intensities of the adoption of supermarkets varied considerably
in each context, they were generally instruments of price containment in national economic
policies. Accordingly, public markets came to play an increasingly residual role. Even so, this did
not prevent the building of a new generation of markets in countries in the Soviet orbit – with a
more controlled economy – or in Spain, which had been left out of the Marshall Plan and main-
tained a strongly autarchic and interventionist economy. The scarcity and deficiency of food in
Spain’s long post-civil war period made the markets policy in Madrid and Barcelona an aspect of
central importance. Between 1939 and 1943, Madrid went from having ten to fourteen markets.
Despite attempts made by Spain’s technocratic governments to renew the economy at the end
of the 1950s, obsolete commercial distribution practices and tariff policies ruined the attempts
to introduce the American supermarket model. As a result, they were forced to trust in the pub-
lic market policy with the goal of containing food prices. Between 1939 and 1977, twenty-six

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new markets were built or rebuilt in Barcelona, bringing the total number to over forty (Fava,
Guàrdia and Oyón, 2016; Miller, 2015). In the context of the post-WWII economic boom in
Europe, these processes were seen as anomalies and the old markets were seen as residual ele-
ments that were doomed to disappear.
Despite the unquestionable erosion of market hall systems during this period, markets in
their various forms have shown a considerable resilience. Of the thirty-four market halls that
Paris possessed in 1870, only sixteen were still standing in 1961 (Pinol and Garden, 2009: 156–
157). Nevertheless, the French capital had fifty-eight outdoor markets that operated two or
three days a week and served the most popular neighbourhoods in the south and east of the
city. On studying sixteen Western European countries in 1992, Nordin found only 3,100 mar-
ket halls in operation (Nordin, 1992). Compared with this, the outdoor markets and fairs that
open a few days each week or each year were easier to set up, more flexible and eighteen times
more numerous. Some recent studies on leading cities in Europe’s four Latin countries high-
light a growing trend in which market halls are replaced by outdoor markets, with peripheral
areas being supplied by this type of market. Turin, for example, still maintains today a network
of neighbourhood markets, which is as strong as that of Barcelona’s market halls but with the
difference that they are mainly outdoor markets (Coppo and Osello, 2006). In the United States

Figure 7.3 Clientele areas of Barcelona’s zonal municipal market halls, 2011

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 Manel Guàrdia, José Luis Oyón, and Sergi Garriga

as well, at the beginning of the 1970s, some voices defended farmers’ markets as fully functional
“anachronisms” (Pyle, 1971).They were more expensive than supermarkets but they had proven
themselves capable of meeting consumers’ demands for fresh products and quality produce from
the surrounding rural area.This revived the traditional contact between producers and shoppers,
a contact that had never actually disappeared in many European cities, especially those in the
South, with a thriving agriculture, intensively producing fruit and vegetables (Nordin, 2009).
Markets can not only compete with the quality of their products, they also offer an especially
attractive shopping experience which the new commercial formats often try to imitate without
much success. For this reason, as opposed to simplified evolutionary views, it should be recalled
that markets, in their different forms, have never ceased to operate, although they have adopted
very diverse forms in various contexts.
The theory of the two circuits of urban economy formulated by Milton Santos in the 1970s
with respect to developing world metropolises evidenced the fact that the process of modernisa-
tion of activities was accompanied by a paradoxical increase in poverty, giving rise to apparently
contradictory results (Santos, 1979; Sposito, 1996; Marina, 2012). These cities functioned like a
comprehensive system formed by interdependent complementary subsystems in a state of bal-
ance. This reality may be read in the morphology of these big cities and it explains the frequent
coexistence of traditional markets and modern commercial formats, just as may be seen in such
cities as Bangkok, Mumbai or Manila, or in African cities like Dakar, Kinshasa or Dar es Salaam,
which maintain centrally located markets full of vitality (Beeckmans and Bigon, 2016). The
subsequent globalisation process has confirmed that it was not a residual effect of modernisation
but rather a trait that is destined to endure. Even in such global cities as New York, London or
Tokyo, one may observe the clear expansion of informal work, and it is not surprising that the
enormous vitality of traditional markets may also be seen in the most dynamic cities like Seoul
or Singapore (Sassen, 1991). All in all, outdoor markets can no longer be considered to be mere
anachronisms but rather fully modern elements of the urban retailing mix.
The case of Lima is paradigmatic. As opposed to many other big cities in South America, Lima
maintains today, together with over one thousand open-air market sites, several hundred covered
and semi-covered markets that are evenly distributed across its sprawling territory (Leung, 2016).
These are over five times more numerous than the seventy-two supermarkets, which serve the
wealthiest areas, and supply the city’s very extensive working-class areas, representing over 70%
of basic foodstuff purchases. Likewise, although a very different case, it is surprising to observe
the enduring vitality of Hong Kong’s “wet markets” in contrast to the weakness of supermarkets
in the sale of fresh foods:

given the well-developed economy of Hong Kong, one would have expected super-
markets to dominate fresh food retailing and wet markets to be in retreat. But consum-
ers’ shopping and consumption culture, the effectiveness of wet markets in handling
consumers’ needs, and the appropriateness of the simple technology used by wet mar-
kets are at the basis of this dominance.
(Goldman, Rider and Ramaswami, 1999; Blake, 2013)

As from the 1970s, to this underlying resilience was added a clear movement of resistance to
the expansive hegemonic food model governed by the processes of capital accumulation, which
bases its principles on long-distance transport and on preservation techniques. The defence
of ‘proximity and seasonality/sensitivity to place and time, healthy food and environmentally
sound agriculture’ has led to a growing advocacy for farmers’ markets in the United States
and to the promotion of regional agriculture assuring the supply of fresh local products while

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providing support for farmers (Bernstein, 2015). Since 1976, the Council on the Environ-
ment of New York has organised and managed outdoor farmers’ markets, and since 1994 the
USDA has published the annual National Directory of Farmers’ Markets. The increase has been
quite significant, with the number of farmers’ markets rising from 1,775 in 1994 to 8,476 to
date. Although their market share is unquestionably small, the growth of the farmers’ markets
clearly indicates a reaction that is also unmistakably manifested in Europe, usually with a more
identity-based nuance relating to the various areas’ claims to their own food tradition. This has
been expressed in Italy and France through campaigns against the growing success of fast food.
Especially significant among the resistance movements is the Slow Food alternative, which has
not ceased to grow since the 1980s and which defends the need to preserve each ecoregion’s
own cuisine and crops. The defence of the Mediterranean diet is based in part on similar prin-
ciples. Its promotion as World Heritage is doubtless the result of growing social activism and the
coordinated initiative of various institutions. That said, it also highlights its status as a threatened
heritage asset in need of protection (García-Fuentes, Guàrdia and Oyón, 2014).
It is not by chance that countries advocating traditional food are precisely those which have
not only accumulated and maintained a richer gastronomic culture but also a commercial fab-
ric of fresh products which is less dependent on supermarkets and on big distribution chains.
It may appear paradoxical, but a clear correlation has been observed between the resilience of
small food commerce establishments and the strength of fresh food wholesale markets in such
countries. It is hard to separate cultural factors in food consumption from the evolution of the
structure and development of the food distribution sector, up to the point that ‘the structure
of the food retail and catering sectors . . . is the leading driver in modelling the structure of the
food wholesale industry’ (Cadilhon, Fearne, Hughes and Moustier, 2003). The consolidation of
well-stocked fresh food wholesale markets is a fundamental support for small-scale commerce,
whereas it is superfluous for big distribution chains or hypermarkets.
It is an undeniable fact that progressive commercial liberalisation and capital accumulation
processes have not ceased to promote, in recent decades, the globalisation of food commerce
throughout the world. A simple exploration on the Internet, however, reveals the great number
of new market halls that have been built in recent times, or renewed market halls, both inside
and outside of Europe. In many cases these structures feature very striking architectures, as one
finds in the recent Rotterdam Market or the new Ghent Market Hall. In the case of Barcelona,
after the crisis of the 1970s, the renewal of the city’s forty neighbourhood market halls, which
were in full operation, appeared to be a good strategy for recovering the fabric of a highly
deteriorated food commerce. These market halls were the tools for containing the effects of
hypermarkets, which were beginning to proliferate in urban peripheries.
An even greater abundance of uncovered markets of diverse characteristics are found in most
cities. It should not be forgotten, either, that in a world in which inequalities are growing itiner-
ant commerce continues to be an overwhelming reality, a phenomenon that is hard to organise
and regulate in many countries. As opposed to what could have been believed some years ago,
markets should not be considered anachronisms doomed to disappear, but rather one more
expression of the overall retail sphere which, in its various forms, appears, disappears or adapts
itself according to the economic, social and cultural conditioning factors in each place and each
time in history, to meet specific demands of consumers. As Fernand Braudel said many years ago:

If this elementary market has survived unchanged down the ages, it is surely because in
its robust simplicity it is unbeatable – because of the freshness of the perishable goods
it brings straight from local gardens and fields and because of its low prices.
(Braudel, 1979: 9–10)

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 8
HIGH STREET/MAIN STREET
Ian Mitchell

Introduction
There is no “High Street” in the centre of the large English city of Leeds. Neither is there in
the smaller city of Chester, a place long important as a retail centre out of proportion to its
size. In Manchester, High Street was and is a relatively insignificant street just outside the main
shopping area while in Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh, it is Princes Street not High Street that is
the city’s principal shopping street. By contrast, in the small Oxfordshire town of Burford the
“High Street” remains a very photogenic collection of independent shops which could easily
be regarded as typical of the English high street. Yet this may not be the case. Without trying
to impose a definition on high street (or main street in the American context), it is clearly not
limited to a street of that name. But neither is it simply any collection of shops in a town or vil-
lage. One defining characteristic in larger towns might be that it is located in the central business
district of the place in question. It should also contain a mix of different types of shops: different
in terms of both the types of goods offered for sale and ownership and management structures.
A typical high street/main street will provide shops that meet consumers’ needs for everyday
essentials, for fashion items and consumer durables. At least from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards it will also include department stores, chain stores and independent shops. It will not
be a street specialising in one type of trade; nor will it be a collection of basic shops grouped
around a market place. However, from at least the late seventeenth century, if not earlier, it will
be the principal shopping street of the town or city.
This chapter takes a broadly chronological view of the evolution of high street/main street
in Europe and in the United States of America. It begins by considering its origins in the
development of shopping in the medieval and early modern period. It then looks at the period
between 1700 and 1850 when the high street became a place of display and leisure.This was the
beginning of the era of shop widow browsing and was the age of the flaneur. Section 3 consid-
ers the era of the classic high street/main street when the mix of large stores and independent
shops dominated shopping and drew consumers into the downtown areas of both American and
European cities. The final section discusses current issues around the decline or possible demise
of high street as shopping moves away from urban centres into out-of-town shopping malls or
into the virtual world of the Internet. Is there any future for high street/main street?

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Origins and early development to 1700

Although shops and shopping streets were clearly important in classical antiquity, this chapter
takes the later medieval period in Italy and north-west Europe as its starting point. This is partly
because of the availability of source material, but mainly because it is then possible to trace fairly
continuous change and development without a significant break in the story in the late antiquity/
early-medieval period. Shopping streets were well-established in Italian cities by at least the late
fourteenth century or early fifteenth. The best shops were generally located along major thor-
oughfares or around key bridges (Blondé et al., 2006). In Siena the Strada Romana was effectively
a shop front for the city’s luxury industries, and many palaces built in the fifteenth century incor-
porated shops (Nevola, 2006).There was an attempt in 1452 to move the butchers from the centre
of the city so that best locations would be occupied by the more prestigious trades. In Naples
there was a clustering of luxury trades such as mercers, cotton sellers, goldsmiths and armourers
in the principal central streets.The same was true of Venice, particularly around the Rialto and the
streets of the mercers and drapers. As in Siena, shops were often included in the ground floors of
palaces and let out to provide rental income (Welch, 2005, pp. 99, 134–135)). In England, London
Bridge was important, and Cheapside even more so, boasting around 400 shops as early as 1300
(Morrison, 2003, p. 19).
From the thirteenth century onwards in England, rows of shops were erected on a specu-
lative basis by religious bodies, colleges and wealthy merchants. Others were simply carved
out of existing house space. Either way, such early shops were not necessarily very impressive.
Many were small, perhaps a mere five feet wide by 12 to 18 feet deep. They may have occu-
pied the front of the service wing of a house; or have been lock-ups which had no means of
communication with the main house. Most were open-fronted and stall like with much sell-
ing taking place through the window opening, although more valuable goods were probably
sold from inside the shop. Somewhat later, goods were displayed and sold on large solid bulks
of wood which projected beneath the shop window opening (Morrison, 2003, pp. 21–27).
Italian shops were similar, often rented from institutions and rarely glazed: curtains were used
to provide shelter from heat and dust. But they could be very well-stocked with valuable
items. Venetian shops were used to display the wealth of the city and could seem like ware-
houses to those who visited. The internal space provided locations for gossip and gambling
as well as trading. Although many high-class medieval shops specialised in particular types of
goods, others were very much general stores: a fifteenth century Prato cheesemonger sold
sewing materials, glassware, ironware and a wide range of foodstuffs as well as cheese (Welch,
2005, pp. 150–151).
Street shops have always had to compete with other outlets. In the medieval period many
shops were located in or near the market place and the distinction between shop and stall
was sometimes rather blurred. In England, selds were also an important part of the retail mix.
These were large, hall-like buildings set back from the street and which could accommodate a
large number of traders – perhaps not unlike the nineteenth century market halls. Selds were
found particularly in London but also in Winchester and Chester (Keene, 2006). From the late
sixteenth century onwards, purpose-built shopping galleries were of particular importance in
London. There were two floors of small shops in the Royal Exchange which was completed in
1567. Around a quarter of these were occupied by haberdashers and one-tenth by mercers. By
the end of the century there was a waiting list for shops. The New Exchange which opened in
the Strand in 1609 was sometimes called England’s Rialto. Shops were larger than in the Royal
Exchange, and goods on sale included such luxuries as porcelain, glass, imported oriental items
and high-quality textiles. Galleries were places to be seen and to socialise; they were public

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places, but also controlled spaces and protected consumers from the dirt and noise of the street
(Baer, 2007; Peck, 2005, pp. 47–52). The gallery rather than the street was the fashionable place
to shop in seventeenth century London.
Across the North Sea, shopping streets were becoming increasingly important in the Low
Countries. Although Antwerp was experiencing economic decline from at least the mid-sev-
enteenth century, its retail sector continued to grow and to flourish, implying that retailing was
more influenced by shifts in taste and consumer behaviour than by the city’s wealth. During
the seventeenth century, retailers selling everyday essentials such as food tended to move away
from expensive central locations while specialist and luxury retailers congregated in the centre
of the city and on arterial roads. Similar types of shops often still clustered together and luxury
goods continued to be sold at fairs. Although shopping streets were becoming more sophisti-
cated, Antwerp was not perceived as a fashionable shopping centre and much selling continued
to take place through open doors and windows (Blondé and van Damme, 2010; van Damme
and van Aert, 2014). By the end of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was the most planned
and organised large urban space in Europe, but even so its retail landscape lagged behind that of
Paris or London. Many shops still resembled stalls, though by at least the seventeenth century
there were some specialist shopping streets such as Warmoesstraat where metalware and fabrics
were to be found. (Lesger, 2014).
The second half of the seventeenth century saw significant changes to the retail landscape
in England. Shopping galleries were becoming less fashionable and the most fashion-conscious
retailers in London were increasingly to be found not in the traditional shopping streets of
the City but in the newly fashionable West End, including Covent Garden, the Strand and the
area around St James (Morrison, 2003, pp. 33–34). There were also indications of changes to
come, including increased regulation of market trading and the beginnings of the sort of urban
improvement that would try to move markets and street trading away from the most fashion-
able streets. Changes such as these tended to privilege fixed shop retailing, often with intimate
selling spaces, at the expense of other forms of retailing (Walsh, 2014). The fashionable high
street with its mix of different types of shops and with opportunities for window shopping and
sociability was beginning to be a part of the townscape of larger provincial English towns. As
Celia Fiennes noted around the turn of the century, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘their shops are
good and are of distinct trades, not selling many kinds of things in one shop as is the custom
in most country towns and cittys’. She also commented on the fashionable walks and public
gardens (Morris, 1984).

The high street and polite shopping 1700–1850

Urban improvement was a key feature of eighteenth century provincial England. As well as the
construction of some imposing public buildings, the laying out of squares and the building of
fashionable terraces of houses for the growing middle classes, there was a perceived need to inte-
grate separate buildings into an harmonious streetscape and to improve the quantity and quality
of the space within it. Ideally streets were to be wide, straight and open with obstructions cleared
away. Better paving, lighting and cleansing were also desired and often achieved (Borsay, 1989).
Shopping and leisure were increasingly intertwined and so streets had to be the backdrop for
encounters and performances that reflected the prevailing attitudes of polite society. By the mid-
dle of the eighteenth century, most respectable English towns had some form of public oil light-
ing in their streets, thus permitting their use after dark for socialising and shopping. Many shops
were also lit at night, adding to the illumination of the street and facilitating window shopping.
Many shopkeepers improved the appearance of their shops in order to project a positive image;

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others were ordered to remove bulk windows and other projections that obstructed footways
(Stobart et al., 2007, pp. 86–97).
Most British towns had their well-identified principal shopping streets. These could range
from the very glamorous to the more ordinary provincial high street. In early nineteenth cen-
tury London there were two main series of shopping streets stretching from east to west: Mile
End, through Cornhill to The Strand; and Shoreditch to Oxford Street. The creation of Regent
Street in the 1810s with its palace-like shops and broad windows set a new standard for retail
elegance (Adburgham, 1981, pp. 5–12). Elsewhere, Castle Street, Dale Street and Bold Street
emerged as the principal shopping streets of Liverpool, with Foregate Street in Worcester, East-
gate and Bridge Street Rows in Chester, Milsom Street in Bath, and Highgait (later High Street)
in Dundee having the same role. Even in the small Cheshire town of Nantwich it was possible
to pick out Hospital Street and High Street as the most fashionable streets (Stobart et al., 2007).
Local inhabitants would of course be familiar with these streets, but in the late eighteenth cen-
tury and early nineteenth information about shopping streets was increasingly widely available.
Initially this might have taken the form of urban maps and prospects, and then towards the end
of the eighteenth century trade directories providing addresses for the principal retailers in
many provincial towns, and in some cases for a much wider range of traders (Mitchell, 2014,
pp. 38–39).
The nature of some of this information suggests that shopping streets were being perceived,
alongside public buildings, as tourist attractions. This was not only true of Britain. Eighteenth
century travellers’ accounts of Paris almost invariably mentioned shops and described the
most important shopping areas of the city. By the later eighteenth century, Parisian shops had
acquired the status of tourist places and key shopping streets were described in guide books.
Individual shops were also described giving travellers information about where to obtain the
best luxury goods (Walsh, 2000; Coquery, 2011). In England, William West’s History of War-
wickshire, published in 1830, took the reader on a tour of Birmingham, tracing out six circuits
each centred on the Royal Hotel at the top of Colmore Row. West pointed out shops as well
as public buildings, and took the stroller inside many of them, emphasising the way in which
Birmingham’s status was based on commerce and industry. New Street’s ‘well stocked shops,
in articles of taste, of luxury, and of general consumption’ were singled out for particular
attention (Stobart et al., 2007, p. 103). Chester’s principal streets were illustrated by George
Batenham in the 1810s. Shops, both fashionable ones with bow windows and more traditional
ones with simple boards, are depicted, but the one street surprisingly ignored by Batenham
was the south side of Eastgate Street and its row which was where the city’s best shops were
located (Batenham, 1816).
The appearance of individual shops was also changing in this period. The shop front was
very important as it needed to lure passers-by off the street and into the shop. Glass was prob-
ably being used by London’s most fashionable retailers from about the mid-seventeenth century
onwards, but open fronts could still be found in the early eighteenth century. By 1750, Cheap-
side was lined by shops with glass windows, modest frames and hanging signs. The latter were
replaced in the 1760s by fascias with the shopkeeper’s name and some indication of his or her
business on them. Bow fronts were generally popular as they made displays more conspicuous
and admitted more light. Their size might, however, be limited as in Bath to minimise obstruc-
tions on the pavement. Plate glass was available from the late eighteenth century but was very
expensive while Argand lamps improved illumination inside shops. Bow fronts remained com-
mon until the mid-nineteenth century when sheet glass made large panes in shopfronts pos-
sible, thus enhancing window displays (Morrison, 2003, pp. 41–47). Going inside the shop, the
potential customer might be confronted by a counter, drawers and possibly some glazed display

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cabinets. He or she might be able to wander through a series of showrooms. Chairs, tables and
looking glasses created a congenial setting and gave an impression of politeness and reliability.
Some customers might penetrate the more intimate areas of the shop to be entertained by the
shopkeeper, and perhaps be offered advice about fashion or the latest novelties (Hann and Sto-
bart, 2005).
Yet it would be misleading to suggest that the high street of the eighteenth century and
early nineteenth was all about fashion and politeness. It was very often contested space. Shop-
ping streets were still often close to the traditional market place with its dirt, noise and smells,
especially if there was a fish market as part of it. The market place might also be an area where
traditional pastimes continued to take place and where people who did not form part of polite
society gathered. Bull-baiting and performing bears could be found in the heart of provincial
towns well into the nineteenth century, including “polite” locations like Chester. Street traders
and hawkers could be a disruptive influence impacting on the respectability of shopping streets
(Stobart et al., 2007, pp. 105–109). Nor was the much desired regularity of the streetscape nec-
essarily achieved in practice. The Batenham etchings of Chester streets reveal a row of butch-
ers’ stalls in Bridge Street directly below some the city’s most fashionable shops. In Northgate
Street a row of respectable looking glazed shops, including gunsmith, linen draper and grocer
terminates in an old-fashioned open-fronted butcher’s business (Batenham, 1816). Chester was
unusual because of its rows: covered passageways with shops at the rear running above the street
level shops. Row level shops were generally more prestigious than those at street level. Those
shopping there were certainly protected from the filth of the street; but the rows must have been
relatively dark before the advent of modern street lighting and window shopping may have been
quite difficult (Figure 8.1).
Paris and London were undoubtedly the leading retail centres in Europe in this period.
Paris, in particular, had a reputation for the very best luxury shops. The Rue St Honoré and its

Figure 8.1 Northgate Street, Chester, c.1810

Source: T. Hughes, Ancient Chester: A Series of Illustrations of This Old City, London, 1880.

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environs emerged in the eighteenth century as the principal area for retailing silks, fine furnish-
ings and fashionable dress. Some Parisian mercers stocked English goods and shop design was
similar to that of the best London shops (Sargentson, 1996). Not all Paris shopping streets were
elegant: many were narrow, muddy, smelly and lacked pavements. Arcades and bazaars, provid-
ing offstreet shopping, were important in the first half of the nineteenth century (Gillet, 2014).
There was gradual change in the Low Countries. In Antwerp, shopping for pleasure was not
unknown but was not on the same scale as in Paris or London, while daily necessities were
increasingly bought from shops rather than markets (van Damme and Van Aert, 2014). Brussels
was becoming a significant shopping centre in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,
with the best streets for consumer goods being those around the Grand Place; as in Paris arcades
were important (Arnout, 2014). Amsterdam also saw the emergence of a central shopping hub
during the eighteenth century with Nieuwendijk as the most important shopping street while
luxury goods, fashion items, art objects and booths were found in Warmoesstraat, Kalverstraat
and Dam Square. Shops selling comparison goods dominated the main arterial routes into the
city. Shops were getting larger and displaying goods more effectively, but in 1800 still did not
really bear comparison with the best London shops (Lesger, 2011, 2014). The economy of The
Hague was based on consumption rather than production and its central thoroughfares were
well-established as the places to shop and to be seen by the mid-eighteenth century (Furnée,
2014). Germany tended to lag behind other Western European countries, with markets and
fairs remaining more important and shopping streets relatively undeveloped until well into the
nineteenth century (Homburg, 2014).
By 1850 there were recognisable high streets in towns and cities throughout Western Europe.
They were places where a wide range of goods could be bought, ranging from items for every-
day consumption, through more specialised foods found, for example in Italian warehouses in
England, to a growing range of consumer and household goods and to imported luxuries like
high-quality textiles. Most shops were small, though large emporia, warehouses for shoes and
clothing and even shops divided into several departments were becoming increasingly common
in the first half of the nineteenth century. The high street was also a place to be seen, to socialise
and to enjoy shopping, or window shopping, as a leisure pursuit. High street shops continued to
face competition from markets, and the building of large market halls from the 1820s onwards
probably intensified this, not only for basic consumables but also for a growing range of con-
sumer goods.There was also continued competition from street traders and, in some places, from
more novel forms of retail outlets such as covered arcades and bazaars. Two key components
of the classic high street, the department store and the multiple store, were yet to make their
appearance.

The classic high street/main street 1850–1970

High street (with or without capital letters) was rarely a single street, but more often a cluster of
shopping streets in the centre of a town or city and still in the late nineteenth century frequently
near the market place. For example in the medium sized English industrial town of Chester-
field, the area around the traditional open market was home in the 1890s to grocers, drapers,
clothes sellers, shoemakers, ironmongers, glass and china dealers, jewellers and watchmakers
among other retailers. The local co-operative society was also present, as were two of the early
multiple stores: the Singer Sewing Machine Company, whose first shop had been in Glasgow in
1856, and Boots the Chemists. A branch of Liptons, the grocers and provision dealers, opened
soon afterwards. There was nothing special about Chesterfield and similar retail provision could
be found in many other places. Nor was the high street confined to urban areas. The small

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Derbyshire mining village of Stonebroom, where prior to 1860 there were only a handful of
houses, boasted over twenty shops along its high street in 1893. These included three grocers, a
confectioner, a fishmonger, two shoe dealers, two drapers, an ironmonger, a chemist, and a glass
and china dealer (Kelly, 1893). In Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis, the Woolworths store which
opened in the town’s high the street (The Narrows) in 1935 became the focal point for islanders’
social and commercial life (Morrison, 2015, p. 96).The general high street was a standard feature
of places large and small (Figure 8.2).
There was nothing static about the high street in Britain or elsewhere. Individual streets
could undergo significant change, often in association with street improvements; and in some
places the location of the central shopping area could move over time. The redevelopment
of Deansgate in Manchester offers a good example of the former. By the late 1860s, the city
authorities were determined to widen the street, which had long been one of the city’s principal
shopping streets but which had not really kept up with the times. Shopkeepers along Deansgate
were, however, less than enthusiastic about the local authority’s plans, particularly when they
involved compulsory purchase and demolition of property. The owners of Kendal Milne, the
city’s leading drapery and home furnishing store, were strongly opposed to the widening of the
street, but were eventually compelled to come to an agreement with the Council and accept a
significant amount of compensation which was used to finance the building of a spacious and
spectacular new store. Another property owner made a deal with the Council that enabled him
to build an arcade. The Council’s plans for modernisation prevailed and Manchester got the

Figure 8.2 High Street, Chesterfield, England

Source: Author’s own photograph.

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wide shopping street it needed; but with the reluctant acquiescence rather than whole-hearted
support of some large retailers (Bertramsen, 2003). In Bradford, the Council’s plans for street
improvement also required the co-operation of one of the town’s largest retailers: the draper and
house furnisher Brown Muff. In this instance the shopkeepers were more enthusiastic. Brown
Muff got a coveted island site for their new store and the town got its wider streets (Bradford
Observer 29 April 1871). In Glasgow, Sauchiehall Street was developed as part of the city’s
westward expansion in the early nineteenth century and although originally mainly residential
had become one of the city’s finest and most prestigious shopping streets by the early twenti-
eth century and home to several upmarket department stores ( Jones, 2010). Probably the most
grandiose street improvement scheme in Europe was, of course, Haussmann’s bulldozing of old
Paris and replacing narrow streets with wide boulevards.These became the stage set for fashion-
able Parisian department stores (Trentmann, 2016; Miller, 1981).
Large glazed windows and internal illumination made high street shops a real spectacle in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly around Christmas time, newspapers were
frequently ecstatic in their descriptions of shop window displays. The high street would have
been a crowded, noisy and at times a slightly dangerous place. The outward appearance of shops
continued to change. In England, there were some cast iron shopfronts in the mid-nineteenth
century, for example in South King Street, Manchester. There was also a fashion for lettering
advertising the business to spread all over the shop front. In the early twentieth century entrance
lobbies were favoured because they increased the display area; and in some cases shop entrances
were set back from the building line and the intervening space occupied by showcases. After
World War I, there was a reaction against some of the more elaborate styles with retailers favour-
ing cleaner lines, geometric shapes and minimal decoration (Morrison, 2003, pp. 51–59).The art
deco style Woolworth’s in Dumbarton typified the updating of traditional high streets, although
such striking modern storefronts did not necessarily blend in with neighbouring historic build-
ings (Morrison, 2015, p. 100). More recently there has been a loss of individuality, particularly as
multiple stores have used shopfronts to project a corporate image, leading to the accusation that
high streets appear simply to be cloned.
Although it has generally been true that there has been much continuity, often over several
centuries, with regard to the location of the high street, there have been exceptions to this.
The West End continued to be London’s principal fashionable shopping area, but the later
nineteenth century saw the emergence of other areas such as Kensington and Bayswater as well
as the proliferation of high streets in London suburbs (Adburgham, 1981). It was hard in some
towns to decide which the best locations were, and in a sense therefore where the high street
was, particularly if these did not seem fixed. For example, in Hanley, one of the constituent
towns of Stoke-on-Trent, the area around the Market Square was the centre of its shopping
district in the second half of the nineteenth century; by the 1930s this had become the north-
ern boundary of the central shopping area with Piccadilly and Parliament Row further south
becoming more significant. Recently, there has been a shift back to the Market Square area.
One result of this was that the town’s department stores became locked into the area near the
Market Square and effectively formed the north-western boundary of the central shopping
district (Stobart, 2001). Derby’s central shopping area has been moving southwards for at least
the last century and a half and is now over half a kilometre south of its earliest location at the
northern tip of the town centre around Iron Gate and Sadler Gate. This southward drift was
completed in the twenty-first century with the opening of a large shopping mall at the southern
end of St Peter’s Street.
Two northern industrial English cities illustrate different ways in which the high street devel-
oped in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Leeds, the traditional principal shopping

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area around Boar Lane, Briggate and Vicar Lane was transformed between 1870 and 1914 from
a slightly old-fashioned, and in places slightly unsavoury, district into one of the most fashionable
shopping locations in provincial England. This was achieved thanks both to a fairly pro-active
local authority prepared to initiate and invest in street improvements and in a reconstructed and
grandiose market hall; and to the availability of potential additional retail space in the heart of the
city. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century ancient courtyards behind Briggate were trans-
formed into shopping arcades populated by relatively small but fashionable shops. These arcades,
coupled with Kirkgate market hall may to some extent have fulfilled a similar role to that of the
earlier department stores in allowing shoppers to search for and buy a wide range of goods in an
enclosed space.The city was not at the forefront of those places in which large department stores
were beginning to emerge in the late nineteenth century, although it was well supplied with
such stores a little later in the twentieth century. By 1909 Leeds’ retailers were happy to promote
their city as ‘the shopping centre of the north’ (Burt and Grady, 1992; Grady, 1980).
Sheffield, just under 50 kilometres to the south of Leeds, had a less clearly defined shop-
ping centre in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. There were some large and
fashionable shops, but these could still be in close proximity to small workshops where metal
working and cutlery manufacture were being carried on. This meant that there was a relatively
high proportion of non-retail businesses in the central area. On the other hand, the city had at
least three substantial early department stores – or at least large stores on their way to becom-
ing department stores: Cockaynes established in 1829; Walsh’s founded in 1875 by John Walsh,
a former Cockayne’s buyer and who built a spectacular new store in the 1890s with cast iron
columns and huge plate glass windows; and Coles located on a corner site which became a
favourite meeting place for Sheffield’s inhabitants. These three stores, located quite close to
each other, became the anchor point for the city’s central shopping area in the early twentieth
century and essentially defined that area. In Sheffield, large independent retailers rather that
the local authority were the driving force in shaping the character of the central shopping area
(Hey, 2010; Dallman, 2002).
Transport links were important in the shaping and reshaping of the high street. The coming
of the railways enabled consumers to travel further and possibly to patronise larger centres at
the expense of smaller ones. In the second half of the nineteenth century Chambers of Trade,
largely composed of shopkeepers, lobbied railway companies for cheap fares from outlying
villages and smaller towns to the towns where they were located. Municipal tramways were
also significant in enabling many more people to travel cheaply into the centre of town. The
Bradford Chamber of Trade was in constant contact with the town’s Transport Department
to ensure that shopkeepers were not disadvantaged by changes to the tram network. In 1903 it
protested strongly against the withdrawal of the tram service from Heaton and Saltaire to Raw-
son Square because of the impact on retailers in many of the main shopping streets in the town.
The service appears not to have been re-instated even though the Chamber of Trade presented
a petition with 3,000 signatures (Bradford, 1903).
In many other parts of Europe and the wider world, high street/main street consolidated its
position as the key urban shopping area in the period after 1850. There were of course signifi-
cant national differences. The wide boulevards of Paris lined with department stores and fash-
ionable boutiques were not really replicated elsewhere. Department stores certainly represented
a challenge to more traditional shops, but to the extent that they stimulated consumer demand
they may have benefitted those smaller shops that were prepared to adapt in the face of com-
petition. Thus a high street with a mixture of shop types became the norm. This seems to have
been true in Besançon in France (Gillet, 2014). In Brussels, the north-south axis became more
important after about 1850 with Rue Neuve emerging as the main fashionable shopping street.

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Arcades were important and successful; attempts to decentralise markets into purpose-built
market halls less so (Arnout, 2014). New shopping streets were laid out in The Hague in the
second half of the nineteenth century, with pavements and with more impressive shop archi-
tecture. By the end of the century the principal shopping streets were the place to be seen with
the daily afternoon promenade a key feature (Furnée, 2014). Display windows were important
in German shopping streets from the middle of the century, permitting window shopping but
also separating the buyer from the merchandise and perhaps creating an air of mystery about the
products (Spiekermann, 2000).
Market and street traders continued to compete with shop retailers in most countries and in
some cases this had an impact on the nature of the high street. For example, in mid-nineteenth
century Denmark, markets were favoured as the hub of urban food provisioning. This did not
suit the growing number of upmarket shopkeepers who were concerned about the plebeian
atmosphere of markets located close to the gradually emerging fashionable shopping streets.
Shopkeepers prevailed in this case and markets were relocated to outlying districts allowing
the high street to become a polite space (Toftgaard, 2016). In Barcelona, dispersed market halls
remained the focus for much food shopping well into the twentieth century. Arterial routes out
of the city were the main locations for high street shops; the most central thoroughfares had
no food shops (Fava et al., 2016). Japan’s retailing sector had long been dominated by itinerant
traders, although the late nineteenth century saw an increase in fixed shops and the first depart-
ment store was opened in 1904. The development of shopping streets was encouraged by the
government in the Meiji period with Ginza Street in Tokyo laid out in the 1870s and soon
becoming the most famous shopping street in the country (Hirano, 1999).

Main Street, USA

By the late nineteenth century, ‘although not every [American] town had a skyscraper or an
opera house, they all had a Main Street’ (Isenberg, 2004, p. 7). For a period of a little less than one
hundred years from the mid-nineteenth century, downtown was the dominant shopping area in
cities and towns across the nation. Downtown was arguably a uniquely American phenomenon:
the place to work, shop and do business; but not to live.This geographical separation of residen-
tial and business was taken further in the United States than in European cities where separation
was achieved vertically: living above the shop. But main street was not just about shopping and
commerce. It was also the embodiment of an urban and cultural ideal, the bastion of commu-
nity-minded and small-scale enterprise. It was the beating heart of thousands of small towns, a
place for interaction and negotiation of difference. Postcards depicting main street projected an
image of a managed, simplified and beautified retail corridor. Reality did not always match up
to the image A typical small town main street would include a grocery store, a clothing store, a
drugstore, and a gasoline station. Almost all were small, independently owned stores with annual
sales of under $12,000 by the 1920s. There could be a depressing sameness about small town
main street, and buildings were often undistinguished (Esperdy, 2008; Isenberg, 2004).
In larger cities, downtown was generally a small area: about one-third of a square mile in
late-nineteenth-century Boston. It was also noisy, dirty and very congested. It was said that
women shoppers in Boston had to hold paper boxes above their heads to prevent them from
being crushed. The location of main street was quite unstable in many cities. In New York, for
example, the most fashionable area shifted from Broadway to Fifth Avenue in the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth; in Seattle it moved northwards; in Philadelphia westwards. Nor did
downtown grow much in size, at least horizontally (Figure 8.3). Instead it grew vertically with
ever taller department stores of twenty stories or more. Although uncomfortable at times, this

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Figure 8.3 Main Street, Buffalo, c.1905

Source: Author’s own postcard.

highly concentrated business and retail area had advantages both for shoppers and businesses.
Consumers could combine work and shopping in a single journey, could find all they wanted
on main street and could compare quality and prices; shops benefitted because a shopper who
intended to purchase from one or two shops would almost certainly browse or buy in several
more simply because they were so close together (Fogelson, 2001).
The success of main street depended on good access, and the presence of department stores.
Rapid mass transport, particularly steam and elevated railways, was essential. By 1890, there were
32,000 streetcars in America operating on 6,000 miles of line; Philadelphia alone had 277 miles
of street railways, over five times as many miles per head as Paris. But there were limits as to how
far surface transport could cope with increasing demand and from the late 1890s the emphasis
was on building subways (Fogelson, 2001, pp. 45, 61–63). Department stores can be dated to
the last third of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, A.T. Stewart in New York created a new
kind of shopping environment for the female market where it was possible to browse without
buying and where shopping became a major source of urban leisure. Later in the century stores
like Marshall Field’s in Chicago were palaces of consumption offering a portal to luxury goods,
services and amenities. Department stores were the anchors of main street and downtown; if a
store moved, the central retail district tended to follow (Howard, 2015).
By the 1920s, there were signs that main street was in trouble. Several factors contributed
to this. People were increasingly using cars rather than mass transit to reach downtown even
though this added to traffic congestion and parking places were in short supply. Main street
businesses responded by trying to persuade the authorities to make it easier to access downtown
by car. But if it was easier to get in, it was also easier to get out and shop in peripheral districts
(Fogelson, 2001). Chain stores, which were becoming increasingly dominant in American retail-
ing, tended to prefer to locate in outlying districts; and some department stores, such as Marshall
Field, were opening suburban branches. Retail trade was growing more quickly in the periphery

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than in the centre. Main street retailers were also perhaps partly to blame. Their focus was very
much on female shoppers, particularly respectable middle class housewives who were responsible
for much consumer spending.The Afro-American market was almost completely ignored. It was
wrongly assumed that Afro-Americans were only interested in bargain basements and had little
sense of style; they were generally expected to keep a low profile and use segregated facilities. At
the end of the nineteenth century black-owned businesses were well integrated into downtown
but over the following twenty or so years many were pushed to the fringe or to sites near black
residential districts. Black main streets emerged such as Auburn Avenue in Atlanta (Isenberg,
2004). Even before the depression hit, between 10% and 15% of main street businesses failed
each year, and between 30% and 60% of new main street businesses failed in their first year. The
depression made matters worse: by 1933 the same number of stores as in 1929 competed for half
as much business (Esperdy, 2008).
In the early 1930s main street shops often looked outdated, while empty business units
blighted the whole area. But main street was not going to be allowed to die. Instead it would
be given a makeover, and would be actively promoted. Starting from the assumption that first
impressions were very important, the modernisation of main street focused on the storefront.
In a 10-year period from the mid-1930s, $5 billion dollars was spent by financial institutions,
property owners and retailers on store modernisation, most notably on new facades. As part of
the New Deal, low-interest federally insured loans were made available; architects and builders
were persuaded that their local main street offered profitable work; and retailers were told that
the increased profits from modernisation meant that the work would soon pay for itself. The
late nineteenth-century downtown district of Gainesville, Georgia was flattened by a tornado
in 1936; 2 years later main street had been rebuilt with uniform building lines and harmonised
facades and signage but without loss of storefront individuality. Westlaco in Texas was given a
makeover in Spanish Mission style, but with modern glass storefronts. In Newark, the Star Elec-
trical Supply Company modernised its turn of the century building by using wraparound light
blue glazed terra-cotta for its facade and large sans serif letters for its advertising display. Modern
materials such as structural glass, laminated plastic and enamelled steel were widely used and
the new storefronts helped disseminate European modernist architecture in America (Esperdy,
2008).
There had been business associations to promote downtown since at least the 1920s in, for
example, Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland. These campaigned for improvements such as better
lighting, cleaner streets and reduced congestion. By the 1930s there was growing concern about
the need to counter the spectre of decentralisation. The Downtown Property Owners Associa-
tion of Oakland aimed to stop the movement of retail trade to uptown Oakland. In June 1944.
the Downtown Association of Milwaukee sponsored a Downtown Day, using the slogan ‘Shop
where you can supply all your needs’ and encouraging shoppers to take in a restaurant and a
show as well. But no amount of modernisation or promotion could buck the long-term trends
towards decentralised shopping in outlying business districts. In the admittedly exceptionally
decentralised Los Angeles, the downtown share of retail trade fell from 30% in 1929 to 11% in
1948 (Fogelson, 2001).
These trends continued after World War II. Although large retailers tried to remain loyal to
downtown, retaining flagship stores on main street, branch stores increasingly showed bigger
profits and smaller expenses than those in the centre. From the mid-1950s onwards, department
stores in landmark downtown locations were being closed down. But even in the mid-1960s
it was far from clear that in smaller towns the main street department store was on its way out.
In 1963 towns of fewer than 10,000 people were served by 218 department stores and those
of between 10,000 and 24,999 by 764 such stores (Howard, 2015, pp. 144–145). What was

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increasingly clear, however, was that the fate of main street rested with Afro-American shop-
pers, not white suburban women. Black shoppers were generous downtown spenders, but were
still expected to keep a low profile and shop mainly in bargain basements or other low-end
businesses (Isenberg, 2004). There may have been missed opportunities here. There was some
renewed investment in the postwar years, but with Americans increasingly moving to the sub-
urbs it was hardly surprising that retail sales were falling in many central business districts. Main
street might hold memories; but it was no longer the place to shop except for budget items.
The closure of old-established department stores, like G. Fox & Co. in Hartford, Connecticut in
1992, might have been mourned by former customers, but most were elderly (Fogelson, 2001,
p. 1). Such stores no longer appealed to a younger generation.
In the early 1970s Cardiff in south Wales and Charlotte in North Carolina were cities of a
similar size, around 300,000 population, and a similar retail catchment area. Both had substantial
city centre retail areas, especially for comparison goods. By 1990, central Cardiff ’s gross retail
area had increased, though with a shift from convenience retailing to non-food and variety
stores; Charlotte’s had shrunk dramatically and three major department stores had closed. There
had been no attempt by local government in Charlotte to stop the shift out of town whereas in
Cardiff the local authority had both opposed major out-of-town retail development and pedes-
trianised the main shopping area (Guy and Lord, 1993). Much has no doubt changed since, but
public policy can have an impact on high street/main street. Even so, as car ownership grew
and shoppers became more mobile it was increasingly likely that consumers would desert the
main street of smaller towns in favour of big cities; or in due course in favour of out-of-town
shopping. Main street might retain its glamour in New York, San Francisco and a handful of
other major cities; but in small town America the independent department stores have gone
and with them the kudos of main street (Howard, 2015). The rise of the mass discounters; the
growth of regional shopping centres and of shopping malls; consumer preference for shopping
out-of-town where parking is easier; and the growth of Internet shopping have all impacted on
downtown and main street. One effect of this is that retail space as a whole (and not just the
inside of shops) is increasingly privately owned and managed; there is consequential loss of space
for free speech and free assembly (Cohen, 2004, pp. 277–278).

High street/main street in crisis 1970 to present day

Montague Burton opened his first shop in Chesterfield in 1904. Since then there has been a
Burton’s menswear shop in the centre of Chesterfield, as in many other towns and cities, until
June 2016. Its art deco shop in the town’s High Street now (2017) stands empty, the business
having relocated to an out-of-town Tesco supermarket. Burtons was just one of the shops
that would have been found in any self-respecting high street in Britain in the last three-
quarters of the twentieth century. Also to be found there would probably have been at least
one department store (more in large cities); several multiple stores specialising in menswear,
women’s clothing and household goods; and variety stores like Marks and Spencer, Boots and
Woolworths. These big names attracted consumers to high street; but because they were the
ones that could best afford high rents, they tended to push smaller independent stores to the
periphery of the town. High streets lost their individual character and every town began to
look the same (Stobart, 2008). But even the big chains were not immune from change. The
fate of Burtons in Chesterfield is just one illustration of the crisis that many commentators
perceive to have faced the high street in the last two decades or so. Is the British high street
about to share the fate of small town American main street, or will it conform more closely
to the European experience?

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In a survey of the state of retailing in the European Union in the early twenty-first century,
Stewart Howe argued that in the 1980s Britain was essentially alone in Europe in its ‘virtual
abandonment of any retail planning’ (Howe, 2003, p. 206). While generalisations are dangerous
given the wide variations in retailing across the European Union, there are arguably a number
of reasons to suspect that the high street in continental Europe may be in a less parlous state
than in the UK or US. First, and particularly in southern European countries like Spain, Italy
and Greece, there is still a strong tradition of small, independent and often family businesses.
Secondly, Britain has been unusual in Europe in that town centre redevelopment has often
included a significant element of retailing, particularly in the form large shopping malls such as
the Arndale Centre in Manchester or Highcross in Leicester. Branches of multiple and depart-
ment stores which once dominated the high street are now located in such malls. In much
of the rest of Europe, new retail developments have tended to be out-of-town. These clearly
impact on city centre retailing, but arguably less so than urban malls. Thirdly, government in
many European Union countries, including France and Germany, has been more pro-active in
trying to prevent socially adverse retail development and in protecting smaller shops. In France,
government policy may even have been partially responsible for the revival of city centre depart-
ment stores. The European high street faces the same challenges from out-of-town centres and
the Internet but is likely to be more resilient than American main street was, or the British high
street appeared to be in the last few decades (Howe, 2003; Walker, 1996).
The scale of the problem in the UK was apparent from market research conducted in the
mid-1990s. This identified an over-supply of poor quality town centre retail space while the
demand for out-of-town space was high and growing. Shoppers were attracted to out-of-town
retail parks because of their convenience; and to city centres because of the wide choice of
shops. High streets in small towns had little to offer and their customer base was essentially older
and poorer people (Mintel, 1995). Matters were even worse by the time Mary Portas was asked
in 2011 by the British Prime Minister to conduct an independent review into the state of the
high street. Her findings were bleak: town centre vacancy rates had doubled over the previous
2 years and total consumer spend away from the high street was over 50%. She summarised her
findings as follows: ‘Although some high streets are thriving, most have a fight on their hands.
Many are now sickly, others are on the critical list and some are now dead.We cannot and should
not attempt to save every high street’ (Portas, 2011).
Identifying the causes of the crisis in the high street was relatively straightforward. Some were
to do with the relationship between local authorities, landlords and retailers; but most were to
do with fundamental changes in consumer behaviour and the changing nature of the retail sec-
tor. Much of this mirrored the American experience. In particular, almost universal car owner-
ship privileged out-of-town retail parks and shopping malls over town centre and high street
shopping.There was easier parking and everything was on one site. High street pedestrianisation
was perhaps a mixed blessing: good if you were young and active; less so if you were one of
the older consumers with declining mobility who had remained loyal to the town centre but
now had to park on the periphery and walk to the high street shops. Shopping outlets offering
branded goods at discounted prices impacted on the high street: why shop at Marks and Spencer
in town if you can buy the same goods at a motorway junction outlet with ample parking and
many other shops to browse? Similarly, supermarket diversification into clothing and household
goods had its effect: why journey into town for basic clothing if you can buy an equivalent
item while doing the grocery shopping? Finally, the Internet is having a growing impact on
traditional shopping. This may, however, affect malls, outlets and supermarkets as much as the
high street. Indeed the high street, with its promise of individual attention and service, may be
better faced to meet the challenge of the Internet than are some of the newer forms of retailing.

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There are no easy answers. Portas offers a range of recommendations addressed to local
authorities, community groups, property owners and retailers themselves. A slightly better
understanding of retail history than some recent commentators have displayed might suggest
the following. First, not every high street and every shop can be saved. There has always been
considerable fluidity both in where the high street was located and which shops comprised it.
Some changes cannot be resisted. Second, every town is different. There is no ‘one size fits all’
solution. It is important to be aware of the socio-economic nature of the town and of its retail
history. It is not only that the promotion of artisan and craft shops which may work well in, say,
a spa town will be less successful in an ex-steelmaking community; it is also that big cities have
their own histories: Sheffield is not Leeds. Third, as Portas rightly recognises, the high street of
the future will not simply be about shopping; it may also again be a place where people live and
engage in a range of cultural and social activities. If this is right, the demise of the high street has
been greatly exaggerated.

Conclusions
High street has been at the heart of European retailing for at least the last 500 years. It has never
been static and has varied significantly over time and from nation to nation. But a central urban
shopping area has been the essential place for shoppers to go since the Middle Ages until the
last decade or so. Main street fulfilled the same purpose in the United States for a much shorter
period but was hugely influential in the creation of a distinct American form of consumer
culture. High street/main street is not dead, but is in an almost critical condition in many
parts of the western world. There are some renewed signs of life and its demise would have
some devastating consequences. Simply shifting where people shop is both inevitable and not
that significant. But shifting the context within which people shop is important. High street/
main street has always been public space and contested space: people used it to do things the
authorities disapproved of, but the populace enjoyed. The privatisation of retail space, typified
by shopping malls and outlets, but also by shopping areas incorporating shopping streets like
Liverpool 1, threatens this. High street matters, both as a shopping environment and as public
space for public protest.

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 9
HISTORY OF THE
DEPARTMENT STORE
Sarah Elvins

In the mid to late nineteenth century, department stores in Europe and North America assumed
a cultural prominence that was dazzling to observers at the time and has tantalised scholars of
retailing in the years since. These “cathedrals of consumption” enticed shoppers in London and
Paris and inspired Emile Zola to set a novel in the exotic and dreamlike space of the depart-
ment store. In Manhattan, Henry James saw with alarm the new “towers of glass” of stores that
dwarfed other structures in the city (Leach, 1993, p. 39). In large and small centres, they came
to dominate downtown spaces, and culturally and economically took on positions of promi-
nence. Despite the sense of some observers that these new forms of retailing had sprung up
like gleaming mushrooms overnight, as Claire Walsh (1999) has noted, department stores had
roots that stretched back to the eighteenth century (p. 46). While the subjects of some popular
histories vie for the status of “first department store”, it is impossible to name a single year or
a single institution as the definitive start of this new form of merchandising. Instead, it is more
useful to see department stores as evolving from a few lines of previous retail business: dry goods
merchants and general merchants. These businesses expanded, often in piecemeal fashion, into
what we now would recognise as a department store.This transition did not occur immediately,
and even observers at the time did not always fully comprehend the innovative nature of these
changes. The term “department store” itself was not in wide usage until the 1880s and 1890s,
but the changes in retailing which it would eventually denote were spreading rapidly around
the globe.
In England, pioneers like Harding, Howell & Co., located in St. James’s in London, catered
to fashionable women by offering not only the traditional line of millinery but furs, fans, per-
fumes, haberdashery, jewellery and clocks all in one large house. Ackerman’s Repository (1809)
described the store in 1809 as so extensive that ‘there is no article of female attire or decoration,
but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion’.The store stocked a diz-
zying array of items from every manufacturing town “in the kingdom” and across Europe. Paris
became home to the grands magasins, most famously the Bon Marché, which opened in 1852
and expanded greatly over subsequent decades. France’s reputation as an international fashion
capital was borne out in the glittering merchandise cases and window displays where shoppers
could peruse the latest clothing and accessories. In New York, A.T. Stewart expanded a small dry
goods emporium by adding new lines of merchandise like carpets, furniture, draperies and other
home accessories (Howard, 2015, p. 13). Stewart was also one of the first retailers in the world to

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erect a specially designed building of multiple levels to house his store (Resseguie, 1965, p. 304).
Philadelphia’s John Wanamaker established the Grand Depot at the abandoned freight depot of
the Pennsylvania Railroad and added specialised lines including the first toy department in 1880.
The many “departments” of these retailers were thus one feature which set them apart from
other shops specialising in single lines of merchandise. Under one roof, customers could now
view traditional dry goods including linens, notions and haberdashery. Macy’s of New York
enlarged existing lines of fancy goods and costume jewellery and eventually departed even
further from the dry goods trade by offering house furnishings, kitchen utensils, baby carriages,
woodenware, bird cages and a wide variety of other goods in over thirty departments by 1877
(Hower, 1967, p. 162). The store expanded into neighbouring buildings and rebuilt so that by
1880 it occupied the end of a city block on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, with
a new iron face and an elaborate ventilation system to pump fresh air throughout the store
(Hower, 1967, p. 167). John Wanamaker’s Philadelphia “store of a thousand surprises” boasted
stained-glass skylights and gas chandeliers, and over 1,400 stools positioned in front of the sales
counters for the convenience of tired shoppers (Hendrickson, 1979, p. 78). When Wanamaker
opened a new store in 1911, it was palatial in size, with twelve floors above ground plus a
basement and subbasement. Timothy Eaton’s in Toronto called itself “Canada’s Greatest Store”,
and by 1897 had over 326,000 square feet of retail space, selling everything from groceries to
furniture. In Mexico City, when Centro Mercantil held its opening celebration in 1899, visitors
marvelled over the sheer size of the store, with four stories of glass and colour stretching more
than a city block (Bunker, 2012, p. 88). Even in smaller communities, department stores often
dwarfed the competition, taking up entire city blocks and offering an array of goods not seen
in small shops or country stores (Whitaker, 2006, p. 78).
Beyond the multiplying departments of goods, these retailers were distinguished by new
merchandising policies. Their adoption of set pricing and rapid stock turn revolutionised busi-
ness practices. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it is thought that major American retail-
ers including Lord & Taylor, A.T. Stewart and Macy’s had adopted the one-price policy (Hower,
1967, p. 94). Customers did not have to haggle with the proprietor to ensure that they got the
best deal on an item; now all patrons would be charged the same price, whether rich or poor,
friend or stranger. For proprietors of large-scale stores, set pricing was necessary, as individual
clerks could not be allowed to make final decisions about the price of individual items. For con-
sumers, the ability to freely enter a store, inspect the merchandise and easily learn its price with-
out interference before making a decision was liberating. Related to the one-price policy was
the new willingness of stores to accept the return of any merchandise which consumers declared
unsatisfactory. Finally, purchases were facilitated by new credit opportunities. Some stores were
unwilling to forgo their cash only policies: at Eaton’s in Toronto, customers could place charges
against a deposit account where they would contribute cash balances prior to shopping. The
deposit account system at Macy’s paid interest of 4% with an annual Christmas bonus of 2% on
net purchases for the year (Santink, 1990, p. 225). Eventually these deposit accounts evolved into
the practice of dry goods houses offering “charge privileges” to their best customers; credit was
expanded to middle-class people so that by the early twentieth century customers were able
to open charge accounts in every large retailer in New York (Leach, 1993, p. 124). In France,
Georges Dufayel helped to normalise instalment buying, allowing customers to put 20% of the
standard purchase price down for household goods, with the rest to be paid in weekly instal-
ments (Williams, 1982, p. 93). Easier access to credit encouraged people to buy more, and to buy
more often. Charge accounts further encouraged patron’s loyalty to one store over another. For
working and middle-class patrons, it allowed dreams to become reality and aspirations of wealth
and luxury to be expressed through consumption.

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Over time, the business practices of the stores became more and more standardised, with
larger retailers taking on new roles not only in distribution but in manufacturing and wholesal-
ing.The Bon Marché in Paris drew on a network of small workshops and artisans to acquire lin-
gerie, shirts and ready-to-wear items (Miller, 1981, p. 57). Eaton’s built factories as it expanded,
so that by 1910 it was both producing and selling much of the consumer goods sold in Western
Canada (Belisle, 2011, p. 30). More commonly, stores entered into agreements with whole-
salers and manufacturers, sometimes striking exclusive deals with large orders which allowed
them to dictate costs and furnish their own “private label” store lines in clothing, notions and
fancy goods. Managers carefully monitored stock and held periodic clearance sales to get rid of
overstocked items. Eventually these clearance sales would come to mark the yearly retail calen-
dar, so shoppers would expect white sales of linens in January and the discounting of seasonal
merchandise at other times of the year. Filene’s of Boston moved unsold goods to its famous
bargain basement, where tables piled high with discounted goods enticed shoppers and freed
up the upper selling floors for new, full-priced merchandise. Advertising in local newspapers
became a major way for retailers to tell consumers about new items. R.H. Macy of New York
experimented with the layout of his newspaper ads, using white space and patterns to catch the
eye (Hower, 1967, p. 57). Department store advertising became a major source of revenue for
urban newspapers. Stores routinely purchased full pages of ad space, touting the arrival of new
lines, announcing upcoming sales and occasionally including personal messages to the commu-
nity from the store’s owner.
The department store’s large display windows were also a vital part of its advertising strategy.
The fanciful displays behind plate glass became a draw for shoppers and spectators passing by,
transforming the visual iconography of the city (Figure 9.1).
The store became an exciting new architectural form in downtown areas. Louis Sullivan’s
design for the Schlesinger and Mayer store in Chicago (later Carson Pirie Scott) reduced the
walls of the structure to a bare skeleton of glass and steel, bringing light into the interior and
maximising the size of the windows. Schlesinger and Mayer directly linked their windows to
other promotional efforts, using the distinct ornamental motifs surrounding the show windows
on State Street in their print advertising (Siry, 1988, p. 133). Initially some stores drew curtains in
front of the displays on Sundays to prevent passers-by from being tempted by material goods on
the Sabbath, but that practice largely was discontinued by the early twentieth century (although
Marshall Field’s famously carried on this practice well into the 1930s). Window dressers com-
peted for the attention of passers-by with elaborate geometric displays of handkerchiefs and
toiletries, often in white or a single colour. Crowds gathered to examine merchandise artfully
presented on mannequins with coordinated backgrounds and dramatic lighting. At Christmas,
snow-filled scenes of villages and children playing drew crowds to bask in the light of the display
window (Figure 9.2).
L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz, used his creative talents initially to design fanci-
ful “illusion windows” for dry goods stores, and edited a trade publication for window dressers.
William Leach (1993) argues that the windows allowed shoppers to gaze upon goods without
smelling or touching them, enticing viewers and highlighting the refinement of department
stores in contrast with open-air markets or immigrant bazaars (p. 62).
The atmosphere within the store was carefully cultivated to please the eye and encourage
crowds to give in to the temptations of goods. Paris’s Bon Marché was a stunning spectacle
of light and colour, with high ceilings and walls festooned with ribbons, Oriental rugs and
fine fabrics. Small items like cosmetics and jewellery were carefully arrayed in mirrored and
lighted cases. Larger items might be given space in a model showroom, like the ones in Gim-
bel Brothers of New York, where customers could see how furniture would look in a sample

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Figure 9.1 Wanamaker’s department store bridal window display, John Wanamaker Collection, Historical
Society of Pennsylvania

home, complete with draperies, lighting and rugs. Wanamaker’s “House Palatial” was an actual
two-story home in the store’s rotunda. Exotic décor, from “Arabian Nights”-themed displays
to Japanese gardens and Parisian street scenes, could help to transport crowds to far-off lands
and turn mundane items like notions or shirtwaists into tickets to another world. Instead of the
humble country store that dominated country life during the eighteenth century, the depart-
ment store became synonymous with urbanity and sophistication. In not only large centres like
Paris, London and New York, but smaller cities and towns across Europe and North America,
department stores signified a connection to larger national and international trends in fashion,
style and manners. The crowds who bustled through the doors of the department store were
drawn by the beautiful surroundings, the many departments of merchandise, and the promise of
a glimpse of something more exotic and exciting – the fulfilment of needs that shoppers might
not even have identified yet.
In the services it provided, as well, the department store bore striking differences from other
contemporary merchants. From the moment patrons entered the store, they could entertain the
fantasy of being waited on by willing servants. For middle-class consumers, the level of service
offered in department stores was a swift departure from the typical interaction with the clerks of
a general store or small merchant. Uniformed doormen welcomed customers at the entrances,
and in some cases young men were available to whisk one’s carriage (and later motorcar) away
to a nearby parking area. A fleet of female clerks showed merchandise to the consumer, bringing
pairs of gloves or stockings out from behind glass cases for customers to peruse. In departments

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 Sarah Elvins

Figure 9.2 Wanamaker’s New York store rotunda interior with Christmas decor, John Wanamaker Collec-
tion, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

like women’s clothing, customers could enjoy personal attention and advice from shop girls,
who accompanied them into the changing room and helped to select garments to try. Elabo-
rate pneumatic tube systems that twisted through the different levels of the stores like arteries
whisked cash and receipts from the departments to unseen central offices. Customers could
arrange the delivery of the items that they purchased, and check parcels and coats so that they
could more comfortably amble through the store aisles.

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The selling floors were the main attraction for shoppers, but the other services provided
by department stores added to the sense of indulgence and escape. Luxurious facilities – from
powder rooms where female shoppers could rest and recuperate, to writing desks and light-
filled atriums – encouraged shoppers to linger within the store. Medical clinics, public library
branches and post offices allowed shoppers to combine browsing for goods with other errands.
Restaurants added another dimension to the experience, and could become a destination
of their own for groups of women to meet and socialise. Tea rooms acted as a sort of feminine
counterpart to male urban spaces like the saloon or men’s club. Their tasteful décor and menu
of refined dishes hid the fact that they were designed to serve large numbers of patrons as effi-
ciently as possible. Marshall Field’s elegant tea room was expanded to fill the entire seventh floor
of the store by 1902, serving 2,000 people a day on linen tablecloths and fine silver (Satter­
thwaite, 2001, p. 43). One of the Siegel stores in Manhattan, Simpson, Crawford, and Simpson,
created a dining room that was intended to compare with exclusive metropolitan restaurants.
Louis Sullivan designed a French café in the Schlesinger and Mayer store in Chicago with elabo-
rate ornamental designs (Siry, 1988, p. 217). These amenities added to the sense that the store
was a world apart, a place of indulgence and relaxation where customers could meet for a meal
to socialise, before ambling through the selling floors together.
Stores were also sites of theatre, sometimes in a literal sense. Shoppers paraded themselves in
their finery, and shop girls applied cosmetics with the skill of thespians taking the stage. Product
demonstrations might feature a woman on a stage showing just how to use a new feature of
a sewing machine. Store aisles were often the first in the community to be illuminated with
new technologies like electric lights. Beyond the spectacle of shopping, the department stores
hosted performances for the local community. Most stores featured auditoriums for a variety of
performances – in the early twentieth century, live music in the form of piano recitals, string
quartets, and choral performances were regular features on the store’s calendar. In Philadelphia,
Wanamaker’s Grand Court was the site of a live performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra, in
front of an audience of 15,000 people (Whitaker, 2006, p. 134).
The Wanamaker great organ was built for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and purchased
by the store in 1911. It became a store tradition to have daily organ concerts at 10:00 a.m.,
noon, and 5:30 p.m. (Hendrickson, 1979, p. 79).The A. Hamburger store in Los Angeles boasted
a 1,000 seat auditorium. Stores in smaller centres acted as cultural arbiters, bringing the latest
fashions, trends and educational exhibits to the community. In 1929, Wolf & Dessauer depart-
ment store in Fort Wayne, Indiana, held a modern art exhibit in their auditorium, complete
with a lecture on modernism by the director of a local art school. The store’s advertising man-
ager boasted of a window display featuring modern objects, and tie-ins to merchandise like
furniture, draperies, fabrics, rugs and lamps that were ‘exquisite in line – scorning all unneces-
sary ornamentation – beautifully proportioned’ (Dry Goods Merchants Trade Journal, 1929, p. 31).
Merchants offered opportunities to meet celebrities like film and sports stars, get autographs
from authors, and hear recording artists. Rochester, New York, patrons had the chance to meet
bandleader Guy Lombardo at Sibley, Lindsay & Curr’s, while shoppers in nearby Buffalo bought
copies of baseball player Walter Johnson’s board game and shook his hand at Hengerer’s Toyland
(Elvins, 2004, p. 150).
The combination of large scale and new style proved irresistible to urban consumers. These
new palaces of consumption transformed urban space in Europe and North America, and
redrew the boundaries of commercial districts, encouraging members of the general public, par-
ticularly women, to venture in to the business district. Shopping became a tourist attraction of
its own, with Chicago’s Ladies’ Mile, London’s West End and New York’s Fifth Avenue drawing
consumers from surrounding suburbs and indeed around the world. Shopping became a leisure

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Figure 9.3 Line drawing of the centre of Wanamaker’s store, John Wanamaker Collection, Historical Soci-
ety of Pennsylvania

pursuit in itself, as consumers derived pleasure from perusing sparkling displays and wandering
the aisles of the store. Department store shopping was highly gendered. As Erika Rappaport
(2000) describes, London’s West End was filled with bustling crowds of “fashionable ladies”,
wealthy upper and middle class women who spent their time outside of their homes ‘discussing,
looking at, touching, buying, and rejecting commodities’ (p. 5). The feminised space of the store
and its respectability gave middle- and upper-class matrons a destination in the downtown that
they had never enjoyed previously.
Where men could retreat to the saloon, club, or sporting venue, the department store now
offered a public space for women to congregate without chaperones. The well-appointed tea
rooms, lounge areas and communications centres facilitated meetings between women. Mar-
shall Field’s famous proclamation to his staff, “Give the lady what she wants”, reflected not only
his attention to customer satisfaction but his acknowledgement that women were his primary
clientele. In London, Selfridge’s rooftop restaurant was a favourite meeting place for the middle-
class members of the suffragette group the Women’s Social and Political Union. As the group

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became more militant, it held demonstrations in which women with hammers smashed shop
windows along Oxford Street. Activists explained that shopkeepers should support the vote
for women, their most important customers. Those who did not lobby the government to
recognise the rights of women as full citizens, not merely consumers, would face punishment.
Because Harry Selfridge supported female suffrage, his store was largely spared (Chapman, 2014,
pp. 241, 244). After women in the United States were granted the franchise, campaigns to get
out the vote organised by the League of Women Voters were carefully coordinated with local
department stores, with information booths in prime selling spaces and messages about voting
incorporated in newspaper ads and windows (Gidlow, 2004, p. 176).
The liberation enjoyed by women who could step out into urban spaces unchaperoned
was tempered by the stereotype of the female shopper as easily seduced and lacking in self-
control. Women’s so-called “natural” role as consumers had a dark side: the medical diagnosis
of kleptomania played on notions of women as irrational and at the mercy of their hormonal
and emotional impulses (Abelson, 1989). Newspapers filled with stories of middle-class matrons
caught stealing trifles like lipstick and stockings. Often these women could easily afford the
items, and typically the store and the women’s husbands would come to an agreement to settle
the matter quietly without requiring the police to press charges. Clerks and store owners tried
various strategies to cut down on shoplifting, including the hiring of store detectives who posed
as shoppers and kept an eye out for suspicious behaviour; a more widespread consequence of
the discussion of kleptomania was the reinforcement of the image of the store as an exotic space
filled with temptations for irrational female shoppers. Even women who were not accused
of shoplifting were portrayed in advertisements and contemporary cultural representations as
being unable to resist the allure of the store, spending time and money that they did not possess
because of the pull of shiny displays and fascinating new fashions.
The initial success of the department store was often credited to its ability to cater to the
masses. Indeed, members of the working class were able to freely enter stores, and some mer-
chants consciously cultivated a clientele that skewed lower, by emphasising low prices and high
stock turnover. Newly arrived immigrants to east coast cities like Boston, New York and Phila-
delphia experienced the department store as a force of Americanisation, and observed the dis-
plays in shop windows and the piles of goods as a means of learning how to fit into their host
society. But it would be a mistake to assume that class distinctions disappeared in the aisles of
the store. In larger cities, there were often several department stores that catered to specific
segments of the population, with elite stores that served the “carriage trade”, big stores for the
middle class, and bargain stores for the working class. The Fair, in Chicago, aimed to provide
“Everything for Everybody”, and welcomed a wide range of patrons, while Marshall Field’s
was known for pursuit of a more affluent and limited clientele. Paris’s Grands Magasins Dufayel
catered to workers in the northern Goutte d’Or neighbourhood of the city, introducing them to
a vast range of merchandise and even providing an in-store cinema (Wemp, 2011). Some stores
managed to divide the carriage trade from the shawl trade within the same store – by separating
stock by price, merchants like Filene’s could welcome upper-class matrons looking for designer
gowns on the upper floor ushering working-class housewives to the bargain basement (Benson,
1988, p. 90).
Culturally, as the department store as a retailing type matured, it increasingly became identi-
fied with the middle class. Elite stores reached out to a wider clientele, and more popular-priced
stores began to offer services more typical of upper-class stores. In Paris, the fashions and home
décor of the department store helped to form a distinct bourgeois sensibility – the continually
changing new styles of linens, fashions, and other marketable goods encouraged the sense for the
middle classes that consumption was a modern means of self-expression and fulfilment. Notions

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of class were also highly racialised. Canada’s Eaton’s stores were slightly more downmarket, cap-
turing urban bourgeois as well as working-class and rural consumers, but the store’s advertising
promoted a type of consumer citizenship based on a primarily white, middle-class vision of
Canada. Indigenous and black customers faced condescension and poor treatment (Belisle, 2011,
pp. 81, 105). In the United States, it is worth underscoring that the experience of department
store shopping was a generally white phenomenon.Throughout the Southern US, black patrons
were by either custom or law denied the levels of service enjoyed by white customers. Southern
stores segregated black patrons in fitting areas and restrooms (Howard, 2015, p. 160). In both
the north and south, black workers were routinely relegated to lower-paying jobs that did not
involve their interaction with the public. For all of the rhetoric of department stores promot-
ing “one price for all” and the democratisation of luxury, some groups of consumers remained
outside of its imagined clientele.
The experience of shopping in the store helped to reinforce the sense of class distinction
among white, middle-class patrons. Indeed, this was part of the store’s appeal for many. Middle
class women who by the early twentieth century might be less likely to be able to afford “help”
around the household could revel in being pampered at the department store. Waited on while
trying on dresses, coiffed in the salon, served tea and dainties on fine china in the tea salon and
saluted by uniformed doormen, middle-class patrons were able to exert a new level of author-
ity within the store. The customer experience, too, evolved into a very distinct set of practices,
with its own rules and expectations. Instead of merchants dictating what goods their customers
should buy, customers were permitted access to merchandise in ways that they had never experi-
enced previously. They could touch, smell, try on and compare a range of items instead of being
at the mercy of a clerk to select an item from behind a glass case or stockroom door. After World
War I, stores became more concerned with acquiring stock that met consumer desires, rather
than assuming that customers would eventually buy any items on display, as long as the price was
right (Whitaker, 2006, p. 38).
For female employees, the store offered new possibilities and opportunities, in particular.
Instead of the monotonous, cramped or dirty conditions facing those in sweated trades or textile
mills, shop girls could enjoy the ambiance of the store and in some cases come to personify the
glamour and fashionability of the institution. In the 1927 silent movie “IT”, film star Clara Bow
is able to showcase her vivacious personality while selling lingerie on the first floor of a large
department store. Her position allows her to interact with members of the public as well as other
shop girls. She and her co-workers happily gossip about customers and the attractive owner of
the store, and in their hairstyles and use of cosmetics embody the freedom and sexual experi-
mentation of the flapper. Women worked behind counters but also found some opportunities
for advancement within the store ranks, with a tiny minority managing to advance to positions
as head of stock, assistant buyer or full-fledged buyer in women’s clothing and lingerie depart-
ments, where it was assumed that their intimate knowledge of female likes and dislikes would
give them a competitive edge. Shop girls too experimented with the power relations involved
in their interactions with customers. As Susan Porter Benson (1988) has ably demonstrated,
managers came to recognise the central role of salespeople in shaping the experience of the
customer, in both positive and negative ways (p. 115). A skillful clerk could guide customers and
suggest certain items, cultivate personal relationships with clients and encourage their loyalty to
the store; a rude or uncooperative clerk could lose sales and ruin a store’s image.
Systems of employee paternalism rewarded those who saw themselves as part of the store
family, while those who broke the rules faced sharp discipline. Employee newsletters, picnics,
sporting clubs, and group outings encouraged sociability within departments. Store owners
picked up on the rhetoric of family, describing themselves as proud fathers and suggesting that

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workers were part of a co-operative effort to serve the community and make the business a
success. Perks for employees encouraged company loyalty. Filene’s implemented profit-sharing
and employee discount plans as early as 1903, and created a credit union which became a model
for dozens of other department store credit unions in America (Hendrickson, 1979, p. 132).
The veneer of paternalism attempted to gloss over divisions between employees and manage-
ment. Workers might be thought of as family members, but if they pushed for more rights or
more control over their working conditions, they could be quickly written off as disobedient
and ungrateful children. In Britain, female shop assistants could be fined for a range of un-
businesslike behaviour, including gossiping, standing in groups, reading the newspaper, or failing
to address a customer by the correct name. Stores were active in discouraging unionisation. In
Canada, striking or joining a union were grounds for dismissal, and during the six-week Win-
nipeg General Strike of 1919, Eaton’s threatened to close the store for a year if the strikers won.
Afterwards, it fired workers who had participated in the strike (Belisle, 2011, pp. 188–189).
Moreover, female workers in department stores found that their wages were consistently lower
than for clerical workers and other branches of white-collar work. Despite the fact that store
employment was a steady, year-round phenomenon, the pay received by workers did not reflect
the fact that they were required to dress in a manner befitting their role as store representatives.
Even an employee discount of 10% or 20% could not compensate for the requirement of dresses
or other attire deemed sufficiently formal and respectable for interaction with the public.
Although consumers largely accepted department stores as appealing new additions to the
retailing landscape, they were viewed with suspicion by older retailers – the Bon Marché was
part of ‘the commercial bulldozer crushing [Paris’s] small shops and shopkeepers’ (Satterthwaite,
2001, p. 31). In France, critics decried the anonymity of the larger store, which some feared
could lead female shoppers into morally questionable behaviour, as they were manipulated by
clerks or thrown into compromising positions with strange men (Tiersten, 2001, p. 28).The fact
that department stores were prominent in bringing ready-to-wear clothing to a much larger
public led to outcry from traditional tailors and dressmakers, who bemoaned the poor quality
of non-bespoke fashions. The threat of competition led small shopkeepers to denounce the
“Department Store Octopus” and to vilify Marshall Field and John Wanamaker. Many protested
the ability of large stores to cut prices on one line while making up the difference because of the
vast array of other goods offered.Yet there was little that smaller merchants could do to fight the
emergence of department stores.Various US state legislatures experimented with new licensing
fees that would require separate licenses for each individual line of goods carried in a store, but
these initiatives were largely defeated, and by 1900 the momentum behind the anti-department
store movement shifted, with most small-town merchants instead focusing on chain stores as
their biggest threat (Howard, 2015, p. 34).
Competition between stores ensured that any time a new innovation was adopted by one
retailer, others would soon imitate and adopt a similar practice. The flow of information and
personnel between stores could be within communities or indeed span nations and continents.
Harry Gordon Selfridge was integral to the growth of Marshall Field’s in Chicago, and then took
his expertise to London, where he opened the marvellous Beaux Arts-style palace Selfridge’s on
Oxford Street. A buyer from Eaton’s in Toronto visited the Siegel Cooper store in Chicago and
observed its successful grocery department, and the following year the Canadian store had a full
grocery line (Santink, 1990, p. 168). Retailers carefully monitored the advertising and display
areas of their rivals, attuned to discounts and ready to follow any initiative that seemed prom-
ising. In New York, the rivalry between Macy’s and Gimbels was legendary, but Don Herold
(1932) of the trade magazine The Merchandise Manager described how both big stores and ‘little
hole-in-the-wall emporiums watch Macy’s like hawks’, often with mixed success as they tried

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to adopt policies that might work in Manhattan but would flounder elsewhere. ‘Store business’,
Herold argued, ‘relies, more than almost any other business, on side glances’ at the competition
(p. 34). Stores at times hired sets of eyes to spy on their rivals: many employed comparison shop-
pers (usually women) who pretended to be customers, and paid close attention to merchandise
displays, levels of service and amenities in stores, reporting back to their employers in the hope
of giving a competitive advantage.
Department stores were innovators in distribution. Stores long offered home delivery of
goods as a form of customer service. But even customers who were unable to visit the store in
person could still make purchases using mail order. In Canada, the Timothy Eaton company had
its flagship store in Toronto but sent mail-order parcels across the country, bringing the fashions
and conveniences of the city to rural customers from coast to coast. Some merchants, like Sears
Roebuck, moved from catalogue sales into building brick-and-mortar stores. Richard Sears built
his business by catering to rural consumers, selling everything from farm implements to tomb-
stones. The initial Sears stores were located in working-class neighbourhoods, but by the 1920s
the chain was opening large stores in urban areas and retail sales were overshadowing catalogue
sales. Montgomery Ward also expanded from selling through its famous “Wish Book” catalogue
to open hundreds of stores in the 1920s, including a flagship store on Michigan Avenue in Chi-
cago. For Montgomery Ward and Sears, the catalogue could act as a supplement to the physical
store, reinforcing the brand’s prominence and offering even more items than could be shown
in actual retail displays, including farm machinery or even prefabricated homes. These newer
types of stores were technically branches of chain organisations, but this distinction might not
have been so clear to customers at the time. Within the retail industry, observers noted that the
chains were able to use their buying clout to ensure great deals with manufacturers. In a smaller
community, a chain branch of a more downmarket chain (or “junior department store”) like
J.C. Penney or Woolworth might be the closest thing to a department store that most residents
would encounter.These branches did not have glamourous amenities as did stores like Macy’s in
Manhattan, but they still sold a range of goods in different departments, and were likely among
the largest retail structures in their particular towns.To further complicate matters, some success-
ful independent stores were able to expand into small, regional chain operations.
Just as the department store itself marked a new stage in the evolution of retailing, the form
itself continued to change, adopting new business practices and forms. Trade magazines like
the Dry Goods Merchants Trade Journal allowed stores to compare their strategies in merchandis-
ing, display, stock turnover and bookkeeping. Articles featured not only large, internationally
known merchants like Macy’s of New York, but also stores in smaller cities and towns that had
developed new methods of efficient and modern storekeeping. The efforts of merchants in
Marshalltown, Iowa, to co-ordinate Christmas decorations and sales contests made the front
page of the Journal in 1924. A survey that asked owners of twenty-eight stores how much they
invested in fixtures featured department stores in Minnesota, Connecticut, South Dakota and
Illinois (Dry Goods Merchants Trade Journal, 1927, p. 49). When chain retailers became more of a
competitive threat, some independent department stores organised into buying groups, to gain
the benefits of large-scale buying while still remaining independent in daily operations. As early
as 1916, a group of five stores including New York’s Lord & Taylor, Newark’s Hane & Co, and
Buffalo’s J. N. Adam’s came together to form Associated Dry Goods. The Midwest was home
to the Central States Department Stores, a group buying affiliation of twenty stores located in
Illinois,Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, and Iowa which was consciously formed as a response to
the threat of chain stores and mail-order competition (Elvins, 2004).
Department stores’ relationship to branded goods shifted over time. Consumers during the
early twentieth century were inundated with the message that brand names signified quality and

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style. Although house brands remained important to department store’s bottom lines, particu-
larly in less glamourous departments like household linens, consumers searching for style could
look for and find the labels of nationally recognised brands in the aisles of the department store,
from Jantzen swimsuits to Monet costume jewellery to Coty lipsticks. Retailers coordinated
their marketing with manufacturers, who could blanket the country with advertising campaigns
in the pages of mass market magazines and newspapers, and might provide display materials or
in some case even pay the salaries of sales help in specific departments. This practice became
increasingly common during the 1920s and would be well entrenched by the 1960s (Whitaker,
2006 p. 216). Some stores attempted to raise the profile of their own private-label items by creat-
ing new private brands, like Sears’ Kenmore appliance line or Marshall Field’s Frango Mints, but
generally consumers preferred national brands (Howard, 2015, p. 81).The development of group
buying may have further accelerated this trend: the large orders required to supply not a single
store but a group of twenty or thirty necessitated doing business with large manufacturers. The
additional perks of assistance in display, promotion and in magazine and newspaper advertising
made branded goods increasingly alluring for retailers.
Department stores reached their zenith in the early twentieth century, when they were
economically and culturally the most dominant form of retailing. Across Europe, North and
South America, stores were innovators in their communities, bringing the latest merchandise
to local consumers and continuing to modernise and expand their operations. Department
stores were crucial to community development and civic celebration: think of the annual Santa
Claus parades which wound through the downtowns of countless communities, coordinated by
local stores. Eaton’s of Canada began holding parades in Toronto in 1905 and by the 1920s the
practice had spread to Winnipeg, Montreal, Edmonton and Calgary (Penfold, 2016, p. 46). On
Thanksgiving Day in 1924, adults and children crowded the sidewalks of New York to catch
a glimpse of Macy’s employees in costume, along with floats, clowns, bears, donkeys and other
attractions as they passed by. Police estimated about 10,000 excited spectators were gathered on
34th Street at 7th Avenue to witness the arrival of Santa and the unveiling of the store’s Christ-
mas window, showing the “Fairy Frolics of Wondertown” (New York Times, 1924). Beyond events
like parades, retailers were leaders in design in their communities, bringing new technologies
and attention to visual display to their communities. Some were early adopters of modernist
architecture, as was the case with the Schocken Department Stores, designed by Erich Men-
delsohn in Stuttgart and Nuremburg during the late 1920s, which were arresting curvilinear
structures of glass and steel.
The economic disruptions of the Great Depression understandably slowed the expansion of
department stores. As stores grappled with plummeting sales and stagnant local economic condi-
tions, many cut back on services and amenities in an effort to contain costs. Some held elaborate
sales in an effort to win back consumers. Others used their advertising to try to explain to the
public how essential it was for consumers to resume “normal buying”, which would help to cre-
ate new jobs and keep the wheels of the economy turning (Elvins, 2004, p. 120). Used to acting
as civic leaders in good times, retailers experimented with ways to restore consumer confidence
and drum up sales. In Rochester, New York, Sibley, Lindsay & Curr used its forty-five show
windows and other display areas to stage a massive “Made in Rochester” exposition, featuring
one hundred local businesses in an effort to draw in local shoppers and express the store’s com-
mitment to the area. Others, like Strawbridge and Clothier in New York, forged ahead with
store expansions and remodelling not only to help with local unemployment but also because
building costs were the lowest they had been in a decade (Longstreth, 2010, p. 34). Interiors were
modernised, with new technologies like escalators (or “electric stairways” to the uninitiated), air
conditioning and fluorescent lighting.

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As the severity of the crisis became clear, many department stores became even more ear-
nest in their imitation of chain store and discount store operations. Writing in a trade journal,
H. L. Post (1934) argued that the “Independent Retailer Not Need to Surrender”, but instead
should try to cater to lower-middle and middle class groups. During the “whoopee era” of the
1920s, Post argued, too many department stores were caught up in selling luxuries to the upper
classes, and lost sight of the average customer. Chain stores had swooped in to capture these
patrons, using a limited number of fast-selling items, standardised merchandise and open dis-
plays that required less sales staff. The answer for many was to imitate the chains. The American
trend towards consolidation which had begun in the 1920s continued throughout the 1930s
and 1940s. Department store corporations like Allied, May, and Federated Department Stores
aggressively acquired new stores and centralised their operations, particularly in purchasing and
merchandising. In Britain, department stores were more able to hold their own against chain
stores and actually increase their share of retail sales over the interwar years (Scott and Walker,
2010, p. 1126).
The outbreak of war created new challenges. Stores showed their wartime patriotism in dis-
plays of flags and bunting and lists of names of servicemen.They used their powers of marketing
and persuasion to help the war effort. The treasury relied on retailers to sell bonds, giving them
monthly quotas (Howard, 2015, p. 116). During World War II, Filene’s in Boston sold more than
$51 million in war bonds (Satterthwaite, 2001, p. 83). Stores dealt with shortages in goods and
had to cooperate with official policies on rationing. In the United States, the Office of Price
Administration imposed price controls, and stores scrambled to comply with rules that required
them to post ceiling prices for specific items (Howard, 2015, p. 125–128). The imposition of
the General Maximum Price Regulation set limits on the prices for nearly 6,000 commodities,
interfering with the ability of stores to stock and price items as they chose. Paradoxically, these
palaces of consumption were now required to spread a message of conservation, encouraging
women to sew at home, recycle and reuse materials, and saving fuel to be used for military
purposes. There were some new opportunities for new business, including bridal services that
could plan quick weddings in various price brackets, complete with flowers, jewellery, music and
bridal gowns (Howard, 2015, p. 121).
The postwar return to consumption was facilitated by government policies that encouraged
private spending and the financing of homes for returning veterans in America. The growth of
new subdivisions filled with ranch houses promised a new era of affluence, and a new emphasis
on the suburbs rather than the urban centre. The early history of the department store was syn-
onymous with downtown: these stores were geographically and culturally located in the centre
of urban life. But as early as the 1920s we can see hints of changes in the spatial orientation
of retailing. Some stores invested in new, planned shopping centres outside of the city centre.
J.C. Nichols opened the Club Plaza to cater to an affluent suburb of Kansas City, Missouri
(Satterthwaite, 2001, p. 47). As suburbanisation transformed American cities, drawing white
middle-class families out of the downtown, department stores gambled with various strategies
to retain their clientele. Some reinvested in the core, attempting to create city-center malls and
build new parking facilities. More commonly, stores opened branches to act as anchors for the
new malls springing up beside new subdivisions outside of the city. As Lizabeth Cohen (2003)
has noted, during the late 1950s there was a rapid proliferation of shopping centres: 940 were
built by 1957, and that number would double by 1960 and again by 1963 so that by 1976 there
were 17,520 scattered across the United States (p. 258).
Department store companies were key in initiating the development of regional shopping
centres. In Seattle, the president of the Bon Marché department store worked with the archi-
tect John Graham to create Northgate Shopping City, a mall which was highly successful and

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became a model for others in the industry. Even when department stores did not spearhead a
project, their key role as anchor tenants helped to shape the size and scope of new develop-
ments (Longstreth, 1997, p. 310). The design of the new stores opening in the malls was dif-
ferent from those of the downtown. By orienting all stores inward towards each other in an
enclosed space, shoppers were encouraged to think of the mall as a single entity, rather than an
array of individual shops. This meant a new way of viewing store competition: where in the
past retailers had been wary of being located too close to the competition, now two depart-
ment stores would commonly be located on opposite ends of a single mall, creating more of a
draw for customers and enhancing each other’s business. Selling areas in branch stores tended
to be spread out horizontally, typically on two or three levels, instead of the elevator-assisted,
multi-story downtown store. Architects and designers devoted more attention to the interiors
of branches, as the exterior was no longer located on a busy urban street with foot traffic, but
in the middle of a parking lot. Some might have ground-floor display windows, but most had
modern, spare, and unadorned exteriors, in contrast to the lavish and ornate Beaux Arts or Art
Deco styles of many metropolitan stores. Parking was a crucial element of the mall’s success.
Planners calculated how to move a high volume of cars to and from shopping centres, and
provided thousands of parking spots so shoppers coming from nearby areas would have ample
room to park their cars.
The shift to the suburban mall had social consequences. By the 1960s, the pattern of “white
flight” had increased racial and class segregation in American urban spaces. Department stores
and mall developers carefully plotted the location of their projects, hoping to make it as enticing
as possible for affluent suburban housewives to come and shop. Other groups were excluded.
Lack of transportation, discriminatory real estate and hiring practices and low pay meant that
African Americans were less likely to be able to purchase homes in suburban areas, and thus were
largely absent from malls as either patrons or employees (Cohen, 2003, p. 288).
Suburban stores were more likely to hire part-time workers, often middle-class women who
resided nearby. By changing store layouts to encourage more customer self-service, stores aimed
to keep labour costs down, and reduced the number of full-time staff. As a result, suburban
stores appeared homogenous, with virtually no visible minorities or members of the working
class working or shopping. White consumers often took for granted how these spaces had been
designed for their convenience. Black civil rights groups during the 1950s and 1960s worked to
eliminate racial barriers to their participation in public life, including their ability to sit at lunch
counters and work as sales staff in the department store, by instigating sit-ins and boycotts of
retailers with less progressive policies. Activists succeeded in changing store rules that segregated
public areas and restricted black hiring, but the geographic separation of city and suburb, of
black and white, proved a more formidable obstacle to overcome.
The 1970s and 1980s were a period of consolidation and increased global competition for
department stores. By this point one could no longer really speak of independent retailers, in the
sense of the locally based and often family-run outfits which had been so common during the
late nineteenth century. Most stores in the United States were either explicitly chain branches of
national brands like Sears or J.C. Penney, or were part of national outfits like Federated Depart-
ment Stores, Robinson-May or Carter Hawley Hale. A series of acquisitions and bankruptcies
spelled the end to many longstanding stores, including Miller & Rhoads of Richmond, which
was acquired by Allied Stores, sold off when Allied was acquired by investor Robert Campeau,
mismanaged by a real estate developer, and closed in 1990 (Howard, 2015, p. 200).The decline of
smaller, independent stores was reflected in popular culture in Britain: the BBC sitcom “Are You
Being Served” followed the antics of the bored sales staff at the once prosperous, now dingy and
declining Grace Brothers flagship store. Episodes featured the efforts of the store’s management

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to slow plummeting sales by making the clerks wear ridiculous costumes, or to cut costs by
turning off heating in the building.
A more precarious global economy during the 1990s and early 2000s further contributed
to the decline of the department store. Bargain-conscious consumers turned away from the
high-service and presumably higher-priced world of the large mall or downtown department
store. Even upscale buyers proudly shopped at discount chains like Kmart and Target. Filene’s
famous basement changed from a separate floor within the store, to a chain of its own, housing
marked down and discontinued items. Newer chains that specialised in bargain apparel like T.J.
Maxx and Marshall’s emerged in strip malls or discount malls, and outlet stores for designers and
manufacturers like London Fog, Brooks Brothers and Coach enticed shoppers with the promise
of “direct from the factory” prices (ironically, as most of the items were actually produced in
Southeast Asia) (Satterthwaite, 2001, p. 182). Stores that specialised in one type of merchandise
like toys, electronics or linens became known as “category killers” as they drew sales away from
product lines that had long been features of the department store. Toys ’R’ Us and Best Buy
were typical of the chains able to present low prices and tremendous selection to consumers for
one particular line of goods.Traditional department stores attempted to keep up with this frenzy
for bargains by offering deep discounts and store promotions, and in the process lost much of
their appeal. Gone were the knowledgeable sales staff, the beautiful displays, the elaborate din-
ing areas, and the trusted house brands once associated with particular stores. Instead, racks of
discounted clothing cluttered once-elegant showrooms, and little was invested in updating the
design of stores.
Today the department store is a relic of another age.Those that survive in many markets seem
only a shadow of the “big stores” of the early twentieth century. Some are able to trade on their
connection with particular metropolises. In New York, tourists flock to Bloomingdale’s, carrying
purchases in “Big Brown Bags” as they hit other historic landmarks in Manhattan. The Christ-
mas windows at Barney’s and displays at Macy’s still warrant occasional mention in the press.
Harrods of London has managed to turn a visit to its Food Hall into a tourist experience listed
on travel websites and tour guides. The shopping experience within most department stores
today, however, is more generic. Most heavily rely on easily recognisable brands of cosmetics and
apparel, combined with occasional private-label items. The level of service is very limited – the
sales staff are often reduced to a lone person in an entire department ringing up sales, rather
than the fleet of eager clerks who had assisted consumers in the early twentieth century. Ameni-
ties like bridal registries, if offered at all, tend to be do-it-yourself affairs online rather than a
chance for shoppers to rely on the expertise of trained staff in selecting appropriate items for
their homes. In smaller cities, the only evidence left of department stores is often an abandoned
shell of a building dotting a declining Main Street.While some developers have managed to turn
these retail relics into loft apartments in cities like Denver and Columbus, in other communities
it has been a challenge to find other uses for these large retail spaces. Attempts at expanding or
rebranding have had mixed results. In 1999, Sears purchased Eaton’s of Canada and attempted
to give the chain a makeover, renaming it eatons and launching a new, more upscale direction
for the store. Less than 2 years later, it conceded defeat and the once venerable national institu-
tion closed its doors. Marshall Field’s was acquired by the retailing division of British-American
Tobacco, then passed through a number of other companies before eventually being purchased
by Federated Department Stores.
Traditional department stores have even started to disappear from the suburban mall, as new
retail behemoths like Walmart and big-box stores began to dominate the landscape. The bare-
bones décor and requirement that customers find and carry many items without any sort of sales
assistance allows retailers like Costco, Price Club and Sam’s Club to keep prices down. These

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warehouse stores cultivate a downmarket aesthetic, yet they sell many items that in previous
years would have been mainstays of department stores, including jewellery, cookware, apparel,
high-end electronics, or appliances. This has created a scenario where affluent urban and sub-
urban shoppers patronise Costco but express nostalgia for the service and atmosphere of the
grand old stores. Online shopping has also made it increasingly difficult for department stores
to compete. Where once department stores could boast that they carried every possible item a
customer could want, in the age of amazon.com, choosy customers often decide to comparison
shop or order specific items online without having to make the trip to a physical store. J.C. Pen-
ney had some success in the early 2000s by encouraging online shopping, becoming one of the
first retailers to allow shoppers to place orders on the Internet and pick up and return items at
stores. This slowed but did not stop the chain’s decline, as it continued to lay off workers and
close stores for the next decade.
Consumers in the twenty-first century seem to be seeking a different kind of retail experi-
ence. Gone are the days when women would spend a day at the store, socialising and perusing
the aisles of merchandise in the big store. Time-pressed modern shoppers order online and
bargain hunt; they don’t walk downtown, and they are even showing less interest in patronising
the large shopping malls that were built in the 1970s and 1980s, with their acres of concrete
parking lots and thousands of square feet of selling space. The tendency of chain organisations
to promote a more homogenised and generic style of retailing has further alienated more
affluent consumers who patronise specialty stores or seek out unique, custom-made items.
That is not to say that the public does not mourn the loss of the department store. Residents
of Chicago protested when Federated decided to rename all Marshall Field’s stores Macy’s,
some ceremoniously cutting their store credit cards in two. On September 8, 2006, Federated
renamed over 400 regional stores, relegating long time brands like Boston’s Filene’s, Houson’s
Foley’s and L.A.’s Robinson-May to the dustbin of history (Danto, 2006). In the Canadian
city of Winnipeg, the traditional Christmas window displays that delighted visitors to Eaton’s
downtown are now preserved in the local children’s museum, so that future generations can
experience this holiday tradition. Websites and coffee-table books devoted to the history of
local department stores sell well at area bookstores, and local residents think fondly of their
formative shopping experiences in the big stores, recalling shopping trips to view store win-
dows or meals in the store tea room. Shoppers remember how at Godchaux’s store in Baton
Rouge, Louisiana, clerks greeted customers by name and children received a nickel to buy a
Coke (Sternberg and Shelledy, 2009). Residents of Marinette, Wisconsin think fondly of Lau-
erman Brothers and their famous frosted malt cones (Leannah, 2013). Customers lament the
loss of regional and specific identity, as distinctive local stores become more standardised as part
of larger chains (Howard, 2015, p. 216). More typically, the stores simply fade away. In 2016,
Macy’s announced that it was closing 100 stores, nearly 15% of its total number, conceding that
the land underneath some of the branches was worth more than the stores themselves (Olen,
2016).The profitability of the department store has waned, and the old formulas which had led
it its success – hand-on service, large scale and boundless selection – now seem anachronistic.
But these grand old institutions linger on in memory, a testament to the tremendous cultural
and economic power they once wielded.

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 10
THE SUPERMARKET AS
A GLOBAL HISTORICAL
DEVELOPMENT
Structures, capital and values

Patrick Hyder Patterson

Supermarkets sell abundance. Built to maximise purchases by guiding customers through a care-
fully programmed experience of pleasure and ease, stocked with the expansive range of goods
needed to make the ideal of one-stop shopping a reality, and managed with a dogged pursuit
of efficiency, consistency, and certainty, the big-footprint contemporary supermarket holds out
to its customers an equally big promise: satisfaction guaranteed, all under one roof, every time.
As such, it represents something novel and remarkable in retailing history, and one of the most
potent, effective, and significant sales methods ever developed. The consequences have been
profound. Through its rise to prominence during the twentieth century, the supermarket has
reordered the commodity chains of food supply from start to finish, restructuring retail markets
with its characteristic insistence on the logics of uniformity, competition and economies of scale.
In the process, the supermarket system and its array of associated techniques and systems have
emerged in the developed world as the leading model for modern, rational, technology-driven
grocery sales, often extinguishing older business practices.
The analysis provided here presents an interpretation of the historical trajectory of the super-
market, emphasising those elements most critical to an integrative understanding of the con-
ceptual aspects of the supermarket model, and those not limited to particular cases. As a model
technology, the supermarket emerged as a distinctive, preferred form for the retail distribution of
food and grocery items, a type marked throughout its history by claims of impressive advantages
for both sellers and shoppers, and one that was heavily dependent on supporting technologies
and, at the same time, a driver of new technological innovations. As a potent extension of modern
urbanism, the supermarket form represents one of the most influential expressions of the pat-
terns of modern urban and suburban development, with important connections to the spread
of motor vehicles and roadways. As a distinctive structure for enterprise organization and function, the
supermarket model made the grocery trade big business, turning it into a modern industry and
driving it towards highly consolidated operations in the hands of centralised firms that were
managed by professionals and owned by large corporate entities commanding massive capital.
As an original instrument of capitalist business, the supermarket has routinely figured in scholarly
and critical studies as an intrinsically capitalist tool, though such judgements lose some force in

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light of the relatively successful transfer of the model to the retail environments of communist
societies. As a compelling and attractive transnational paradigm for development, the supermarket
form has spread far beyond its origins in the United States and proven a genuinely global model,
gaining sizeable market share in economically advanced societies and, increasingly, in develop-
ing countries as well, albeit with considerable modification and local adaptation in the process.
As both a mirror and engine of culture, the supermarket has shaped and carried the values of a
transnational culture of modern retailing rooted in abundance, variety, satisfaction, competition,
individuality and choice. And finally, as an important formative factor in the economic, social, business,
labour, and cultural history of the recent past, supermarket retailing continues to be understudied
in many ways, although it has proven a durable and resilient form that remains positioned as a
dominant model and seems likely to do some for some time, notwithstanding continuing pres-
sures, obstacles and competitive threats.
As we seek to develop an integrative account along these lines, it should be noted at the
outset that the boundaries of the category “supermarket” have long been imprecise. Part of the
problem here is that the term itself arose as, in essence, a form of advertising, meant more to
showcase the advantages of new stores and a novel sales method than to delineate a distinctive
type with taxonomical rigour. The power of the label proved remarkably attractive and endur-
ing: as the signifier of what has become an enormously popular business form, the supermarket
designation is one that promotionally minded retailers have often applied to their own stores
in an imitative way, regardless of whether or not those outlets actually satisfied the customary
definitional criteria of any particular place and period.
Not surprisingly, those criteria have been divergent, fluid and variable. In recent years, for
example, the Food Marketing Institute, the leading trade association for supermarket and gro-
cery retailing activities in the US, has defined a “traditional supermarket” as one with a complete
assortment of produce, meats, and grocery items, normally stocking from 15,000 to 60,000 dis-
tinct products, with no more than 15% of sales deriving from the non-food general merchandise
and health and beauty care categories, and registering at least $2 million in retail transactions
each year (Food Marketing Institute, 2018). Historically, however, there have been many other
definitions. This longstanding looseness in nomenclature means that many “supermarkets” are,
in fact, better thought of as something different, especially when these venues are small and offer
only a limited product assortment. Complicating this problem, the quest for innovation, pro-
motional advantage, and higher earnings has led to new store designs that transcend the classic
supermarket to offer, as it were,The Next Big Thing. Accordingly, not every shop that calls itself
a supermarket (or is called that by customers) comes anywhere close to the classic supermarket
form, while true, full-scale supermarket operations are also to be found within expanded or
hybridised store variants that have discarded or otherwise sought to move beyond the “super-
market” label. Considered in world-historical perspective, the definition of the supermarket
has thus been fuzzy at best: subject to dispute and to divergent interpretations, rooted in the
self-understandings (and commercial motives) of enterprise managers and entrepreneurs, shaded
inevitably by local particularities and circumstances and evolving over time.
Consequently, and with an eye to the value of a broader comparative viewpoint, the analysis
here adopts a broad and pragmatic understanding of the category, one that acknowledges the
distinctiveness of the supermarket model and its related technologies and management processes
in their paradigmatic (indeed, now “traditional”) iterations, while at the same time recognising
that the classic supermarket form has been, for almost the entire course of its historical develop-
ment, supplemented and in some instances supplanted by other types including smaller-scale
superettes and mini-marts, large-format warehouse stores and wholesale clubs, and enormous

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 Patrick Hyder Patterson

hypermarkets and supercenters that combine a full range of grocery sales and services with a
similarly broad offering of non-grocery items.

Satisfaction by design: the supermarket as a model technology

Historical scholarship on the development of supermarkets remains, on the whole, underdevel-
oped and incomplete, particularly with regard to the global and comparative dimensions of the
supermarket phenomenon. The origins of the genre, however, are well-documented in a variety
of useful works on the rise of self-service grocery sales and, perhaps most notably, on the impact
of pioneering institutions and entrepreneurs such as Michael Cullen of the King Kullen stores
in the early 1930s, the programmed flow of the famous Piggly Wiggly chain built by Clarence
Saunders in the late 1910s and 1920s, and the energetic promotion of the self-service system
by industry groups, including the publishers of the influential trade journal Progressive Grocer
(Zimmerman, 1955; McAusland 1980; Tedlow, 1990; Tolbert, 2009; Cochoy, 2016). These roots
in the self-service method, with its emphasis on continual technical refinement and relentless
rationalisation, signal some of the most important conceptual dimensions of this retail form:
from almost the very beginning, those responsible for the design and management of supermar-
kets have routinely approached them as a model technology – a distinctive physical form, coupled
with a similarly distinctive set of operational systems, understood by its creators and enthusiasts
as the pinnacle of technical progress and the consummate achievement of the science of selling.
Moreover, while the supermarket has always been a technology-dependent form, relying on a host
of supporting tools and practices, it has also been a technology-promoting form, spurring and in
some cases dictating the development of further technological innovations as the new style of
shopping led to new demands and expectations on the part of both consumers and retailers.
The most immediately noticeable feature of the supermarket as a distinctive technological
form is the coupling of self-service for most (not all) goods on offer with the elaborate and
extensive material infrastructure and vast sales-floor area of the store.
Business purposes are paramount here: as James Mayo (1993) notes, ‘the history of the gro-
cery store is the history of economic competition over space’ (p. 235), and constant pressures
for reconfiguration and enhancement mean that ‘the design remains in place as long as it is eco-
nomically competitive’ (p. xvii). What the customer encounters in a classic supermarket is, first
and foremost, a space noteworthy for its sheer size and scale, for the enormous variety of items
offered, and for the unmediated, hands-on contact with those products that a trip through the
supermarket affords. Less apparent to non-specialists and to the consuming public is the care-
fully crafted layout of the supermarket form, one designed to create a customer experience that
is planned and managed from start to finish – and therefore, the technology promises, reliably
productive of higher sales volume. Control of movement through the store, signage and logical
positioning to ease customers’ self-service routines, staging of sensory stimuli, engagement with
products on display, exposure to in-store advertising, presentation of opportunities for unantici-
pated “impulse” purchases: all of these, and more, have been organised and executed with an
attention to detail that is frequently invisible to shoppers themselves but nonetheless painstaking,
employing models and methods continually refined through what soon developed into a huge
technical-operational management literature for retailing specialists (e.g., Brand, 1963). Obvi-
ously or not, the supermarket is programmed shopping.
In its origins, this systems-minded programming mirrored the preferences and passions of the
broader commercial and industrial culture. For the United States and Europe, the mid-twentieth
century was an age fascinated by the power of technology to transform human experience. In

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 The supermarket as a global historical development

Figure 10.1 
Interior of an Albertson supermarket. Modernity, rationality, technology, abundance: a
typical postwar American supermarket in the Albertsons chain. Seattle, Washington, USA.
February 1955.
Source: Seattle Municipal Archives, photographer unknown (public domain).

that environment, the thoroughgoing connection of supermarket operations to technologi-

cal advances – and indeed, the prevailing understanding among retail specialists that the new
store model was a technological advance in its own right – rapidly made the supermarket the
grocery-sales method that drew the most attention as the shape of things to come. Mechanised,
standardised, rationalised, and optimised, it became a symbol of achievement and modernity for
retailing, popular with customers and celebrated among businesspeople for its scientific advan-
tages and technical superiority over old-fashioned methods (e.g., Zimmerman, 1937).
Just as retailing specialists pursued the planning, design, and layout of supermarkets as, at their
core, matters of technology, the stores themselves were dependent on a wide range of supporting
technologies, without which they could not function properly (Keh, 1998). Making purchases
on the scale that the supermarket offered posed technical problems for customers from the
moment they arrived at the giant stores: the old hand-held baskets and bags into which cus-
tomers once packed the paid-for items handed to them by store clerks in traditional over-the-
counter outlets now had to be replaced by a technology that would be suitable for self-service
use by the dozens or even hundreds of shoppers that could be inside a store at any moment
and, at the same time, large enough to carry greatly increased volumes. Baskets provided by

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the markets themselves did and still do remain available even in the most “modern” of stores,
but the supermarket model shifted customer habits in an entirely new direction, encouraging
them to load up with more items than could be comfortably carried by hand and spurring the
development of a new device to solve the new problem, the shopping cart (Grandclément, 2009;
Cochoy, 2016; pp. 166–198).
A less obvious technological dynamic proved important here as well: for enterprises, their
workers, and their customers, the supermarket model also functions as a critical technology
of time management. Big stores of this kind, and especially big chains of such outlets, require
considerable investments of company resources simply to guide the flow of employee labour
in order to ensure reliable service and presentation in stores that are – if the model is to live up
to its promise – always full, with nothing missing from the shelves. Just as employees’ time is
carefully organised, shoppers’ time is also valuable, with store operations calculated to strike the
proper balance between, on the one hand, the need to ensure that the supermarket experience
feels quick and convenient for customers and, on the other, the desire to keep them in the store
aisles longer to raise sales.
As supermarkets rose to prominence, technology was everywhere, almost from the very
beginning: refrigerators and freezers to prevent spoilage, spray misters to keep produce fresh
and appealing, lighting to enhance the visual appeal of products, music to create a pleasant
atmosphere, customised in-store advertising displays and specialised shelving and free-standing
gondolas to put the right items in front of the right eyes in the right place, at the right time.
The end of the shopper’s circuit brought an encounter with new technologies of theft preven-
tion and cash control: checkout lanes staffed by specialised cashiers who, in the new division
of labour that self-service contemplated, did little other than handle money, logging each tran-
sition using yet another technology critical to the success of supermarkets, the cash register.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes and away from the eyes of shoppers on the carefully staged sales
floor, the service areas of the store likewise bore the marks of a pervasive reliance on technol-
ogy, from the loading docks where enormous volumes of freight were continually received and
processed, to the massive storerooms and cooling units where products were held for quick
deployment on store shelves, to modern food-preparation facilities where fish and meat, baked
goods, delicatessen items, and prepared foods were readied for sale. Eventually, the efficiency
and data-handling demands of supermarket sales would drive innovations in the technology of
the checkout lane, with further refinements of the cash register that had played a major role in
the ‘deskilling of clerks into cashiers’ (Palm, 2017; p. 49), the widespread implementation of the
Uniform Product Code and related scanning and inventory-management methods (Morton,
1994), and later on, the introduction of self-checkout technologies that eliminated cashiers
entirely.
The supermarket’s thoroughgoing dependence on technology has not been confined to
what happens in the stores themselves. It has imposed a corresponding set of technological
requirements extending all the way through the countless supply routes that end on supermarket
shelves and in display cases.Where supermarkets predominate, each node and link in these com-
modity chains – local and regional delivery vehicles, warehouses, wholesale distribution centres,
food processing and small-goods manufacturing plants, long-distance transportation and farms –
has been shaped and conformed to the needs of supermarket-style sales, with their insistence
on uniformity, reliability, constant quality, continuous replenishment, uninterrupted supply and
an enormous range of product choice. Accordingly, the supermarket system’s demand that both
quality and quantities be consistent led to the proliferation of standardised items produced using
technological processes to ensure the needed certainty.

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Similarly, the increasing popularity of the densely stocked, highly regularised supermarket
format stimulated parallel developments in packaging. These changes arose in part from the
concrete material requirements of the grocery trade (product preservation, convenience in
handling, easy fit in store displays), but they were also a response to promotional considera-
tions that took on greater significance when a given product could likely command only a
few inches of display space on shelves jammed with competing options. To be most effective,
packaging now had to serve as a means of advertising and brand distinction: everything that
faced the shopper was expected not only to inform, but also to attract, appeal, inspire, persuade
and sell.
Often enough, a grocery item that came packaged was one that had been manufactured
or processed, and self-service supermarket sales helped drive a shift away from raw, unpro-
cessed and bulk merchandise, generating widespread demand for factory-made articles and the
technologies needed to supply them. Heavy reliance on coolers and freezers, a critical part
of in-store infrastructure, meant that refrigeration technology had to be implemented back
throughout the supply chain, necessitating extensive networks of refrigerated shipping, trucking
and warehouses. Agricultural output responded, too. The new store model placed a high value
on products that could survive their long journeys from farms to shopping carts unblemished
and arrive at least seemingly fresh, with the consistent supermarket look and feel that both store
owners and customers came to expect.To meet that need, growers and ranchers reoriented their
production around factory-based food processing, turning to genetic science to originate new
breeds and varieties that might better serve the new demands of the market. As examples like
these suggest, the evolution of the supermarket has generated pervasive pressures for the intro-
duction of new technological solutions throughout the production and distribution networks
that it engages. The model retailing technology so eagerly promoted and celebrated by its early
advocates now finds itself embedded in, and continually reinforcing, a far broader systemic tech-
nological dependency.

Driving forces: the supermarket as an extension of modern urbanism

Grounded in the complex network of technologies and technically oriented management
methods just described, the supermarket appears as a paradigmatic expression of the distinctive
patterns of urban and suburban development that have characterised late modern industrial and
post-industrial societies. The relationship here is reciprocal: modern urbanism’s comparatively
concentrated configurations of housing and businesses render the mass-scale supermarket form
economically viable, while the availability of supermarket shopping helps to make cities and
towns appealing and “liveable”.
In the United States, the expansion of the supermarket system appears closely linked
with a specific variant of modern urbanism resulting from the rapid rise in ownership of
private automobiles. By the latter half of the twentieth century, cars and supermarkets had
become, along with single-family homes, emblems of the Good Life and the American
Dream. The connection with driving was no mere coincidence: for the United States, the
automobile was the essential convenience technology that made the supermarket a truly
countrywide phenomenon, bringing shoppers to the big stores they seemed to love so
much. Nowhere was America’s car culture in its early decades stronger than in Southern
California, and what started there as limited moves by local innovators later prompted
much broader changes. The auto-driven refinements and elaborations of the supermar-
ket model undertaken in the Los Angeles area from the 1930s through the 1950s soon

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influenced national trends, and what had been specific practices devised for grocery sales
ended up reshaping other retailing forms such as drugstores and variety stores (Longstreth,
1999). America became the quintessential supermarket society, and cars were a big part of
what made that happen.
But while it is true that supermarket retailing was at once a prime cause and prime
beneficiary of the profound transformations that Chester H. Liebs (1995) calls ‘the shift of
commerce from city to highway’ in the United States (p. vi), it is important to recognise
that even as supermarkets spread along new roads and highways, they did not vanish from
American cities. Indeed, the supermarket model has managed to survive – and make room
for the automobile – in urban centres. Big store footprints grew even bigger with the incor-
poration of adjacent parking lots, while in some cases developers have invested in expensive
garage infrastructure to accommodate drivers, all intended to incorporate the ease of auto-
oriented suburban, exurban and small-town supermarket shopping into the fabric of larger,
denser cities.
It would be a mistake, however, to approach the supermarket model as entirely an epiphe-
nomenon of automobilism. Widespread reliance on personal cars is by no means an indis-
pensable condition for the proliferation of the supermarket form. Quite to the contrary, the
large-scale, full-assortment supermarket has proved sustainable in many areas where either
suitable concentrations of high-density housing or reliable, convenient networks of urban
public transportation, or some combination of the two, can ensure that stores have the cus-
tomer counts and purchasing volumes needed to support a model premised on massive in-
store inventories and high throughput.To some extent this has occurred even in American city
centres, but it is especially true of developed urban areas outside the United States, where town
dwellers enjoy more sophisticated mass-transit systems and where the supermarket model
has managed to take root and survive, albeit in modified forms tailored to local customs and
conditions.
At least as important as the personal automobile, though far less salient for shoppers, has been
another critical aspect of motoring technology and modern urban development: the extensive
network of roads and delivery vehicles needed to ensure that stores stay stocked with a wide
variety of goods and to guarantee the regular refreshment of perishable items.
The supermarket method cannot be understood without a recognition of its fundamental
dependency on high-quality roads and transportation networks. Railways and seagoing freight-
ers can do some of the long-distance shipping work, but distribution from local and regional
depots must rely extensively on large fleets of wheeled vehicles in continuous circulation. Cars
may not be a requisite for success, but supermarkets have not functioned and will not function
without reliable trucking. At the same time, this dependence on road-transportation networks
meant that supermarket operators were among the most important sources of trucking demand,
giving them enormous market power over not only transportation providers but also over the
makers of the products they moved (Hamilton, 2008).
No analysis of the relationship between supermarkets and modern urbanism would be
complete without a recognition of the connections between one of the most conspicuous
failures of contemporary food distribution systems and the distinctive demands of the capital-
intensive, high volume, low-margin supermarket model. Patterns of land use that have acceler-
ated suburban sprawl away from urban cores (or more precisely, away from those parts of cities
that have stirred misgivings about “blighted” zones and prompted white flight) have resulted
in the emergence of so-called “food deserts”, areas where substantial portions of the popula-
tion lack access to a wide range of grocery options, especially healthier foods like the fresh

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 The supermarket as a global historical development

Figure 10.2 Montgomery, Alabama. Produce truck making deliveries at a supermarket, March 1943.
The unnoticed infrastructure of the supermarket form: urban sites and transportation
networks.
Source: Library of Congress, photographer John Vachon (public domain).

produce routinely stocked in supermarkets. The problem has been most serious and best stud-
ied in the United States, but it has appeared in other developed countries as well, notably in
Britain, where in recent decades a burgeoning automobile culture has in some ways mirrored
patterns seen in America, diminishing the availability of supermarkets in city centres (Shaw,
2014). Linked as it is with the broader tendency to shift shopping to the urban periphery, the
widespread adoption of the “progressive” supermarket model thus has not guaranteed progress
for all consumers.

Progressive grocers: the supermarket as an enterprise structure

Progress or not, the changes have been enormous. Writing in 1958, one management spe-
cialist weighed in on the transformation that by then had become so apparent in the busi-
ness of food distribution, noting that ‘twenty years ago the “supermarket industry” was

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Figure 10.3 New brands and new uses in a new capitalist era: A department store from communist
Czechoslovakia’s state-owned PRIOR chain, now repurposed for use as a shopping mall,
with a large ground floor supermarket operated by the Austrian Billa chain, a subsidiary of
Germany’s REWE Group. Note the multi-modal access: the store complex is sited directly
adjacent to the Prague Metro’s Prosek station, with automobile parking and bus stops in front
and many large socialist-era apartment blocks in the surrounding area. August 2017.
Source: Author photograph.

non-existent’ (Lawrence, 1991; p. 8). In short order, however, an industry had indeed mate-
rialised. The supermarket model altered the commercial landscape not just for shoppers but
for enterprises as well, and grocery retailing was well on the way towards the patterns that
have since typified the supermarket business for both the stores themselves and their suppli-
ers: ownership has become increasingly corporatised, management highly professionalised,
and operations unmistakably industrialised. At the same time, supermarket proprietors and
managers have sought to carefully optimise the scale of their firms using methods grounded
in the new principles of scientific management. And usually, “optimal” has meant big –
sometimes very big.
The key factors highlighted in the foregoing discussion – the importance of technology, the
reliance on sufficiently dense population clusters that can furnish adequate consumer markets,
the overriding concern for cost-cutting and efficiency, the magnitude of economies of scale –
have meant that ongoing optimisation presses supermarket operations towards the concentra-
tion of capital and management resources. And that pressure has favoured the consolidation of
supermarket holdings in chains of considerable size. In many ways, the history of supermarkets

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is a history of increasing scale: the pursuit of economic efficiency drove the evolution of the big
store, and the big store made the establishment of the big chains all the more profitable and all
the more logical.
This tendency has, not surprisingly, spelled trouble for small, independent store owners. In
the United States, market share had by the mid-1960s shifted with astonishing speed towards
highly centralised firms, with one analyst then noting that ‘the fact that the ten largest chains
sell almost 30% of all the food purchased at retail and that the three largest chains account for
almost half the business done by all food chains is giving some substance to the hue and cry aris-
ing across the land that “there out to be a law”’ (Markin, 1964/1965; p. 36). As that observation
suggests, competitive pressures from the chains sparked fierce resistance. Even before the self-
service and supermarket revolutions, small proprietors fearful of price cutting and consolidation
fought back. Many joined what ultimately became a ‘century-old battle between independent
merchants and large retailers’ (Levinson, 2011; p. 22), a conflict that continues in various ways to
this day and one that did, especially early on, result in some victories for the smaller firms, even
in the more free-wheeling American environment.
The struggle prompted a variety of notable competitive adaptations, as seen, for example, in
the independent outlets banded together under the brand IGA (Independent Grocers Alliance).
Part of the longer history of independent resistance, this network predated by a few years the
emergence of the supermarket form. With time, it developed into a noteworthy mechanism for
pushback against what the group calls “cookie-cutter chains”, now operating, in most American
states and more than thirty countries, almost five thousand “Hometown Proud” supermarkets, a
designation meant to evoke the independents’ local, community-oriented virtues (IGA, 2018).
But despite certain successes that cushioned at least some independent owners, there were lots
of failures, too. Often, and especially in the more laissez faire legal environment of United States,
the competitive advantages of the big chains proved difficult if not impossible to withstand
(Markin, 1968;Yee, 2003; Levinson, 2011).
The supermarket is a global phenomenon (or perhaps more aptly, one in the process of
ongoing globalisation), and it is critical to acknowledge that not all the world has taken the
anti-protectionist posture that has long encouraged so much enterprise consolidation in the
United States, or the course towards deregulation that has marked more recent British history,
with similar effects. Especially in continental Europe, frameworks of government policy have
helped loosen the hold of big chains, shielding independent supermarkets, smaller firms and
indeed smaller stores (Logemann, 2012). Europe has also seen some noteworthy departure from
the otherwise well-traveled path towards ownership by publicly traded corporations. As Andrew
Seth and Geoffrey Randall (2011) note, a number of the most significant supermarket firms
there operate with a commitment to “behind-the-scenes family control”, while ‘the question
“Who needs shareholders anyway, and what can they tell me about running my business?” has
never been very far away in the continental European retail markets’ (p. 130). Nevertheless, such
companies remain large, powerful, chains with highly concentrated capital assets and massive
economies of scale at their disposal. They are no less manifestations of “big business” for their
lack of accountability to stockholders, and in that respect they still confirm the broader trend
towards consolidated and centralised enterprise structures driven by the cost-cutting logics of
the supermarket form itself.

Purchasing power: the supermarket as an instrument of capitalism

Critical to both the enterprise structures just described and to the supermarket form as an
inherently technology-dependent model is the evident need for substantial, indeed often

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massive, investment.With their large-scale, heavy reliance on expensive infrastructure and exten-
sive transportation networks and far-flung commodity chains, supermarket operations and the
enterprises that support them simply cannot go forward in the absence of big capital holdings,
and in practice this capital has often been heavily concentrated in firms controlling many stores.
Capital counts.
And because big capital counts for so much, capitalism itself has routinely figured as an
essential element in efforts to tell the supermarket story. The practical bonds between super-
market operations and the structures of modern capitalist business have yielded a widely shared
conceptual construct: scholars have commonly treated the form as something characteristically
and indeed even intrinsically capitalist. It is easy enough to see how this conclusion might arise
without any serious reservations from the cases most often studied. For there is no denying the
very capitalist origins of the supermarket model in the very capitalist United States, and there is
a certain apparent naturalness to interpretations of the supermarket as an extension of the mar-
ket logics of capitalist efficiency and profit-seeking. Along these lines, for example, Victoria de
Grazia (2005) observes that the history of Italy’s Supermarkets Italiani/Esselunga chain appears
in many ways to be ‘the story of a purposeful, consumer-oriented globalizing capitalism’, one
that ‘tells of a forceful entrepreneur working with an expert staff to forge a new social alliance
between foreign capitalism and local consumer interests by endorsing a high-volume, low per-
unit-cost operation’ (p. 379). In the same vein, Tracey Deutsch (2010) notes that supermarkets
became ‘vehicles for establishing the superiority of America and, more broadly, of capitalism
itself ’ in the rhetoric of their backers in business and government circles, who insisted that
‘because supermarkets lowered food prices, celebrated freedom of choice, and made customers
feel they were being treated equally, they reduced the appeal of communism and showcased the
real value of American capitalism and free enterprise’ (p. 192). Deutsch is therefore pointing
to something quite important about the way grocery retailing has functioned in the United
States when she concludes that supermarkets and similar store forms are sites where ‘capitalism
is embedded, undermined, reinforced, and indeed constituted and made meaningful through
social relations at the point of purchase’ (p. 229).
Those adopting a more normative, explicitly critical stance, as in the case of various observers
writing from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, have frequently
gone even further, seeing the supermarket not just as another manifestation of capitalist busi-
ness practice, but as a tool of capitalism. If celebratory accounts from industry boosters typi-
cally assume that the interests of shoppers and supermarket owners “automatically coincide”, as
Rachel Bowlby notes (1997), such critiques habitually posit the opposite: ‘the more the capital-
ists benefit, the less the customers do’ (p. 94). Accordingly, the supermarket functions, in one
such critical reading, as ‘the dominant contemporary symbol of capitalist penetration into the
food system’ (Mann, 2014, pp. 19, 26). Proceeding along similar lines to identify the supermarket
as ‘the highest temple of the modern food system’ (p. 216), Raj Patel (2007) treats the big gro-
cery chains as thoroughly and hopelessly entrenched in that system, one that follows the ‘cardi-
nal rule of market capitalism: “buy cheap, sell dear”’ (p. 10). Seeking some remedy, Patel endorses
community-oriented, cooperatively managed challengers to the supermarket model and to the
corporatised food structures that supply it, arguing that ‘what’s at stake isn’t only the dominion
of the supermarket, but the stability of an entire matrix of living, working and consumption,
one that shapes not only our choices but . . . our very selves’ (p. 252).Viewed from such vantage
points, capitalism is crushingly coercive. The supermarket is capitalism.
That common assumption, however, has thus far not been subjected to much in the way of
serious and sustained analytical scrutiny.There has been, to be sure, some pushback against total-
ising views that treat the supermarket as a place where, naturally and invariably, capitalism works

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its dangerous magic. Kim Humphery’s study (1998) of the cultural impact of the supermarket in
Australia, for example, endeavours to articulate a revised yet still critical analytical stance that is
neither blithely celebratory of the consumption experience in developed capitalist societies nor
constrained by an unwavering, simplistic hostility towards contemporary retailing as the creature
and servant of big capital and its self-interested culture (pp. 209–210). He thus cautions against
reductionist interpretations that see supermarkets as inherently, and more or less inescapably, the
devices of capitalist power (pp. 16–17). But notwithstanding some reservations like these, the
tendency towards a straightforward linkage of the supermarket model with the purposes and
market logics of capitalist economics continues to prevail. Capitalism, in the dominant view, is
intrinsic to the supermarket, part of the essential nature of this retail form.
A careful comparative study of a broader range of historical cases, however, should elicit
some reservations about pushing that diagnosis too far. No matter how unshakeable the capital-
ist global economy may seem from the standpoint of the early decades of the new millennium,
a longer world-historical view reminds us that there were alternatives to that economy – and
potent, entrenched, durable ones – during the consolidation of the retail systems and practices
that came to typify the developed West in the latter part of the twentieth century. Communism
offered other options. Yet despite its capitalist beginnings, the supermarket was enthusiastically
embraced by members of the political, planning, and trade establishment in a number of com-
munist-led societies. Ultimately, the form proved perhaps surprisingly adaptable to commercial
settings grounded in Marxist principles and thus in the state or collective ownership and control
of the means of production. And at least in the most prosperous and consumer-oriented com-
munist countries, supermarkets functioned reasonably well given the constraints of the broader
economic system (Patterson, 2009). For our conceptualisation of the relationship between the
supermarket model and the private ownership and control of business and investment assets, the
implications are clear: the supermarket model requires large-scale capital. But it does not require
capitalism. Considered in global terms, the supermarket form is therefore best understood as
an instrument shaped and wielded with great effect by capitalist owners, but not invariably or
intrinsically a tool that does the work of capitalism.

The distribution of choice: the supermarket as a transnational model

The quickest and most dynamic importations of the supermarket model occurred, understand-
ably enough, in other highly developed capitalist countries. Proximity to and frequent contacts
with the US, certain parallels in urban design and land use, and a comparative lack of war-related
displacement and destabilisation helped make the Canadian marketplace one of the earliest sites
of supermarket expansion. But the spread of the supermarket would soon involve something
much more than efforts to replicate the achievements of successful next-door neighbours. After
World War II, the appeal of the model proved very far-reaching, and the transnational networks
of business expertise, information and know-how, investment, and ownership that propagated
the supermarket form would become, with time, genuinely global.
Europe in particular offered tempting new markets for supermarket operators. The United
Kingdom is perhaps the best-studied case, and retailers there were comparatively early and eager
promoters of the model (Shaw, Kurth & Alexander, 2004; Alexander, 2008; Shaw, Bailey, Alexan-
der, Nell & Hamlett, 2012; Bailey & Alexander, 2017).The burgeoning English-language profes-
sional literature that had resulted from the enthusiastic embrace of the supermarket in North
America was, naturally, readily available to British commercial specialists, easing the flow of ideas
and contacts. In business, networks matter, and in mass-scale retailing in the latter half of the
twentieth century, influential network leaders in Britain, as in a number of other countries, grew

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excited about the promise of the supermarket. Fairly quickly, the UK saw the coalescence of
‘something akin to a self-service retailing “community of practice” emerging from the activities
of key stakeholders connected with the retail trades’, with impetus coming from advocates and
analysts in the business press, from government officials charged with regulating and promoting
commerce, from retail firms and entrepreneurs who saw opportunities as supermarket pioneers,
and from industries specialising in the design and furnishings of retail outlets who stood to profit
from a big new modernising shift. (Alexander, Shaw & Curth, 2005; p. 807). There were bumps
in the road, to be sure, with energetic competitive opposition and some regulatory obstacles, as
seen in the early phases of the American case. But the new store form was, in fairly short order,
on the path to becoming an essential feature in UK grocery retailing, with the country’s larg-
est chain Tesco ultimately becoming Europe’s biggest grocery enterprise and, since the 1990s, a
major driver of the ongoing expansion of supermarkets and supermarket-style shopping venues
into developing countries and other new markets.
On the European continent, patterns of diffusion varied significantly depending on national
and local conditions. Seen from the standpoint of the first two decades of the twenty-first cen-
tury, the supermarket and its close variants appear as dominant forms in European retailing, with
recent decades witnessing the maturation and diversification of the business. As the supermarket
model has taken root firmly, a more favourable legal and regulatory climate for cross-border
expansion within Europe has seen the consolidation of several very large national and interna-
tional chains operating both traditional supermarkets and other stores that, whether bigger or
smaller, incorporate key aspects of the supermarket model. These giant firms are headquartered
in a number of European countries, including France (e.g., Carrefour, Auchan, E. Leclerc), the
Netherlands (Ahold Delhaize), and Germany (REWE, Edeka, Aldi, Lidl), with many managing
a variety of store types under multiple brand names and maintaining a substantial European and
global presence well beyond their institutional bases and countries of origin (Mouncer, 2017).
Yet as impressive as the supermarket industry may be in Europe today, the historical trajec-
tory of supermarket expansion there was anything but uniform.The “diverging itineraries” seen
across European countries – a pattern found in the history of self-service stores more generally –
were the product of multiple, complex, interacting factors, and the results on the ground were
remarkably mixed, with the market penetration of the form by 1972, as measured in supermar-
kets per million residents, marked by wide variations: Denmark with sixty-five supermarkets per
million; Belgium with sixty-two; the UK, fifty-eight; Switzerland, fifty-five; the Netherlands,
forty-seven; West Germany, forty-six; France, forty; and Italy registering only eleven stores per
million (Van den Eeckhout, 2012; p. 78; citing Lescent-Giles, 2005, p. 199). More than is com-
monly recognised, the law loomed large: in a number of European countries, there were big
difficulties, especially early on, in overcoming regulatory barriers and the policy-shaping power
of entrenched local market incumbents. There is likewise no doubt that the cold economics
of competition figured enormously, but culture mattered too, sometimes speeding, sometimes
hindering the uptake of the supermarket model.
Although the United States and its big, captivating, sometimes spectacular stores held an
undeniable appeal for many, especially the entrepreneurial advocates of the supermarket form,
there were also recurring worries about American influence and, accordingly, unease about and
resistance to the proliferation of the new sales methods. This raises the issue of “Americaniza-
tion”, a term that, for all its importance and power, is often deployed too broadly, and with
too little rigour. For historians’ core concerns with causes, effects, and the agents and sources
of change, it is best reserved for instances in which we can demonstrate either (1) a strong
case: identifiable, discrete transfers from the United States to other societies (with or without

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intermediaries) of elements of culture, behaviour, thought, or practice that clearly and indis-
putably originated in the US, and their adoption in the societies receiving such transfers; or
(2) where specific transfers from the US cannot be proven, a weaker but still sufficient case: the
adoption by other societies of elements of culture, behaviour, thought, or practice that are so
distinctively associated with the US as to be convincingly if not indisputably “American”. The
supermarket is, without a doubt, so strongly associated with its origins and success in the US as
to be fairly considered “American”, but its reception in Europe offers, in fact, so many examples
of discrete, direct transfers from and through American institutions and actors that even the
strong case of Americanisation is, for many European societies, amply proven. Here the label fits.
That said, the mechanics and results of Americanisation were by no means straightforward,
unvarying, or predictable. In Italy, Americanisation – real and imagined – proved an especially
hot issue. The ongoing contest between leftist and rightist blocs in the immediate postwar
decades meant that the supermarket figured as something much more than just a food store
in the minds of those concerned with the country’s future. Businessmen, investors, companies
and ideas from the US were at the forefront of the effort to popularise the supermarket form,
and American influence and the power of capitalist big business were major concerns for Ital-
ians. ‘Amid the Cold War climate’, as Emanuela Scarpellini (2012) notes, ‘this often turned the
opening of a supermarket into a cause politique’ (p. 60). Italy did ultimately see the penetration
of the supermarket model and the rise of a number of large chain-style enterprises, but early
efforts there were remarkable for their slow pace and for the difficulties that entrepreneurs
and managers encountered (De Grazia, 2002; De Grazia, 2005; Scarpellini, 2005; Scarpellini,
2012). For another important case, West Germany, Lydia Langer (2012) concludes that although
there is abundant evidence of an ‘important push factor’ in the form of direct transfers of the
self-service and supermarket models from the US, such borrowing was ‘not in fact the decisive
factor’ for the transformation of German grocery sales and the rise of the supermarket, which
instead depended more on ‘the establishment of a European network promoting the rationalisa-
tion of distribution policies’ (p. 72). (This finding, of course, raises the question of whether the
European network on which the Germans relied might itself fairly be described as the product
of Americanisation.) Across Europe, there was rarely if ever anything like a direct, cookie-cutter
replication of American practice. Instead, the process was marked by considerable localisation
and hybridisation, making for a wide range of outcomes in practice.
There were, moreover, a few notable European laggards. In Spain, for example, a combination
of political and economic circumstances connected with the survival of Francoism until 1975
meant that the model would be quite slow to take hold (Ruiz, 2007), though the transforma-
tion in later years has been dramatic, moving the country’s commercial practices more in line
with prevailing European dynamics that have made the supermarket a common feature of the
retailing landscape.
The model proved attractive in developed countries beyond Europe and North America
as well. In Australia, for example, expansion was rapid and robust, and by the mid-1990s three
large chains accounted for three-quarters of the prepackaged grocery items sold in the country
(Humphery, 1998; p. 2). Japanese developments attest to both the power and the limits of the
supermarket form, as well as to its flexibility in the face of new and different competitive condi-
tions and cultural expectations. After the first experiments with self-service retailing in the late
1950s, a number of innovative Japanese firms and business leaders worked hard over the next
several decades to harness the country’s economic dynamism through supermarket-style retail-
ing. In the ensuing consumer boom from the 1960s through the 1980s, grocery sales in many
Japanese retail outlets started to take on many of the attributes that characterised supermarket

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retailing elsewhere, with a wide variety of prepackaged and processed foods sold in increasingly
large stores. The supermarket-style would not be dislodged from its prominent position even as
Japan’s economy slid towards stagnation in the 1990s. At the same time, however, urban settle-
ment patterns and distinctive consumer preferences for certain fresh foods and freshly prepared
dishes have meant that Japan has also seen a number of departures from the dominance of the
traditional supermarket. Many Japanese consumers continued to opt for daily or near-daily
shopping trips, encouraging the persistence of small neighbourhood stores, while supermarkets
themselves responded to local market conditions by adding special sections catering to the
demand for the fresh, daily items that shoppers insisted on. Meanwhile, supermarket-style food
sections were often integrated into a distinctive hybrid retailing form (customarily called super
in Japanese even though many are not, strictly speaking, just supermarkets), one that blends a
wide variety of self-service grocery options into much larger stores with the extensive non-food
offerings typically found in department stores and discounters (Usui, 2014; pp. 111–153).
Despite its tight connections with the power of capitalist business in Western Europe and
the United States, the supermarket model held an undeniable allure for many planners and
commercial specialists in socialist societies. Yugoslavia’s unorthodox and innovative system of
“self-management socialism” under Josip Broz Tito, for example, proved unusually open to
the promise of the new grocery sales method. In as clear an instance of a direct Americanising
transfer as might be imagined (and, at the same time, an unmistakable use of the supermarket
success story for Cold War messaging about the superiority of capitalism), the manager of a
socially owned Yugoslav retailing enterprise, wowed by the exhibition of a functional, full-
scale exemplar at the Supermarket USA exhibit at the 1957 International Trade Fair in Zagreb,
purchased the furnishings and equipment of the entire store, carting them off for installation in a
prime location in downtown Belgrade (Hamilton, 2009; Rusinow, 1969). On the heels of that
extraordinary episode, Yugoslavia eagerly participated in the “supermarket revolution”, with
more big stores established in urban centres during the 1960s, and many thereafter (Rusinow,
1969; Patterson, 2009). The model also proved attractive in several other, comparatively pros-
perous East European countries, with the construction of limited but nonetheless impressive
networks of supermarkets and smaller-scale superettes in East Germany, Hungary and Czecho-
slovakia (Patterson, 2009). Even the Soviet Union, a stronghold of communist orthodoxy and
no great wellspring of commercial innovation, finally took steps towards the adoption of the
model, opening the country’s first supermarket in Leningrad in 1970, with many new stores
planned in subsequent years and 239 built by the end of the decade (Skurski, 1983; p. 131). In
many cases, these early socialist-era store networks formed the basis for the expansion of West-
ern firms into newly opened East European markets following the collapse of communism and
the resultant privatisation of retailing assets (Dries, Reardon & Swinnen, 2004).
Turning our examination now to the developing world, we find further confirmation of the
profound influence of the supermarket form as a favoured model for development and mod-
ernisation. Suggesting that the phenomenon has truly global dimensions, Reardon and Gulati
(2008) describe a “supermarket revolution” occurring in four waves. The first wave, seen in
much of South America, East Asia (excluding the People’s Republic of China), and South Africa,
began in the early 1990s, with supermarkets’ share of relevant sector sales in these areas rising
from about 10% around 1990 to approximately 50–60% by the middle of the next decade. The
second phase, encountered in Mexico, Central America, and many countries of Southeast Asia,
started in the middle and later years of the 1990s and saw supermarkets’ market share rise from
a baseline of 5–10% in 1990 to 30–50% by the mid-2000s. A mix of political and economic
factors meant that China, India, and Vietnam would wait to participate in these trends until the

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Figure 10.4 SPAR hypermarket entrance, New South China Mall, Dongguan, China. The supermarket
as an adaptable transnational model for retail development: a massive grocery/non-grocery
hypermarket operated by local owners under the internationally licensed SPAR brand at the
New South China Mall, Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China. February 2010.
Sources: Wikimedia Commons, photographer User David290 (public domain); https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:NewSouthChinaMall-SPAR.jpg

third wave that began in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with market share ranging from 2%
to 20% by the middle part of the 2000s. By the latter part of that decade, sales in modern, self-
service stores were expanding dramatically in these third-wave countries, increasing 30–50% per
year and far outstripping these economies’ already remarkable rates of growth in gross domestic
product, indicating that major sectoral realignments were underway. Finally, by the latter half of
the 2000s, a more recent fourth wave appeared to be building in very poor and comparatively
less developed countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia and various West African nations,
though these areas were marked by considerably slower growth, with the prospect of ‘another
one or two decades before supermarket diffusion in the fourth wave areas is appreciable’ (Rear-
don & Gulati, 2008; p. 1; see also Reardon, Timmer, Barrett & Berdegué, 2003; Weatherspoon
and Reardon, 2003). The analysis used in delineating these four waves applies a broad definition
of supermarkets that includes all “modern retail”, thus encompassing not just traditional super-
markets and larger hypermarkets with full-assortment supermarket sections, but also modern
convenience stores and neighbourhood stores. Nevertheless, these research findings are strongly
suggestive of the timing, pace, geographic variation and extent of the spread of the supermarket
model.

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For businesses and the consumers they seek to attract, the implications of these changes have
been enormous. In at least some parts of Latin America, the “traditional image” of supermarkets
as ‘niche players for rich consumers in the capital cities of the region’ was rendered invalid by
the early 2000s, quickly becoming ‘a distant memory of the pre-liberalisation period before the
1990s’ (Reardon and Berdegué, 2002; p. 517). (Here “supermarket” is defined in narrower terms
that include traditional supermarkets, hypermarkets, and other large-format venues such as ware-
house stores and membership clubs; p. 319.) The transformations involved here are astonishing
for their magnitude and speed. ‘In one globalising decade’, as Reardon and Berdegué observe
with respect to the huge shifts in market share attributable to these “modern” store forms, ‘Latin
American retailing made the change which took the US retail sector 50 years’ (p. 517).
Although historical work can draw usefully from recent empirical findings of researchers
in fields like business, management, economics, planning and policy studies, developing a truly
global account of the contemporary history of the supermarket will prove difficult. Conditions
are shifting, markets and retail strategies are rapidly changing, case studies are patchy, data are
fragmentary and interpretations are, as a result, incomplete. Some caution is in order. Readings
of the same record are, moreover, sometimes widely divergent in their emphases, in some ways
even contradictory. Thus we find one pair of analysts (Reardon & Minten, 2011) concluding
that ‘supermarkets have taken-off quickly in the “traditional retail setting” of India’ (136), a
market environment that they find to be essentially comparable in key aspects (urban density
and agricultural patterns) to many other Asian settings that have already experienced their own
“supermarket revolution”, noting that, in the end, ‘India seems to differ in just doing it faster,
combining lessons from others, creating new solutions’ (137). Others interpreting the same
conditions, however, stress that ‘in India, even in the most advanced urban settings, there are
no “true modern shoppers”. Nor are there “true modern outlets” since even the Western-style
superstores generally have to incorporate some traditional elements’ (Dholakia, Dholakia &
Chattopadhyay, 2012; p. 252). As variant readings like these suggest, to some extent it remains
unclear just what has taken place “on the ground” as the supermarket has extended its reach into
new markets. There is obviously much more work to be done.Yet despite such reservations, the
available evidence leaves no doubt that, even in these less-studied cases that have only recently
started to attract sustained scholarly consideration, the supermarket form has functioned as a
profoundly influential transnational and global model, and it continues to do so.

Everyday values: the supermarket as a site of culture

As it has travelled to occupy a worldwide stage, the supermarket model has been recognised by
both scholarly and popular observers as among the most potent cultural forces in modern com-
mercial life. Commentaries on supermarket shopping are filled with affirmations of the novel
and remarkable cultural power of the form. The account provided by Sharon Zukin (2004),
describing developments seen in American society in the latter half of the twentieth century,
offers a signal example:

Shopping in supermarkets changed us as a public. Our geographical mobility – our

ability to range much farther from home in quest of goods – empowered us; it made
us feel we had a wider choice. But shopping in the most modern stores, which were
not only larger but located at a greater distance from home and work, made shop-
ping more tiresome. And though parking lots, shopping carts, and multiple checkout
lines . . . made it faster to get in and out of the store, it took longer to escape the

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supermarket’s totalizing environment. . . . We were emotionally immobilized by the

immense abundance.
(p. 79)

Moving beyond the much-discussed American case, and beyond even any literal connection
with what goes on in grocery stores, the supermarket has become a familiar metaphor for more
general cultural conditions (Bowlby, 2000), evoking for better or worse the broader human pre-
dicament in a modern world shot through with commercialism and filled with choices that call
out for our attention, our action, our money, our love.
Generalisations about culture are both useful and treacherous. For what is really at work here
is not culture but cultures – multiple, fragmentary, overlapping and sometimes competitive and
contradictory.This observation certainly holds true for the manifold cultures that arise from and
connect with the world of business: the undeniable importance of the supermarket as a cultural
phenomenon points promisingly to the value of crafting defensible generalisations, but caution
is required. Along these lines, Kim Humphery (1998) offers a useful distinction when he asserts
that

retailers develop retail forms and construct retail cultures; they do not create smoothly
functioning mass consumer cultures, however hard they may try. Consumer cultures arise
only in the interaction between those who have something to sell and those who look,
listen, watch, wander, feel and sometimes buy.
(p. 5)

The same insight applies with full force to the culture, or cultures, of the supermarket. Criti-
cally, the supermarket is at once an important arena for market culture (the designation I use to
emphasise the efforts and values of businesspeople in the marketplace, including but extending
beyond the retail setting) and for consumer culture (a term that shifts the inquiry back towards
what shoppers and buyers actually do with the markets and goods they encounter). Occupying
in this way a prominent place not just in business and commercial affairs but also in the broader
currents of social and private life, the mass-scale, full-assortment, self-service grocery store has
come to function as an important setting for and generator of a pattern that I have previously
described as an expansive “culture of the supermarket” that was consolidated over the course
of the late twentieth century and spread well beyond the developed capitalist societies where it
first emerged (Patterson, 2009).
Examining world-historical trends, key comparative cases, and global flows, we find that
supermarkets have been (and, for now at least, remain) prime sites and drivers of a still larger
pattern, one that may properly be termed the transnational culture of modern retailing. Built and
maintained not only in supermarkets but in other prominent retail venues as well, the vital
assemblage I identify here attempts to capture the most important aspects of both business-built
market culture and shopper-supported consumer culture. It exhibits the following key elements:

• the emphasis of the pleasurable, satisfying qualities of shopping

• the promise of spontaneity and discovery
• the pursuit of modernity through innovative, up to date, progressive shopping
• the promotion of the virtues of novelty and progress
• the security of satisfaction guaranteed
• the restructuring of shopping sociability towards a more individualised experience

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• the eclipse of labour and the subordination of production to consumption

• the demarcation of a feminine domain of consumption complementing shifting work roles
• the elevation of abundance as an end in itself
• the embrace of competition
• the acknowledgement of the sovereign consumer and the primacy of choice

As a set of common behaviours and expressive activities grounded in the communication of

shared ideas, beliefs, attitudes, preferences and identities – in other words, as a culture – these
ways of marketing, buying, thinking, feeling and living all combine to make the supermarket
experience a powerful marker and multiplier of prevailing priorities, norms and ideals. In a
sense rather different from the promises made in advertisements and store promotions, the
supermarket really is where everyday values are found.
The customer-retailer interactions that take place in supermarkets routinely serve to rein-
force those values, with every element of the pattern set forth above amply attested in the
scholarly and trade literature on supermarket operations and supermarket culture. Of course,
many messages about modernity, novelty, pleasure, satisfaction and abundance are, by design,
immediately apparent to shoppers themselves as part of the in-store experience. Features like

Figure 10.5 Housewife shopping in supermarket (Gisella). The transnational culture of modern retail-
ing: satisfaction, pleasure, progress, abundance, competition, choice and the feminine domain
of consumption. A self-service shopper amid the promises of consumer sovereignty in an
American supermarket. May 1957.
Source: Library of Congress, photographer Thomas J. O’Halloran (public domain) www.loc.gov/resource/
ppmsca.51756/

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 The supermarket as a global historical development

these surface so frequently and with such force that the claim that these are prime constituents
of contemporary retail culture will likely seem uncontroversial. Other important aspects of the
prevailing cultural pattern, however, tend to be revealed only through deeper, sustained analysis.
The supermarket sells more than meets the eye, and greater care is needed to discern what the
retail style works to obscure, as happens with the tendency to render labour invisible and elevate
consumption practices above the underlying production relations that make all the purchases
possible. When self-service retail methods seek to drive labour costs down by ‘employing the
customer’ throughout the shopper’s circuit around the store (Palm 2017; p. 41) as the supermar-
ket model does so consistently, it is not clear that many of those who have ended up doing the
labour for themselves actually recognise the scope and impact of the larger dynamics to which
they are contributing. Investigations of the gendered dimensions of the supermarket suggest
similarly interesting results. Past practice has seen, for example, efforts by a number of store
operators to encourage men to embrace grocery shopping, while husbands’ control of house-
hold budgets has required some caveats about the supermarket as a feminised domain (Cohen,
2003; p. 148). But on the whole, the culture sustained through grocery shopping remains one
attuned to the critical importance of women’s roles, with American supermarkets by the 1950s
established at the forefront of what Tracey Deutsch (2010) calls ‘a new gender system’, one in
which grocery retailers of various types moved towards ‘a remarkable convergence’ of styles and
messaging built around the norms and expectations of comfortably middle-class female shop-
pers, a system that departed from the more varied cultural palette of past retail cultures to present
women instead with ‘glamour and convenience – not autonomy or authority’ (p. 134; see also
Deutsch, 1999).While most shoppers may remain heedless of their participation in such regimes,
a lack of conscious awareness does not render the resultant effects any less shared, any less reflec-
tive and expressive of values, any less cultural.
Notwithstanding the various reservations voiced by critics about the constraints that they
believe the supermarket and related sales methods impose on the welfare and freedom of shop-
pers, the internationalised culture of modern retailing is one that vigorously asserts the impor-
tance of consumer sovereignty and consumer alternatives. It is, ultimately, a culture of choice.
Evidencing its power and appeal, that culture has arisen in places where choices are harder to
come by, including those that do not share the characteristics of fully developed industrial and
post-industrial capitalist societies. Indeed, the culture of choice managed to take hold even in
communist-led polities where there was no large-scale private ownership of retailing capital
and, at least in comparison to the capitalist world, rather limited choices in the stores and on the
shelves (Patterson, 2009). Further testimony to the influence of the cultural pattern is the fact
that its diffusion has taken place not just spatially, but across retail categories as well, into food
and grocery stores that, by virtue of their reduced size and more restricted product assortment,
do not really warrant classification as supermarkets. Limited as they are, many of these smaller
shops acknowledge and reinforce the power of the transnational cultural ideal as they attempt
to capture and communicate the vision of abundant modernity and choice that is regularly on
display in the classic supermarket, the model form.

This lane open? The supermarket as history

Supermarkets cannot, of course, function everywhere. As explained above, they are heavily reli-
ant on technology and complex supply networks, dependent on proximity to concentrated
urban, suburban, and exurban pools of mobile consumers, and better suited for wealthier devel-
oped economies with purchasing power that warrants the major capital investments that the

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 Patrick Hyder Patterson

form requires. Such limitations help explain the persistence of a variety of different grocery-sales
models alongside the massive, full-selection, chain-operated supermarket form that has thus far
attracted the most attention from scholars, observers and business managers. Small and inde-
pendent stores that fill quite different market niches, or just a part of the market niche of the
classic supermarket, persist as an important feature of the grocery retailing landscape (Logemann,
2012). Still, as its global spread goes forward, the supermarket remains a highly favoured retailing
model among both business specialists and consumers.
Nevertheless, supermarket operations and the supermarket model itself have been and will
likely continue to be subject to pressures, primarily economic but also social and cultural, that
can result in considerable modifications. Over the past decades, what is meant by the concept
“supermarket” has changed in notable ways and no doubt will do so in the future. The super-
market form is a flexible form. But in spite of that adaptability and the obvious success of the
supermarket as it nears the end of its first century of practical implementation, there is at least
some reason to wonder whether the grand-scale, full-assortment supermarket model is sure to
survive as the dominant paradigm for grocery retailing. Is the supermarket in the process of
becoming a modernism of the past?
Recent developments have seen the form pressed in new directions. Perhaps most notable are
those modifications that have incorporated supermarkets into expanded venues such as hyper-
markets, superstores and supercenters (e.g., Walmart), and similar outlets that operate in an even
larger format and offer a much wider variety of non-grocery items than is found in the stand-
ard supermarket product range. Such businesses, along with warehouse stores and discounters
(Costco, Sam’s Club) that sell many grocery items without attempting to stock anywhere near
the full range that a supermarket must offer to meet customers’ expectations, pose significant
threats to the profitability of traditional supermarket enterprises (Smith, 2009; pp. 180–181). In
addition, market conditions in some highly developed countries have encouraged the emer-
gence of stores that occupy notably narrower niches than classic supermarkets, with a restricted
selection of products and marketing that is targeted at limited consumer segments, while still
cultivating the evident “feel” of a supermarket and exploiting the form’s technological, oper-
ational and productivity advantages. Along these lines, for example, we find non-traditional
supermarkets (or not-quite-supermarkets) aimed at upscale or health-conscious consumers (e.g.,
Whole Foods in the US, Bio-Planet in France), food-savvy value-minded customers (Trader
Joe’s in the US) and discounters (Aldi in Europe and beyond). Outlets like these differ from
traditional supermarkets through their option to offer not quite “everything” or a different,
niche-inflected version of “everything”, yet they remain deeply influenced by the supermarket
model and represent in many ways a fairly straightforward revision or extension of that template.
Predictions about the future are rarely the province of historians, or at least of cautious ones.
That said, a sensitivity to history can usefully inform assessments of present developments and
trends, in turn offering at least a few clues about what may lie in store (literally and figuratively)
for the future. And on that point much of the answer may emerge from a return to this essay’s
earlier emphasis of the driving forces of profit-driven efficiency imperatives and, especially,
technology. If the supermarket model is to be superseded, the causes of its decline will most
likely be found there. Just as efficiency opportunities are dependent on a constantly shifting set
of economic, demographic, technical, legal, environmental and other factors, technology itself
is continually in flux – today remarkably so. Supermarket operations have been, as we have
seen, quick to adopt technologies for an apparent market edge. But store owners readily modify
or even abandon technological solutions when circumstances compel it: witness the ongoing
displacement of throwaway bags made of polyethylene and other plastics, an invention that not

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 The supermarket as a global historical development

long ago was treated as an essential convenience technology for supermarket shoppers (light-
weight, remarkably durable) and supermarket operators (cheap, compact, self-opening). Today,
however, what once seemed the indispensable disposable is under serious pressure as a worri-
some source of pollution, an externalised cost increasingly unsustainable in new environmental
and regulatory conditions.
Given that the ancillary technologies of the supermarket form continue to emerge and
decline as circumstances demand, it is conceivable that similar forces might also weaken the
supermarket model itself. Present developments already allow us to imagine a future in which
new automated or semi-automated delivery systems, made possible through innovations in
energy, transportation, and information technology, may at last oust the supermarket from
its dominant position as a vital, large-scale cost saving link between warehouse and customer.
Admittedly, early efforts at web-based delivery systems during the dot-com boom of the first
decades of the Internet did not prove much of a disruption, and some failures (e.g., the e-com-
merce grocer Webvan) were spectacular (Kornum & Bjerre, 2005). But there is reason to think
that future refinements could pose more of a threat to the supermarket model, as recent specu-
lation about the long-term significance of the acquisition of the Whole Foods chain by Internet
shopping behemoth Amazon suggests. Live by the price cut, die by the price cut.
Even so, an essential element of the equation will be the expectation, long cultivated through
the supermarket model itself, that more or less “everything” will always be available to grocery
shoppers. Competing with supermarkets is not just about costs and ease. It is about the com-
pleteness of the assortment on offer. It is, in other words, about choice. Any alternative model will
have to respond to the multiple strong advantages that the supermarket has provided to shoppers
and sellers alike. Consequently, there seems little reason at present to wager that the supermarket
form will not survive much longer. It has proven both remarkably persistent and remarkably
mutable, and it likely will for some time.
How, then, might historically minded scholars continue to most profitably address the super-
market phenomenon? Developments in the practice of business history in recent years have
demonstrated the value of approaches that draw more deeply on concerns with the broader
social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of business and commerce and, in so doing,
move away from narrower, more traditional examinations of enterprises and their managers.
More studies along these lines could helpfully augment a literature that was in some ways, early
on at least, a bit too prone to hagiographic accounts of the great entrepreneurs and the great
companies. Labour needs more attention, too. The tendency of supermarkets, and self-service
more generally, to render invisible much of the work necessary to put all the abundance on the
shelves leaves historians the task of remedying that invisibility. Further emphasis on the lives and
labours of supermarket workers should help build a more complicated, revealing and produc-
tive picture. Building on impressive extant work, further investigation of the deep connections
between supermarkets and gender roles could likely yield interesting results, while the compli-
cated relationship between food shopping, food retailing and issues of race, ethnicity and class
presents a terrain with great untapped potential, as does the supermarket industry’s engagement
with children and with people living in small towns and population centres at the demographic
limits of the supermarket model’s viability. And while recent decades have brought a welcome
attention to the extraordinary importance of consumption practices, there is still plenty to be
done to assess how consumers experienced their supermarkets (and the alternatives) and to
determine what difference the much-vaunted method of modern shopping has really made.
The supermarket’s power as a transnational commercial and cultural model, and its con-
nections with the global economic order and international flows of capital, technology and

175
 Patrick Hyder Patterson

know-how, suggest the value of further work on the geographic diffusion of the supermarket
form. Despite some very interesting contributions on the history of grocery sales beyond the
United States in recent years, considerably more work is needed, particularly work on the food
distribution systems of poorer developing countries, where the supermarket model may have
great appeal but where structural limitations may hinder its spread or require more extensive
local adaptations to make the format viable. Along these lines, it would be profitable to consider
how supermarkets may or may not function in those few places where Marxist-Leninist gov-
ernance and socialised ownership of the means of production still prevail (e.g., Cuba), as well
as the trajectory of the supermarket model in post-socialist societies (Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union) and in the rapidly changing business systems of states that have managed
to combine elements of capitalism and Leninism (China,Vietnam).
The extensive connections, obvious or not, between supermarket commerce and the under-
lying political orders that govern business likewise indicate the potential payoffs from new
studies that probe more persistently the legal and regulatory frameworks that have shaped super-
market development and operations. On matters as diverse as labour regulation, land use and
zoning, opening hours, price setting, and restrictions on permitted product assortment such as
Europe’s widespread bans on sales of over-the-counter non-prescription medications (Chave,
2014), the success and dominance of supermarkets is dependent on supportive legal regimes,
and historical writing should grapple with law and policy more consistently and more carefully.
Similarly, the importance of concentrated capital (typically in the form of big business
chains) for the supermarket’s characteristic economies of scale points to the value of further
examination of divergent management structures. Even if, globally speaking, socialist owner-
ship no longer offers much of an alternative, it certainly did at one time, and there still remain
meaningful and significant options for collective ownership and governance. With respect to
stores run by co-operative societies, for example, we may learn a great deal about the import
of the supermarket model more generally by asking how such operations have been shaped
and constrained by the broader patterns established by for-profit private chains and by the
prevailing culture of modern retailing, with its profound insistence on variety, competition
and choice.
Finally, there is a clear need to bring the fields most concerned with the big things that
supermarkets do into a much closer conversation – and one that is more explicitly historical. To
a notable extent, work undertaken by scholars in business, economics, management, marketing,
advertising, planning, design and architecture directs little attention to historical developments
and their impact, and along these lines there remain some deficiencies even in sociology, anthro-
pology, cultural studies, and related critical disciplines. By the same token, historians need to
dig more deeply into the key findings and governing concerns of those working in these other
fields and take them more seriously on their own terms. Much of the history of the supermar-
ket remains to be written, and there are big opportunities both for illuminating, conceptually
sophisticated studies of particular cases and for wide-ranging integrative, comparative and inter-
disciplinary work.

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 11
VILLAGE SHOPS AND
COUNTRY STORES1
Douglas McCalla

Introduction
‘The history of shopping has been written, but not the history of shops’, T.S. Willan wrote in a
pioneering account of Abraham Dent, an eighteenth-century shopkeeper in Kirkby Stephen, a
market town in northwest England with a population of about a thousand (1970, p. 8).

This may be the result of a persistent belief that people, before the nineteenth century,
obtained their goods at fairs and markets or from pedlars. People did buy goods at fairs
and markets and from pedlars . . . but shops were more numerous and more important
than is commonly realized.

For the historian, one challenge in showing this was ‘the paucity of sources. If shopkeepers kept
accounts, few of those accounts seem to have survived’. Useful diaries and letters were equally
rare. For Dent, however, a variety of documents allowed closer examination of shopkeeping.
Working with, then succeeding, his father, Dent sold mercery (textiles and sewing supplies), gro-
ceries, stationery and ‘a considerable range of goods, which almost defied classification’ (p. 11).
Few of these goods were local; he ‘sold exotic products, the market sold local produce’ (p. 12).
Concluding, Willan noted (p. 147) that Dent’s activities ‘drew him into contact with a much
wider world extending from Newcastle to London. If more were known about more Abraham
Dents, eighteenth-century England might appear less bucolic and less provincial’. On the other
hand, he wondered if Dent was representative:

it would be misleading to regard [him] as typical of the small town shopkeeper of the
eighteenth century. Dent was too versatile, he combined too many roles, to be typi-
cal. Had he been simply a shopkeeper or a hosier or a wine merchant or a brewer he
would have been more typical of the small town business man.

In the years since Willan’s study, the problem of detailed records of actual businesses has
hardly been solved. More have been identified, especially in North America (e.g., an informed
estimate is that there are ‘at least 1,000 examples of shopkeeper account books alone for Nova
Scotia’ [Gwyn 2015, p. 114]), and a few have been intensively used. Historians have also found

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 Village shops and country stores

other paths towards a more comprehensive understanding of early modern retailing, including
in village and rural settings. Among them are tax records and directories, which are external to
individual businesses, and bankruptcy records and probate inventories, which provide an inter-
nal perspective, albeit at a particular moment. The stereotype of a static, routine and timeless
provincial world to which Willan referred has not disappeared, but wherever close analysis has
been possible, Dent and his shop have proven to be more representative than Willan imagined.
Rural retailing was highly competitive; success at it required skill, work, judgement and risk-
taking. And because most of the world’s people were rural, the market served by such retailers
constituted a significant part of the whole marketplace.
The easiest way of defining rural is as a residual after urban is accounted for. ‘Dividing cities
from non-cities . . . cannot help but be arbitrary’, Jan de Vries writes in his analysis of urbanisa-
tion (1984, p. 11). When a threshold population of 10,000 is used to define a city, about 10% of
Europe’s population lived in such places in 1800 (with England and Wales and the Netherlands
the most urbanised, at more than 20%). By 1890, the European figure had risen to almost 30%,
with England and Wales and Scotland over 50%. In the United States, the urban population
was just 5% of the total in 1790 and 35% of an exponentially larger population a century later
(Historical Statistics 2006, Series Aa36 and Aa46). For the world as a whole, cities of over 10,000
accounted for only about 5% of the population in the early nineteenth century (de Vries 1984,
pp. 39, 45–8, 349–350). A place did not have to be this large, of course, to have essentially urban
functions; as de Vries recognises (1984, p. 22), ‘a serviceable definition of urban population in
early modern Europe is the inhabitants of densely housed settlements of at least 2000 or 3000
population’. A lower threshold still is suggested by George Grantham (1989, p. 190), who argues
that during the Ancien Régime it was ‘the little market towns that in many ways represent the
heart of France’.Whatever the threshold, until at least the early nineteenth century, most people
almost everywhere lived outside such places, in villages and the countryside. In much of the
world, that was still the case far into the twentieth century. And wherever population was grow-
ing rapidly, rural numbers could continue to increase alongside urban population; in the United
States, for example, the non-urban population grew more than tenfold between 1790 and 1890.
According to a mythology that has proven “remarkably resistant to change” (Cox 2000,
p. 14), a majority of rural people lived outside the marketplace. In France, as Philip Hoffman
argues (1996, p. 13), ‘the consensus about the French countryside . . . begins with a large number
of subsistence peasants, who farmed in isolation from markets’. Thus, Fernand Braudel could
write (1982, pp. 59–60) of ‘the life going on at the level underneath [the market], a modest but
independent life of total or near self-sufficiency’. In North America, an influential interpretation
held that until the nineteenth century most rural communities lived largely outside markets;
even a thoughtful survey that recognises rural shopkeeping can still speak of ‘the relatively simple
material lives and insular community economies’ of rural America prior to the Civil War (Mat-
son 2006, p. 55). In this powerful story, rural people were on one side of a set of dichotomies,
with consumption on the other side (see Stobart, Hann and Morgan 2007, pp. 13–14). They
were traditional rather than modern, producers rather than consumers, participants in a custom-
ary more than a market economy, etc. That left little room for village shops. As an anthropologi-
cal study of retailing in a small Irish town notes, outside a specialist literature, retailers

have not captured the historical imagination or historians’ interest; and this has been
exacerbated by a general and common antipathy towards retailers in western soci-
ety. . . . [T]here has been an obsessive stereotype of Ireland and of rural western Europe
as comprising regions of farmers, farmworkers, or peasants.
(Gulliver and Silverman 1995, p. 354)

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Among the reasons to question this understanding is evidence that in the early modern era
goods produced beyond the immediate locality were clearly reaching ordinary rural people (e.g.,
North 2016). These increasingly included goods new to western society. Exotic groceries such
as tobacco, tea, and sugar and Asian manufactures such as cottons and ceramics were already
widely consumed in North-Western Europe by the early eighteenth century; and import vol-
umes tended to grow, despite various efforts to limit them by protective trade restrictions and
taxes. In England, the latter helped to promote domestic manufacturing that met an increasing
share of the demand for manufactured imports (and that then began to export them, notably
to the colonies). Rising volumes did not imply that everyone consumed the new products, but
in a mainly rural world the scale of trade makes it unlikely that the entire rural population was
excluded from the market. In work and household situations where a substantial proportion of
earnings was paid in kind, much consumption was ‘hierarchically structured’, with choices made
by employers and masters (Shammas 1990, p. 203). But however decisions were made, a study of
early modern England concludes that

consumer goods [were] available . . . to a large proportion of the population. The

evidence used by many historians to indicate a substantial rise in the use of consumer
goods throughout all strata of society is proof of the success of retailers in distributing
them.
(Cox 2000, pp. 227–228)

On the continent too, it has been argued that ‘colonial groceries stimulated growing transport
flows and favoured retail outlets and pedlars as the last part of a long chain in the supply of a
growing army of consumers of tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, and fashion’ (Blondé and Van Damme
2013, p. 247). The distribution of shops and goods was uneven, but in at least Western Europe
only the most isolated areas can have been wholly untouched. For example, evidence from the
enforcement of sumptuary laws that aimed to restrict consumption also reveals the attractive-
ness of new goods and their availability: in a well-documented case from a small southwestern
German community, almost 10% of the population was fined for violations in a single year
(1713–14). Most were women, charged with wearing forbidden clothing, typically ‘small items
of silk or calico’ (Ogilvie 2010, p. 308). In Britain’s American colonies, Lorena Walsh writes
(1983, p. 117), ‘rural dwellers were ready to participate in their own way in an increasingly
sophisticated material culture where artefacts took on a critical role in defining family routines
and relationships with the community at large’. And T.H. Breen speaks (2004, p. xvii) of a ‘mid-
eighteenth-century transformation’ there, marked by ‘the flood of imports that found its way
into even the most humble provincial households’.
The way in which the rural market would be served is a separate question. Acquiring the
many goods produced for local consumption need not involve a retail shop selling from a stock.
Agricultural produce could be purchased directly from farmers or at the regular markets that
had long characterised town and even village economies, and local artisans sold their products
either from their workshops or by working at the premises of the buyer (Everitt 1967; Willan
1976, pp. 56–58; Mui and Mui 1989, p. 27). For the growing array of goods not produced locally,
rural consumers could buy in larger centres, going there themselves or ordering from suppli-
ers there. Nevertheless, it is clear that in the early modern era shops were a normal part of the
economy of a village (defined, for our purposes, as a compact place with a population of less
than a thousand – many were substantially smaller). Evidently some shops were modest, perhaps
operated part-time, but shops on the scale of Abraham Dent’s were found in many villages. How

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Figure 11.1 Store at Lang Pioneer Village, Peterborough County, Ontario. North American living history
museums commonly include a general store. Although modest in size, these buildings housed
large and varied stocks. Villages of any size had more than one such store, and competition
was a fundamental element in country retailing.
Source: Photo by Dennis Halstead, courtesy of Lang Pioneer Village, www.langpioneervillage.ca/

they made a profitable space for themselves is the principal focus of this essay. A concluding sec-
tion briefly addresses the long-term vitality of a form of retailing that thrived as long as villages
themselves did so.
The first requisite was the potential of the local market to support permanent retailing, a
function of population numbers and density, family incomes, and the character of the local
economy. As a study of nineteenth century Europe (relevant a century earlier too) writes, ‘viable
peasant farming generated the commercialised villages and bourgs which were dotted amongst
the small farming communities, and whose artisans and shopkeepers served expanding rural
markets’ (Crossick and Haupt 1995, p. 56).Variety within rural society was reflected in the inten-
sity and complexity of urban hierarchies. In the eighteenth-century, village retailing was more
developed in southeast England, the western provinces of the Netherlands and northeastern
and Mediterranean France than in other parts of these countries (Cox 2000, pp. 63–65; van den
Heuvel and Ogilvie 2013; Lepetit 1994, pp. 354–363). But retailing was anything but absent in
other regions. In the north of England, John Styles writes (2007, p. 146), ‘There is little doubt
that . . . in the eighteenth century the bulk of the fabric used to make garments for ordinary
men and women came from retailers of various kinds’. The shops that sold these fabrics could
be found in villages as well as towns. A case in point is early modern Cheshire, where ‘nowhere

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was more than five miles or so from the type of fixed shop which might reasonably be expected
to carry a range of consumer items’ (Stobart 2016, p. 92). Beyond Western Europe, other pat-
terns were possible. Villages could be the largest nodes in the urban hierarchy when a region
first opened, as in settlement colonies, or where there were geographic barriers to movement
on land, as in mountain valleys and along coasts. In Tokugawa Japan, there was a well-established
network of towns and cities, yet much of the country’s economic development after 1750
focused at the village level, with corresponding growth in village shops. A heavy weight of
regulations, enforced in towns, could not be effectively imposed in the countryside. Hence the
complaint of leaders in Mito, a castle town north-east of Edo (Tokyo), that ‘Year after year the
retail trade in the country districts increases. Saké, dyes, dry goods, toilet articles, lacquerware
and everything you can think of are sold in villages. Moreover, recently [village shops] have
begun to buy directly from Edo’ (Smith 1973, p. 141).

Goods
Although village shops might deal in local products, their distinguishing role was stocking and
selling products from outside their immediate region. Like Abraham Dent, they carried a diver-
sified stock, extending far beyond what the descriptors given in directories (e.g., draper, mercer
or grocer) suggest. The complexity and range of products (and thus of the demand for them)
can be seen in surviving inventories, invoices and shop accounts. If village shops could not hope
to match the breadth of stock of the principal shops in larger towns (Baulant 1987, p. 120), they
nevertheless stocked hundreds of distinct products, many of which encompassed substantial vari-
ations in quality and character. As Nancy Cox writes of retailers in general (2000, p. 59),

The most cursory study of the contents of their shops shows their importance as dis-
tributors of consumer goods. Their shops are stuffed with household items like glass
and earthenware, cooking pots and tools, needles and soap; quality fabrics like broad
cloth, stuffs and Holland; crape for funerals and ribbon favours for courtship; and
exotic imports like sugar, spices and dried fruits, not to mention tea, chocolate and
coffee.

Among these products, some clearly were much more important than others. For example, a
study of seven village shops in Upper Canada found thousands of transactions in tea, very mod-
est purchases of coffee – and not a single transaction in chocolate (McCalla 2015, pp. 67–83).
Where it is possible to see the specifics of goods, the scope and variety of the merchandise
at village shops become clearer. At John Hook’s country shop in Virginia, the eleven leading
products (presumably by number of transactions) among a total of almost 250 sold in the
autumn of 1771, which together accounted for about 40% of his sales, were rum, osnaburg
(a multi-purpose, unbleached, long-wearing linen), hats, handkerchiefs, buttons, gun powder,
sugar, thread, linen, hose and cotton (Martin 2008, p. 75). Most, perhaps all, of these goods
were imported, rum and sugar from the Caribbean colonies and the remainder from Brit-
ain (Shammas 1982, pp. 266–267). Many disappeared or were transformed in consumption,
and none were durable; as a result, except in inventories of shops themselves, they are rarely
individually visible in the probate inventories that have been used to study consumption and
living standards in the early modern period (Main 1982, p. 241; de Vries 2008, pp. 150–154;
Styles 2007, p. 327). A list like this also fails to catch nuances essential to an appreciation of
shops and their place in customers’ lives. At a later shop, Hook’s stock included 124 distinct
types of buttons (Martin 2008, pp. 148, 150). Such products were not only functional, they

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were, Nancy Cox notes (2015, p. 129), ‘important in proclaiming identity’. As Ann Smart
Martin writes (2008, p. 84), ‘a hat is not merely a hat; it is a particular kind of hat that is
desired and available’. Hook’s textile imports in early 1772 included twenty-five different
linens, more than a thousand yards, at prices ranging from under one shilling to three shillings
six pence per yard. Besides their many practical purposes, these and other textiles represented
‘goods offering color and drama and romance, the sensuous world of beautiful textiles’ (Mar-
tin 2008, pp. 78–79).
One reason for Abraham Dent’s wide network of connections was the need to acquire such
a diversified stock. From his ledger, about 190 different suppliers can be identified, forty-seven
of them in 1763 alone (Willan 1970, pp. 28–29); many were nearby, but over two decades he
had twenty suppliers in Newcastle and twelve each in London and Manchester. Another exam-
ple is Thomas Turner, a village shopkeeper in Sussex, who visited twenty-seven suppliers on a
three-day visit to London in 1759, ‘settling accounts, buying goods, and exchanging bills’ (Vaisey
1984, p. xxxvii). Directories suggest the range of their (and his) trades: tobacconist, druggist,
“horse-millener”, grocer, ironmonger, hosier, warehouseman, hat warehouse, metal button and
hardware warehouse, woollen draper, “chinaman”, distiller, pewterer, “merchant”, cheesemon-
ger, wholesale mercer, oilman, hop factor, hatter, two linen drapers and two haberdashers (Vaisey
1984, pp. 343–346). These were not all of equal importance. Notably, one of the haberdashers
acted as Turner’s London banker, accepting bills of exchange drawn on the firm; and one of its
partners was a regular visitor to Turner’s shop and home.The London journey was unusual, as he
normally dealt with more distant suppliers (some as far away as Manchester) by correspondence
or when their representatives visited him. He did travel extensively to closer locations, including
to visit suppliers in Sussex and Kent.
In Britain’s trans-Atlantic colonies and in New France, this kind of direct access to suppliers
was impossible. The system in which Hook learned his trade in Virginia was created mainly by
Glasgow merchants in the mid-eighteenth century in colonies that could supply staple exports
such as sugar and tobacco. They sent out or recruited men, often quite young, to operate chains
of shops which they supplied from Britain, based on orders from their local partner or shop-
keeper-employee. Although most of the country retailer’s stock would thus appear to come
from the parent firm, it too would have been assembled from many suppliers; for example, one
firm recorded ‘forty different manufacturers, craftsmen, and merchants’ as sources for a single
shipment in 1757 (Martin 2008, p. 19). For these British-based firms and networks, intercolonial
trades were also coordinated and financed through Britain, even for goods shipped directly. If
any goods produced nearby figured in such shops’ stocks, they could be purchased from the
maker or through a colonial wholesaler.
Country shops not part of this system were supplied by importers in the leading cities, such
as Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore and Montreal. For many goods, nuances of style,
quality and price mattered, and personal selection was preferred where distance made that
practicable and where the shopkeeper was able to take the time away from the business. (When
settlement moved west, the desire to select goods in person was a factor in the emergence of
wholesaling inland, as cities developed there [McCalla 1979].) Often country merchants had
one main supplier to whom they were closely linked by credit, but it is clear that they also
bought from other sources. For example, one Upper Canadian business with shops in two vil-
lages on the upper St Lawrence River acquired about two-thirds of its $12,000 in purchases in
1808 from a single Montreal wholesaler but also bought from nine other firms in Montreal and
four in its immediate vicinity, three on the American side of the river (McCalla 2015, p. 218).
What a buying trip involved is suggested by an 1838 letter to his father in Scotland from Adam
Hope, a young emigrant whose shop in a growing village near the Upper Canadian frontier was

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backed by a leading Glasgow merchant house. He selected many goods from the firm’s Montreal
branch, but also patronised other importers.

I will not be able to get through my business before Wednesday, which will be a stay of
two weeks! . . . Our purchases will amount at least to £3,000 or $12,000 & when you
consider the multiplicity of articles required for an Upper Canada Store you will be
able to form some idea of the time & Care required to make a judicious selection & to
see that the prices will enable us to compete successfully with our neighbours.
(Crerar 2007, p. 298)

‘Year in, year out, the range of goods demanded by rural customers remained remarkably stable’,
Allan Greer writes (1985, p. 156) of Samuel Jacobs’ long-lived shop in rural Quebec, which
opened in the 1760s. ‘Consumer demand was rather inelastic as it was dominated by the real
needs of the population, mostly habitants’. It is reasonable to picture rural demand as based on
‘real’ needs, yet the effort shopkeepers put into buying suggests that needs were not as static as
this phrasing implies – a point confirmed by Greer’s subsequent detailed discussion of Jacobs’
stock and clientele. In the first place, products such as rum, tea and cotton had not always been
necessities. In the second, if categories (such as textiles) were constant, variation and changes
within them mattered vitally to the shop and its clientele. In the third, rural populations were
less homogeneous than this suggests, and their demands were more varied.

Shopping
For many goods, any bourgeois and (in the old world) aristocratic and gentry families in the
vicinity were likely to prefer the greater possibilities afforded by urban suppliers. But they might
still buy locally, for convenience and in the context of relationships that were both hierarchi-
cal and reciprocal, such as between landlord and tenant (Bailey 2015, p. 11). A close analysis
of clothing purchases by a family of the English ‘rural lesser gentry’ finds, for example, that
it acquired ‘most essential items’ locally, notably from a village shop with which it had a very
long-term relationship (Bailey 2011, pp. 91–101). Members of such families did not necessar-
ily shop in person, however. They might instead send a message or a servant and have goods
delivered (Stobart 2012, p. 267). Families of this status must have been among the most valued
customers for shops that attracted their patronage. But no village had many such families. Most
customers were farmers, artisans and labourers (and their families) – categories that themselves
encompassed substantial variation in wealth and in needs. To attract buyers of all classes, shops
had to anticipate their requirements, even as they sought to influence demand by their choice
of goods to stock. They also faced competition, as Hope noted, not only from other shops in
the village but from shops in other villages in the area (which might be equally accessible for
many rural customers), from retailers in nearby towns, and sometimes from pedlars (see Stobart
and Bailey 2018).
Thus, shopping involved choosing where to shop as well as what to buy (e.g., Stobart, Hann
and Morgan 2007, pp. 46–53). For the former, proximity and the value of time were impor-
tant considerations. Customers living in or near the village could shop often, if they wished.
People living at greater distance might combine shopping with other activities, such as visiting
a mill or attending the local market. Credit was also crucial; having an account at a shop was
a reason for buying there rather than elsewhere. To Fernand Braudel (1982, p. 73), credit was
‘the principal reason for the development of shops’. But that understates the importance of the
goods themselves: the only reason for taking on a debt was the desire for the goods it purchased

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(Dépatie 2003, p. 176). Some buyers had much larger accounts – and closer ties to the mer-
chant – than others. Where it has been possible to study purchasing in detail, however, it is clear
that no families bought all their supplies from a single shop (e.g., Pronovost 1998, p. 190; Craig
2009, p. 121). That suggests the reality of customer choice, as does the turnover in clientele that
merchants experienced. ‘Beneath the semblance of continuity, domination and changelessness’,
a study based on the detailed accounts of two shops in a nineteenth-century Newfoundland
fishing community shows, ‘there was very substantial movement’ (Sweeny, Bradley and Hong
1992, p. 14).
For England, Cox and Dannehl write (2007, p. 36), ‘No illustrations of eighteenth-century
village shops have been found at all’. The shop, they speculate (p. 45), was ‘unsettling. . . [and]
could thus be written out of economic and social equations. Its presence was neither acknowl-
edged in the travel books and guides nor depicted in the paintings of the rural scene’. There are
more images for the nineteenth century, and a general store is essential to many North American
representations of historical villages of that era [see Figure 11.1]. They seem small to our eyes,
but modest dimensions were the norm for retail shops (even, indeed, on principal streets in
leading urban centres [ Jenkins 2018, pp. 17–21]). A mid-eighteenth-century merchant on the
St Lawrence River below Montreal, for example, began with a store and grain storage space of
20 by 30 feet (Michel 1979, p. 233). John Hook’s first shop, whose substantial stock we have
already noted, measured 42 by 20 feet, which gave it ‘a larger footprint than most others in the
region’ (Martin 2008, pp. 29–30, 152). The shop itself was 20 by 20 feet, divided by a counter
2 feet 10 inches wide, with a space of 8 feet by 20 feet for customers. As well, the building
included a lumber (storage) room and a counting room (office). His later shop, a rare shop build-
ing to survive from the eighteenth century, seems no larger (Martin 2008, p. 203). Hook lived
nearby; often, in fact, merchants (including Thomas Turner) lived above or behind their shops.
In the early modern era, some shops sold goods through a window on the street. If the
practice continued, it implies a social distance between the shopkeeper and those who traded
without entering the shop. Customers worthy of credit must have been welcome inside, and the
most valued might conduct their business in the merchant’s private room (Stobart 2010, p. 344).
If most accounts were in the name of a male household head, the actual buyer could be a family
member (wife, child, brother, etc.), a servant, an employee or a neighbour. Many buyers (and
some suppliers) were women (Innes 1988, pp. 32–33; Mancke 1995). Sometimes a buyer car-
ried explicit written authorisation but in most cases that was not needed; the shopkeeper knew
his or her clientele. ‘With the counter . . . as the focus for exchange of goods’ (Stobart 2016,
p. 95), every purchase entailed personal contact with the shopkeeper or a clerk. As the role of
credit also indicates, transactions were part of a continuing ‘face-to-face, personal’ relationship
with the merchant (de Vries 2008, p. 175). For the many goods that varied in quality or pattern,
selecting, then weighing, measuring, cutting or counting could be time-consuming, especially
when a number of products were purchased at the same time, as was often the case. For common
goods, such as tobacco and gun shot, merchants could prepare packages of standard quantities
in advance.
The conversations during such transactions may help explain a common story, here from
an argument about foods but widely found in descriptions of shops of every kind: ‘there were
no fixed prices and no price ticketing . . . and the final price for any food item was arrived at
through a process of haggling’ (Walsh 2008, p. 23). There must have been talk of prices, but
careful studies of retailing have shown that ‘haggling’ was not an everyday practice (Stobart
2012, pp. 159–163; Mui and Mui 1989, pp. 223, 239; Willan 1970, p. 13; Craig 2009, p. 121). In
support of this argument are the detailed lists of a year’s orders or of inventory at three Upper
Canadian village shops, which run to at least five hundred distinct entries, each with a specific

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cost. As we have seen, that number was not unusual. A busy shopkeeper must have had some
means of recording this information, not just for personal use but for a clerk or apprentice (if
there was one) or the person (often a family member) who looked after the business when the
proprietor was absent, a not uncommon situation. Evidence from 750 charge accounts at these
and four other village shops in Upper Canada also fails to reveal the variation in retail prices
that the story of bargaining requires (McCalla 2015, p. 148).2 Prices were consistent whether
the buyer was the account holder or someone else, even a child, and whether the transaction
involved the merchant or a clerk or substitute. Typically, unit prices were also consistent when
quantities varied.When prices varied, at a single shop or among shops, the differences can nearly
always be attributed to other factors, particularly seasonal and long-term variations that were
consistent among customers and quality variations within a category – the kind of differentia-
tion represented by John Hook’s 1772 linen imports.

Credit
Ordering goods and managing credit required literacy and numeracy. Essential for business,
these skills might also be called upon in community life and in such business-related processes
as conducting probate and bankruptcy inventories. For example,Thomas Turner ‘was one of the
few people in East Hoathly who thoroughly understood financial matters’ (Vaisey 1984, p. 340).
If many shopkeepers did not meet the accounting standards recommended by contemporary
manuals (e.g., Coquery 2008, p. 348), all needed at least to record ‘who owed how much to
whom’ (Craig 2009, p. 125). Without written documentation of a debt, there was no basis for a
legal claim to its repayment.The usual basic record was a journal (daybook) in which credit (but
rarely cash) transactions were recorded in sequence, generally with the date, the name of the
account holder, the identity of the actual buyer, the product and quantity purchased and the unit
and total price. The journal might record payments on account, with date and means of pay-
ment, or entries in it might simply be crossed out when paid or marked ‘settled’, without further
detail. Payments might instead be recorded elsewhere, most commonly in a ledger. Organised
by customer, with information transferred from the journal, typically in summary form with a
cross-reference to the original source, it provided an overview of each account and permitted
periodic reckoning of the balance due. At this stage, if a debit balance was long-running (say
more than twelve months), it was common to begin to charge interest at the standard legal rate
and sometimes to expect the debt to be acknowledged formally, in a promissory note. This was
all the routine accounting many shopkeepers attempted, particularly if they were sole proprie-
tors. A formal partnership required a further stage, valuing assets (inventory and debts due, with
an allowance for bad debts) and liabilities, crediting interest on each party’s share of the firm’s
capital, and calculating profits (or losses) to be allocated among the parties (e.g., Crerar 2007,
pp. 344–345).
Clearly a sale did not complete a transaction; it was necessary to secure payment, ultimately
in ways that allowed the shop to pay its bills to non-local suppliers and creditors. The shop-
keeper had to think carefully about customers’ probable ability to pay. If that estimate proved
incorrect and the account fell behind, securing payment called for persistence and imagination.
Although a debtor who was still nearby could be pursued through the law, that was costly, far
from certain of actually securing repayment, and (within such small communities) stressful as
well (Vaisey 1984, pp. xxiv, 149). Thus, a gloomy Thomas Turner reflected, ‘The long credit that
I am obliged to give must greatly hurt my trade’ (Vaisey 1984, p. 153). He was not alone. Not
even a retailer as prudent as William Stout (a late-seventeenth-century shopkeeper in an English
market town) could avoid accumulating bad debts (Craig and Schofield 1967, pp. 24–25). This

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reality underlies a common understanding that shopkeeping was notably insecure. As Braudel
writes (1982, p. 73), ‘the shopkeeper was a capitalist in a very small way, [who] lived between
those who owed him money and those to whom he owed it. It was a precarious sort of liv-
ing, and one was always on the verge of disaster’. Actually, because debt was a normal feature
of economic life, this kind of insecurity was widely shared. More fearful were extraordinary
events that could completely disrupt routine payment processes – a war, commercial or political
crisis, or natural disaster. Problems specific to the individual merchant and family were a second
unpredictable source of potential disaster – including accidents, illness, or unfortunate outcomes
from a business venture (and not only the merchant’s own speculations – it was common to
post bonds or guarantee transactions for others, particularly within the family). The latter cir-
cumstances could likewise affect a customer (and thus the likelihood of being paid) or a major
creditor (and thus the possibility of continuing support from that source).
One attraction of credit for many rural buyers was that their incomes were irregular – farm-
ers, labourers and artisans all depended on being paid for their produce or work. In deciding
what to buy and from whom, they also had to anticipate how they would eventually pay. This
might be in cash (coin and bank notes), forms of payment more prevalent where a sophisticated
financial system existed and welcomed by the shopkeeper because they could be used to pay
creditors and suppliers. Negotiable instruments such as pay warrants, warehouse receipts or bills
of exchange were close substitutes. An option was to sell goods to or work for the shopkeeper,
who required local goods and services for everyday living and for the business and who might
hire help for the household, the shop, and associated business ventures (such as a mill). Proto-
industrial activities could have the same character. In addition to selling non-local goods, some
shops took artisans’ products and/or farm produce in payment and resold them locally. In prin-
ciple, transactions in such goods could have been conducted directly between producer and
consumer; evidently trades via the shop offered an advantage to the producer and/or the buyer
(such as convenience and credit), as well as to the shop. It is also possible that some goods that
seem local were not; when rural marketing patterns can be explored in detail, more complex and
nuanced patterns of local and non-local exchange appear (e.g., Postel-Vinay and Robin 1992).
Many shops also accepted or actively sought local products that could be sold beyond the
immediate region. Thomas Turner, for example, bought rags (sold to paper-makers), wool, but-
ter, hops and horse hair. If necessary, the shopkeeper arranged for processing, at a grist, saw, or
woollen mill or another facility (such as a tannery). In staples-oriented locations, buying the
principal export product was the original purpose of many shops, such as the ones established by
Glasgow merchants in Virginia to secure tobacco. Equally, buying furs was the raison d’être for
the posts of trading companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company. Although it was not practi-
cable in the case of furs, customers in other settings had options besides selling to the shopkeeper
to whom they owed money.3 For the principal exports, there were usually a number of active
local buyers; and producers could also use the merchant’s own network to consign produce for
sale on commission in a distant market (e.g., Wermuth 2001, pp. 57–58; Bruegel 2002, p. 93).
Such trades benefited the merchant, whose account was credited when the produce was sold,
and the consignor, whose shop account was credited with the net proceeds.
Exchanges in which goods and labour were credited to a customer’s account are sometimes
described as barter or truck. But these labels can be misleading, because transactions were rarely
simultaneous (i.e., a direct exchange of one good for another), goods were valued at current
prices, and work was credited at standard wage rates. Once it is recognised that most goods and
work had market prices, the idea that one commodity was traded for another disappears, as does
another idea, that the merchant could dictate the terms of the exchange (Craig 2009, p. 12).
Even in the fur trade, easily imagined as based on barter, extending credit was normal, and a

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pricing system allowed valuing the variety of furs delivered and goods purchased by indigenous
traders (Ray and Freeman 1978, pp. 54–55, 186–187). A further element to exchanges through
the shop were third-party transactions, in which a credit on one customer’s account was charged
to another’s (e.g., Wermuth 2001, p. 56), a process reflecting wider patterns of local exchange.
As a study of late-eighteenth-century rural Pennsylvania notes, ‘an extensive web of sales of
goods and services among . . . shoemakers, joiners, shopkeepers, and the like bound . . . neighbors
together and created an interdependent community’ (Clemens and Simler 1988, p. 114).

Management
What proportion of shops routinely employed sales or other staff is not clear, but few if any
shopkeepers could do entirely without help, for busy days, heavy work and times when the
owner was absent. When the shop was associated with another business establishment, such as a
mill or another shop, an owner could not directly oversee everything; much responsibility had
to be delegated. If an employee took charge of a shop, long-term success required aligning the
shopkeeper’s and owner’s interests. Keeping the relationship within the family was common.
Another approach was to give the shopkeeper a share of the profits, possibly through a formal
partnership agreement. Or the owner could rent the shop to someone to operate independently.
A successful shop might generate enough revenue to reward two partners who shared work and
responsibility; alternatively, having a second responsible figure could make a larger operation
possible (Bruegel 2002, p. 165).The durability of such relationships depended on mutual respect,
a sense of shared interests (in which family ties were often vital), and the continuing ability of
the business to earn a return large enough to support both partners.
Becoming a shopkeeper required skills and capital. Here too family connections were fre-
quently central, including through inheritance, financial backing and access to work experience.
In a village shop, a young helper might mainly be paid in knowledge, room and board. In larger
mercantile enterprises, the employment relationship could be formalised in an apprenticeship.
Either setting could prepare someone for village shopkeeping. Some shops were operated by
women, including widows or sisters who continued a family business. Many of them already had
experience of daily shop operations, but even if not, they benefited from knowledge acquired
from association with it. To minimise capital requirements, a shop could be rented, and credit
could supply part of the working capital.Wholesalers were on the watch for promising locations
and people, to expand their markets and also to replace clients lost to failure and competitors.
Writing in 1840, a leading Upper Canadian wholesaler described this process (albeit with some
exaggeration): ‘the wonderful success of my operations in Canada may be to a great extent
attributed to my . . . system of rearing up a new set of customers for myself who are generally
two young Scotchmen associated as partners’ (McCalla 1979, p. 38). Some of these men had
been clerks in the firm, which helped in judging their potential.
A rapidly expanding rural economy provided many retail opportunities, both in new vil-
lages and in the growth of favourably situated existing villages (e.g., Hofstra and Mitchell
1993). In established societies where village structures were more stable, entry into shopkeep-
ing tended to come through an existing shop. The failure or death of a shopkeeper could
provide an opportunity to take over an ongoing business or vacant premises. Or an owner
wishing to retire or move on might sell his shop. Doing so on credit, however, ran the risk
that a buyer might run the business poorly and fail to maintain payments. That was what
prompted William Stout’s return to retailing some years after he had transferred his shop to an
apprentice (Craig and Schofield 1967, p. 25) and Thomas Turner’s caution as he considered a
possible sale: ‘I would part with it on no other terms but by his taking the goods all at prime

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cost, and all the fixtures, and the money to be paid down’ (Vaisey 1984, p. 92). Over the long
term, market, demographic and individual factors made for considerable business turnover;
few families managed successful transitions through multiple generations. As a study of this
issue in a small Irish market town over 150 years discovered, there was a ‘relatively high degree
of discontinuity amongst retailer families’ (Gulliver and Silverman 1995, p. 264). That was not
necessarily evidence of failure. Children might be raised to imagine other possibilities or too
young to take over on a parent’s death; and ambitious shopkeepers could move on to new
opportunities, as Stout and Dent did and Turner often imagined. In Upper Canada, Adam
Hope moved from village retailer to urban wholesaler. One of his customers, Timothy Eaton,
who had emigrated from Ulster in 1854 at the age of twenty after training in a village shop,
began with a shop in the small village of Kirkton, later moved to a nearby town, and then
in 1869 to Toronto; there, over the next twenty-five years, he would create Canada’s leading
department store (Santink 1990).

Continuity and change

There was considerable continuity in the goods that shops stocked. Godfrey’s Cordial, a patent
medicine purchased at several Upper Canadian shops in 1861, had been sold by Thomas Turner
in the 1760s. And hats, handkerchiefs, buttons, gun powder, sugar, thread and cotton, among the
most-purchased goods at John Hook’s shop in Virginia in the 1770s, rank high on a list of the
purchases at village shops in Upper Canada in the early and mid-nineteenth century (McCal­la
2015, pp. 203–212). (But the ranking of gun powder and shot fell substantially during that
period.) Tea and tobacco, two of the three highest ranked goods on the latter list, had long been
important to village shops. But rural demand was not timeless and unchanging. For example,
osnaburg, second only to rum on the list for Hook’s shop, had just nine buyers among the 750
customers whose accounts were the basis of the Upper Canadian study. Demand there for linens
of all kinds was modest; cotton was the leading fabric for rural buyers in Upper Canada (and
evidently far more widely), purchased in many variations and in large quantities (see Styles 2007,
pp. 109–132; Riello 2013). Other goods whose production was transformed by industrialisation
in the nineteenth century, such as nails, boots and shoes, also became prominent on the Upper
Canadian list. Products like kerosene, paint and matches, new in the mid-nineteenth century,
appeared almost immediately in rural shops.
Beginning about the middle of the nineteenth century, the context for village shops, at least
in Western society, changed in many ways.The development of new forms of transportation and
communication, the growth of banking institutions and more formal channels of rural credit
and payment, new technologies (including growing farm mechanisation), continuing industri-
alisation (including of an increasing share of clothing production), and urbanisation had a variety
of implications for village economies. Some rural trades (such as shoemakers, tailors and coop-
ers) faded, as did rural industries that were overtaken by the factory system. Railways afforded
easier personal access to larger centres and could bring rural people merchandise purchased
through the catalogues that flourished at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the other
hand, growing rail networks (even if they bypassed many villages) improved transportation for
farm produce, and city growth expanded demand for foods and other primary products.Village
shops benefited from changes that brought many new products to stock and to make a shop
more attractive (the latter including lighting, larger panes of window glass and eventually refrig-
eration), a more developed financial system that facilitated payments by customers, and the easier
access to suppliers provided by railways and the telegraph (including via the rising importance
of travelling sales representatives).

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Figure 11.2 Store at Lang Pioneer Village, Peterborough County, Ontario (Interior). The main story line
at Lang aims to “tell the pioneer story” and “demonstrate traditional . . . trades”, but the inte-
rior of its store is set in a later era. The cash register and packaged groceries (such as Salada
Tea, a brand launched in 1892) suggest the modernity that was essential to stores’ continuing
viability.
Source: Photo by Dennis Halstead, courtesy of Lang Pioneer Village, www.langpioneervillage.ca/

The new developments in retailing represented by department and chain stores, co-operative
stores, catalogue merchandising, advertising, and branding affected the competitive environment
for shopkeepers in many ways, and they rightly worried about competitors’ buying power. But
the wholesale sector that was crucial to independent retailers proved very resilient, large enter-
prises had managerial and other overhead costs that an owner-operated shop did not, and shop-
keepers were anything but passive in responding to the challenges (Monod 1996, pp. 205–213).
Thus, alongside bins, sacks and barrels of bulk groceries and high shelves of textiles, which
reflected long-term continuities in demand, early twentieth-century photographs of village
shops’ signage and interiors reveal up-to-date stocks (packaged and branded groceries, cigarettes,
chewing gum, gasoline, etc. – see Figure 11.2). Some shopkeepers also sought agency business,
representing manufacturers (of sewing machines, pianos, farm equipment, etc.), insurance and
mortgage companies and other outside enterprises (Drummond 1987, p. 276). In most villages,
a shop served as the post office, which generated income and drew people to the shop. As well,
until the 1920s, when the automobile began to have a substantial impact (at least in North
America), little changed in the time constraints governing the lives and work of village and farm
families or in transportation at the immediate local level, which relied on walking and on horses.

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 Village shops and country stores

For many goods, that gave customers strong reasons to value the convenience of a nearby shop
(Gal 2016).
Thus, even as the village sector declined in relative importance in the developed world, it was
possible for village shops to earn a return attractive enough to sustain their owners (see Cros-
sick and Haupt 1995, pp. 216–218). A Canadian case in point is that there were almost as many
country general stores in Ontario in 1930 as there had been in 1871 (Drummond 1987, p. 302).
Writing of English retailing in general at the time, Michael Winstanley (1983, p. 217) sums up
the continuing resilience of the independent shop:

Together . . . large-scale retailers were significant in certain trades but elsewhere the
private shopkeepers, despite their misgivings, still dominated retailing. . . . The most
interesting feature of the distributive trades was not the emergence of such giants but
the much larger, and not as observers seemed to think, smaller, number of general and
specialist independent shopkeepers.

The ‘golden age of general stores’, according to a Canadian study aimed at a popular audience,
lasted at least until the 1920s (Fleming 2002, p. 181); and its illustrations show that such stores
were still important in many small places thirty or more years after that.The challenge for shop-
keepers, ever more difficult in the ensuing years, was to offer a diverse stock of goods appropriate
to the clientele at acceptable prices, in the face of wider changes in retailing and in the rural
economy (for example, farm consolidation and rural depopulation).
To Fernand Braudel, the key commercial trend in the eighteenth century was the emergence
of various ‘forms of specialized shops’; Abraham Dent’s shop (and others like it, which dealt in
‘the strangest assortment of goods’) were “survivals” (1982, pp. 64, 67). It is true that “lack of
specialization” was a defining element of the village shop (Bruegel 2002, p. 164), but Braudel’s
image makes it difficult to account for the vitality of such shops for another two centuries.What
the village shop actually specialised in was a place. As long as such places thrived, shops would
too. The shopkeeper’s knowledge of, judgements about, and relationships with the people and
economy of a particular locality were the fundamentals of success both in shopkeeping and in
any of the other local ventures in which rural entrepreneurs like Dent engaged.

Notes
1 For consistency, I generally use “shop” for these enterprises, although in North America it was common
to speak of them as country or general “stores.” Thus, shopkeeper and storekeeper are also synonyms.
Sometimes I speak of these figures as merchants, because that is what they were, albeit not on the scale
of large international trading houses.
2 To take a simple example, almost every purchase of a box of “pills” at these stores cost exactly 25¢, an
unlikely result if bargaining had been involved (McCalla 2015, p. 83).
3 Even for furs, at the peak of competition in the trade, c.1800, rival posts were often close enough to
provide a choice of buyers; before that, sellers could threaten to take their furs to a different post in the
following season.

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 12
ARCADES, SHOPPING CENTRES
AND SHOPPING MALLS
Vicki Howard and Jon Stobart

Introduction
Shopping malls are ubiquitous features of modern life across the globe, but unlike many other
retail formats, their origin can be traced to a specific time and place. On 8 October 1956, the
first fully enclosed shopping mall with dual department store anchors opened in Edina, just
seven miles outside downtown Minneapolis where over the years Minnesotans had to brave
snowy winters and steamy summers as they shopped. Designed by architect Victor Gruen, an
Austrian expatriate who gained a national reputation in the United States for his visionary
shopping centre designs, many of them open-air, Southdale was understood at the time to be an
entirely new retail environment. The Southdale Regional Shopping Center made the national
news, a New York Times article touting ‘Shopper’s Dream Near Completion’.The article noted its
seventy-two stores, two full-size department stores, and generous parking, but what drew most
praise was its climate-controlled garden court, three stories high and decorated lavishly with
trees, flowers, fountains and sculpture. Planned ‘for ease of shopping’, according to the national
report, Southdale developers rented space to chains like F.W. Woolworth, to supermarkets, and
many local merchants. By the mid 1960s, enclosed malls like Southdale were an industry stand-
ard in the United States, a planned and centrally managed large-scale commercial development
deeply connected to automobile-driven suburbanisation (Spielvogel, 1956, p. 38; Jackson, 1996;
Longstreth, 2010, p. 247; Hardwick, 2004, chapter 6).
As this revolutionary retail format spread across the globe both to urban centres and new
suburban developments, it adapted and evolved within varying political, social and geographic
contexts. With their increased importance in economic and cultural life, shopping centres and
malls have drawn the attention of a wide range of scholars from diverse fields, including history,
anthropology, sociology and management studies, not to mention architecture and urban plan-
ning. Historical and contemporary interpretations of shopping centres, malls and their predeces-
sors, the shopping galleries and arcades of Europe, have varied widely. All agree, however, that
market places have always been about more than economic transactions (Hardwick, 2004, p. 1;
Stobart, 2008, p. 210; Srivastava, 2015, p. 225). Shopping centres, malls, and by some accounts
even earlier organised covered markets, such as galleries and arcades, were key instruments of
modern consumer society. Despite national or geographic differences, their shared form and

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function provide a starting point for discussions about the changing relationship between com-
mercial enterprise and social practice over time.

Shopping galleries and arcades

Internal and regulated shopping galleries were features of commercial and financial exchanges
in many cities in early modern Europe. In London, the Royal Exchange, built on Cornhill in
the heart of the City in 1566–68, led the way. This was built in the style of the Nieuwe Beurs
in Antwerp and was intended to emulate the trading and financial power of that city, but above
the arcades that framed the exchange were added galleries containing over 100 small shops, most
measuring just 2.3m by 1.5m. Despite some initial reluctance, retailers with shops elsewhere in
the city rented stalls in these galleries to take advantage of both the grandeur of the setting and
the fact that the exchange quickly became both a centre for business and a social rendezvous
(Walsh, 2005). Such was its success that it spawned copies and rivals at Westminster Hall, and
the New Exchange (1609), Middle Exchange (1672) and Exeter Exchange (1676), all located
on the Strand, some distance to the west of London’s traditional retail centre. This proliferation
was greeted with alarm by the London Corporation who argued – in terms that are echoed in
later concerns about shopping centres – that the New Exchange would ‘take all resorts from
this place . . . and in tyme will drawe Mercers, Goldsmythes and all other chiefe Traders to set-
tle themselves out the Cittie in those parts . . . to the greate decay of Trade within the Cittie’
(quoted in Stone, 1973, p. 87). In reality, the stalls were simply too small to carry a sufficient
quantity and range of stock to do serious damage to retailers in the surrounding streets, some
of whom took leases on the stalls to benefit from the new types of shopping spawned by the
exchange galleries.
Each exchange had its own character, Westminster Hall, for example, appealed to male shop-
pers on account of its numerous booksellers and stationers, whilst the New Exchange was known
as a place where elite women would meet to shop and socialise. Since the galleries’ shops were
arranged along indoor walkways, shoppers were able to stroll in a leisurely manner, browsing the
goods or simply passing time. Indeed, the words used by contemporaries to describe these spaces –
walks, galleries and malls – reflects their promenading function.They were about seeing and being
seen as well as inspecting and buying goods.The owners of exchanges sought to create a feeling of
social exclusivity partly through the grandeur of the architecture and aristocratic associations, and
partly by regulating the type of retailer allowed to trade there and the quality of visitor allowed in,
with beadles employed to police entry. Despite this, exchanges increasingly gained a less desirable
reputation, the preponderance of female shopkeepers being problematic because, as one commen-
tator put it, they sat ‘begging of custom with such amorous looks, and after so affable a manner,
that I could not fancy they had much mind to dispose of themselves as the commodities they
dealt in’ (quoted in Adburgham, 1979, p. 15). More succinctly, the Middle Exchange earned the
nickname ‘Whores’ Nest’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 34). Perhaps as a result, but more likely because fash-
ionable society and fashionable shopping moved further west, the exchanges gradually withered
as a retail format: the Middle Exchange was demolished in 1694 and the New Exchange followed
in 1737; the shops in the Royal Exchange were converted to offices.
These same attributes, impacts on behaviour, and contested uses of space have characterised
the various forms of internalised retail space that followed the exchanges: arcades, malls and
shopping centres. Whether we see these various retail spaces as evolutionary or revolutionary is,
in many ways, a matter of perspective, but each offered contemporary shoppers new experi-
ences and opportunities.

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Arcades are usually traced back to the Galeries de Bois – part of the retail and public spaces
which made up the Palais Royal in Paris. Built in 1786, the Galeries comprised rows of shops
separated by covered passageways which were illuminated by skylights. The success of this retail
format quickly spawned copies elsewhere in Paris, including the Passage Feydau (1790–91),
the Passage du Caire (1799) and the Passage des Panoramas (1800). They also spread rapidly to
French provincial towns, including some relatively small centres such as Chambery, Niort and
Amiens, all of which had arcades by 1820 (Gillet, 2014). Wherever they were built, the format
and the link to theatres and other forms of public entertainment remained strong. England’s first
arcade, the Royal Opera Arcade (1817) was designed as part of the King’s Opera House then
being built in the Haymarket in London. It ran between Pall Mall and Charles II Street, parallel
to the newly constructed Regent Street, and quickly became a fashionable promenade. As such,
it epitomised the function of arcades as a means of facilitating the movement of pedestrians
between urban blocks and alleviating traffic on the main thoroughfares. However, its single
row of little shops appears to have been insufficient to make it a long-term commercial success
(Mayhew, 1865). In contrast, Burlington Arcade, built just one year later in a prime commercial
location near to the major shopping nexus of Old Bond Street, was far more successful. It com-
prised a double row of shops some 178 metres long, the central walkway being illuminated by
large skylights and a series of lamps running its entire length. Its main entrance on Piccadilly was
marked by a triple-arched classical façade, whilst the shops themselves had large glazed windows
some two metres in height. Above each shop was living accommodation for the shopkeeper
(Morrison, 2003, p. 99). The arcade was conceived of as ‘a Piazza for all Hardware, Wearing
Apparel and Articles not offensive in appearance nor smell’ (quoted in Adburgham, 1979, p. 101)
and its shops were quickly filled with drapers, milliners, haberdashers, booksellers, toy sellers,
shoemakers, hosiers, glovers and so on, who sold small luxuries to elite shoppers.
Part of the enduring popularity of Burlington Arcade was undoubtedly down to its careful
policing by beadles who enforced a whole series of regulations. Visitors were not allowed to
whistle, sing or play musical instruments; they could not carry bulky parcels or open umbrel-
las, nor could they run or push perambulators. Moreover, the arcade closed at eight o’clock
in the evening, discouraging its use as a place of clandestine assignations. In this sense, arcades
have much in common with modern shopping malls, both being heavily regulated spaces of
consumption, shaped around the architectural and behavioural blue prints of their designers
and owners. That said, Burlington Arcade, like the earlier galleries, was not entirely immune to
subversive uses. Mayhew wrote in his Survey of London that prostitutes haunted the arcade ‘ready
at a given signal to dart into a nearby shop whose upper floors had rooms furnished to their
taste and their purpose’ (quoted in MacKeith, 1985, p. 23). These same contradictions fascinated
Walter Benjamin; his famous Arcades Project focuses (if that is the right word for what is in some
ways a scrapbook of observations and anecdotes) on these enclosed semi-public spaces as ‘tem-
ples of commodity capital’, but also as one of the principal habitats of the urban flaneur who
wandered the streets, aloof from his surroundings, but observing and judging what he saw (see
Savage, 2000). Indeed, it was the combination of consumption and entertainment (both planned
and opportunistic) that made the arcades so attractive for such purposes.
Despite the spatial paradox of arcades as spaces that were public and private, designed and
subverted, they became a key element of the European retail and urban environment during
the second half of the nineteenth century: symbols of modernity and vitality. In metropolitan
centres, they were constructed on a monumental scale, most famously in Brussels (Galeries Roy-
ales Saint-Hubert, 1847), Milan (Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, 1867) and Berlin (Kasergalerie,
1873). Further east, another predecessor of the arcade can be found in the bezistans, covered

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retail venues made of stone with vaulted ceilings and domes, which had been built in the market
squares of towns in Ottoman controlled areas in southeast Europe since the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury (see Chapter 23 – Hilton). Similar forms of covered retail passageways were found in Russia
by 1785, and arcades proper had spread to north America by the 1820s. America’s pioneer was
the Westminster Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island (1828) which, unlike its European coun-
terparts, had small shops arranged along two upper story galleries as well as the main walkway
at ground level. It opened for only two hours each day so was hardly a major retail venue. More
conventional was the Paddock Arcade in Watertown, New York (1850) where only the ground
floor was used for shops – the upper floors containing offices. Perhaps most spectacular was the
1890 Cleveland Arcade, a huge development modelled on Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II,
but containing shops on five levels and linked with two large office blocks rather than theatres
or other places of entertainment. As in Europe, however, these were places for pedestrians who
were brought to these city-centre locations via mass transportation systems, most notably trams
and railways.
Arnout (2014) argues that the splendour and scale of these structures formed one of their
key attractions for urban authorities in sanctioning their construction – they would be orna-
ments to the city, augmenting its standing relative to other centres. As such, they were part of the
wider process of “civic boosterism” that underscored the construction of magnificent town halls
and market halls, as well as leisure and educational facilities. And they were well suited to such
purposes; the extensive use of innovative materials and building techniques, most notably the

Figure 12.1 The Arcade, downtown Cleveland, OH

Source: Credit: Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

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combination of steel and glass in the construction of their roofs, gave them an air of modernity
as well as splendour. Add to this the introduction of gas lighting and the presence of a theatre and
several cafes and restaurants, and it is easy to believe the rhetoric of the promoters of the Galeries
Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels, who wrote that ‘Paris’s most frequented arcades offer no sight
livelier than the Galeries St-Hubert; a crowd of strollers and passer-by fills them from morning
till night’ (quoted in Arnout, 2014, p. 170). Yet they faced the same issues seen in Burlington
Arcade; the shopkeepers’ desire for regulation and respectability clashing with the status of the
arcades as a place of entertainment open to everyone.
There is a further paradox: the grand arcades in Brussels, as well as those in Milan and
Berlin, were built at a time when they were already going out of fashion in Paris – replaced
by the department store and the broad sweep of open boulevards. This highlights the lack
of uniformity of the urban experience across Europe and even within a single country. We
thus see the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels prospering into the twentieth century
when the Antwerp Cité arcade was struggling. Similarly, there was a burgeoning number of
arcades being built in the cities of northern England when the emphasis in London, as in
Paris, had moved to department stores. There had been a flurry of building in the 1820s, when
arcades were constructed in Hastings, Bristol, Bath, Glasgow and Newcastle (Morrison, 2003,
pp. 100–101). In London, various mid-nineteenth-century schemes re-envisaged the arcade
on a magnificent scale – part of grandiose schemes to re-imagine the city. That of William
Moseley linked an arcade of shops to the construction of an underground railway, whilst
Joseph Paxton suggested a 16km glazed arcade that would encircle central London – an idea
that re-emerged in Ebenezer Howard’s vision of a garden city. However, it was only from the
1870s that arcade building gained real momentum in provincial England and began reshap-
ing the retail and urban landscape, especially in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham. Again,
they served as important pedestrian thoroughfares, almost invariably being built to link streets,
whilst offering new commercial space. Many, including the 1873 Barton Arcade in Manches-
ter and the 1898 County Arcade in Leeds, broke with earlier tradition and had two or more
stories of shops. Others had upper floors given over to offices or incorporated central rotunda
or an enlarged central space providing a spatial and functional focus. The Leyland Arcade in
Southport (1896), for instance, originally housed a bandstand as well as palm trees and seating
(Morrison, 2003, pp. 102–106).
This kind of provision, plus the inclusion of several stories of shops, blurs the distinction
in form between late nineteenth-century arcades and twentieth-century malls – something
which seems particularly true of the Cleveland Arcade. However, in providing small premises
for independent retailers, arcades formed a complement to high streets (and a contrast to later
malls), which were increasingly dominated by large department stores and multiple retailers.
That said, by the early twentieth century, when the boom in arcade building had passed – at least
in Britain – chain stores like Boots were starting to occupy shops in arcades, rendering them less
distinctive as retail spaces.

Shopping centres and malls: American origins

The terms shopping centre and shopping mall are used interchangeably in the United States and,
to a lesser extent, in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Historically, shopping centres referred to
planned developments oriented to the automobile that were typically open-air, arranged along
a strip or around a courtyard or open area, and situated away from the city centre. The term
mall appeared with the rise of the enclosed shopping centre – a format which, as we noted
above, might be seen as a development of earlier shopping arcades. In the UK in particular it

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Figure 12.2 Barton Arcade, Manchester, UK
Credit: Author’s own photograph.
 Arcades, shopping centres and shopping malls

was sometimes associated with regeneration of the city centre, although confusingly, many of
these developments were referred to as shopping centres – for example, Birmingham’s Bull
Ring Shopping Centre (1964). As Longstreth (2010) suggests, any distinction between malls and
shopping centres was often semantic and, in any case, was soon lost.
When they first appeared in the United States, shopping centres were a revolutionary way
of distributing goods and services. First and foremost, their unique form offered consumers
a physical/spatial experience distinct from that of the traditional downtown business district.
The central business district or market street, which had long served most shopping needs, was
comprised of independently owned and operated businesses housed in architecturally distinct
buildings. They were heterogonous, often messy places that evolved over time in an organic
fashion to serve the needs of their city and wider trading area. Many downtown department
stores, for example, reflected their nineteenth-century origins well into the twentieth and were
conglomerations of buildings patched together as the business grew and needed to expand
within the confines of the city centre. Within the new commercial complexes, however, all
stores were ‘designed, built, and operated as a single unit’, usually at the same time. Mall owners/
managers populated them with tenants who were selected for what they could contribute to
the whole (Longstreth, 2010, p. 170). Run together as a business, they promised efficiency and
order, in contrast to the chaos of an aging downtown. Centralised administration allowed for
standardisation and control of architectural and design features, as well as store placement, so as
to shape the consumer experience and maximise profits. As well as being designed and operated
as a single unit, they were also promoted as a whole, through the efforts of management and
their tenants (Cohen, 1996, p. 1056; Longstreth, 2010, p. 170).This revolutionary form remained
consistent over several decades in the shape of three distinct categories of shopping centres in
the United States: neighbourhood, community, and regional shopping centres were based on
size, make-up and target market (Longstreth, 2010, pp. 173–174). Such clear distinctions are less
apparent in Europe, although an informal hierarchy is apparent, notably between older in-town
malls and later out-of-town regional shopping centres such as Merry Hill in the West Midlands
and Bluewater in Kent.
In the United States, where the shopping mall was born, the industry demonstrated a com-
mitment to automobility. Shopping centres’ unique form was in fact a product of the automo-
bile revolution, a response to the challenges of downtown parking and traffic congestion in
central business districts as car ownership soared. The first fully planned shopping centre, Kansas
City’s Country Club Plaza, which opened in the early 1920s, exemplified the emergence of a
new automobile orientation in retail construction. A multi-building complex, it was arranged to
resemble an idealised village, yet nevertheless was oriented to the motorist, with parking lots and
wide streets (Longstreth, 2010, p. 170). Other interwar developments occurred in Los Angeles,
with its car culture, spreading housing developments and highways that provided easy access
to commercial locations outside the urban core (Hardwick, 2004, p. 95). Before World War II,
however, shopping centre development was quite limited. Department stores were expanding
outside traditional central business districts, but these early suburban branches were typically
stand-alone buildings. Department stores came to play a central role in their development after
the war, increasingly establishing suburban branches as anchors first for outdoor shopping cen-
tres, then enclosed malls (Longstreth, 2010, p. 163).
Residential decentralisation and suburbanisation, facilitated by private automobile owner-
ship, played a major role in new shopping centre development in the United States. Between
1950 and 1955, the suburban population grew seven times as fast as that of central cities. Decen-
tralised residential patterns were tied to increased automobility as people relied on their personal
vehicles to get to work or to travel downtown to shop or do business. Between 1946 and 1955,

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Figure 12.3 Country Club Plaza, Kansas City
Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by John Margolies, [reproduction number,
e.g., LC-MA05-1]
 Arcades, shopping centres and shopping malls

new-car sales in America quadrupled (Tarver, 1957, p. 427; Nicolaide and Weise, 2006, p. 7;
Cohen, 2003, p. 123). As postwar automobile-oriented suburbanisation expanded markets, shop-
ping centre numbers skyrocketed, reaching 7,100 by 1963 (Cohen, 1996, p. 1052; Longstreth,
2010, p. 170; Howard, 2015, p. 139). By 1960, government reports described suburban shopping
centres as ‘the inevitable by-product of the automobile age’ (Impact of Suburban Shopping, 1960).
Shopping centres’ connection to automobility was by no means inevitable, however, as the
pervasiveness of central or urban shopping districts in Europe suggests. In part, this was a reflec-
tion of better state support for European public transport systems. In addition, it was the product
of American regulations that facilitated expansion into the suburbs. Since the Great Depres-
sion, the federal government had shaped the geography of American retailing. By pumping
money into the suburban housing market through programs that eased home financing, more
Americans became homeowners. After World War II, federal policies continued to support the
decentralisation of cities, not least through federal and state financed highway building which
facilitated the movement out of cities. By 1960, 62% of Americans owned their own homes
(Nicolaide and Weise, 2006, p. 4; Hardwick, 2004, pp. 86–87), many of which were in new devel-
opments that needed the services that a big shopping complex could provide.
Aided by tax policy, such as the 1954 Internal Revenue Code that favoured new construc-
tion, developers responded to this growing demand. The policy allowed investors to depreciate
their commercial real estate investments in a manner that encouraged new construction over
maintenance or renovation of existing properties. Building a shopping centre required a high
level of initial investment with an extended pay-out time. By allowing accelerated deprecia-
tion, policymakers gave investors a tax break big enough to overcome these potential barriers.
Moreover, the law encouraged turnover, as investors sought repeated deductions with new
properties. According to historian Thomas Hanchett, this tax code underwrote shopping mall
expansion in the postwar era and was a major contributor to decentralisation, along with subur-
ban home ownership, America’s automobile culture and rising racial tension in cities ( Jackson,
1996, p. 1115; Hanchett, 1996, p. 1082–1110). American shopping centre developers were also
aided by financial institutions, such as insurance companies and pension trusts.Their reliance on
these financial institutions influenced their makeup. Developers and department store executives
at first preferred that the majority of shopping centre tenants be independents, but demands that
merchants have the highest credit rating meant that big chains like J.C. Penney would have an
advantage (Howard, 2015, p. 139). The trajectory towards chain organisation within the depart-
ment store industry influenced the character of malls, which became increasingly standardised
after the late 1980s (Howard, 2015).
When they first appeared on the American scene in large numbers in the 1950s, shopping
centres seemed to fill pressing needs, both economic and social. Built to serve as both a commer-
cial and a social centre for burgeoning new suburban communities, their function was unique.
Architects like Victor Gruen designed them to provide American suburbanites with a new kind
of urban experience. At Northland outside of Detroit, for example, Gruen’s design evoked a
European city, featuring clusters of open spaces that were labelled with names that evoked urban
pathways or public space – such as lanes, terraces, courts and malls – all of which were decorated
in an idyllic way with colonnades, sculptures and fountains (Hardwick, 2004, pp. 80, 85, 128–
130; Cohen, 2003, pp. 262–263). Contemporary shopping centres were built with non-selling
spaces, such as community halls that hosted dances, meetings and receptions. Department stores,
and in many cases, supermarkets, anchored these developments, meaning they could replace
the traditional downtown food market, butcher or corner grocer. In suburban New Jersey, for
example, when Bergen Mall and Garden State Plaza opened in 1957 they offered everything
that was available downtown. More than just a collection of department stores, specialty shops

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and restaurants, the New Jersey malls featured every service, from laundry to shoe repair, from
banking and stock brokerage to travel and real estate offices. Functioning in many ways as a civic
centre for the suburbs, they were home to a Catholic chapel and diverse recreational facilities,
such as a movie theatre, ice-skating rink and bowling alley. Children were even made to feel at
home with a gymnasium and a playground (Cohen, 1996, p. 1058). Such services and amenities
were intended to draw people in and by increasing mall traffic, drive sales volume.
Shopping centres were consciously developed and promoted to function as an alternative to
the heterogenous city street and traditional downtown business district. Their American devel-
opment took place in direct conversation with downtown retail traditions. Typically built on
inexpensive land well beyond the central business district, they expanded outward rather than
upward, leaving behind the traditional verticality that downtown department stores adopted
out of necessity as well as for prestige (Hardwick, 2004, p. 97). Their early architects hoped they
would have the appeal of a traditional downtown centre but without the aggravation of limited
parking and congested streets. (See illustration in Chapter 5 in this volume: Cross County Shop-
ping Center, Westchester County, New York.) Shopping centres like NorthPark, for example,
which opened outside Dallas in 1965, were advertised as ‘an attempt to counteract the confu-
sions of the city’. By the mid-1960s, this view of the shopping centre as a solution to ‘the plight
of cities’ and ‘unplanned urban sprawl’ was widespread (Howard, 2015, p. 142).
In Britain as well, shopping malls were understood to offer an experience in direct contrast
with High Street or downtown shopping and its association with urban decay and crime, not
to mention inclement weather (Stobart, 2008, p. 206). Some British shopping centre architects,
however, turned away from the American-style developed by Victor Gruen. Referencing their
parking lots, one of the architects of Britain’s visionary 1979 Milton Keynes shopping centre
criticised them as ‘tarmac machines for spending money, entirely enclosed’ (quoted in Gos-
seye, 2015, p. 213). That said, the shopping centre that was built in Milton Keynes resembled
its American counterparts more closely than any other British development (Morrison, 2003,
p. 267). ‘Pav(ing) paradise to put up a parking lot’ was looked down upon by some in the United
States when Joni Mitchell sang these words in 1970, but in the emerging neoliberal environ-
ment of both nations suburban shopping mall development advanced unabated. There were
22,000 shopping centres in the United States by 1980, and this number had more than doubled
by the early twenty-first century (Blaszczyk, 2009, p. 210). Development was slower in Britain.
From pioneers in the 1960s, development was steady through the 1970s before accelerating to
culminate in the construction of eleven out-of-town regional shopping centres, seven of them
built in the 1990s (Pacione, 2005, pp. 255–262). By 2017, there were about 550 shopping centres
in the United Kingdom, twenty of them “supermalls” (The Guardian, 16 December 2017).
In Britain, most shopping centres appeared as part of programmes of urban development (as
at Milton Keynes) or redevelopment (for example, in Bradford and Newcastle in the 1970s or
Reading and Kingston-on-Thames in the 1990s). In the United States, though, they were largely
suburban enterprises and as such embodied the ills and injustices of American suburban history.
Decentralisation took place in a racialised context in the United States. The suburban/urban
bifurcation that emerged in contemporary shopping centre discussions reflected the industry’s
racism, as well as the racially driven demographic shifts taking place in the postwar period.
When American department stores considered expanding by opening branches, for example,
they generally chased the white, emerging middle-class markets that were racing to the suburbs
after World War II (Howard, 2015, pp. 2–3). Unlike downtown emporia, shopping centres and
their branch department stores catered specifically to the needs and preferences of this more
homogenised group. While marketers were beginning to discover African American consumers

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through the early postwar period, shopping centres largely ignored them. One exception was
the South Center Department Store, which opened in 1928 in Chicago as part of a shopping
and entertainment complex. It was white-owned until the late 1960s, when it was bought by an
African American developer (Howard, 2015, pp. 54–55).
When African American citizens and retailers came together in the media it was through
coverage of civil rights protests, particularly the boycotts of Southern department stores and
variety chains like Woolworths where black shoppers faced employment discrimination and
segregation in store restaurants and restrooms. Civil rights protests largely bypassed suburban
shopping malls during this period. Shopping centre developers single-mindedly sought a mid-
dle-class market, which was understood to be white even though the black middle-class was
expanding significantly (Howard, 2015, pp. 159–162). To pursue this market, department store
branches in these shopping centres did things differently to their downtown parent store, culti-
vating a controlled, safe atmosphere that was believed to appeal specifically to white, suburban
housewives. Suburban branches, as it was understood by the trade press, were ‘breaking away
from downtown traditions’, establishing evening hours, offering novel services, and even com-
peting with the new mass merchandisers like the discount operation.The practice of self-service,
led by the grocery trade in the 1930s but also increasingly instituted at downtown department
stores, was fully part of this suburban shopping mall experience (Howard, 2015, p. 90). The
massive new complexes were meant to appeal to families, not just women, all of whom were
encouraged to spend their leisure time wandering between stores, handling the goods if desired,
and most important, spending. Indeed, by the early 1960s shopping malls appeared to have had
some success in reorienting the experience, as retail and marketing experts noted a change in
family buying habits, with the husband becoming a ‘more active member of the family purchas-
ing team’. When depicted in advertisements or trade literature, this purchasing team was largely
figured as white and middle class (Isenberg, 2004, p. 176; Howard, 2015, “family purchasing
team” quote, 143).

Diffusion and diversification of shopping centres: the US and beyond

Shopping malls were an American invention, built on the nation’s early and ongoing com-
mitment to private automobile ownership; but, as we have already noted, shopping malls did
not stay a uniquely American retailing mode over the second half of the twentieth century. By
the 1960s and early 1970s, the father of the American shopping mall form, Victor Gruen, was
exporting his ideas back to Europe, his suburban shopping centres appearing outside Vienna,
around Paris and the French Riviera, and in Zurich (Hardwick, 2004, p. 221). As many West-
ern and non-Western nations embraced the retail format, they faced different economic, politi-
cal and social imperatives. In the United States as we have seen, decentralisation was a key force.
Department stores and mall developers built “markets in the meadows” in order to follow
residential populations shifting from urban cores to the periphery into new housing made pos-
sible by mass housing construction methods, affordable automobiles, tax breaks for developers
and inexpensive home loans provided through the GI Bill after the war (Hanchett, 1996; May,
1988). Suburbia and mall development emerged in the context of post-World War II prosperity
in the United States.
Other nations dealt with differing postwar circumstances. Following World War II in Britain,
for example, shopping centre development took place hand-in-hand with larger redevelopment
schemes addressing wartime damage and the need to reconstruct town centres and provide
housing (Stobart, 2008, pp. 192, 203; Morrison, 2003, pp. 251–273). To a large extent, British

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department stores, chains, independents and co-operatives maintained a strong presence on the
High Street, with shoppers continuing to see downtown as a place to take care of their daily
needs (Stobart, 2008, p. 193). Schemes for gathering retailers into specially redeveloped shopping
districts or precincts emerged in the 1950s, with the earliest perhaps being the Chrisp Street
Shopping Precinct in Poplar, East London in 1951. Many took design clues from the Lijnbaan
in Rotterdam, a completely pedestrianised zone rebuilt in 1953 after the city was devastated by
wartime bombing.The 1960s saw these shopping precincts emerging in towns that had suffered
little damage in the war, but that were committed to modernisation (Morrison, 2003, pp. 251,
258–259; Stobart, 2008, pp. 203–204). This process continued with the development of urban
shopping malls from the 1960s into the 2000s. The first of these was the Bull Ring in Birming-
ham (1964), followed by a succession of others, including the Arndale centres built on a massive
scale and in modernist styles in many northern cities. Whilst more sympathetic architecture was
adopted from the 1980s, the key role of the shopping mall in reviving the city centre was main-
tained with schemes such as Touchwood in Solihull (2001) and Liverpool One (2008).
Enclosed, out-of-town shopping malls like Southdale Center in Minnesota were being
developed in France by the late 1960s, with early examples being Parly 2 (1969), Velizy 2
(1972) and Rosny 2 (1973), all in the Ile-de-France. Britain was slower to embrace these devel-
opments, in part because of much tighter planning regulations, including Green Belt restrictions
designed to limit out-of-town developments of any kind. Although out-of-town centres were
built near Peterborough (Breton Centre, 1971–72) and Northampton (Weston Favell, 1974)
as part of new town expansion schemes, The Brent Cross Shopping Centre, which opened in
northwest London in 1976, was the first to really follow the American model in location and
scale. It was situated away from established centres of retailing and not part of a larger urban
redevelopment plan (Morrison, 2003, pp. 296–297; Miller et al., 1998, p. 2; Gosseye, 2015,
p. 212). The mall’s design also mirrored the standard US dumb-bell style, with two anchor
department stores linked by a two-level mall. It also featured a supermarket, many large chain
branches and originally had 3,000 parking spots, all on a 52 acre site. (Miller et al., 1998, pp. 32,
44; Gosseye, 2015, p. 212). By the 1990s, Britain was building very large out-of-town shop-
ping centres, such as Manchester’s Trafford Centre (1995–98) and Bluewater in Kent (1999),
mirroring earlier American developments with regional malls (Stobart, 2008, pp. 219–222).
While on the surface shopping malls may appear to have the same form and serve the same
function across national borders, the context in which they were produced varied widely across
space and time. New Town shopping centres, for example like that developed at Milton Keynes
in 1979, were intended to serve a civic function and were accordingly built with many non-
commercial features and attractive landscaping, as in the United States in the early postwar
period (Gosseye, 2015). But unlike purely private commercial developments in the United
States, Milton Keynes was the product of a public-private partnership intended to cater to the
interests of investors but also to promote particular social and political goals in an era when
neoliberalism was beginning to pick apart the welfare state in Britain under Prime Minister
Thatcher (Gosseye, 2015). In this, Milton Keynes was perhaps unusual, with most UK shopping
malls, especially the larger regional centres, being financed and built by private developers.
Beginning in the 1980s, shopping malls began to face competition from new brick-and-
mortar retail formats. In the United States, designer outlet malls like Ontario Mills in California
and Sawgrass Mills in Florida were built along highways and attracted bargain hunters willing
to drive long distances for fashion labels at a lower price (Farrell, 2003, p. 13). The outlet mall
village format spread in the United Kingdom in the following decade, the first being built in
1993 by the shoe manufacturer Clarks on their redundant factory site in Street, Somerset (Mor-
rison, 2003, pp. 293–295). Others quickly followed, many constructed in a quasi-high street

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format with relatively small stores often built in a vernacular if sometimes anachronistic style.
Out-of-town outlet centres came to Japan at the turn of the twenty-first century, with Gotemba
Premium Outlets winning an award for its publicity campaign to convince Japanese customers
of the benefits of the new retail format (Farrell, 2003, p. 253). More significantly, perhaps, for-
midable power centres first appeared in the 1970s in the United States (Spector, 2005, p. 111).
Comprised of a Walmart or Target, and a row of so-called “category killers”, big-box stores that
dominated one line of goods, such as toys, hardware or bedding, they marked a turn towards
discounts and specialisation (Spector, 2005, p. 110). They were also more firmly embedded
in automobile culture. Stores share a parking lot and, unlike a traditional shopping mall with
pedestrian passageways between anchors, power centres are ‘a cars-only zone’ (Spector, 2005,
p. 4). While typically associated with American car culture, these commercial developments also
prospered in Britain and across Europe, even in countries with a much stronger commitment
to public transportation.
Finally, the regional shopping centre, once the largest retail format, faced competition from a
new giant, the megamall. The term first appeared in 1979, but only became common in 1986, a
year after the first of its kind opened in Alberta, Canada (NYT, “Why Supermall is Superbad”,
1979; “A Shoppers Paradise on the Prairie”, 1986). Finding its niche in cold climates, where
indoor shopping and entertainment complexes provided leisure opportunities in long winters,
the 1985 West Edmonton Mall, was followed by the 2.5 million square foot Mall of America
outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1992. Anchored by multiple department stores and boast-
ing such things as an ice skating rink, aquarium, water park, rollercoaster rides, movie theatres,
hotel and wedding chapel, they serve as tourist attractions, drawing millions of visitors a year.
And outdoor “lifestyle centres”, distinct from power centres and the traditional postwar mall,
grew in popularity during the same time period. Consisting of specialty and big-box retailers,
interspersed with fine dining opportunities along a landscaped outdoor walkway, these upscale
venues harkened back to the original outdoor shopping centres introduced by architectural
visionaries, like Victor Gruen, right after World War II (Sherman, 2008). Not surprisingly, con-
sumer interest in the ordinary indoor shopping malls has been declining since the mid-1990s. In
America especially, older enclosed shopping malls have been shut down, converted to alternate
uses or demolished by the hundreds since then (Spector, 2005, p. 176).
As the traditional American shopping centre is in decline in the early twenty-first century,
a boom in mall construction is underway globally. Russia, India and Latin America have all
undergone a retail transformation in their urban centres (Davila, 2012, p. 23; Srivastava, 2015,
p. 224; Abaza, 2006, p. 196). In Cairo, Egypt, there were two dozen by 2003 (Abaza, 2006, p. 197)
and in Japan several railway companies were instrumental in constructing malls and department
stores linked to their city centre terminals (Fujioka, 2014, p. 31). With the rise of major players
globally, American influence has lessened. Southeast Asian malls in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and
Jakarta, for example, with their glass elevators and elaborate facades provide a new model for
mall development in other countries, like Egypt (Abaza, 2006, pp. 208–209).
In terms of size, the United States is no longer the leader either. In the twenty-first century,
megamalls opened in China, a country which now boasts a number of the world’s largest malls,
reflecting its new consumer economy and expanding middle class. The Golden Resource Mall
in Beijing, which opened in 2004, covered six million square feet and became the largest, though
other bigger Chinese megamalls arrived quickly on the scene (Campanella, 2008, p. 236). After
a shopping mall building boom in China, however, much retail space remains unrented. Over-
storing and the astronomical popularity of e-commerce in China will cause many to close
by 2020, according to several reports (Minter, 2016; Linder, 2016). Shopping malls in other
countries have also suffered from overbuilding, recession and currency devaluation.Vast income

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Figure 12.4 Suria KLCC, a shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur, located at the base of the landmark
­Petronas Towers
Credit: https://pixabay.com-

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disparity is to blame in countries like Egypt, where only a minority can afford to shop in the
new upscale malls. Like the United States, Egypt has experienced the “dead mall” phenomenon
(Abaza, 2006, p. 199, mall quote p. 216). It remains to be seen whether the enclosed shopping
mall retail format can withstand all these pressures or whether it will decline as a global trend.

Behaviour, power and space in the shopping mall

As a retail format that has shaped landscapes and transformed economic and social behaviour,
it is not surprising that the shopping mall attained a prominent place in American culture,
emerging as a positive symbol of postwar suburban consumer abundance. Surrounded by a
sea of colourful parked cars, it was a concrete monument to American prosperity. Ubiquity,
however, transformed this symbol into a reference point for everything that was wrong in
American society. Shopping centres and megamalls have often appeared as the ‘apotheosis of
American consumerism’ (Hardwick, 2004, p. 1). One 1979 observer described them as symbols
of ‘undisciplined American consumption, showrooms for planned obsolescence’ full of ‘pumped
waterfalls, plastic flowers, filtered air and wired birdsong’ that parodied nature (Neill, 1979, p. 20).
This type of criticism stems from a critical view of suburban identity. In this view, shopping
malls stand for other negative aspects of mass culture, namely the perceived dull homogeneity of
suburban living. In part this was a response to their regularised appearance. Unlike the traditional
downtown store, which was part of the heterogeneous city, shopping mall formats were quite
standardised. This was the result of a number of factors, both practical and strategic. Shopping
centre leases during the period sought to control the overall visual effect by requiring tenants
to create unified colour schemes and signage. Increasingly they were organised around plain,
windowless department stores – boxlike containers with low-key signs and entrances. Centres
were regularised into ‘a linear sequence of stores facing a front parking lot’, laid out in a straight
line or bent at one or two points to form a V or divided into two parts into an L shape (Isenberg,
2004, p. 198; Longstreth, 2010, p. 178). The overall effect was a low-slung, windowless shape the
monotony of which critics found emblematic of suburban living.
As the shopping mall form made its way into non-Western cultures by the late twentieth
century, its meaning continued to evolve and scholarly interpretations continued to diverge.The
imposition of standardised Western retail modes, some have argued, have destroyed local cultures
and hindered social and family ties (Davila, 2012, p. 23). And yet, while the shopping mall has
been seen as an Americanising force – and a negative one at that – it has also found a positive
reception. This favourable interpretation has largely hinged on the idea that shopping malls
provided privatised public spaces within which there could be a great diversity of experience
and potential for social/cultural and political expression. Daniel Miller and others have long
argued there are multiple publics even within each mall (Miller et al., 1998, p. 29). Sociologists
and others have also emphasised the potential for consumer agency in malls. Looking at non-
Western countries, such as Egypt, Turkey and India, scholars have made the point that a wide
cross-section of people visit malls, even if they do not shop there (Srivastava, 2015, citing Abaza
and Erkip, p. 225).
By focusing on individual consumer practices, it is possible to see malls as a positive source of
social interaction and expression of identity (Davila, 2012, p. 23). As did the nineteenth-century
urban department store in the United States (Benson, 1988), recent non-Western shopping
malls have created newly gendered middle-class spaces for women (Abaza, 2006, pp. 215–216).
In India, for example, malls appealed to middle-class women, young and old, providing them
with a socially acceptable, safe place for socialising. They also provided a place for courting

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couples who did not have parental approval. Their appeal was quite wide-ranging in terms of
social class as well.The sociologist Sanjay Srivastava has argued that they formed ‘meeting points
of the promises of urban culture and the aspirations of the hinterlands’ and played a role in the
lives of the urban poor who, though unable to spend money there, took part in their ‘imagina-
tive economies’ (Srivastava, 2015, p. 225, 259). In Egypt, young people who live in informal
housing or slums find in Cairo’s shopping malls a clean space where they can feel they are
participating in a better world, imitating through dress and through their presence in the mall
a higher social status (Abaza, 2006, p. 216). There are limits, however, dictated by the privatised
nature of shopping mall space. As Srivastava (2015, p. 225) suggested, ‘there is only so much soci-
ality investment capital can countenance’. Mall owners have had to ‘calibrate sociality so that it
issues an exchange value’, in other words, finding ways to balance the non-commercial activities
or actions of mall visitors with spending.
As privatised public spaces, others point out that they reproduce social inequality by policing
and excluding people who might not so easily be ‘kept at bay in the public street’ (Davila, 2012,
p. 24). Nevertheless, such scholarship has documented public activities in shopping malls that
actively resist their consumerist message and goal. This is the case in Puerto Rico, where the
shopping mall industry underwent expansion between 1993 and 2001, and by 2008, was home
to 317 malls. This construction boom, as Arlene Davila (2012, pp. 30–31) argues, did not mean
that the new retail format was accepted uncritically. This same period not surprisingly saw a
steep rise in small retailer bankruptcies, which led to concerns that the island’s retail sector was
undergoing “Walmartisation”. Moreover, the shopping malls were not always used for the pur-
pose for which they were built. Senior citizens used them as meeting places for socialising, with
little consumption attached, while unauthorised, outside vendors try to use their open spaces
to sell their wares. The major Puerto Rican shopping mall, Plaza las Americas, was even the site
a major takeover by student strikers who were protesting university tuition fees. Such demon-
strations, Davila suggests, are evidence that shopping malls are not necessarily apolitical spaces
just for leisure and entertainment. ‘These striking performances showcased a key predicament
of neoliberalism: that if there are no jobs or accessible public higher education, there cannot be
shopping’ (Davila, 2012, p. 44).
Envisioning a commercial cultural sphere that is distinct from the political domain, some
scholars have argued that the expansion of mass consumer culture has cut into public space.
Such encroachment has ‘blurred the distinction between arguments made on behalf of politi-
cal claims and the rationales used for making consumer choices’ (de Grazia, 2005, pp. 229–230;
Ewen, 1976). Shopping centre development made physical inroads into public space, its paved
parking lots and highway access standing in direct contrast with downtown centres that evolved
to serve the needs of pedestrians. Unlike the public spaces that served as a community forum for
citizens and free speech, shopping malls privileged the rights of private property owners (Cohen,
1996, pp. 1053–1054). Shopping centres were privatised spaces, with entry limited to opening
times and behaviour and activities monitored and controlled by security personnel and mall
management. In this view, the expansion of this commercial sphere came at the cost of avenues
for political expression and action.
Just as scholars have interpreted these commercial spaces differently, seeing them as contested
spaces where power relations play out in a variety of ways that change over time, mall manage-
ment and shoppers themselves have also understood their public function in contrasting ways.
A key point of debate in the American context is connected to the issue of free speech and
the legal interpretation of shopping malls as public or private space. There is no absolute First
Amendment right to free speech in privately owned spaces in the United States. As privatised

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spaces where the public typically has free entry, shopping malls are potentially the site of leaflet-
ing, petitioning, or expressions of a political nature, either through speech or even dress. A key
Supreme Court decision (Pruneyard Shopping Center v Robins, 1980) argued that state constitu-
tions might protect free speech in such private forums, but that no federal protection was given.
As a result of this case, some states amended their constitutions to allow certain kinds of speech
in private forums, but others did not. Pruneyard meant ‘as state law will oblige, shopping centres
can be converted into a limited public forum open to political speech of all shades and opinions’.
But, in states where no state constitutional protection was offered, malls were able to eject cus-
tomers or patrons based on their own rules. This was found to be the case in Albany, New York,
for example, when a father and son wearing political t-shirts were told to leave the Crossgates
shopping mall; the father was arrested when he refused to leave. (Pigeon, 1981; Epstein, 1997,
quote p. 35; New York Times, 6 March 2003). While the issue seems settled in a legal sense in the
United States (state variations/no federal protection), on a daily basis shopping malls continue
to be sites of social interaction, stages upon which the power relations to do with race, class and
gender are contested and upheld. In a more benign manner, however, malls continue to offer
a venue for the sort of activities noted by Davila (2012) in Puerto Rica. While behaviour is
regulated by private security guards, malls formed places to meet and socialise for young and old
alike, sitting on the benches provided an enjoyable a pleasant and safe environment, free from
the normal urban hazards: ‘no hassle, no traffic, older kids don’t bother you’ (Matthews et al.,
2000, p. 286).

Conclusion
Malls might be the epitome of late twentieth-century retailing, but their roots lie deep in
the shopping galleries and arcades of early modern Europe. While different in their form,
scale and location, they share a common thread of planned and regulated space, designed
to foster leisurely shopping and with the ability to shape consumer behaviour. In their own
times, each has been very successful, shopping malls in particular spreading across the globe
very soon after their introduction in postwar US. In this context, they formed a symbol of
modernity and of the American dream: a venue in which consumer desires could be formed
and satiated in an environment that was safe, enticing and above all convenient. Success can
be counted in numbers, but also in the way that malls quickly became central to modern life-
styles and cultural norms. In Europe, and especially in the UK, they took on the additional
role of urban renewal, both in a series of New Towns and in the reconstruction and conscious
modernisation of city centres. But the mall format was constantly shifting in its location and
form, out-of-town and later regional shopping centres have undermined the viability of many
downtown malls in the US and a similar problem has emerged in the UK and elsewhere. Just
as profound as this devaluation of the mall’s economic currency is the tarnishing of its social
and cultural credentials, with earlier complaints of uniformity and ennui being overlain with
concerns over citizens’ rights and the privatisation of urban space. Changing economics have
meant that hundreds of malls have closed in the US and shops lie empty in many UK malls,
though the problem of vacant premises is less severe than on many high streets. The conveni-
ence of the shopping mall, accessed by car, has been replaced by the convenience of online
retailers, accessed via the Internet and by vast numbers of delivery vans (see Chapter 5). And
yet shopping malls remain places to go for millions of shoppers across the world – places to
acquire the trappings of modern consumer society; places to look at both goods and people or
simply places to be and be seen.

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 13
BIG-BOX STORES
Stephen Halebsky

Introduction
A twenty-first century urbanite in the developed world can choose from an array of retail for-
mats: slightly faded but still elegant downtown department stores; no-frills dollar stores where
everything costs a dollar or less; family-owned and – operated specialty stores that have been in
business since the middle of the last century; and discount mass merchandisers operating out of
huge single-story rectangular windowless buildings.
Various formats have been associated with different levels of popularity and dominance.
Today the big-box store is clearly the dominant retail format in the United States and has made
significant inroads into other formats. Among the companies that operate big-box stores there
is one that stands apart from the rest. That company, Walmart Stores, Inc., is the nation’s biggest
retailer (measured by sales, among publicly held companies, Fortune 500, 2017), the nation’s big-
gest company (Fortune 500, 2017), the world’s biggest retailer (Fortune Global 500: 2017) and the
world’s biggest company (Fortune Global 500, 2017).
As a result of its economic dominance and the fascination which that has for many people,
Walmart has become the subject of a large, multifarious literature, making it difficult to disen-
tangle Walmart and the general phenomenon of big-box stores. The perspective taken here is
that Walmart, as the world’s biggest company, deserves more attention than other retailers, but in
the final analysis Walmart and the other big-box retailers are more alike than different.
I begin with some basic information about Walmart and the other leading big-box retailers.
I then provide some historical context, emphasising the period from 1945 to the present and
noting the possible effects of neoliberalism, globalisation, technological change, suburbanisation
and sprawl. I describe the development of the big-box format, interspersed with the story of
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and his rise to retail supremacy.
A note on terminology: “Format” is used inconsistently in the literature. Sometimes it is used
somewhat narrowly to refer to the material aspects of a store such as its size, shape and place-
ment. Other times it is used more broadly to refer to the entire integrated complex of charac-
teristics – both material and immaterial. I will use it in the latter sense.
What has changed over time? The most salient change, visible to the naked eye, is ‘the
growth of large national retail chains . . . coupled with a dramatic decrease in the share of retail
activity accounted for by small single location or “mom-and-pop” stores’ ( Jarmin et al., 2005).

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Also, stores selling general merchandise (i.e., Walmart, Target, etc.) have gotten larger and the
companies that operate these stores are now mostly chains. Industry concentration is now the
rule.
Size has brought with it many problems. The actions of Walmart and to a lesser degree other
big-box stores have sparked controversy, including local disputes over the siting of superstores,
the treatment of the retail workforce and the desirability of Walmart as a contemporary para-
digm for the organisation of work and consumption in America.

Retail formats and contexts

Opening his first discount store, Walmart Discount City, in the small town Rogers, Arkan-
sas in 1962, Walton drew on previous innovations. Discounting is a strategy in which ‘retail
establishment[s] . . . operate on very low margins in order to offer merchandise at prices well
below the recognized market level’ (Ostrow and Smith 1988). Vance and Scott (1994) suggest
that the roots of discounting reach back to the 1930s when supermarkets enthralled customers
with their ‘inexpensive locations, long hours of operation, and brash advertising’ (24). They dis-
tinguish three retail formats coming out of the Great Depression: department stores, chain stores
and variety stores. Big-box stores like Walmart can be seen as taking elements from each: they are
large like department stores; they are standardised chains (or multiples); and they emphasise low
prices like variety stores. Managed properly – get the goods cheaply, keep costs down, turnover
inventory frequently – discounting could be very profitable. Sam Walton excelled at this strategy
and others followed. As of 2018, almost all of the large general merchandise stores operate on
the discounting model.
The spread of big-box stores is closely linked to demographic change after World War II. Mil-
lions of Americans moved from the central cities to the suburbs where they participated in an
auto-centric way of life. This is a high-consumption lifestyle involving shopping centres, malls,
and driving. The government’s hand was quite visible: suburban home loans guaranteed by the
FHA and VA, the financing of shopping centres aided by changes in tax laws (Hanchett 1996)
and roadbuilding paid for by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Big-box stores like Walmart
are even more car-centric than the shopping malls of the postwar period. Generally not inte-
grated into a shopping mall, they tend to stand-alone in a type of retail agglomeration known as
a power centre, where every customer must drive from store to store.
What makes a store a big-box? From a physical point of view, we have in mind a building
that is very large, single-story, windowless, monochromatic, rectangular, with acres of parking – a
Walmart.The spread of this format is tied to sprawl – low density development. Local land ordi-
nances often codified these settlement patterns and promoted sprawl. Sprawl consumes huge
amounts of land, makes driving virtually mandatory, and is implicated in poor health. By the
1990s, sprawl had become a key issue for national level organisations such as the Sierra Club, the
Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Trust for Historical Preservation (Haleb-
sky 2009). Big-boxes, according to their critics, are the epitome of sprawl because they are rarely
sited downtown and consume large tracts of land themselves.
Big-box stores are often part of a global corporation. Currently perched atop the Fortune
500, Walmart has ranked first or second every year since 1999. The company operates 5,443
stores in the US and 6,363 abroad to generate total world sales of $485,873 million, about four
times the corresponding amount for Costco, Walmart’s closest competitor. Walmart divides its
operations into three segments. Walmart US comprises the domestic operations that remain the
heart of the Walmart empire and account for 64% of total sales in 2016 (Walmart Annual Report
2017; Walmart 10K Report 2017). Walmart has stores in every state. Walmart International

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operates stores in Africa (326), Argentina (107), Brazil (498), Canada (410), Central America
(731), Chile (363), China (439), India (20), Japan (341), Mexico (2411) and the UK (631),
which collectively generated 24% of total sales. Sam’s Club is the third pillar of the Walmart
empire. There are 660 Sam’s Clubs, Walmart’s version of a warehouse club, which produced
12% of total sales.
Walmart’s unheralded emergence as a discounter in 1962 in a small town in the northwestern
corner of Arkansas, followed by its rise to the heights of corporate power and influence may
appear to be the result of Sam Walton’s keen business sense and knack for discount retailing.
Walton’s success and that of other big-box retailers, however, is best understood when placed
in a larger neoliberal context. During the 1970s, a small but determined group of intellectu-
als, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, began applying neoliberalism to the
policy questions of the day. President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher were enthusiastic
about neoliberalism, which they understood as a necessary reaction against the evils of big gov-
ernment, excessive taxation and unjustified regulations.
The rhetoric of Walmart fits comfortably with the spread of neoliberalism, especially with
respect to organised labour. The Walmart culture, as analysed by Copeland and Labuski, is anti-
thetical to unions. Its extreme hostility towards unions continues to be an obstacle to organising
retail employees (Lichtenstein 2010; Ortega 2000; Warren, 2011). The proliferation of right-
to-work states, whose stronghold is the South where Walmart originated, is evidence of this
antagonism. In every state all the workers at a unionised workplace are entitled to the benefits
specified in the union contract, regardless of whether they actually join the union or not. In
non right-to-work states those who do not join the union must pay an amount equal to union
dues.What this means in practice is that unions in right-to-work states are weakened financially,
sometimes fatally, because they have a legal obligation to support all employees while receiv-
ing dues or an equivalent amount from only from a minority of workers. This sets up a free
rider situation in which many workers covered by union contracts opt not to join the union.
Thus, unions in right-to-work states are weakened financially. Most of the southern states have
become right-to-work states.
Walmart’s rise was in part the result of the United States’ larger transformation from an
industrial to a service economy. When Walton began discount operations in the 1960s, the US
still manufactured an enormous amount and variety of goods. As the number of Walmart stores
increased the company’s purchasing power increased, as evidenced by Walmart’s demand that
manufacturers sell to Walmart at lower and lower prices. Moreover, as the number of Walmart
stores increased the potential advantage of selling to the company increased as well. Realising
that it had the upper hand, Walmart pushed its suppliers to cut their prices. Each year Walmart
demanded more price cutting, until it became apparent that the only way an American company
could meet Walmart’s demand was to move its factory to someplace with cheaper labour. This
might mean moving to a low-wage right-to-work state. If that was not sufficient the com-
pany might have to move its manufacturing to a maquiladora in Mexico. And if that failed the
remaining alternative was to move production to China, which had a booming manufacturing
sector built on exactly this sort of situation.

Logistics, information technology and Walmart

The rise of the big-box stores coincides with the development of information technology. In
some instances, an older invention provided the necessary groundwork for the far-reaching
changes that eventually occurred. Self-service, which began in 1916 at a Piggly Wiggly food
store in Tennessee, was a prerequisite for discounting. The lowly shopping cart (“trolley”) is

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another example. However, the universal product code (UPC) was a key contemporary techno-
logical development which benefited Walmart. Originally developed by (and for) supermarkets,
“the bar code” was first used in an actual commercial transaction in 1974. Once it had been
established as a viable technology, Walmart and the other large retailers forced it on all their
larger suppliers. It sped up checkout and improved inventory management (Leibowitz 1999).
The UPC also enabled retailers to collect detailed point-of-sales (POS) information almost
instantly, thereby revealing exactly what merchandise was selling – and what was not.
One unanticipated and far-reaching result of these changes was a radical restructuring of
the relationship between retailers and manufacturers. As retailers acquired enormous amounts
of information about their customers and their shopping habits, they came to realise that now
they knew more about their customers than the manufacturers. Retailing had been viewed as
a necessary but prosaic intermediary between manufacturers and their customers. It had always
been assumed that the manufacturers knew what their customers wanted and what they would
pay for it. But when the retailers figured out how to use the data they had collected, they began
to call the shots: the outcome was an historic reversal of fortune.
Manufacturers and retailers normally maintained an arms-length relationship based on sepa-
rate interests and proprietary data. Walton, wanting to increase turnover, proposed to give
certain large manufacturers access to some of Walmart’s data in exchange for more timely
replenishment of merchandise. This was accomplished through EDI (electronic data inter-
change), a system developed for this purpose. When a store ran out of an item a production
order would be initiated automatically, enabling the manufacturer to take the steps necessary to
get the product back on the shelf as soon as possible with as little paperwork and as little human
intervention as possible. EDI is now used across the industry. It was Walton’s genius to see that
both manufacturers and retailers could benefit from this arrangement.
Another innovation that increased efficiency is the reconfigured warehouse, known now as
a distribution centre. In traditional distribution most new merchandise spent some time ware-
housed before it reaches its final destination. To have salable goods just sitting in a warehouse,
however, is costly for the owner of those goods. A Walmart distribution centre, by contrast,
is not intended to be a place where goods are simply warehoused. Rather, it is meant to keep
goods moving on their way to the store or stores that will be their final destination. As described
by Abernathy et al. (1999: 63), a Walmart distribution centre ‘consists of bays for inbound and
outbound trucks, an automated, fast-moving conveyer network’ and a sophisticated infor-
mation system to control movement from receiving to shipping docks. The purpose of this
arrangement, known as cross-docking, is to minimise or eliminate time spent in warehouses.
Containerisation – the practice of using identically shaped, stackable, interchangeable con-
tainers to transport merchandise to and from seaports, train depots, and truck terminals – is
another advance that aided the big-box stores. The “box” is now the standard method for
transporting large amounts of goods throughout the world (Levinson 2016). The increased use
of the box has led to the enlargement of the container ships that move the boxes across the
waterways of the world (Cudahy 2006).
These advances are associated with store size and company size in various ways, often involv-
ing economies of scale and scope. As a general proposition, expensive technology and big-box
retailers have a mutually beneficial relationship: big-box retailers are better able to afford sophis-
ticated software and hardware; in turn, this software and hardware allow the big-box compa-
nies to order, stock, and keep track of a greater number of SKU (stock-keeping units), which
allows big-box stores to appeal to more people. A Walmart supercenter, once established, can
sell many different products and services. This is an example of an economy of scope. A large
retailer can spread the cost of sophisticated-but-expensive data processing equipment over a

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large number of transactions at many stores. This is an example of an economy of scale. The
most important corollary of increasing size is that large of retailers – those large enough to buy a
significant percentage of a supplier’s output – can demand to pay for manufactured merchandise
at a per unit price below what small retailers pay.

Globalisation of big-box stores

While Walmart may appear to be a singular behemoth, it has counterparts in Europe, notably
Carrefour in France and Tesco in the UK. Outside the United States, large boxy stores that
sell food and non-food items are known as hypermarkets (this term is used rather loosely).
According to the standard account, the first true hypermarket was built in 1963 at Sainte-
Genevieve-des-Bois, near Paris, by Marcel Fourneier, Jacques Defforey, and Deni Defforey, who
were affiliated with Carrefour. There is evidence, however, that the first European hypermarket
was actually built in 1961 in Bruges by the group GB-Inno-BM (see Brussels Studies.)
The big-box phenomenon is no longer peculiar to the United States and can be found
around the world now. What Walmart and the other boxes – big, medium and small – have
in common is a commitment to the rationalisation that stalks the history of retailing. It is
evident in the various advances in information technology, in the transformation of distribu-
tion from supplier- to retailer-driven, and in the careful attention given to choice of retail
formats. The modus operandi associated with big-box stores has become the most common
form of contemporary retailing. In spite of the impressive size of stores, the rationalisation of
retailing is not complete, and that incompleteness is most easily seen if we take a global view
of big-box stores.
Viewed at the global level it is easy to see that whether a store is a big-box store is ultimately
secondary to whether it pursues a strategy that is highly rationalised. Being highly rationalised
is usually taken to result in a modern way of doing business and a modern way of life. Accord-
ing to the rhetoric, rationalised retailing is modern retailing and is taken to be superior. The
traditional is ultimately displaced by the modern.
HP & S argue that the big retailers have become so powerful that they “make the market”
for many of the commodities that constitute contemporary society. HP & S don’t present a
normative argument but simply assume that the highly rationalised big-box format will ulti-
mately dominate all consumer goods markets, and that is for the best in the best of all possible
worlds. Put differently, the future will be dominated by “modern consumer markets” (101).
A very brief look at a few aspects of globalisation highlights the extent to which rationalisation
exerts its force.
There are various reasons for venturing abroad. One reason is the saturation of the home
market. This applies especially to Walmart, which has saturated many areas in the South and
Midwest. Zook and Graham (2006: 20) report that ‘96 percent of the US population are within
20 miles’ of a Walmart. Another reason is the increased difficulty in obtaining the necessary
approvals from planning authorities to build large stores outside of Main Streets and similar
local venues.
During the 1960s, the French authorities encouraged suburban living, which included big-
box stores. By 1980, there were 541 hypermarts in France.Threatened by this, small shopkeepers
and their supporters led three “direct action campaigns” (Cliquet 2000: 186) against the big
chains. The number of small independent retailers continued to shrink. Planning restrictions on
size and location of retail development are more formidable in Europe than in the US.
To increase sales Walmart must now open stores in cities, in other countries, or both.Walmart
has been doing this since 1991 when it began a joint venture with a Mexican company to

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operate a wholesale club in Mexico City (Walmart 1992). There are differences within Europe.
In Germany, for example, there is a culture of searching for the lowest price, while in England
convenience and the personal touch of the smaller independent stores are still highly valued.
Fernie et al. observe that ‘Germany has a strong discounter culture, reflected in its large number
of hypermarkets and discounters’ (Fernie et al. 2015: 230–231.)
Walton expanded his empire by carefully building new stores along the front lines of the
existing stores, instead of setting up new stores in locations far removed from current operations.
He first expanded into areas and markets that were closer geographically and culturally. The big
European-based retailors have used this strategy too. Thus, ‘the UK favor Ireland. . . ; France tar-
get Spain; Germany target Austria; Japan target Hong Kong and Singapore; Australia target New
Zealand; and the USA target Canada and Mexico’ (Fernie et al. 2015: 34). Walmart has pushed
thus strategy about as far as it will go, such that the company now has 410 stores in Canada and
2,411 in Mexico (Walmart 2017 Annual Report: 63).
This rather conservative strategy is perhaps not surprising given the number of failures
(politely called “disinvestment”) experienced by the world’s leading retailers.Walmart, for exam-
ple, gave up and pulled out of Germany. It also tried and failed in Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong,
Indonesia and Japan. [Wang (2011)] examines the growth of various retail formats in China over
the last twenty years.

Reactions and controversies

Ostensibly nothing more than a place to purchase toothpaste, milk, and other banal commodi-
ties, big-box stores have become integral to life in the modern world, while arousing intense
debate on a wide range of issues.What is perhaps most striking are the stark differences between
the various parties in these debates, many of whom evince little interest in understanding the
concerns and arguments of the other side.
Beginning in the 1980s and continuing today, big-box retailers have encountered organised
resistance by local citizens to the siting of its stores. Walmart has been the most frequent target
of ire, but not the only one.There are many reasons behind these “site fights”. One is the simple
fact that the big-boxes have gotten bigger, in part because they have added full-sized supermar-
kets to their full-sized discount merchandise stores.The general trend, with the US in the lead, is
for more and more of the landscape to become covered by big-box stores and their even bigger
parking lots.
As Sam Walton opened stores farther and farther away from his patch of “Walmart Country”
(Moreton 2009: 8) in northwest Arkansas, he encountered local residents who were knowledge-
able about Walmart’s record in regard to unions and labour, to alleged gender bias, to the prob-
lems faced by American manufacturers, to Walmart’s effect on downtown and local merchants,
and did not want a store in their town or city. Also, as the big-boxes have exhausted small town
and suburban locations, they have started to venture into the large cities where they have not
received the same welcome as they did in some small towns.
When Sam Walton first encountered resistance he seems not to have taken it too seriously
and famously said that

today we have almost adopted the position that if some community, for whatever
reason, doesn’t want us in there, we aren’t interested in going in and creating a fuss.
I encourage us to walk away from this kind of trouble because there are just too many
other good towns out there who do want us.
(Walton 1992: 182).

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The people of the Ozarks had been active in the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and
early 1930s. Walton, however, was able to neutralise any potential populist threat to his stores
by reconfiguring the once-radical culture of the Ozarks into something Moreton (2009) calls
“corporate populism” (p. 50).
The announcement that Walmart is planning to come to town often sets off a spirited debate.
Walmart and its representatives claim that the new store is desired by the overwhelming majority
of local residents who will benefit from low prices, jobs and increased tax revenue. The protes-
tors respond by arguing that two of these three benefits are illusory. Regarding jobs, they argue
that the situation is essentially a zero-sum game in which an increase in the number of jobs at a
new Walmart will eventually be offset by a loss of jobs elsewhere (i.e., at those stores which will
eventually be forced to close). And the same for tax revenue: the increase in income or sales tax
from a superstore will be offset by the taxes not paid by other stores, some of whom will even-
tually go out of business. The protestors also note that the profits generated by the store will be
sent back to Bentonville and thus not spent or invested locally. Besides raising doubts about jobs
and tax revenue, the opponents often elaborate a series of problems associated with superstore.
A store occupying 180,000 sq. ft. is simply out of scale with everything else in a small town
(except other similar stores) (Evans-Cowley 2006). A new Walmart in a typical small town
instantly becomes the biggest building in town and is radically incongruent with other local
buildings. While huge stores provide retailers with economies of scale, they do not satisfy basic
human needs for intimacy and familiarity.
Unless required to meet some specified standard of architectural design, a new superstore will
be “architecturally uneventful”, in the words of architect John Rohe. Early big-boxes tended to
be plain, windowless and monochromatic, with “unimproved” interiors. Recently built stores
tend towards a cheap version of postmodernism. Writing in Harvard Design Magazine, Dunham-
Jones notes that whereas ‘downtown department stores were constructed of high quality materi-
als and built to last, Wal-Mart’s treatment of its stores and employees as . . . disposable assets . . .
exemplifies corporate strategies of flexible accumulation’ (Dunham-Jones 1997).
Big-box stores tend to be built in low density zones several miles from downtown (“Main
Street” or “High Street”), which means they contribute to the sprawl that has become a nation-
wide concern.Walmart and the other big-box retailers place their stores where they do because of
cost and efficiency: land outside of town is cheaper and single-story buildings can more efficiently
accommodate the frequent truck deliveries that are an essential part of the big-box format.
Big-box stores inevitably draw some portion of shoppers away from downtown. This mat-
ters because a thriving downtown functions as the civic, social, political and commercial enter
of a town. If too many merchants desert downtown, the ramifications can be severe: up to and
including the eventual collapse of downtown. One can see evidence of this all over the US.
The local merchants are invested – literally and figuratively – in the local community and
have a long-term commitment to it. They tend to be active in their communities to a greater
extent than the average resident. A new Supercenter may pose an existential threat to the inde-
pendent merchants in a small town ( Jarmin et al. 2005; Peterson and McGee 2000; Stone 1995;
Stone et al. 2002).
In Europe, by contrast, local planning authorities have been more concerned with the adverse
effects of commercial development outside downtown. The shortage of land and its concomi-
tant regulation has been an impetus for large European retailers such as Carrefour to expand
outside their national borders.
The local supporters of a proposed new big-box often speak about “modernization”. They
contrast the small, local independent merchants, who are portrayed as plodding, insular, and old,

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with the imagined big new store in its big new building.To the big-box supporters the newness
and the size are ipso facto modern.The meaning of being “modern” is not explained; it is assumed
to be superior to whatever is not modern.
Along with the hundreds of siting controversies that have occurred across the country, what
has landed big-box stores on the front pages of the nation’s news media is their treatment of
workers. In Walmart’s early days Sam Walton promoted a pseudo-egalitarian approach in which
workers were referred to as “associates”. As the company grew the personal touch began to dis-
appear and the conflictual nature of employment in the retail industry came to the fore (Adams
2006; Seligman 2006; Lichtenstein 2010; Ortega 2000; Rosen 2006; Bair and Bernstein 2006;
Copeland and Labuski (2013). Labour issues at big-box stores – with Walmart as the most vis-
ible offender – include employees forced to work off the clock, workers locked in stores dur-
ing overnight shifts, lack of affordable health insurance and inadequate wages (Copeland and
Labuski 2013: 43).
As part of their strategy to minimise costs most of the American big-box stores have taken
an extremely hostile stance towards unions. When the butchers at a Walmart in Texas voted to
be represented by a union the company quickly discontinued all butchering at all stores. When
workers at a Walmart in Canada voted to be represented by a union Walmart promptly closed
the entire store. Today there are no unionised retail workers in any Walmart stores in the United
States or Canada.
Abstracting from the particularities of each case, what this illustrates, according to labour
historian Nelson Lichtenstein, is Walmart’s retrograde attitude towards workers. This social
policy was put forth in such key pieces of legislation as the National Labor Relations Act of
1935, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and is ultimately a
reflection of the common interests of the American people as expressed through their elected
representatives.
What Lichtenstein finds troubling is that Walmart has become

the template business setting the standards for a new stage in the history of world capi-
talism. In each epoch a huge, successful, rapidly emulated enterprise embodies a new
and innovative set of new and innovative set of technological advances, organisational
structures, and social relationships. It becomes the template economic institution of
its time.
(Lichtenstein, 2006: 4)

US Steel, A&P, General Motors (GM) and IBM were earlier template corporations (p. 5). GM,
arguably the most influential company of the twentieth century, differs from Walmart in a fun-
damental way: GM strove to maintain profitability and provide a rising income for its employees.
Walmart, by contrast,

takes the most potent technological and logistic innovations of the twenty-first
century and puts them at the service of an organisation whose competitive success
depends upon the destruction of all that remains of New Deal-style social regulation
and replaces it . . . with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor costs.
(2006, p 4). (See Coclanis [2007] for a pro-labor alternative to Lichtenstein.)

In 2001, the McKinsey Global Institute, a consulting firm, issued a report about the relation-
ship between low prices, low costs and productivity growth. The report noted the impressive

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increase in productivity that occurred in the American economy between 1995 and 2000 and
found that a substantial portion of this growth occurred in retailing and, furthermore, that
‘Wal-Mart’s success forced competitors to improve their operations’ (p. 2). This report has led to
further study of the economic effect of big-box stores.
Another report, released in 2005 by Global Insight, a consulting firm, claimed that Walmart
had saved the typical American household $2,329 (or $895 per person) between 1985 and 2004
(Global Insight 2005: 1). Thus, Walmart’s ability to squeeze inefficiency out of every part of the
supply chain (the “Walmart effect”) actually made the country as a whole more efficient. These
views are presented very favourably by Vedder and Cox, who see the Walmart phenomenon as
essentially another instance of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” which will eventually make
everybody better off. From this perspective outsourcing is good for consumers in the developed
world because of low prices and good for the developing countries because they can use their
relative advantage (low wages) to accumulate capital which can then be employed in capital
goods. What Americans may see as severe exploitation of production workers in China is seen
by Vedder and Cox as a necessary phase of the economic development of China. More gener-
ally low costs, whether through new technology or low wages, translates into higher productiv-
ity, which benefits all Americans, even those who dislike Walmart.
If big-box stores put small independent merchants out of business this is taken to reflect
either the inevitable replacement of low-productivity firms by high-productivity firms or sim-
ply consumer choice, in the sense that if consumers shop at Walmart then, ipso facto, a retail
sector dominated by Walmart is what they need.
The critics respond by arguing that whilst low prices on consumer items do offset low wages
somewhat, they do little to reduce the costs of housing, health care, insurance, education and trans-
portation, which constitute a larger proportion of expenses for most people than do the sundries at
Walmart.The earlier studies generally concluded that Walmart and other stores have had an overall
negative impact on small towns and on the lives of Walmart employees. A second round of studies
has come up with results that are more mixed in regard to the economic impact of superstores.
In regard to all matters moral, aesthetic, political and cultural,Vedder and Cox have nothing to say.

Recapitulation
Big-box stores, virtually unknown before the 1960s, have become the leading retail format in
the US. Their lineage is uncertain but they appear to have evolved out some combination of
chain stores, variety stores and existing supermarkets. While some locate their ancestors in the
early supermarkets, others find theirs in the large department stores that remain a fixture of
downtown retailing long after their glory days.
The emergence and growth of big-box stores reflect a number of favourable conditions,
including a neoliberal political environment in which labour, broadly speaking, is disempow-
ered. New technology, especially in communications, computing and logistics, has enabled large
retailers to gain better control of their inventory, containerisation and the mega-ships designed
to carry containers, highly automated distribution centres, and logistics in general.
Global big-box stores are prevalent in North America (US, Canada and Mexico), followed
by Western Europe and then Eastern Europe, Asia and the developing countries.
Big-box stores pose various threats to the small towns and suburbs where most have been
built. In respect of their format, the critics charge them with being ugly, too homogeneous and
clashing with local architectural styles. Because they are usually built in or near small towns but
not actually downtown they contribute to sprawl, which entails excessive driving, leading to
poor health and increased risk of isolation.

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After more than twenty years of contention, big-box stores continue to inspire awe and dis-
gust. The former is primarily based on appreciation for the large number of different types of
products available and their low prices.

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 PART III

People, processes and practices

 14
PENNY RETAILERS AND
MERCHANT PRINCES
Susan Spellman

Introduction
When the doors at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Streets opened on 21 Septem-
ber 1846, few in attendance at the much-anticipated event thought themselves at the centre
of a retail transformation. Alexander Turney Stewart’s “Marble Palace” had drawn shoppers and
reporters who for months had speculated about the store’s rumoured opulence and grandeur as
they watched the austere façade of a four-story structure rise along one of New York City’s main
thoroughfares. It was the building’s location, in fact, that initially caused the biggest stir. ‘Well –
we are at last actually in the midst of a revolution, and in a short time the East side of Broadway
will be as fashionable as the West’, one New York journalist surmised (“City Items” 1846). As
crowds of women streamed through the front doors they met with 100 uniformed clerks ready
to show $1,000 shawls, kid gloves, valuable laces and expensive dresses housed within one of
the grandest spaces many had ever shopped. Massive plate glass windows illuminated mahogany
counters and maple shelves, while a domed ceiling rose 90 feet above the sales floor supported
by Italian marble columns, each topped with a ‘cornucopia intertwined with the caduceus
of Mercury, the god of commerce’ (“Stewart’s New Dry Goods Store” 1846). There was no
mistaking Stewart’s intention with his symbolism. His was a store designed for abundance and
profit-making.
Stewart’s contemporaries likewise saw benefit in expanding the scope of operations and
providing shoppers with plentiful goods and posh spaces. A few doors up on Broadway, James
Beck & Company sold an impressive array of expensive embroidery, laces and other stocks esti-
mated to be worth nearly the same $600,000 Stewart claimed (“Fashionable Shopping in New
York” 1846). Meanwhile in England, Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge had by 1849 organised
his Newcastle-upon-Tyne drapery and dry goods store into twenty-three different departments,
and provided a ladies’ tea room for female sociability (Mitchell 2014). A few years later in 1852,
Parisian entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut transformed Au Bon Marché from a small notions
shop, where he sold laces, ribbons and thread, into a full-scale department store with a wide
assortment of merchandise, fixed prices and guaranteed returns (Miller 1981).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the movement towards big retail organisations and mass
merchandising was well underway.With its flashy and expansive selling spaces, division into sales
departments and one-price system, Stewart’s store and methods signalled for some scholars a

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“retail revolution”, a transition from the penny merchants who had directed retail commerce
for much of the nation’s early history to the merchant princes who would transform shopping
from an everyday task to an experience (Leach 1993).While department stores brought about an
alteration in the size, scope and methods of some retail operations – particularly in urban loca-
tions – many underlying trade principles remained remarkably similar for small and large-scale
traders alike. In other words, Stewart and other merchant princes may have built the physical
structures that gave rise to mass retailing, but they did so on methodological foundations laid
by penny retailers.
Initial forays into retailing history by business and consumption scholars nevertheless led
many to the merchant princes. Evaluating department stores and methods, historians focused on
identifying signs of “modernity” to help explain the transition to mass retailing during indus-
trialisation in America and Europe (Pasdermadjian 1954; Ferry 1960; Miller 1981; Benson 1986;
Leach 1993; Lancaster 1995). Developments such as Stewart’s fixed-pricing system, the Bon
Marché’s guaranteed return policies and the creation of elaborate shopping spaces supposedly
demarcated the line between so-called “traditional” penny merchants operating on a small scale
and “modern” large-scale retailers. As a result, much of what we understood about retailing in
the industrial era centred on Gilded Age, urban department store owners and consumers, despite
the overwhelming presence of stores and shoppers who neither operated nor patronised big-city
consumption palaces. The emphasis, too, has been on the most successful businessmen and their
enterprises. Names like Rowland H. Macy, Marshall Field and H. Gordon Selfridge adorned
buildings, wagons and labels for decades, their longevity making them an obvious foundation
for tracking long-term trends and innovations. Like most royalty, though, these merchant princes
rarely represented the majority of subjects who populated the retail kingdom.
Equating “bigness” with modernity likewise led to characterisations of rural and urban small-
scale shops as places where “confusion and disorganization” reigned, making them a seemingly
fitting counterpoint for those seeking to explain the rise of the mass market (Tedlow 1990).
Yet as more recent scholarship has acknowledged, a remarkable number of small grocers, dry
goods dealers, boot and shoe merchants, confectioners, haberdashers and other retailers persisted
alongside department and other big stores well into the twentieth century, and in some lines
even into the twenty-first century. Were they not just as “modern” as the department store
contemporaries? The entrepreneurial men and women (if there were merchant princesses, we
have yet to learn their stories) who owned and operated microenterprises tended to operate in
the rural and urban niches of the economy. Their persistence has challenged historians in the
last twenty years or so to reconceptualise modern business along broader lines that includes not
only organisational systems and selling methods, but also technology adoption, merchandising,
distribution and contributions to local as well as national economies (Blackford 1991; Wills
2005; Sparks 2006; Gamber 2007; Spellman 2016).
These more recent histories cover both European and US retailing and range in time from
the early modern period through the twentieth century. Collectively, they demonstrate that
there was no clear break between the so-called “traditional” methods of small retailers and those
of their large-scale counterparts. Elements of design and practice such as fancy interiors, alluring
displays and show windows, along with cost accounting, departmentalisation and fixed-pricing
systems could be found in backwoods shops as readily as urban stores, and often long before
department stores made them standard (Walsh 2003, p. 68; Fowler 1998; Spellman 2016). Others
have identified elements of “modern” retailing in eighteenth-century England (Mui and Mui
1989; Cox 2000; Stobart, Hann, and Morgan 2007), as well as in the networks and practices
of peddlers, open-air markets and fairs of medieval and early modern Europeans (Benson and
Ugolini 2003).

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Moving away from binary comparisons of “traditional” and “modern”, others have begun to
consider how small-scale merchants contributed to local, national and global economic, social
and cultural systems (Elvins 2004; Wenger 2008; Martin 2008). In so doing, they have illumi-
nated the complicated ways in which retailers became central to the growth and development
of communities large and small, and the relationships upon which these economies formed and
operated. As a result, our understandings of retail enterprise have expanded beyond store walls to
consider the role of commercial exchange within broader and more sophisticated frameworks.
While Alexander Stewart’s 1846 grand opening may once have marked a transition from old to
new, the notion of a nineteenth-century “retailing revolution” in the US and Europe has been
complicated by our growing knowledge of the many and varied ways small retailers innovated
and implemented many of the methods often associated solely with the era’s consumption
palaces.
Evaluating the stores, sales methods and distribution strategies of penny retailers and mer-
chant princes reveals as many similarities as differences between the two forms.While there were
changes on all three fronts – stores got bigger, sales strategies evolved and distribution systems
varied across product lines – there were ties that bound and continue to bind together turn-of-
the-twentieth-century entrepreneurs. Indeed, the coexistence of small- and large-scale retailing
throughout the period and beyond throws into sharp relief assumptions that industrialisation
and its concomitant population, transportation and technology developments elevated con-
sumer demand as prerequisites to the rise of “modern” retail systems. This essay will explore the
similarities and differences between penny retailers and merchant princes, their stores, methods
and long-term contributions to the development of retailing in the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries.While the focus is primarily on the US and the UK, it will make occasional forays
into other markets in an attempt to highlight the multi-faceted nature of retailing in the period.

Penny retailers
Small retail merchants were present in the US from its founding, initially in the form of inde-
pendent trading posts and later in the shops that emerged in colonial villages and towns. These
early outlets furnished shoppers with a wide range of Atlantic World goods, enmeshing both
retailers and consumers in a complex international market economy (Martin 2008). In the UK
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, fixed shops catered primarily to wealthy
customers, with others relying on public markets to satisfy many of their needs. Specialty crafts-
men such as saddlers, cabinet makers, jewellers and clock and watchmakers combined both
workshop and retail space as some of the first traders to open storefront locations. Grocers,
however, were among the most numerous both in the US and the UK, as the regulated nature
of public markets and concerns over sanitation prompted the increased privatisation of food
selling (Tangiers 2002; Winstanley 1983; Spellman 2016). Regardless of their specific origins,
small merchants dominated retailing in the middle of the nineteenth century and remained so
well into the twentieth century. They were key agents in the formation of local, national and
international economies. Their stores, sales methods and distribution networks served as tem-
plates for commercial exchange and developments that came to characterise the industrial and
post-industrial eras.
General stores dominated US retailing in the early nineteenth century. Small and fragmented
markets, especially in rural regions, influenced the development of outlets that sold a range of
bulk goods from brooms and calicoes to crackers and pickles. Merchants focused on accommo-
dating customers’ essential needs, both in cities and in frontier towns. In 1824, New York store-
keeper Alexander Walsh, boasted of having a ‘large stock of Dry Goods, Hardware, Groceries,

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Crockery, Glass, &c &c’, in his Lansingburgh shop, and carried ‘nearly every article in usual
demand, and extending the variety to whatever constitutes the character of a general store’
(‘Fresh goods’ 1824). Rural shops tended to be small free-standing structures approximately 20
by 30 feet, with shelves, hooks and pegs lining the walls. A countertop served as both point of
exchange and packaging station in the absence of boxed and canned goods. In urban regions,
these same kinds of stores took root in the narrow, but deep street-front buildings that lined
board sidewalks.There was little in the way of formal merchandising or display in either country
or city shops, but rather a functional arrangement familiar to storekeepers who picked items
at the customer’s request. Walsh, however, understood his village store in terms that became
more common later in the century, announcing the “numerous additions” made to his “Grocery
Department” (“Stock Renewed” 1825), a nod to Walsh’s grasp of organisation.1 Others like New
Orleans dealer William Smith sold items like guava jelly and marmalade in “handsome glass
jars”, acknowledging the importance of presentation and merchandising in these early days
(“Choice Havana Sweetmeats” 1827).
In the US, many of these early proprietors, including Walsh and Smith, conducted both retail
and wholesale businesses, buying and selling in large quantities with an eye towards supplying
both consumers and other merchants.Wholesaling helped stabilise profits in the wake of unpre-
dictable consumer demands and a reliance on barter to supplement a cash-starved economy.
Likewise, few wholesalers in this early period carried the small lots most general storekeepers
required. Merchants procured their stock of goods by knitting together nascent distribution
networks of commercial intermediaries that required them to travel twice yearly to trade cen-
tres in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston, and other port cities (Spellman 2016). One
trip could take up to six weeks of hazardous travel through undeveloped lands by horseback,
riverboat, wagon, railroad or an exhausting combination of all (Blackford 1991). Indiana mer-
chant John Brownlee, for example, endured frigid sleigh rides, frozen canals and “very lonely”
horseback rides in the 1830s and 1840s as he made his way to commercial centres hundreds
of miles away in Pittsburgh and Baltimore.2 Storekeepers like Brownlee would visit multiple
manufacturers, wholesalers, drummers, commission merchants and other retail intermediaries to
purchase and arrange shipping for their goods. The commercial networks these entrepreneurial
men and women forged supplied the growing nation’s interior and established a distribution
system utilised for decades to come.
Urban shopkeepers, like those in England, sometimes benefitted from better access to a
range of goods. Port cities profited from the regular arrival of both supply ships from abroad and
merchants’ wagons from the interior, which brought produce and other agricultural products
to trade in commercial centres. Liverpool, for example, by the late eighteenth century imported
cotton on a large scale in addition to a wide variety of linens and animal skins, lumber, tobacco
and wines from around the Atlantic world, and built large warehouses to accommodate this
trade. The city opened its ports to a growing number of manufactured and agricultural goods,
such as Chinese silks and tea, by the middle of the nineteenth century (Haggerty 2003, p. 108;
Milne 2000). The close proximity of urban merchants to these resources reduced travel and
transportation costs, potentially increasing profitability. City retailers, however, faced greater
competition from a range of large and small merchants who competed for shoppers’ atten-
tion. Parisian arcades and galleries, along with sizeable drapery shops and English department
stores, emerged in the late eighteenth century, giving consumers their first taste of shopping for
pleasure as they strolled past window displays (Furnée and Lesger 2014, pp. 11–12). In both the
US and England, though, small retail outlets grew significantly over first half of the nineteenth
century, expanding rural and urban commerce and opening the door for entrepreneurial men
and women who sought to join their ranks.

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While small-scale retailing theoretically offered men and women in both the US and England
a promising path to financial independence, many who undertook the risk found the rewards
long in coming. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic bemoaned the lack of preparation and
skills in aspiring storekeepers. The grocery trade in particular saw its share of entrepreneurial
spirits who found the low entry barriers an enticing opportunity. Tales abounded of men who
purchased a barrel of peanut butter, pickles or crackers, laid an old plank on two crates, opened
their doors and declared themselves in business.These undercapitalised ventures often struggled,
owing in large part to the practice of wholesalers and other middlemen overextending credit to
merchants in the interest of moving more products, thus contributing to an epidemic of failures
that befell many nineteenth-century small businesses (Spellman 2016).While no agency tracked
the total number of bankruptcies in the period, newspapers routinely announced the many
and varied kinds of firms that shuttered their doors. ‘Bank and business failures are the order
of the day’, one Ohio daily opined in 1854 (“News of the Week” 1854). Word of a company’s
collapse sometimes travelled far and fast over the wires. Missouri readers learned in 1851 of a
Philadelphia firm ‘doing a very extensive business’ that had failed just the day prior (“By Tel-
egraph” 1851). Over in Indiana, journalists relayed a New York Times report indicating that losses
in 1856 due to failures amounted to $200 million, ‘of which nearly three-fourths fell upon the
dry goods trade’ (“The Dry Goods Business” 1857). Accurate or not, few could deny that small
ventures tended to be unduly burdened by those who entered retail trade without the capital or
knowledge needed to make such undertakings profitable.
These cautionary tales did little to dissuade would-be penny retailers throughout the nine-
teenth century from commencing business. Developments in industrial manufacturing triggered
the mass production of goods on a larger and broader scale, with new retail shops emerging
to accommodate the demands of an enlarged consumer population. Advances in transporta-
tion, communication, and industrialisation spurred the expansion of urban and rural markets
alike, prompting corresponding changes in the retail sector. Between 1815 and 1860, costs for
long-distance travel in the US fell nearly 95%, while goods moved along by rail and steamboat
five times faster than they had by canals or wagons (Spellman 2016). The ease with which
even frontier storekeepers could now place orders by telegraph and postal mail and receive
them by train led to changes in distribution patterns. Travelling salesmen replaced merchants’
bimonthly buying trips, relaying orders to wholesalers and jobbers, who now sold the small
lots corner storekeepers demanded. Indeed, most consumer goods manufacturers continued
to rely on wholesalers for distributing the vast majority of their products. The costs associated
with marketing and warehousing the large quantities and range of their products deterred many
manufacturers from taking on these marketing and distribution challenges. As a result, interme-
diaries continued to supply the thousands of US small retailers who made up the late-nineteenth
century’s diffuse retail sector (Porter and Livesay 1971).
The speed and ease with which goods now travelled through established distribution lines
helped give rise to a greater number of retail outlets. While general stores prevailed in the first
half of the century, specialisation intensified in the second half, particularly in the US post-Civil
War years. A range of jewellers, milliners, boot and shoe merchants, stationers, musical instru-
ment stores, confectioners, hardware dealers, clothiers, grocers and others appeared in backwater
towns and commercial centres alike, echoing many European towns of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. These shops reflected both the growth of a consumer society
that sought luxury and staple goods and the expansion of economic opportunities that arose
both during and after the war. US retail proprietors numbered almost 430,000 in 1869, soar-
ing to over 600,000 a decade later (Spellman 2016). Between 1869 and 1919, the number of
retail employees in these outlets grew from 720,000 to 4 million (Blackford 1991). While men

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predominantly occupied the retail sector, female employees and proprietors were a small, but
growing category within the retail space, as one study of San Francisco has shown. By the 1870s,
6% of the city’s women business owners identified as “traders and dealers” or “hucksters and
peddlers” in keeping with national trends. The majority congregated in the grocery, dry and
fancy goods, confectionary, clothing and drug trades (Sparks 2006). Low entry barriers com-
bined with the ease of operating shops from within the home attracted a significant number of
women to the grocery business, where they could service parlor-front stores while tending to
family needs in the kitchen or upstairs.
In England, storekeepers catering to the working-class trade increasingly organised as co-
operatives or multiples, otherwise known as chain stores in the US. Both retailing forms ini-
tially focused on selling foodstuffs, while maintaining similar organisational features, including
limiting product availability to a few high-demand and easily sourced items; deep discounts
negotiated through large volume purchasing; and vertical integration, with several firms manu-
facturing and marketing their own branded items.While both co-operatives and multiples oper-
ated large numbers of small shops, co-operatives appeared earlier in the mid-nineteenth century
and tended towards a decentralised structure, where several entrepreneurs joined together spe-
cifically to benefit from the economies of scale offered by manufactures’ and other distributors’
volume discounts. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, formed in 1844, generally is
credited with originating the co-operative enterprise model, with partners passing along divi-
dends to members as incentive to patronise their stores.Thousands of co-operative shops opened
across northern England throughout the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Other
shop owners themselves became co-operative society members and bought from co-operative
stores; in Bolton, over three-quarters of the town’s retail operators were co-operative society
members by 1909. In contrast, co-operative retailing would not appear on a large scale in the US
until well into the twentieth century, when small entrepreneurs would face fierce competition
from chain store conglomerates (Winstanley 1983; Spellman 2016).
As the number of retail outlets grew, so too did competition for customers. Price wars
were common among tradesmen in similar lines. Retailers lured shoppers into their stores with
bargain-priced goods with the intention of selling them higher margin items to compensate for
any potential losses. Others focused on more innovative methods by creating enticing decors,
a technique generally attributed to the late-nineteenth-century department store magnates
(Leach 1993).Well before large emporiums emerged, however, scores of small retailers decorated
their shops with fancy wallpapers and parlour furniture to attract customers. Glass showcases
enhanced the appeal and desirability of gloves, tobacco, pocket watches and other valued goods
while safeguarding them from light hands (Sparks 2006). Packaged and canned foods replaced
the barrels and crates found in most grocery stores. Meanwhile, products lost their generic qual-
ity with branded and labelled products appearing nationwide on store shelves and in magazine
advertisements. Manufacturers worked to differentiate their products in the market, while simul-
taneously seeking consumers’ trust by promoting the superiority, taste, style and appeal of their
goods over other brands. Companies like Sapolio Soap, one of the first to mount an aggressive
advertising campaign, used colourful trade cards, lithographs and broadsides to promote their
product, much like English tea dealers such as Melrose and Company did in the late eighteenth
century (Strasser 1989; Mui and Mui 1989). Working together, manufacturers and penny retail-
ers introduced scores of shoppers to mass production and mass consumption, altering the retail-
ing landscape to accommodate new products and different ways of selling.
Small retailers employed manufacturers’ fancy labels and advertisers’ imaginative lithograph
posters and displays as merchandising centrepieces. Pyramids of canned goods rose from grocers’

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floors; cigar box lids depicting faraway places topped drugstore counters; and mirrors promot-
ing well-known chocolatiers backed confectioners’ shelves. Some shopkeepers drew customers
into their stores by creating elaborate window displays that included stuffed and mounted ani-
mals, holiday decorations and mounds of shoes, boots, coats and hats. Others, however, went to
extra lengths to keep passers-by curious about what delights could be found beyond the glass.
Shoppers, for example, delighted in the window display of one Washington, DC druggist who
installed a barnyard scene complete with a hen and brood of chicks with dyed feathers, mak-
ing them appear ‘not unlike a lot of animated Easter eggs’ (“Easter Window Displays” 1889).
While amusements drew attention, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, abundance
became a popular merchandising theme in these rudimentary exhibits. Between 1869 and 1909,
the total value of US goods rose from $3.6 billion to over $13 billion, with many viewing the
proliferation of consumer goods pouring out of factories as a sign of advancement and material
progress (Olegario 2006; Lears 1994). Storekeepers piled high cans, boxes, baskets and bottles in
their front windows to tempt customers into their stores, spurring the growth of a consumer
market and increasing retailers’ bottom lines.
Expansion of the retail market, however, came at a price. Despite advances in manufactur-
ing, advertising and distribution, the risks associated with small-scale enterprise remained, with
countless numbers of undercapitalised firms emerging in all lines. This was possible in part
because of the structure and function of the retail trade system, which relied heavily on credit.
Wholesalers extended generous credit lines to most storekeepers, encouraging them to purchase
large stocks for their stores to generate faster turnover rates and greater profits. Retailers likewise
took advantage of this system to extend their buying power and financial capacity, with many
quickly becoming indebted to several commercial intermediaries, often with disastrous results.
Figures from as early as 1858 suggest that in the US, country storekeepers on average owed
approximately $14,500 each to wholesalers, a number that sometimes represented four or five
times the actual value of a retailer’s business capacity (Olegario 2006). Female proprietors were
often disadvantaged in this system, as credit reporting firms typically based their assessments
on available capital and collective business experience, both of which women in the period
generally had limit access (Sparks 2006). Longstanding custom and competitiveness often over-
ruled rationality, however, and wholesalers routinely granted generous credit lines even to those
deemed unworthy, thus perpetuating the system.
Retailers in both the US and Britain likewise extended consumer credit as a necessary
function of running a small store. Limited availability of hard cash in the US for much of the
early and mid-nineteenth century gave rise to systems of barter and credit in small shops. Rural
shoppers in both the UK and the US traded produce and livestock for goods and services, addi-
tionally maintaining credit lines paid in conjunction with harvest cycles. Wealthy and working-
class city shoppers alike regularly held accounts settled on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis,
depending on the proprietor’s liberality. In England, co-operative stores adhered to a strict cash-
only basis, which sometimes excluded poorer shoppers who relied on credit to make ends meet.
While most nineteenth-century merchants understood the advantages of dealing on a cash-only
basis, they found it exceedingly difficult to acculturate shoppers to pay before taking their pur-
chases, especially in rural and tightknit towns where such longstanding practices had become an
expectation for community members (Spellman 2016).
With retail competition on the rise at the turn of the twentieth century, credit and personal
services such as delivery and telephone ordering increasingly became a method small proprie-
tors employed to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Storekeepers promoted their cred-
iting policies as one of several services that fostered community welfare, while corporate-owned

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chains were routinely criticised for funnelling their profits to out-of-town management and
investors (Spellman 2016). Proprietors selling high-ticket items such as furniture, household
goods and jewellery likewise found credit selling one of the only ways to move a profitable
quantity of wares in a timely fashion. Clothiers, dry goods dealers and others who marketed
essentials routinely found themselves dependent on credit sales to accommodate customers
who demanded goods at a quantity and rate that exceeded their budgets. Credit likewise ena-
bled merchants to turn stock faster, an issue particularly acute to those who dealt in perishable
goods, and earn customer loyalty.Yet limited capital combined with excessive encumbrances to
both creditors and customers often limited the ability of many small merchants to expand their
businesses beyond one shop. This became increasingly worrisome as large-scale chain stores and
multiples began to emerge in the US and the UK in the early years of the twentieth century,
bringing significant changes to retailing.
Looking eastward to Russia, however, the retail landscape had remained remarkably static,
with public markets and small shops scattered and large stores rare. While manufacturing firms
such as the Singer Company had made inroads by the turn of the twentieth century, establishing
upwards of 4,000 outlets across the country, these magaziny and other similar outlets catered to
a largely metropolitan consumer population. Railroad improvements had made the year-round
movement of goods and people faster easier as it had in the West, yet nearly 80% of retail licenses
in 1912 were still held by lavki – peddlers, street vendors and market stall hawkers – concentrated
in major cities (Hessler 2004). These penny merchants faced little competition from the kinds
of new retailing forms emerging in the US and Western Europe. Peasants’ limited purchasing
power combined with a lack of manufacturing and distribution advances stalled commercial
development, and was further hampered by the nation’s transition to a Communist state. One
exception was Moscow’s GUM (Glávnyj Universáĺnyj Magazín), the nation’s largest retail store.The
GUM started in the early nineteenth century as a trading centre filled with small shops housed
in one building; by the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, nearly 1,200 stores occupied
the glass-roofed structure. A few years later, the state established the GUM as a model retail store,
designed to serve consumers of all classes and advance Bolsheviks’ goal of squashing private enter-
prise. By 1918, Bolshevik leaders had shut down nearly all privately owned stores, concentrating
commerce in the hands of the state (Hilton 2011).
While shopkeepers in the newly formed Soviet Union found few commercial paths open,
small retailers in the US and Western Europe faced new pressures at the turn of the century from
department stores and other challengers. Penny entrepreneurs who once dominated the com-
mercial landscape now saw merchant princes establish themselves as commercial leaders. Men
like Stewart, Field, Selfridge and Macy constructed oversized emporiums that drew shoppers
with promises of opulent fixtures, abundant goods, courteous salespeople and extensive services.
While their buying and selling methods might have appeared fresh to those outside of retailing,
many who operated within the commercial space found them to be familiar and tried. It was
the scale and scope of these operations that initially distinguished merchant princes from penny
retailers. Some, like William Whiteley, a London draper who dared to combine groceries with
dry goods under one roof in building the West End’s first department store, ran afoul of small
dealers for challenging retailing custom (Rappaport 2000). As their imposing structures rose in
cities across the US East and Midwest, and in places like London and Paris, millions of urban
shoppers lauded their arrival. Countless others, however, continued to patronise the penny mer-
chants who retained the lion’s share of the marketplace, particularly in rural and outlying areas.
Yet even from afar, most consumers could not help but notice merchant princes’ shopping
emporiums, as they cast a long shadow over the retail landscape.

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Merchant princes
Alexander T. Stewart was no stranger to small-scale entrepreneurship. The Irish-born merchant
opened his first dry goods shop in 1823 on Broadway in New York City, not far from City
Hall. The space was compact at approximately 12½ feet wide and 30 feet deep, a typical urban
street-front store for the period. Like most retail entrepreneurs of his day, Stewart functioned
as clerk, bookkeeper and delivery man, taking on every task necessary to carry on trade, with
the doors open up to eighteen hours daily. Stewart’s willingness to try new methods to attract
customers – like other fellow penny merchants – distinguished him from some competitors. In
addition to setting fixed prices on his goods, Stewart also instituted liberal return and exchange
policies, installed floorwalkers – employees trained to meet customer needs – and applied prin-
ciples of rapid stock turn and departmental organisation. High stock turn rates soon would
become a hallmark of department stores, as merchant princes amassed fortunes on the principles
of volume sales and low markups. Unlike many of his smaller contemporaries, Stewart bought
from wholesalers on cash terms and frequented “sample lot” auctions, where larger (sometimes
damaged) assortments were broken down and sold to the highest cash bidder (Elias 1992). He
likewise insisted in receiving cash on delivery from his customers. Upon Stewart’s death, the
New York Times noted that ‘buying on credit and selling on credit forced him to the adoption of
this rule’ after he found himself early on encumbered by creditors. Stewart’s cash trading was a
luxury he could afford, having inherited a tidy sum of £1,000 in 1823 (approximately £82,000
in 2015) from his Scottish grandfather (“Death of A.T. Stewart” 1876).
Stewart’s ample capital and cash policies were some of the many advantages he and other
merchant princes exploited to build their retailing empires. First department stores, and later
chain stores, represented the expansion and growth of mass production and mass distribu-
tion during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In both the US and the UK, men with
big ideas and a keen understanding of retailing methods built grand, multifloored structures
designed specifically to move large quantities of goods profitably through calculated organisa-
tional and merchandising methods (Howard 2015). While department stores have been cred-
ited with pioneering the use of showcases and windows, bargain sales, delivery, parcel wrapping
and departmentalised operations, what made them appear fresh and new was the scale and
refinement with which they were employed. Merchant princes constructed retailing empires
that both presaged and guided the growth and development of consumer culture and society.
They did so by creating a new kind of shopping environment focused on female shoppers that
encouraged browsing, lingering, and engaging with products, sales staff and other consumers.
From dry goods, ready-to-wear, home furnishings and groceries to lunch rooms, phrenol-
ogy studios and libraries, visitors to these consumption palaces could expect to not only buy
what they needed and wanted, but also to be entertained while doing so. While perhaps not
revolutionary, department stores and the men who pioneered their development represented a
notable departure from established selling norms.
Much like Stewart, many of the era’s merchant princes had emerged from the ranks of penny
entrepreneurship, with most learning the trade while working as clerks, stock boys and sales-
men in various retail establishments before striking out on their own. Marshall Field clerked
for a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, dry goods dealer, spending five years sweeping floors, arranging
stock and reading Godey’s Lady’s Book and Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine to learn about women’s
consumption preferences and general business practices before heading west in 1858 at the age
of twenty-one. He furthered his retail education in the frontier town of Chicago with the dry
goods firm of Cooley, Wadsworth and Company, eventually becoming a partner and then pro-
prietor of his eponymous store. In 1879, an energetic Harry Gordon Selfridge joined the firm

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of Marshall Field as a stock boy. The Michigan-born 21-year-old soon after became a wholesale
salesmen before being moved to the retail sales floor, where his merchandising ideas earned him
a promotion to head of the retail division and later junior partner. Thirty years after joining
Marshall Field, Selfridge struck out in 1909 to open his Oxford street emporium in London.
Demolishing a host of penny merchants and their shops to clear the city block for his store,
Selfridge later noted, ‘Bigness alone is nothing, but bigness filled with the activity that does
everything continually better means much’ (Selfridge 1918). Embarking on a mission to cut
costs and vertically integrate, he delegated decision-making to a host of managers who added
mills and factories to produce textiles, foodstuffs, glassware and furniture for his enormous store.
Selling to London’s masses was Selfridge’s primary goal, one that he embraced by employing
marketing strategies learned during his time with Marshall Field.
Drawing on the bolder, more colourful and assertive style of American advertising, Selfridge
conjured up images and copy that cast his store as a theatrical experience, one in which all
were welcome to enjoy. Full-page ads extolled the virtues of shopping, encouraging consumers
to take in poised mannequins in dramatic window displays and elaborate lighting and grand
productions frequently staged in various departments. Selfridge likewise promoted his store to
journalists, inviting reporters and editors to indulge in personal tours and private dinners, and
cultivated relationships with the press to encourage free advertising in the form of extended
editorials in the papers touting his emporium (Rappaport 2000). Not all found the merchant’s
outspoken and boisterous personality appealing, with some West End competitors deriding
Selfridge as “the American hothead” (“Dislike American Hothead” 1912). Addressing critics
who speculated that he would never make a go of large-scale American-style retailing England,
Selfridge remarked in a 1918 interview about his vigorous advertising campaigns, ‘We never
could have broken through these traditions. . . .We had to use all we could to break down preju-
dices.We made people stop, look and listen.Then the store itself did the rest’. Paying upwards of
one dollar per copy line, Selfridge credited the power of advertising for making him a merchant
prince. ‘We are limited only by the limitations of the newspapers’, he claimed, ‘I will take all [the
ad space] they will give’ (“Advertising Is Secret” 1918).
Back in the United States, Rowland H. Macy started his first business in 1844, a small Boston
thread-and-needle shop that promptly failed. He next embarked on a course of serial entrepre-
neurship, opening another short-lived Boston shop, a gold-rush trading venture in California
and a Haverhill, Massachusetts, dry goods business that also closed.While Field and Selfridge had
avoided Macy’s trial-and-error method for learning the retail trade by joining established firms,
Macy finally cobbled together a winning strategy when he opened his New York City fancy
goods shop in 1858. Macy’s inclination for diversifying his product lines allowed him to test
small quantities of goods before committing to a full-fledged department. He took chances in
his first year by adding men’s gloves and hosiery and house furnishings to his stocks, later experi-
menting with imported pocketbooks, picture frames, dolls and jewellery, along with books,
garden implements and fancy groceries. More of a seat-of-the-pants buyer than merchandise
planner, Macy and his methods were perhaps unorthodox when compared with other depart-
ment store merchants, but they afforded him flexibility in his offerings and the ability to take
advantage of bargain lots. Macy, like many of his contemporaries, travelled regularly overseas in
search of fresh stocks and well-priced products to fill his stores. He took chances on velocipedes,
potted plants and anything else he thought would sell, enabling him to accommodate a wide
range customers’ pocketbooks and tastes. Upon his death in 1877, his store conducted over US
$1.5 million in annual sales, and featured multiple departments, delivery service and dynamic
advertising campaigns that drew customers from across the region. In the following years, several

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part-owners directed operations before Lazarus Straus and his son Isador Straus took control
and grew the company into a nineteenth- and twentieth-century retail giant (Mahoney and
Sloane 1966).
Throughout the nineteenth century, retailing ideas and methods flowed like goods across the
Atlantic. In addition to department stores, chain stores (or multiples) opened doors for those
looking to capture budget shoppers by stocking their stores with large lots of identical products
purchased at deep discounts and sold for cheap prices. In the US, George Gilman, founding
proprietor of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), has been credited with pio-
neering the chain grocery model with his 1859 beginnings in New York. By 1878, the firm
boasted seventy-eight stores spread throughout the Northeast (Levinson 2011). Gilman’s UK
counterpart, Scottish-born Thomas Lipton, left his family in 1865 at the age of fifteen bound
for the United States. There, Lipton travelled throughout the South labouring first on a Virginia
tobacco plantation before finding work as an accountant and bookkeeper on a South Carolina
rice plantation, eventually moving north to take a position in a New York grocery store ‘run on
up to date methods’, according to Lipton (Mathias 1967). Upon returning to Glasgow in 1869,
Lipton settled into his family’s provision shop, applying his newly acquired skills to the trade.
When his reticent father hedged at expanding the family firm into a second store, Lipton struck
out on his own and opened his first grocery shop in 1872. Inspired by his time in the US, Lipton
maintained,‘Every business idea, every successful move I have made has been suggested to me by
my observation of American methods’ (Matthias 1967, p. 106). This included daring advertising
techniques that featured elements such as parading pigs, cheeses and brass bands through public
streets to draw attention to store openings, sales and philanthropic efforts.
Much like Selfridge, Lipton’s outspoken personality, combined with his flair for self-promo-
tion, aided him in growing his firm at an extraordinary pace. By the end of the century, Lipton
boasted over 250 retail outlets across the UK, eventually expanding to thirty-eight countries,
including Germany, China, Chile and New Zealand, among others. It was an impressive feat,
especially given Lipton’s penchant for overseeing every facet of his vast organisational empire.
Whereas department store operators like Selfridge employed decentralised management to
administer their enormous operations, Lipton preferred to remain the primary decision maker
on all matters large and small. This was particularly challenging as Lipton vertically integrated,
buying tea plantations in Ceylon, bakeries in the UK, and pork processing facilities in the US.
Lipton’s insistence on running his business in the style of a sole proprietorship created difficul-
ties for the organisation, with poor business and financial decisions such as ill-advised forays
into wines, spirits, and beef extracts, imperilling the firm at the turn of the twentieth century.
Ultimately, it was Lipton’s expansive tea business, though, that stabilised the firm and garnered
the purveyor the recognition he desired. Identifying an untapped market in selling low-priced,
high-quality tea to the masses at home and abroad, Lipton established the tea-packing firm of
Thomas J. Lipton Company in 1893, and sold his affordable, standardised product in premeas-
ured packets. Lipton was forced out of the company in the 1920s at the age of seventy-six, and
his grocery store empire eventually refocused its efforts solely on consumer goods manufactur-
ing, a holdover from Lipton’s intense nineteenth-century efforts to vertically integrate and cut
production costs (Mathias 1967).
While Lipton was building his grocery empire through bold and brash methods, Earle Perry
Charlton was quietly and confidently helping to pioneer the five-and-dime chain movement
in the United States. Born in 1863 in Chester, Connecticut, Charlton broke with his fam-
ily’s artisan roots (his father was a blacksmith) and moved to nearby Hartford, Connecticut, to
work in a local retail shop. From there he went to Boston, clerking for a penny dealer before

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taking to the road as a “drummer”, or travelling salesman, for Thomas C. Newell, a wholesaler
specialising in fancy goods, notions and toys. Eight years after joining Newell’s firm, Charlton
partnered with Seymour Knox – Frank W. Woolworth’s cousin. In 1889, they opened a store in
Fall River, Massachusetts, based on the principle of selling a wide variety of merchandise bargain
priced at five and ten cents, with nothing over fifteen cents. It was a model Frank Woolworth
first introduced in 1879 in Pennsylvania, and one that Charlton would launch into California,
the Pacific Northwest and Canada. After splitting with Knox in 1896, Charlton formed E.P.
Charlton & Company, and sold nine of his New England stores to Woolworth to capitalise his
expansion into Canada. His first store opened in 1900 in Montreal, followed closely with a
second and third shop in the same city, along with outlets in Ottawa, St. John, Quebec, Halifax
and Amherst, Nova Scotia. By 1910, Charlton boasted thirteen stores throughout Canada and
its provinces. Concurrently expanding in the US, Charlton opened his first west coast shop in
1905 in Portland, Oregon, with Los Angeles and San Francisco, California, close behind. Dozens
more followed in Washington, Montana, and Utah, with E.P. Charlton & Company operating
fifty-three stores in two countries by 1911, yet Charlton continued directing activities from his
company’s headquarters in Fall River. Nevertheless, the organisation’s rapid national and inter-
national expansion made it one of the few US retail chain operations in this period conducting
business at such vast distances (Charlton and Winius 2001).
Charlton relied on his low-priced merchandise to do much of the selling for him. His bar-
gain prices, Charlton believed, spoke for themselves. Although men like Selfridge and Lipton
liked to employ flashy advertising to draw customers, Charlton instead maintained a muted
and reserved media presence. Preferring simple copy to announce store openings, he rarely
promoted sales or products available in his shops. ‘If you have never seen one of these mod-
ern, novel, and thoroughly up-to-date “5, 10 and 15¢ stores”’, one newspaper post quietly
announced, ‘it will pleasantly surprise you to see our store and goods’ (E.P. Charlton Advertise-
ment 1909). Charlton shunned flashy demonstrations and instead focused on the principles of
five-and-dime chain retailing, negotiating deep discounts with manufacturers for large lots of
everything from glassware and sheet music to clothes lines and dime banks. He often purchased
goods in conjunction with Woolworth and a number of other five-and-dime dealers affiliated
with Woolworth, expanding the groups’ buying power. While department store merchants
like Macy, Field, and Selfridge promoted their emporiums to the middle-class masses, five-and-
dime retailers like Charlton pitched their stores and products to the throng of frugal shoppers
in search of deals rather than experiences. In a 1929 essay on mass selling, Charlton ascribed the
success of five-and-dimes to rapid turnover, allowing companies like his and Woolworth’s to
profit by making ‘the same invested capital work for it eight and one-half times in one year’,
by turning stock faster than most penny retailers or department stores could muster. It was a
risky strategy, Charlton admitted, as ‘the moment the public fails to buy fast enough and steadily
enough, our whole structure crumbles’ (Charlton and Winius 2001).
By 1911, Charlton perhaps thought the gamble too great. When Frank Woolworth pro-
posed a merger with Seymour Knox (who had gone on to open 112 stores on his own), along
with his brother Charles Sumner Woolworth, former business partner Fred M. Kirby and
William Moore, Charlton agreed, helping to form the conglomerate F.W. Woolworth Com-
pany (Pitrone 2003). Charlton retained his original store and Fall River headquarters (which
continued to operate under his own name), but chose to retire from the day-to-day ministra-
tions of retailing, and instead served behind the scenes as a vice president of the newly formed
corporation. Upon his death in 1930, Charlton had amassed a fortune of over US $30 million,
making him one of the era’s more notable, if unassuming, merchant princes (Charlton and
Winius 2001).

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Conclusion
How did some storekeepers grow to become merchant princes while others remained
penny retailers? It is impossible to say with any certainty. Several who expanded their retail
empires shared entrepreneurial qualities such as a willingness to take risks, a flair for self-
promotion, and a pioneering spirit. Yet many small retailers likewise possessed these same
characteristics and remained microentrepreneurs. Others might point to the ability of the
princes to raise capital, their extraordinary business acumen or their keen understanding of
markets and consumers. A quick perusal of any city directory, though, will likely turn up
any number of individuals tucked away in small towns who also benefitted from these same
insights and abilities, but their names and businesses were familiar only to those locals who
patronised the shops. By the same token, there were many who had all the makings and
advantages of merchant princes, opened grand stores that catered to shoppers’ every whim
and failed miserably.
This was the case in 1908 when the D.C. Beggs Company of Columbus, Ohio, failed, making
news from Washington, DC, to San Francisco, California. Once touted as “the largest depart-
ment store in central Ohio”, the firm operated by David Carson Beggs boasted fifty depart-
ments in an eight-story building some described as “mammoth”, and was outfitted with modern
conveniences including telephone service (“Independent Telephones Adopted” 1906). Beggs
had started in business in the 1870s as a clerk and salesman for local carpet and upholstery deal-
ers. He partnered in the 1890s with another carpet retailer, and together the pair ran a success-
ful trade for several years, with Beggs demonstrating “good business qualities”, which included
“conscientious work” along with “courteous manners and characteristic energy” (“D.C. Beggs a
Successful Carpet Merchant” 1904). Sometime around 1902, Beggs consolidated his operation
with another well-known area merchant, bringing together two of the city’s largest department
stores. Despite his mercantile experience and advantages, however, Beggs’s slow customer debt
collections, combined with an ‘inability to dispose of the huge stock in a short time’, forced the
company into receivership after only a few years (“Big Department Store Fails” 1908). Just as
there was no guarantee of success in the retail trade, there was no secret formula for becoming,
or remaining, a merchant prince.
Department store princes and their stores loomed large over the retail landscape by the
end of World War I. The overwhelming majority of shoppers, however, never stepped foot
inside their lavish interiors or experienced firsthand the plethora of services they offered.
Despite their size and scope, the period’s department stores, like their smaller counterparts,
served largely local markets. Most consumers continued to patronise neighbourhood shops,
five-and-dimes, regional outlets and a growing number of chains for most of their needs
and wants. Visitors to those stores, knowingly or not, likely experienced department stores’
influence on the way products were priced, displayed and arranged. They might also have dis-
cerned a difference in the way clerks spoke with them and how their accounts were handled
at the sales counter. It is also possible that the floors were a bit cleaner, the walls a slightly
more decorated, and the windows filled with attractive arrays of enticing goods. Shoppers
may now have strolled from department to department, instead of perusing a single aisle of
products. In this way, penny retailers and merchant princes combined to propel retailing in
new and significant directions, indelibly altering the commercial landscape at the turn of the
twentieth century.
From backwater towns to major metropolises, retailers small and large took note of each
other’s methods and practices, continuing what worked, modifying what did not and innovating
where necessary to increase demand and profitability. Few (if any) penny retailers or merchant

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princes found themselves driven to modify their methods solely based on either demand or
supply, or any other single economic or political development. Rather, their businesses and eco-
nomic contributions are best understood by acknowledging the opportunities and constraints
under which they operated, and the dynamic combination of commercial, social and cultural
processes that influenced their choices. While entrepreneurs like Alexander Stewart and other
department store moguls often forged their path to prosperity (and failure) through highly capi-
talised urban enterprises, microentrepreneurs tended to focus on servicing niche economies by
providing products and services that catered to local and regional consumers. The complexity
of both retail types and the men and women who ran these operations speaks to the need for
understanding large- and small-scale commercial development as two sides of the same coin.
Both made significant contributions to national and international commerce, with both repre-
senting the range of entrepreneurial opportunities open to those willing to take a risk.

Notes
1 Italics in original.
2 John Brownlee to Jane Brownlee, May 13, 1834, folder 2, “Correspondence, 1833–1838,” Brownlee
Family Papers, 1828–1851, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis.

References

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‘Advertising is secret of Selfridge success in London,’ 1918, Gazette-Times (Heppner, Oregon), 25 July, p. 2.
‘Big department store fails,’ 1908, San Francisco Call, 19 July, p. 21.
‘By telegraph,’ 1851, Democratic Banner, 18 June, p. 3.
‘Choice Havana sweetmeats’ (advertisement), 1827, Louisiana Advertiser, 1 January, p. 4.
‘City items,’ 1846, New York Daily Tribune, 22 September, p. 2.
‘D.C. Beggs a successful carpet merchant,’ 1904, Carpet and Upholstery Journal, 10 October, p. 63.
‘Death of A.T. Stewart,’ 1876, New York Times, 11 April, p. 1.
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‘The Dry goods business,’ 1857, Evansville Daily Journal, 13 August, p. 2.
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‘News of the week,’ 1854, Spirit of the Times, 14 November, p. 2.
‘Stewart’s new dry goods store,’ 1846, New York Herald, 18 September, p. 2.
‘Stock renewed’ (advertisement), 1825, Saratoga Sentinel, 18 January, p. 4.

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Elvins, S. (2004), Sales and celebrations: Retailing and regional identity in Western New York State, 1920–1940
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 15
RETAIL WORKERS AND THEIR
UNIONS, 1850–2016
Daniel Opler

In many ways, the history of workers in the American retail industry is very similar to other well-
established narratives about American workers. Meagre efforts at unionisation in the nineteenth
century led to much more effective strategies and struggles in the 1930s, followed by a serious
and rapid decline in workers’ power in the later twentieth century. As in other industries, retail
workers’ control over their jobs and conditions lessened throughout most of the twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries.While the story looks slightly different in European countries, there
too, one sees the rapid decrease in retail workers’ control over their jobs, and the overarching
failure of retail workers’ unions, although there are a few scattered signs of more powerful retail
workers’ unions in a few European countries, where unions generally are far more powerful.
If retail workers fit fairly well into these overarching narratives, there are some impor-
tant aspects of retailing that make the industry unique in labour history. Women workers, for
instance, have represented a far higher percentage of workers in the retail industry than in other
industries. Also, retail work conditions were often significantly worse than in other industries:
retail workers’ hours in the nineteenth century were generally significantly longer than in
other industries (before a shift to part-time employment reversed this trend, bringing with it
a new set of problems), and retail workers’ pay was often lower. In addition, the unions in the
retail industry, even more so than elsewhere in American labour history, have been noticeably
fractured, mired in internal conflict and powerless to effect important changes in workers’ lives,
even at their height. Finally, the forces that worked to the grave detriment of other workers
in the late twentieth century, mechanisation and globalisation, have had far more mixed and
complicated effects on retail workers; the challenges workers faced were far more likely to result
from suburbanisation, the rise of online retailing and the rise of new retailing strategies such as
self-service shopping.
Also unlike many other industries, retail workers are relatively rarely studied. Although
there have been a few local studies of retail workers and their unions – especially New York
City’s left-leaning District 65 and its affiliated locals – and some good studies of retail workers’
strikes throughout the country, there has not been a full-length study of retail workers and their
unions in almost fifty years. And, while historians’ understanding of retail workers continues to
grow, it remains largely an incomplete picture, with key developments in retail history largely
unexamined.

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The AFL era, 1850–1930

Working in nineteenth century retail stores in the United States was, by all accounts, strenuous.
Workers in the stores seem to have made even less than workers in factories (Obenauer 1913,
6–7). In addition, store managers were as demanding and patriarchal as any employer of this
era. In an 1850 list of instructions issued at one store, the owners warned against smoking and
dancing and suggested that ‘leisure hours should be spent mostly in reading’. Finally, and most
frustratingly for many retail workers, the hours of work were significantly longer than in many
factories; a 112-hour work week was the norm for many store workers, in part to make sure
that stores remained opened so that other workers who worked long hours would be able to
shop after work if they wished (Kirstein 1950, 4–5).
The long workdays meant that some retail workers got involved in labour organisations as
early as the 1840s, when New York clerks formed an association specifically targeted at shorten-
ing their working hours. The association amassed a great deal of public support, holding mass
meetings in Union Square attended by important political figures like Horace Greeley, but did
not seem able to shorten working hours. For the next thirty years, clerks at grocery and small
dry goods stores throughout the country issued petitions, organised small associations, and wrote
letters to newspapers in an effort to convince the public that these long working hours were
morally objectionable and should be stopped. Their efforts at getting the public to condemn
their long working hours continued throughout the 1870s and 1880s, and spread throughout
the country to cities large and small. Despite the decades of effort, however, these public rela-
tions campaigns were largely unsuccessful, perhaps because the long working hours of clerks
(and the long hours the stores were open) seemed good for the consumers to whom the early
closing associations would have had to appeal to have any lasting impact (‘Clerks congratulatory
meeting’ 1863).
The early closing associations were also generally limited to relatively small retail establish-
ments. They did not exist in the great palaces of consumption, the department stores that were
an increasingly important part of upscale consumption in America in the late nineteenth cen-
tury.There were a few reasons for the absence of the early closing associations in the department
stores. Certainly gender played a role; the leaders and many of the members of the early closing
associations were men, and the women workers of the department stores were somewhat foreign
to their organising experience. Equally important was the status of department store workers,
who were at least on occasion eligible for promotion to low-level managerial positions, a rarity
for any worker in this era, let alone women. But perhaps most important of all, as Susan Porter
Benson argued in her landmark study, Counter Cultures, workers in the department stores had
their own system for challenging employers’ power. Women working in these stores, Benson
demonstrated, were particularly adept at fashioning a work culture that allowed them all sorts of
small perks, defiantly riding the elevators that were reserved for customers, taking full advantage
of their charge accounts, and occasionally openly criticising the store to customers if they felt
they were ill-treated by store managers. These techniques meant that formal organisations to
fight for workers’ interests were simply not necessary in the department stores (Benson 1986).
By the end of the 19th century, American department stores had developed into solidly
non-union establishments, even as retail workers in other retail establishments, finding their
independent early closing associations ineffective, sought permanent unions affiliated with
national and international coalitions. As early as 1886, grocery store clerks in New York affili-
ated their early closing campaigns with the national labour union, Knights of Labor (‘Grocery
clerks encouraged’ 1886). The Knights’ collapse later in 1886, in the aftermath of the Chicago
Haymarket Bombing and the Red Scare that followed, meant that this affiliation was very

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short-lived. Beginning in 1890, however, grocery store clerks in the Midwest organised the first
permanent retail workers union in the United States, the Retail Clerks International Protec-
tion Association (RCIPA), affiliated with the powerful American Federation of Labor (AFL)
(Kirstein 1950, 11–13).
In Europe the situation was more complex, and varied widely from country to country. But
in Europe as in the United States, the primary concerns seem to have been working conditions
and hours rather than wages. In France, the Catholic-inspired Syndicat de Employés du Com-
merce et de l’Industrie set out to organise workers in the growing department store industry as
early as 1887, and won notable successes reasonably quickly. By 1900, French retail workers had
forced legislators to pass the seat law, which gave women clerks the right to sit-down when not
waiting on customers, and by 1906 they won an even more important legislative victory: the
six-day work week for French retail workers. Employers, seeing the writing on the wall, began
instituting early closing in France in these years, perhaps forestalling even more legislative action
(Miller 2014, 146–147).
Workers in Germany took on similar issues in the late nineteenth century, though with dif-
ferent allies. As early as 1896, women’s rights activists spearheaded campaigns for seat laws in
Germany, forcing city governments to back down. By 1900, the German Industrial Code was
amended to include the requirement that employers had to provide seats for sales clerks, only to
run into the problem that most store owners, even if they did follow this code, instituted poli-
cies forbidding workers to actually use the seats. At the same time, German retail workers began
working on a petition campaign to demand early closing, apparently getting their demands met
in at least some cities where they were organised (Adams 1988, 57–59).
In England, employers seemed to have combined the American and French retail practices:
workers had extremely long work weeks, ranging from 70 hours a week up to as many as 90 in
some suburban stores. There, however, perhaps influenced by the famous upstairs dormitories
for workers at the Bon Marché and other French stores, large retailers practiced the living-in
method of employment, requiring some 400,000 workers in their stores to live in employer-
owned lodgings, often in cramped conditions and in dangerous neighbourhoods. Employers
in these circumstances had tremendous power, dismissing workers for such offences as getting
married or putting up photographs or other pictures on the walls of the employer-owned
housing (Richardson 1979, 5–7). In part in response to this system, in 1891, English retail work-
ers formed the National Union of Shop Assistants, which, a few years later, expanded to the
National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks.
In both England and the US, the unions set their sights on achieving earlier closing times.
In England, the union was part of the formation of the Early Closing Association, which called
upon employers to voluntarily establish shorter hours; when this proved ineffective, the union
began organising strikes. In the US, by the early 1900s, the RCIPA, drawing on a longer tradi-
tion of struggles around the shorter workday, called upon customers to boycott stores that would
not grant the 60-hour week.This tactic proved only slightly more effective than any of the other
efforts at limiting working hours.They had a few scattered victories in mining towns where they
were able to get the support of the comparatively powerful mine workers’ unions, but outside of
these communities, the union found managers unwilling to limit the number of hours potential
customers could shop in their stores (Kirstein 1950, 19).
The early 1900s also saw a short-lived independent union campaign in department stores in
the US. Spearheaded by the New York Women’s Trade Union League, and bolstered by Progres-
sive reform groups’ investigations into the department stores, Macy’s workers set up the Retail
Clerks Union (RCU), which then attempted to spread to other department stores around
New York City. Store managers quickly increased commissions and cracked down on any and

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all union activity, establishing extensive informant networks, locking store exits near union
meetings to physically prevent workers from attending meetings, and firing workers who were
involved with the union. The RCU applied for AFL affiliation, but apparently never received it,
and all but vanished from the historical record after 1914 ( Johnson 2007).
The RCIPA and RCU alike generally avoided calling strikes. The RCU simply did not last
long enough to launch any major strikes, and the RCIPA leaders viewed boycotts and public
condemnation of recalcitrant managers as far more promising than strikes. Partially this was a
sign of the times; strikes were expensive and risky, and many labour leaders were uneasy about
their viability as a tactic in labour struggles. But the peculiarities of work in the retail industry
might also have played a role; retail establishments, more directly than most other businesses,
catered to the public at large and so a boycott could have very immediate, visible and devastating
effects, if organised effectively.
Despite the union leaders’ disinterest in organising strikes, retail workers did strike on occa-
sion. In Buffalo in 1913, for instance, department store workers went on strike to demand both
higher wages and an 8½-hour workday. In that strike, in which the RCIPA was only marginally
involved, workers emerged with some important gains; weekly pay was raised to $12 minimum
for men and $6 minimum for women, somewhat less than the workers had demanded when
they’d begun their strike, though they did not get the hours of work shortened. Other strikes
called by the union during the 1910s, most important at stores in Memphis and in St Louis,
saw even less success, and by the end of World War I, the union was weaker than ever (Kirstein
1950, 42–49).
In Europe, conditions were more complex. In the United Kingdom, retail workers began
striking against the living-in system in the early 1900s. Beginning with the small 1901 strike
against William Whiteley’s store in London and continuing with strikes throughout the United
Kingdom, retail workers began destroying the living-in system. By the beginning of World
War I, workers in the UK had largely won the right to choose between room-and-board and
wage increases (USDAW 2016). And, following the war, the retail unions in the UK began to
expand rapidly, reaching some 86,000 members by 1920, only to collapse again in the postwar
economic recession.
In America, while the unions were far weaker than in the UK, workers found that they
could have a lot of power without the aid of the union. Especially in the larger department
stores, retail managers, in keeping with their patriarchal methods before World War I, created
massive “welfare capitalism” programs in the 1920s, offering workers profit-sharing, vacation
homes, employer-sponsored pension and health care plans and, quite famously, at Macy’s, a free
turkey every Thanksgiving. As managers used these tactics to gain greater worker loyalty and
discourage turnover, they openly condemned unions as un-American and unwelcome in their
stores. The RCIPA, small and not especially powerful, had no effective means to combat these
sorts of tactics (Kirstein 1950, 48).
It is also worth noting that American retail jobs were strictly segregated throughout the late
nineteenth early twentieth centuries. While African American and other non-white workers
often had jobs in the stores, especially in larger department stores, these jobs fell into two catego-
ries: either behind the scenes or in servile positions, as washroom attendants, cleaning staff and
elevator operators. African American workers were not employed in sales generally, except in
the few African American owned stores in segregated neighbourhoods. (Even these stores were
sometimes the sites of racial violence. A famous lynching took place in Memphis, Tennessee
in 1892, when three African American men opened a grocery store that might take customers
away from a nearby white-owned store; it was this case that first drew the attention of journalist

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Ida B. Wells to lynching, and launched her career as an anti-lynching activist.) By and large, the
unions did nothing to challenge this situation.
The Great Depression and World War II would dramatically change the situation of retail
workers in America and beyond. These decades would mark the end of retail unions in Axis-
controlled countries, and a new respect for their tremendous service in the UK during the war.
At the same time, in the US, these years would bear witness to the rise in the power of unions
within the retail industry, introduce different retail strategies with profound effects on workers’
situation, see the first major challenges to segregated hiring practices and would forever trans-
form the conditions of retail workers.

Unions ascendant, 1930–1950

The Great Depression saw a tremendous increase in strikes against retail stores. With national
support for workers and unions growing rapidly in the early Great Depression, workers were
more willing to go on strike than ever before. The largest strike of the early Depression years
took place in Milwaukee, a centre of radical labour activism. In September 1934, Milwaukee
retail workers at several different stores applied for RCIPA membership, and in November of
that year they demanded a union contract at the large Boston Store.When management refused,
workers went on strike, hitting the store at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.
Store managers applied for and received an anti-picketing injunction, and the strike became a
war of attrition, with store managers taking out advertisements in the city’s papers condemning
the union, and with workers resorting to breaking windows and throwing stink bombs into the
store to drive away customers. By January 1935, the strike was over, with workers receiving
merit-based raises and with most workers receiving their jobs back. Workers received neither
the level of raises nor the union representation they had demanded (White 2016).
More important, though equally unsuccessful in most regards, were a series of small strikes in
New York City that would lead to the creation of a more radical retail workers’ union, the retail
branch of the Office Workers’ Union. Affiliated with the Communist-led Trade Union Unity
League, the Office Workers’ Union defied all the accepted wisdom of retail organising, setting
its sights on the upscale department stores as well as the lower-priced stores where the RCIPA
had previously been successful. When managers at the S. Klein’s store, a cut-rate department
store on Union Square, fired a number of workers for union organising, workers at Klein’s went
on strike; within a few days, workers at the competing Ohrbach’s store went on strike as well
(Opler 2002).
The strikes were dramatic ones. The strikers took advantage of Communist-affiliated allies to
transform the stores and Square alike into a battleground, decorating statues with picket signs,
etching strike slogans into the store windows, handing balloons with strike slogans on them to
the children of customers, recruiting writers and actors to join their picket lines on special strike
“theme days”, introducing white mice into the stores to frighten customers, and interrupting
charity banquets at which the store owners spoke. Again and again, the strikers found ways to
capture the public imagination, enough so that by 1935 there was a play based on the strikes, The
Klein-Ohrbach Strike, produced by the important Workers Laboratory Theatre, and by 1936, there
was a novel based on the strikes, Leane Zugsmith’s A Time To Remember. Despite the attention
they received, the strikes were not successful. At both stores, workers got reinstatement, and at
Ohrbach’s workers got a verbal promise of reduced hours. At both stores, however, managers laid
off workers in the weeks and months after the strikes had taken place, marking a serious defeat
for the radicals. After these and other similarly devastating losses, the Office Workers’ Union

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merged with an RCIPA local to create the important Local 1250, which would become a major
force in organising department store workers in New York City into unions (Opler 2002).
If the dramatic strikes of the early Depression years were largely unsuccessful, that would
change in the late 1930s, when organising and striking resulted in permanent and powerful
unions. The key moment in retail unions’ history occurred in early 1937, when, in the after-
math of sit-down strikes at auto and rubber plants, workers at five-and-dime stores went on a
sit-down strike in Detroit, Michigan. Locking themselves inside Woolworth stores, and singling
out Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton as a target for their ire, the Detroit Woolworth workers
quickly made headlines throughout the country.This tactic played nicely into the radical world-
view of the 1930s, which often singled out wealthy women as particularly greedy, wasteful and
deserving of contempt, and throughout the Woolworth strikes, workers played up the contrast
between the hardworking female Woolworth clerks and the wealthy, lazy, spoiled Barbara Hut-
ton, both with songs invoking Hutton’s name and with what became their favourite chant in
some of the stores on strike, ‘Barbara Hutton, she gets mutton! Woolworth workers, they get
nothin’!’ (Frank 2012; Opler 2007).
The strikes spread. In New York City, former OWU organisers started to pay more attention
to workers at five-and-dime stores, and in March 1937 they wound up leading massive sit-down
strikes in a number of New York five-and-dime stores, capturing the front pages of newspapers
and attracting tremendous attention (and eventually pressuring New York City Mayor Fiorello
LaGuardia and others to intervene on behalf of the workers). Unlike in the earlier strikes, the
Woolworth strikes ended with contracts, raises, and improvement in working hours. After years
of defeats and compromises, unions had finally won a clear-cut victory in the retail industry.
Influenced by these victories, a group of more politically moderate RCIPA insurgents in New
York City abandoned the AFL, joining with the former OWU leaders in forming a union that
would eventually become the CIO’s retail union, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store
Union (RWDSU) (Opler 2007).
These same years also marked the beginnings of effective labour organising in San Francisco’s
retail industry. As early as 1936, organisers for the powerful west coast branch of the Interna-
tional Longshoreman’s Association had led small strikes of warehouse workers in five-and-dime
stores, and in 1937 these strikes spread to the sales workers. That year, as workers did in five-
and-dime stores throughout the rest of the country, workers launched a massive strike against
Woolworth stores in San Francisco that won workers better conditions, better hours, and union
recognition. In 1938 this campaign culminated in a still larger strike against twenty-seven of the
largest department stores in San Francisco in an effort to win all retail workers in the city shorter
work weeks, store-wide seniority policies and union contracts (Reagan 2016).
The 1938 San Francisco strike was an important if not entirely victorious one. The strikers
resorted to tactics similar to those used in earlier New York City strikes, making them as dra-
matic as possible. Female picketers wore their best dresses to the picket lines, and the New York
Times suggested that, at least on the first day, the picket lines looked more like “fashion shows”
than anything else, with the strikers engaging in dance steps, chatting with passers-by and keep-
ing the mood as light as possible. This light mood did not last long; the strike became a violent
one within days, with workers and police (and sometimes workers and store managers as well)
fighting on the streets outside of the stores. For two months, workers kept the stores shut down,
until they reached a somewhat weak compromise, accepting a seniority clause but giving up on
the shorter workday and union shop clauses. Despite this weak compromise, the strike meant
that the Department Store Employees Union (DSEU) was in San Francisco to stay, and the city’s
retail trade would remain unionised for years to come (Reagan 2016; Kirstein 1950).

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Following the massive retail workers’ uprisings of 1937 and 1938, the retail workers unions
saw gains across the country. In Denver, Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Provi-
dence, retail workers voted to unionise. But the bulk of the retail unions’ strength was always in
San Francisco and New York City. In these cities, most of the major stores were unionised – in
New York, managers at Macy’s, Gimbels, Hearns, Bloomingdale’s and Sterns all signed contracts
with the CIO, perhaps in hopes of avoiding the unpleasant strikes that had shaken so many other
stores in these years. In San Francisco the Emporium, Hale Brothers and J.C. Penney stores
(among many others) all signed contracts with the AFL’s RCIPA. The unions’ accomplishments
were important ones – some of the largest stores in the country’s largest cities were now union
stores, and they would remain so for many years to come. At the same time, it’s important to
note the limits of this organising drive; retail workers’ unions never achieved anything close
to the size or power of the unions in the auto or steel industry, and there were a number of
stores – especially more downscale stores and grocery stores – that remained largely untouched
by unionisation drives even in this era (Kirstein 1950).
Retail employers also faced a challenge to their segregated hiring practices in the 1930s.
While at the largest New York City stores, down on 34th Street, racial segregation remained
virtually unchallenged (despite the radical politics of many of the leaders, the retail workers
unions did almost nothing on this issue, preferring to focus on more standard labour issues like
wages and hours), during the Great Depression African Americans did begin organising to push
retailers to offer more jobs to African American workers in the famous “Don’t Buy Where You
Can’t Work” Campaigns. Beginning with struggles against Chicago Woolworth stores in the late
1920s and expanding into New York City in the 1930s, this campaign pitted African Ameri-
can consumers against retailers who owned stores in their neighbourhoods. With the support
of important activists like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the campaign was eventually successful
enough that every major store in Harlem employed at least one African American worker by
the end of the 1930s (Greenberg 1997).
As with other workers, then, the Depression era marked some important gains for retail
workers. However, retail workers still faced some important obstacles, especially with regard
to the major labour legislation of the 1930s. Until 1941, courts were reluctant to apply the
Wagner Act, which protected workers’ right to choose their own unions, to retailing. Even
more important, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the 40-hour week,
the minimum wage, an end to child labour, and other important reforms, explicitly exempted
retail workers, so long as their work was primarily related to intrastate commerce (New York
Times 1938, 1, 1941, 28).
As a result, most retail workers lacked the eight-hour day, and the length of the workday,
a concern throughout their history, continued to be a sticking point. This issue of the length
of the workday became a key issue for an unexpected 1941 strike against New York’s Gimbels
store, led by the radicals who had left the Office Workers Union and now joined with the CIO.
Gimbels, like Macy’s and other upscale department stores, catered to a largely upper-class and
wealthy clientele.
That did not stop the workers, however, from engaging in some fairly militant tactics in the
strike, releasing pigeons into the store and taking their picket lines right into the store in order to
cause disruption and force customers out.These sorts of tactics proved effective, and the workers
won the eight-hour day, but also earned the local union the tremendous ire of store managers.
Gimbels’ managers, who had signed a union contract precisely because they hoped the more
moderate national CIO leaders could help them avoid this sort of disruption, were furious, and
happily testified in state hearings later that year against the radicals leading their local unions.

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Figure 15.1 Sales clerk and customer examining a dress at Saks Fifth Avenue store following a fashion
show presented by the Chrysler Girls’ Club of the Chrysler Corporation in 1942.
Source: Siegel, A. S., photographer. (1942) Detroit, Michigan. Girl and sales lady examining a dress at Saks
Fifth Avenue store following a fashion show presented by the Chrysler Girls’ Club of the Chrysler Corpo-
ration. Detroit Michigan United States Wayne County, 1942.
Source: Spring. [Photograph] Library of Congress

In Europe, as always, things were different, depending especially on what country one was
in. In countries occupied by the Axis powers, unions were made illegal and driven out of
existence in the 1930s and early 1940s. In the United Kingdom, however, retail unions, now
under the umbrella of the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers (NUDAW), had
grown quite large, with around 200,000 members, and increasingly powerful.Their role as non-­
essential workers during the war would mean that they were frequently drafted, and some esti-
mates suggest that as many as 100,000 of these members served in the armed forces during the
war (Richardson 1979, 144–145).
In the US, World War II and the early Cold War years severely weakened unionisation in
the retail industry. Many of the most militant organisers left the stores; men left for the front or
sometimes for other war industry jobs, and women, who before the war had no more promising
job opportunities, now found work in war production plants a lucrative alternative to the stores.
At the same time, the political divisions between moderate Democrats, who ran the national
RWDSU, and the more radical voices who were often in charge of the more successful locals,
especially in New York, began to surface more clearly in the war and postwar years.

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The earliest signs of major internal conflict within the RWDSU took place amidst a major
labour conflict, at the Montgomery Ward store in Chicago. Montgomery Ward chairman Sewell
Avery, a fierce opponent of the New Deal and especially of the government’s involvement in
his business, rejected the federal government’s insistence that he allow workers at Montgomery
Ward stores in Chicago to unionise peacefully during the war. After some unproductive efforts
at negotiation with Avery, the federal government took over Montgomery Ward stores and
allowed workers to form unions, only ceasing their involvement in the store management after
the war was over. The strike sharply divided the union. Local leaders who were affiliated with
the Communist Party condemned the strike, committed as they were to defeating Hitler at all
costs, while national leaders who were moderate Democrats tended to celebrate their victory
against the store managers (Phillips 2013, 84–87).
The divisions got significantly worse after the war. At first, there were serious efforts by the
radical and local leaders to collaborate, but with the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that
required non-Communist union leaders to sign affidavits stating explicitly their lack of mem-
bership in the Communist Party, the divisions greatly worsened. In 1948, as early Cold War para-
noia took hold of the country, national CIO leaders vocally condemned Communist influences
in the New York local unions and participated, although reluctantly, in a House Un-American
Activities Committee investigation into the role of Communists in the retail and wholesale
trade in New York City.
Adding to the CIO’s political troubles were two major structural changes in the American
retail industry. During the war, due to labour shortages, retail managers increasingly experi-
mented with self-service retailing, which allowed customers direct access to merchandise and
eliminated the need for some salespeople, in some cases allowing stores to run with half the
salespeople as the full-service stores (Ziskind 2003, 58).This would expand in the postwar years,
spreading to Europe as well by the late 1950s (USDAW 2016). In addition, as suburbanisation
became more and more prominent in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, store
managers increasingly focused on the suburban market, opening up new branch stores that were
separate from the cities that had so often been the union’s strength.
In New York, the centre of the RWDSU’s strength but also the centre of the union’s
political struggles, the combination of political disarray and the transformation of the retail
industry was disastrous. Retail union organisers attempted again and again to organise in the
suburban branch stores, but these efforts were problematic. For one thing, the stores were
often located in malls rather than on public streets, which made picketing more difficult. For
another, there were fewer workers available to picket. In the city, as historian Minna Ziskind
has demonstrated, workers could picket neighbouring stores during their lunch breaks; they
could not do so in the suburbs, where the unions lacked support. They set up a few picket
lines here and there where store managers proved fiercely intractable, but these picket lines
were poorly staffed and had no real effect on the stores’ function. By the late 1950s, Ziskind
writes, ‘admissions of responsibility [for the union’s failures in the suburbs] were almost rou-
tine parts of meetings’. The union’s presence in the suburban branch stores would always be
limited, and one of their major bases of strength – the big department stores – was rapidly
fading in importance, as the stores became increasingly reliant upon the branch stores for sales
and profits (Ziskind 2003, 65).
However, despite these important setbacks, there were clear signs of progress, especially for
the RCIPA in this era. In 1944, a new leader, James Suffridge, took over the RCIPA, and became
an important force in the industry. Suffridge, a veteran of struggles in the Oakland grocery
workers’ unions, quickly worked to centralise power in the union, and modernise operations.

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Politically moderate (he was a registered Republican, but routinely supported Democratic can-
didates for office), Suffridge had some important qualities that his predecessors in the RCIPA
had lacked. He was a fierce proponent of integration, and had long since refused to allow seg-
regated locals in the union, and insisted upon organising white and non-white workers alike
into the union. He was also extremely savvy about the importance of chain stores to the retail
industry, and by the late 1940s he set about hiring large numbers of organisers to work directly
for his international union, circumventing the locals in an effort to organise the national chain
stores that were increasingly dominating the retail industry. Finally, Suffridge was, by all accounts,
a militant leader, more than willing to have workers go on strike if it meant a chance for a better
contract. (Harrington 1962, 13–42; Zielinski 2001).
Suffridge’s rise coincided with other events that demonstrated that the AFL would leave the
war in a more militant fashion. In Oakland, California, workers at the Kahn’s and Hasting’s stores
struck under RCIPA leadership in 1946, part of a massive postwar strike wave. Truck drivers
from the AFL’s Teamsters refused to cross the picket line to deliver goods to the store, but store
managers employed non-union trucking companies to try to break the strike. It was a serious
error: some 100,000 workers in Oakland declared themselves on strike, closing all stores except
for pharmacies and grocery stores, taking over traffic, banning all non-union members from
downtown Oakland, and carefully monitoring those stores that remained open for any signs of
price gouging (Kirstein 1950; Lipsitz 1994, 148–152).
The unions also attempted to expand internationally, especially in Canada. Beginning in
1948, the RWDSU participated in a major drive to organise at Eaton’s in Toronto, the largest
department store in Canada (and Canada’s third largest employer). The campaign was problem-
atic from the get-go; the RWDSU was still reeling from the struggle over communism in the
US, and the Canadian store managers used that to their great advantage to paint the union as a
whole as a Communist-inspired movement. To make matters worse, as Donica Belisle has dem-
onstrated, the union’s emphasis on masculine rhetoric and male figures did not match the largely
female workforce at Eaton’s. The result was that the campaign at Eaton’s, the largest union drive
in Canadian history, was a dismal failure (Belisle 2005).
More importantly, though by far the least studied aspect of retail workers’ history, the RCIPA
and RWDSU both found some important successes in the grocery industry in this era. In the
early 1940s, the RCIPA extended into grocery stores throughout the Philadelphia area, includ-
ing victories against such chains as A&P and Food Fair, and in other scattered cities throughout
the country. By the early 1950s, grocery stores in most major cities – Los Angeles, Chicago,
Cleveland, Detroit and St Louis, were largely unionised (New York Times 1940, 26; Zundel 1954,
306).
This did not mean that retail workers were getting significantly higher wages or that their
conditions were improving dramatically. If anything, the 1950s and 1960s saw retail work-
ers’ wages stagnating, with workers making an average of $1.68 an hour in the early 1960s,
well below the $2.25 in manufacturing and other trades (Schaffer 1963). Additionally, a sizable
minority – around 1/3 – of retail workers continued to work more than 44 hours a week.While
a far cry from the 112-hour work week workers had faced in the nineteenth century, the long
workdays that had been the impetus for unionisation in the nineteenth century had continued
well beyond the rise of unions in retailing.These long work hours came at least sometimes with
unions’ support; in union stores, workers received additional bonuses for working longer hours,
and got time-and-a-half for working on Sundays. In addition, some union organisers took
the view that by allowing retail chain stores to stay open later (especially with the increased
wages), they would undercut smaller non-chain stores that were generally non-union, thus
allowing union membership numbers to grow (Walsh 1993, 50). And, whether they opposed

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these conditions or not, developments of the late twentieth century would mean that retail
workers’ unions were facing a long and steady decline in the coming years.

Towards the twenty-first century: Walmart and globalisation

The late twentieth and early twenty-first century have not been promising for retail workers.
Working hours, wages and discrimination continue to be key parts of working in the retail
industry, while unions have faded in importance, leaving workers with limited ability to change
their working conditions.
By far the most important development in retailing in the late twentieth century was the
rise of Walmart and other big-box stores. Corporations like Target and Walmart expanded
rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s to become the most important players in the retail industry.
Their model of the big-box store – low prices, low overhead and low wages combined with
a very high sales volume – became the new hallmark of the retail industry, which had massive
implications for retail workers.
Store managers at these big-box stores have taken tremendous measures to prevent work-
ers from organising unions in their stores. In the late 1970s and 1980s, for instance, when the
Teamsters made tremendous strides in a unionisation campaign among Walmart distribution
centres, company managers threatened to close the warehouses if the workers voted to support
the union in a National Labor Relations Board election. In 2000, when meat cutters at Walmart
stores began organising under the auspices of the United Food and Commercial Workers,
Walmart announced that they would no longer employ meat cutters at all in their stores,
requiring customers instead to buy pre-cut meat (Lichtenstein 2009, 128, 137).
If Walmart is most notorious for its anti-union practices, it is by no means alone. Target
stores made a small splash in 2014 when their anti-union video, “Think Hard: Protect Your
Signature” was leaked to the public. The video warned employees that if unions came in they
would destroy Target’s “fast, fun and friendly culture”. More seriously, when workers at Target
stores did organise, as did workers at a store in Valley Stream, New York, Target manage-
ment crusaded relentlessly against the union, warning that the store might well close if it was
unionised; then, after the workers voted against unionisation, and the National Labor Relations
Board ordered a second election, store managers actually did close the store for six months,
leading up to a massive defeat for the union in the election that followed (Becker 2014).
These anti-union practices have forced union organisers to turn to other techniques to fight
on behalf of workers. Most important here are the recent campaigns for the $15 minimum
wage, the Fight for Fifteen movement. With support from the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), the Fight for Fifteen movement has successfully skirted the challenges of gaining
union recognition in extremely difficult conditions by working on behalf of workers who are,
by and large, not unionised. By focusing on the minimum wage, the SEIU’s movement has
become remarkably successful, especially among fast food workers, but also increasingly among
convenience store workers (DePillis 2016).
Workers also continue to struggle around the length of the workday. Nelson Lichtenstein
reports that Walmart managers routinely require workers to put in more than 40 hours a week,
and to alter workers’ time cards so that no over time needed to be paid. Workers respond to
this old problem with time-honored solution: looking for new jobs and stealing from the stores
whenever possible. Here, too, in recent years, workers have turned to more formal methods of
protest. Especially important here are the strikes and protests around stores that remain open on
Thanksgiving weekends. Beginning in 2011, the union-sponsored campaign, OUR Walmart,
organised Black Friday strikes on the very busy shopping day directly after Thanksgiving. As

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Jess Guh pointed out in Counterpunch, this was a new strategy for the labour movement. The
strikes did not include enough workers to slowdown or even greatly complicate store opera-
tions; they also had no appreciable effect on customers’ desire to shop on Black Friday. What
they did instead was raise public awareness of Walmart’s labour issues. Accompanying stories on
store-sponsored food drives for Walmart employees drove home the point that the unions were
trying to make, that Walmart’s labour policies were simply unacceptable (Guh 2014).
Big-box stores’ presence has also meant that other retail establishments have changed their
employment practices. In 2003, supermarket managers at three different chains in southern
California announced they were cutting wages and benefits in order to compete more effec-
tively with Walmart. Workers, longstanding members of the UFCW, declared a strike against the
stores in response, significantly slowing down business at 900 stores in the state. From Octo-
ber 2003–February 2004, the stores and unions fought bitterly, only to negotiate their way to a
compromise that meant a two-tiered hiring system.
Dire as the situation looks for retail workers, the two most serious challenges facing workers
in other industries, globalisation and mechanisation, have had far more complicated effects on
American retail workers. In the retail industry, globalisation has taken two primary forms. First,
large retail businesses based in the US and Europe have systematically displaced smaller firms in
the rest of the world. While globalisation began in Europe, American firms began the process in
earnest in the 1990s, and quickly became important players. Walmart, for instance, has opened
stores (sometimes under different names) in dozens of countries, including Argentina, Brazil,
China, India, Japan, Mexico and South Africa. But unlike in other industries, because of the very
nature of retailing, globalisation does not mean that the US stores are likely to close as a result of
the now-global reach of the store managers.The second aspect of globalisation in retailing is the
import of products made all over the world. Again, while this has dramatic and serious effects on
American manufacturing industry, its effect on retail workers is negligible.
For all its importance, then, globalisation has simply not been a major factor in the working
lives of American retail workers. It has obviously impacted workers in other countries, though
the effects have been extremely complex. In a 2006 study on retailing in Mexico, for instance,
Charles Tilly and José Luis Álvarez Galván found that the retail sector as a whole in Mexico
was not a promising one for workers, with low pay and company unions that are so powerless
that at several stores, workers were uncertain if they were even in a union. However, they also
found that Walmart’s role in Mexico is not, as it has been in the United States, as a leader in the
fight to keep unions out of retailing and drive down wages, but rather as a participant in a much
more common, mainstream business practice of company unionism and low wages (Tilly and
Galván 2006).
Things are even more complex when one gets beyond Mexico. In a more global study of
Walmart’s employment practices, Tilly found that in most of the world, Walmart’s wages are at
or near (and in several cases, even above) industry standards (Tilly 2007). A 2006 study by Yuko
Aoyama and Guido Schwarz suggests that part of this is because retailing doesn’t work like other
industries – so much of it is controlled by customer expectations that foreign-owned retailers
have to act, to some extent, like local retailers (Aoyama and Schwarz 2006, 290–291), making
globalisation in retailing a more complicated phenomenon than in manufacturing.
Like globalisation, mechanisation has had mixed effects on retailing. There have been efforts
at using mechanisation to reduce labour costs, to be sure. When computerised price tags and
Universal Product Codes (UPC’s) were introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, many feared it
would mean a severe reduction in the number of workers employed in retail stores, a change
that never took place. Similarly, in the late 1990s and especially early 2000s, many major stores
introduced self-checkout options for consumers. However, the machines were so unreliable and

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unwieldy that by the early 2010s, several store chains, most notably the Albertsons grocery stores,
gave up on the machines altogether. Self-checkout remains key to Walmart and other cut-rate
stores, but many retailers’ focus on customer service means self-checkout is incompatible with
their business model.
Other forms of mechanisation, though still in their infancy, are likely to have more serious
effects on retail workers. The rise of Internet sales, for instance, has meant major store closings,
with major retailers from Office Depot and Sports Authority to Macy’s either closing down
stores, cutting back on over time or going out of business entirely (Close 2016).
While the rise of Walmart and the Internet of course represent new factors in the lives of
retail workers, most of the struggles that American retail workers face are issues they have faced
since the nineteenth century. Wages, for instance, continue to be a major problem for retail
workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, retail workers made an average of $17.87/
hour in September 2016, significantly below the $25.79 that was the national average. The
$17.87/hour makes retail workers the lowest paid workers in any employment sector except
for leisure and hospitality, which included fast food and restaurant workers (Bureau of Labor
Statistics 2016).
Like low pay, issues of racial inequality also continue to plague the industry. According to a
2015 study conducted by Demos and the NAACP, African American and Latino retail workers
were disproportionately underrepresented in management positions, and overrepresented in
the lowest-paying retail jobs, such as cashier positions. In addition, according to the same study,
African American and Latino employees made between 75–90% of what white employees made
in corresponding positions (Ruetschlin and Asante-Muhammad 2015).
Gender inequality likewise continues to play an important role in the retail industry.This was
especially central in the famous Sears case, where the Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion (EEOC) argued that statistically, women were severely underrepresented in the relatively
lucrative commission sales jobs. After years of hearings (the charges were first filed in 1973, but
the case was not heard by the court until 1984, and the decision not issued until 1986), the
Court found that the EEOC’s statistical analysis did not, in itself, prove discrimination. Whether
or not Sears discriminated against women in these jobs, however, the statistics did demonstrate
conclusively that women in retailing did face severe inequality. This has not changed in the
intervening decades; a 2015 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that retail
saleswomen made 71.2% as much as their male colleagues, as opposed to the 81.1% of their col-
leagues’ salaries made by women in other fields (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2016).
Retail workers also face new problems, most important among them the rise of part-time
employment. A 2013 study cosponsored by the Retail Action Project and the Murphy Center
for Labor Studies found that between 2003 and 2013, the number of involuntary part-time
workers (part-time retail workers looking for full-time work) had more than tripled in number;
by March 2014, 7.4 million American workers were involuntary part-time workers, many of
them in the retail industry. To make matters worse, managers in many stores have introduced
just-in-time scheduling, which requires workers to be available for work on less than 24 hours’
notice and often gives workers very little notice about whether they will have any work at all
the next day, making scheduling anything outside of work tremendously difficult (Luce, Ham-
mad, and Sipe 2016).
Retail work has, unquestionably, changed over the century and a half during which workers
have attempted to organise to make their lives better.The rise and fall of unions, however, seems
to have not been the driving factor in these changes. Economic and population shifts, chang-
ing marketing strategies and a changing business environment have all played a role in making
the situation of retail workers today markedly different than that of the nineteenth century

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clerks who began organising. Unfortunately, those changes have not, on the whole, substantially
improved retail workers’ always difficult circumstances.

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 16
RETAIL MANAGEMENT
Martin Purvis

Introduction
All retailers, no matter where and when they traded, and on whatever basis and scale, will have
had managerial decisions to make; about the location of their business, how best to obtain and
manage stock, what to sell and at what price, what forms of payment to accept, how to keep
costs in check and how to record receipts and expenses. Nor were such decisions simply a func-
tion of routine trading. Many retailers would have reflected more strategically on whether and
how to expand their business; by selling new lines, by greater promotional activity, by employing
more staff, and by investing capital in larger or additional premises. Only latterly, and chiefly in
bigger businesses, have such decisions become the preserve of senior staff specifically identified
as managers, working within an organisational structure which distanced them from the shop
floor. At other times, as remains true for many small retailers today, the full range of managerial
responsibilities has been assumed by a single proprietor, or by an owning family, still closely
involved in everyday trading.
Yet, for all its importance in ensuring that goods flow efficiently from producers to consum-
ers, retail management has rarely been subjected to sustained historical investigation. Despite
Chandler’s (1977, 1990) example, retailing receives short shrift in most mainstream business and
management histories. Nor have calls for closer connections between studies of past and present
been widely answered by researchers interested in contemporary retail management (Alexander
2016; Savitt 1989). Retail historians, meanwhile, have frequently focused on the outcomes of
managers’ decisions – evident in the development of new forms and formats, and the rise and
fall of specific businesses – rather than exploring managerial structures and decision-making
processes. Only gradually has such work begun to engage with wider arguments about the
implications of management for organisational performance (Alexander 2015). Retail history
is, moreover, partial in its coverage; paying disproportionate attention to individual larger busi-
nesses. Company histories and biographies of leading retailers are also inconsistent in quality.
Some are rich in empirical detail; but too many are uncritical and formulaic, offering few mana-
gerial insights. Given the limited documentation of past practice, especially for smaller family-
owned businesses, redressing the balance is not easy.
Yet not all is gloom. We can draw on a rich literature which, whilst often chiefly concerned
with other matters, illuminates aspects of managerial practice and the evolution of management

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structures in retailing. As noted this literature reveals most about the workings of the large-scale
retail businesses of the modern era, which frequently grew beyond the managerial capabilities
of any single individual. It is thus amongst department stores and multiple retailers that we often
find the clearest evidence of managerial innovation, of the complexity of change as an experi-
mental and contested process, and of the impact of management decision-making on business
performance. Much of the following discussion focuses, therefore, on retailers’ responses to the
challenges of managing at scale, and of co-ordinating increasingly large and spatially dispersed
branch networks, during the century between 1850 and 1950.
We cannot, however, assume that major stores have always maintained the highest managerial
standards, or that effective retail management has ever been confined to such operations. The
demise of familiar brands since the financial crash of 2008 confirms that even substantial retail-
ers can be undermined by inadequate, inflexible or complacent management. Equally important
is that we recognise the part played in modern retailing by a multitude of smaller shopkeep-
ers. Although often dismissed as laggards, independent retailers sometimes displayed managerial
skills that rivalled their larger counterparts. Indeed, their ideas and methods arguably exerted a
greater influence than is generally acknowledged upon the “revolutionary” forms of large-scale
retailing that developed from the nineteenth century onwards.This chapter thus attends initially
to retail management amongst independent businesses, before turning to department and chain
store development. In so doing it considers not only the ways in which key aspects of retail
management evolved between the eighteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, but also why
such change appeared necessary and how it was enacted. Geographically, greatest attention is
paid to Western Europe and North America, but discussion of the transmission of ideas between
particular national contexts will take us further afield.

Managing on a small scale – independent retailers

Small-scale retailing has generally been characterised by organisational simplicity, with mana-
gerial functions being discharged by a single owner, or owning family. Indeed, small business
structures often echoed those of the family; with proprietors exercising “parental” supervision
over the work of relatives, and of apprentices and other paid employees, who sometimes formed
part of the retailer’s household. In other respects, however, the differing levels of competence
exhibited by individual shopkeepers, the variety of circumstances in which they operated and
the wide range of trades involved, make it difficult to discern common managerial characteris-
tics. Before the advent of industrialised mass production, retailers were often judged as much for
their knowledge of the products which they sold, and for their skills in producing and processing
their own merchandise, as they were for more abstract understanding of business organisation.
Perhaps partly as a result, efforts to characterise independent retailers often imply only a limited
interest in the finer points of retail management, or in the pursuit of managerial innovation.
At times and places when independent shopkeepers have been most numerous – particularly
in the expanding urban settlements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North
America – only a minority made more than a marginal living. Retailing presented few entry
barriers, so that small ventures were frequently started by individuals with little or no capital,
education or commercial experience. Success was represented by the establishment of an endur-
ing business, even if this entailed long working hours and the exploitation of family labour. But
reports from Britain, Germany and the United States indicate that thousands of shopkeepers
failed every year; defeated not just by growing competition, but also by their own flawed under-
standing of purchasing, stock control, account keeping and credit management (Douglas 1935;
Strasser 1989). Such naivety was rarer amongst more substantial independent retailers. But the

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competent management of routine business which apparently characterised this latter group has
often been taken as confirmation of the innate conservatism of established family firms. The
proprietors of such businesses – including the Banbury shopkeepers studied by Stacey (1960) –
are portrayed as risk averse, disdainful of modern business methods, unwilling to countenance
expansion that would erode their personal proprietorial control and ultimately more concerned
with preserving their social status than with maximising profits.
Whilst claims about the limitations of shopkeepers’ managerial and entrepreneurial abilities
are often justified, they cannot be taken as a judgement upon all independent retailers (Phillips
and Alexander 2005; Spellman 2016). A minority of individuals – blessed with greater ability,
ambition and good fortune than their neighbours – created substantial businesses. Indeed, the
origins of many department and chain stores can be traced to a single modest shop. Nor was
independent retailers’ ability to confound predictions of their demise entirely a product of iner-
tia, or of the legal protection afforded by some governments. Successful shopkeepers may have
exhibited little formal understanding of managerial principles, but experience and knowledge of
the community which they served provided invaluable insights into which items their customers
would demand most frequently, the prices they could afford to pay, how best to present goods
and the creditworthiness of potential purchasers (de Grazia 2005; Spiekermann 2006). Such
knowledge, moreover, was applied not just to maintaining a store’s existing business, but also to
developing new lines and services, even if only on a modest scale. These are aspects of retailing
about which we know frustratingly little, largely because of the lack of documentary evidence.
Recent research has, however, drawn on sources including diaries, account books, advertising
and trade publications to reveal something of shopkeepers’ practices in specific contexts. As the
following sections discuss, such work confirms the managerial sophistication of some independ-
ent retailers; both in pioneering ways of working that were subsequently more fully developed
by others, and in adapting the methods of larger businesses for their own purposes.

Foreshadowing retail revolution

Our knowledge of retailers’ methods in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England
chiefly reflects the practices of relatively prosperous traders selling higher-order goods in major
urban centres. These individuals doubtless exhibited a degree of managerial ability and a capac-
ity for innovation that were rare amongst contemporaries. But some practices first identified
amongst metropolitan traders have also been detected in humbler provincial contexts (Stobart
and Hann 2004; Walsh 1995). Even if they were atypical these progressive retailers provide valu-
able evidence of the emergence of recognisably modern commercial practice (Walsh 1999).
Taking advantage of the decay of legal and customary constraints upon retailing, and spurred
on by an associated increase in competition, many displayed ‘enterprise and adaptability’ both in
day-to-day business and in expanding their trading activities (Cox 2000, p. 227).
Such enterprise is evident in the unusually full surviving records of provincial shopkeepers
William Stout of Lancaster and Abraham Dent of Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland; both of
whom developed complex and geographically extensive networks of suppliers so as to secure
a wide range of goods at advantageous prices (Stobart 2012). Contacts were also cultivated
as sources of intelligence about changing fashions, new goods and the wider state of trade.
Progressive retailers, particularly in trades such as drapery and footwear, were equally active
in marketing their wares to potential purchasers; investing in shop fittings and lighting, and
developing window displays (Riello 2006; Walsh 1995). Shopkeepers also attended to the
internal organisation of their stores; as a direct contribution to increased operational efficiency
and as a means of conveying their managerial skills to customers. The creation of structured

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systems for the storage and display of goods allowed retailers to demonstrate the range of their
stock, minimise losses caused by damage or contamination, and improve customer service by
ensuring that items could be readily located. Indeed, some larger eighteenth-century businesses
found it advantageous to organise their premises as a series of separate areas dealing with par-
ticular categories of goods, each with their own specialist staff. Such traders foreshadowed the
organisational practices of later department stores in other ways. Fixed prices and cash-only sales
speeded up transactions and reduced the need for close proprietorial supervision. It thus became
easier to delegate routine transactions to employees and apprentices, whether within a single
store, or – as was true of emergent footwear chains trading in Regency London and provincial
centres including Brighton, Bath, Norwich and Liverpool – in branch outlets (Riello 2006).
Little of this would have been possible without careful bookkeeping and attention to finan-
cial management; whether in respect of supplier payments, customer credit or receipts for
goods sold. Standards in such matters must have varied enormously. But mathematics and basic
accountancy formed part of the education received by more substantial English tradesmen from
at least the sixteenth century onwards. Indeed, it was in this field that some of the earliest com-
mercial textbooks were produced to disseminate good practice, including double-entry book-
keeping. Business success was thus, in part, a product of what later centuries would formalise
as management training, communicated between the generations in trading families, between
masters and apprentices, but also through instruction manuals. The most famous of these books,
Daniel Defoe’s The Complete English Tradesman, with its comments on shop location and design,
the importance of civility to customers, managing credit and bookkeeping, was thus a prototype
for many retail management textbooks (Cox 2000; Stobart 2012).

Rising to the competitive challenge

If eighteenth-century shopkeepers pioneered modern retail methods, a focus on the later nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries reveals independent retailers’ ability to respond positively
to challenging circumstances. Efforts to ensure their own survival in competitive markets led
shopkeepers to explore ways to increase operational efficiency, boost sales and reduce costs. In
some contexts, moreover, shopkeepers abandoned their traditional individualism to cooperate
with other retailers – locally and nationally – and with manufacturers and suppliers. Inde-
pendent retailers were potentially enthusiastic adopters of new technologies, provided that they
appeared relevant and affordable. Automatic cash registers, produced in the United States from
the 1880s onwards, were one such technology, promising an immediate check on the compe-
tence and honesty of sales staff, and greater ease and accuracy in account keeping. Indeed, it was
independent shopkeepers, rather than large-scale retailers, who made greatest initial use of cash
registers and whose experience contributed to the technology’s refinement (Spellman 2016).
At the same time, in both Europe and the United States, the trade press and technical manuals
offered shopkeepers practical advice about other ways to boost their business, including inno-
vations in advertising and display, modernisation of their premises and reorganisation of store
layouts (Alexander et al. 1999; Cochoy 2010).
Independent traders were thus exposed to arguments for a rational approach to retailing
which paralleled developments, explored below, in department and chain store management.
But documentary limitations frustrate efforts to gauge the extent to which shopkeepers’ outlook
and methods changed in practice. Particular proposals – including self-service, which increas-
ingly featured in advice to American grocers during the mid-twentieth century (Cochoy 2016;
Deutsch 2010) – represented too decisive a break with tradition for some retailers to counte-
nance. Nor did those who saw the commercial logic of new methods always possess the financial

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and organisational means to implement them. Even relatively modest changes probably spread
slowly and selectively, at least initially.Work on the take-up of cash registers, using manufacturers’
sales records, confirms that early adopters were a tiny minority of all shopkeepers in the United
States (Spellman 2016). Aggressive marketing, especially by the National Cash Register Com-
pany, extended demand to Western Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa
and Japan by the 1900s. But annual sales in specific national contexts rarely numbered more than
a few hundred (Haberstroh 2013). Germany proved a receptive market; but even here barely
half of all retail establishment had a cash register by the 1920s. Indeed, only a quarter of German
retailers reportedly kept regular accounts; a situation mirrored in Britain and the United States
(de Grazia 2005; Douglas 1935; Tedlow 1990).
Technical and managerial innovation by individual shopkeepers was, however, reinforced
by strategic alliances with other retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. Initially such opera-
tions were often defensive, aiming to kerb competition and price cutting. But joint initiatives
developed in ways that contributed positively to retail modernisation. In interwar Britain
some local trade associations collaborated with Art Schools and Technical Colleges to provide
instruction in window dressing and display; others coordinated joint advertising and pro-
motional initiatives. The latter included shopping festivals, intended not just as a stimulus to
trade, but also as an encouragement to shopkeepers to raise service standards and to invest in
modernising their premises. Efforts to replicate the vertical integration and scale economies
achieved by larger retailers, through joint purchasing of stock and requisites such as wrapping
paper did not, however, flourish in Britain. By contrast Germany, with its traditional regard
for the Mittelstand, proved fertile territory for co-operative purchasing amongst independent
retailers. Local ventures established during the late nineteenth century subsequently com-
bined to create national associations. Two of the largest such co-operatives, Edeka (founded in
1907) and Rewe (established in 1926) were still substantial forces in German grocery retailing
when converted into corporate entities in the 1980s (Wortmann 2004). Retailer purchasing
co-operatives also took root in the United States from the 1880s onwards, particularly in the
drug and grocery trades.
Alternative joint-buying initiatives were promoted by wholesalers keen to protect their own
sales. In their most developed form these operations created voluntary symbol groups which
involved independent shopkeepers in identifying with a common brand. The implications
of membership for retail management extended beyond the central contractual relationship
between retailer and supplier. Shopkeepers surrendered some of their independence as they
were expected not only to make a minimum weekly stock purchase, but also to uphold com-
mon service standards and to display group signage. In some instances members were required
to purchase equipment supplied by the group, or to submit trading figures in a prescribed fash-
ion. In return, however, they gained access to centrally provided services, including advertising
and publicity material, insurance, managerial training and advice about business modernisation.
The influence of voluntary symbol groups was greatest in the United States, where operations
such as Royal Blue Stores and the Independent Grocers Alliance emerged in the 1920s; and
in parts of continental Europe, particularly the Netherlands, where groups including SPAR
expanded rapidly from the 1930s (Deutsch 2010; Jefferys and Knee 1962). By contrast, such
organisations did not take off in Britain until the 1950s. They were eclipsed little more than
a decade later by the rise of the supermarket, and the spread of cash and carry wholesaling as
a more flexible means of reducing independent retailers’ costs (Fulop 1962). However, some
of the functions which voluntary groups provided elsewhere, in particular the modernisation
of publicity and display, and a willingness to supply small retailers at competitive prices, were
partially fulfilled by major manufacturers.

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Managing on a large scale – department stores

If growing competition created managerial challenges for independent shopkeepers, the devel-
opment of large-scale retailing produced its own distinctive difficulties. The department stores
which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, and subsequently spread
elsewhere, were retail businesses on a scale that had few precedents. Their appeal reflected, in
large part, the diversity of goods sold at affordable prices. Commercial success therefore required
contacts with multiple suppliers; the search for volume at competitive prices often leading to
direct dealing with producers. The department store’s business model also demanded fast stock
turnover. Operational systems had thus to be capable of handling a large volume of business; and
of working effectively at speed when dealing with the transfer of physical goods, and associated
flows of orders, invoices and payments. Store premises, too, were substantial; encompassing not
only spaces for selling, but also for the production, inspection, pricing and storage of goods, for
mail-order trading, for financial and administrative functions and for staff facilities, sometimes
including residential accommodation (Iarocci 2014; Whitaker 2011). Such businesses became
major employers. By the early 1920s, Macy’s of New York had 12,000 permanent employees,
whilst Bresee’s, a small-town store in upstate New York, had nearly 200 on its payroll (Graham
2000; Howard 2008). This increasing scale and complexity of operations prompted managerial
innovation.
In practice the growth of individual businesses was often incremental. Many major stores
had modest origins; as wholesale dealers which started selling on a retail basis, or as drapers
which added lines in jewellery, fancy goods and furniture. Expansion, moreover, often reflected
an opportunistic search for new business, rather than pursuit of a grand strategy (Miller 1981).
Managerial developments tended to have a similarly experimental and evolutionary character.
At times stores drew inspiration from other large organisations, including railways and the mili-
tary. But there were also important continuities with the managerial ethos of the family firm,
not least in the importance of store founders and their heirs as the public face of the business –
projecting an image variously as commercial visionary, showman and paternalist – and as the
ultimate, even dictatorial, authority sanctioning all key decisions (Belisle 2011; Miller 1981). In
some smaller department stores, such as Bresee’s in upstate New York and Power’s of Montana,
individual proprietors retained direct control over routine operations, as well as strategic deci-
sion-making (Klassen 1992; Howard 2008). But expansion usually required the recruitment of
additional managerial expertise, at senior levels and throughout the store. Responsibilities within
this hierarchy were defined by the individual’s place in an increasingly formal division of stores
into sub-units or departments, each with their own management team.
The origins of the departmental model are unclear and, as previously noted, probably predate
the department store per se. The model was, however, applied at least as early as the 1840s by
growing stores such as A.T. Stewart of New York, creating an organisational structure that argu-
ably would ‘have looked efficient even by modern standards’ (Resseguie 1965, p. 314). Some
departments dealt with functions, including financial record-keeping and store maintenance,
which served the business as a whole. But at Stewarts, as elsewhere, the operation’s core was
constituted by a series of merchandising departments specialising in particular lines of goods.
Each was headed by a buyer, responsible not only for sourcing goods from suppliers, but also
for setting retail prices and all aspects of selling. Buyers’ powers did not usually extend to staff
recruitment, which was handled centrally by the store superintendent; but they were frequently
influential in determining the staffing levels and personnel of their own departments (Benson
1986). Considerable authority was thus conferred on buyers; reflecting a belief that business suc-
cess was dependent on skilled buying of fashionable and keenly priced goods by individuals with

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specialist knowledge of their own particular lines of trade. Selling, by comparison, was regarded
as a secondary function.
The managerial model which came to be associated with the late-nineteenth-century
department store was something of a hybrid in terms of the relationships which it fostered. As
stores expanded they became bureaucratic and impersonal workplaces. Operational efficiency
was seen to require a clear, if increasingly complex, division of labour. Alongside sales staff, stores
employed a growing body of other workers, including window dressers, stock controllers, cash-
iers, bookkeepers, seamstresses, packers, cleaners, maintenance engineers and delivery drivers.
Effort was invested in standardising and documenting the tasks that each would perform. Indeed,
workers were increasingly judged on the basis of their conformity with these norms, which
often extended to matters of personal appearance and morality. Application and efficiency, espe-
cially amongst sales staff, were encouraged by linking reward to performance. Commission
on sales was a necessary supplement to low basic pay, and longer-term loyalty was fostered by
systems of internal promotion to supervisory and managerial positions. By contrast, even trivial
misdemeanours – including, at Macy’s of New York, unauthorised sitting and talking – could
prompt instant dismissal. This emphasis on discipline and conformity was, however, tempered
by efforts to refashion the personal bonds between employer and employee which characterised
smaller family firms. Institutionalised paternalism – evident in subsidised meals, health, educa-
tional and leisure programmes, staff benevolent funds and celebratory social events – encouraged
staff to identify themselves as part of an extended family constituted by the store and its owners
(Benson 1986; Miller 1981).
Stores were also structural hybrids, combining centralised direction of functions including
personnel management and financial accounting with significant autonomy for individual mer-
chandising departments. It was a model which initially secured success, but which contained the
seeds of later tensions.The identification of buyers as temperamental and authoritarian figures is
a recurring theme in writings about department stores. Inter-departmental relations, moreover,
were often unhealthily competitive, with buyers prioritising the interests of their own fiefdom
over those of the wider store (Benson 1986). The operation of stores as a fractious collection of
quasi-autonomous units was widely tolerated on both sides of the Atlantic – including Macy’s
of New York and Bon Marché of Paris – whilst sales and profits continued to grow. Some stores,
indeed, leased out particular departments to other specialist retailers (Perkins and Freedman
1999). It was thus understood that units with store-wide functions were intended chiefly to
relieve buyers of burdensome distractions, rather than to constrain their activities. Even financial
accounting had a relatively lowly status in most nineteenth-century department stores as an
exercise in routine record keeping.
Proprietors and senior managers, keen to ensure that popular merchandise was always avail-
able, but without accumulating costly stock surpluses, attempted some control over buyers. This
usually entailed setting limits to individual buyer’s spending or, in the case of John Wanamaker
of Philadelphia, restricting external advertising to goods deemed worthy of carrying the store’s
name (Perkins and Freedman 1999). Despite internal opposition, the distance between some
American stores and metropolitan suppliers also encouraged them to depute buying duties to
resident agents in New York and Chicago. But proprietors generally lacked both the means and
inclination to subject buyers’ performance to closer scrutiny. Store-wide costs were frequently
allocated to merchandise departments in proportion to their sales, without regard to their spe-
cific origins. Stock-taking, meanwhile, was a laborious and infrequent process which did little to
inform future planning, or to highlight poor purchasing by buyers (Walsh and Jeacle 2003).This
managerial ethos changed only slowly even in stores which, like Bon Marché of Paris, were by
the 1880s compiling statistics for sales and other indicators of departmental performance (Miller

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1981). Senior figures perhaps understood the potential managerial value of such information,
but few felt the need for greater intervention.

Experiments in “scientific” management

Attitudes would, however, change later in the nineteenth century as major stores struggled to
sustain their growth. Initially this encouraged greater attention to selling; prompting innovation
such as the bargain basement, popularised by Filene’s of Boston, and a modest redistribution of
authority from departmental buyers to the store superintendent responsible for staffing. Often
the superintendent acquired an enhanced status as the head of a newly constituted team of
floorwalkers who supervised the daily work of departmental sales staff. Intended to reinforce
customer service standards, such developments risked creating organisational confusion. Lines
of authority were blurred as sales staff appeared answerable to two superiors, often falling foul
of antagonism between buyers and floorwalkers. More substantial reforms were thus required to
enable department stores to respond to increased retail competition, the effects of suburbanisa-
tion and transport improvements and wider economic volatility.
As governments and manufacturing industry were drawn to the writings of Frederick W.
Taylor and other advocates of workplace planning and rationalisation, so leading retailers also
came to see a solution to their own difficulties in “scientific” management ( Jacobs 2007). Such
thinking was not entirely new; department stores were early adopters of technological innova-
tions – including telephones, escalators and pneumatic cash transfer systems – which promised
to increase the speed and efficiency of particular tasks. Moreover, some individual businesses
had previously used sales and stock holding records to inform purchasing decisions. Marshall
Field’s wholesaling division in Chicago began working in this way in the 1870s, and its methods
perhaps spread to its customer stores in smaller American cities (Twyman 1954). Former Mar-
shall Field employee Gordon Selfridge implemented a similar system when establishing his own
London store in 1909, in turn influencing Harrods and other British retailers (Scott and Walker
2012). In Germany, meanwhile, Salman Schocken of Kaufhaus Schocken independently devised
an organisational structure which employed a central statistical office to monitor income and
expenditure, and to support managerial decision-making (Lerner 2015). Only gradually, how-
ever, did such experiments come to be accepted as normal working practice. Research into the
rationalisation of retail management was published at least as early as the 1900s. But even in the
United States, where such thinking originated, change in retail practice became widespread only
during the interwar years (Walsh and Jeacle 2003).Thus, Graham (2000, p. 285) identifies Lillian
Gilbreth’s work with Macy’s between 1925 and 1928 as the first close collaboration between a
store and a ‘bona fide scientific management consultant’. Such initiatives were encouraged by
the depression of the early 1920s; declining retail profits being widely, if often unfairly, attributed
to poor purchasing by departmental buyers. Efforts to eliminate waste and promote efficiency
thus assumed an increasing importance.
Much of Gilbreth’s work with Macy’s focused on efforts to increase the economy with
which individual workers executed routine tasks. Macy’s own staff subsequently applied similar
principles to store planning; recording, for example, customer movement patterns to identify
optimum locations for particular sales departments, lifts and elevators. In Paris, meanwhile,
Galeries Lafayette first engaged with scientific management in an effort to rationalise the opera-
tions of an associated clothing plant (Champsaur and Cailluet 2010). The wider application of
“science” to retailing, however, had particular implications for the role and status of departmen-
tal buyers. Reliance on their individual judgement about stock gave way to a conviction that
purchasing must be informed by systematic analyses of past sales and research into consumers’

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tastes and preferences. Only in this way, advocates of scientific management claimed, could
retailers ensure that their stores would always be full of the goods which their customers wanted
to buy, in exactly the right mixture of styles, sizes and colours. Informed purchasing and devel-
opments such as the model stock plan – promoted by Boston store proprietor Edward Filene as
a means to streamline stocks by focusing on the fastest selling and most profitable items – prom-
ised not only to maximise sales, but also to reduce costs by making it easier to order goods in
bulk, minimising the capital locked up in accumulated stock, and reducing the need to discount
slow-selling merchandise (Savitt 1999).
Crucially, this new perspective identified the store as a whole as the primary operational unit.
Evolving ideas about managerial structures were captured in a series of interwar publications.
In particular, the ideas of Paul Mazur (1927) – an American retailer turned banker and consult-
ant – became a model for department store organisation. Although stores still appeared to their
customers as a series of product-based departments, Mazur outlined a managerial structure which
grouped activity across the entire operation into four functional divisions: merchandising (buying
and selling goods); communications (advertising, display, promotional activities); store manage-
ment (personnel, stock storage and inventory control, customer deliveries, maintenance); and a
controlling division responsible for financial accounting (see Figure 16.1). The size and impor-
tance of their workforce subsequently led many stores to identify personnel management as a sep-
arate division. But this refinement does not alter the main implication of Mazur’s work; authority
would henceforth be wielded by those individuals who headed the major store-wide divisions.
Mazur’s model promised greater rationality in internal organisation, reducing costs, eliminat-
ing duplication, and placing key functions under the supervision of senior specialists. In practice
it did not always enable stores fully to achieve these goals; tensions often remained between buy-
ing and selling staff within newly established merchandising departments (Wood 2011). But the
reformed structure addressed the primary concerns of proprietors and senior managers. Buyers
with product expertise and supplier contacts remained important figures, but increasingly they
worked to execute store-wide purchasing strategies defined by merchandise managers. Central
control of staff recruitment, training and retention was also confirmed. Equally significant was
the emphasis placed on the collection and analysis of financial information about all aspects
of store operations; as a means of reviewing current performance and to inform future plan-
ning. Employees were increasingly judged on the extent of their contribution to growing store
revenues, or reducing operational costs. Regular sales and profits reviews also became a vital
means of maintaining the discipline which stores sought to impose on buyers. New accounting
techniques were thus important managerial tools. In particular, the retail price method of inven-
tory control allowed a constant check to be kept on stock levels, and the ready identification of
losses due to theft or the discounting of surplus stock (Savitt 1999; Walsh and Jeacle 2003). The
interwar years thus saw the elevation of the financial controller, or company accountant, to a
prominent role in store management.
Scientific management did not claim to increase sales and profits only by enabling stores to
make informed stocking decisions. A similar logic was applied to the allocation of store staff and
floor space, aiming to focus resources on the fastest selling and most profitable merchandise. In
parallel, the emergent science of psychology promised greater understanding of what motivated
customers to buy and how sales staff could encourage purchasing (Chessel 1999). Salesmanship
training therefore sought not only to improve product knowledge and service standards, but also
to teach staff to recognise supposed customer types, each of which required handling in par-
ticular ways to maximise sales. Engagement with psychology extended to staff recruitment with
the aim of identifying individuals with the greatest aptitude for particular tasks. This was often
allied to wider efforts to promote a more positive labour regime, emphasising staff retention and

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 Retail management

President

General Manager

Research Assistant Assistant to

Director General Manager General Manager

Financial Publicity Merchandising Store

Controller Manager Manager Manager
Merchandise Control

Receiving & Marking

Customer Service
Expense Control

Public Relations

Merchandising

Merchandising

Merchandising

Warehousing

Maintenance
Advertising

Workroom

Personnel
Divisional

Divisional

Divisional
Displays
Records

Manager
Manager

Manager
Credit

Buyer Buyer Buyer

Stockpeople

Stockpeople

Stockpeople

Stockpeople

Stockpeople

Stockpeople

Figure 16.1 Mazur’s Organisational Plan for Department Store Management

Source: Adapted from P. Mazur, Principles of Organisation Applied to Modern Retailing. New York NY: Harper, 1927.

welfare. Analyses of work routines thus promised not just efficiency, but also an improved work-
ing environment, greater job satisfaction and reduced staff fatigue (Graham 2000). In parallel,
training and internal communications grew in importance as a means of encouraging identi-
fication with the business. Stores established staff magazine; including Filene’s of Boston (The
Echo), individual branches of the Hudson’s Bay Company (The Bay Builder, The Bayonet and The
Beaver) and Brown, Muff of Bradford (The Beam) (Miller 2006). Scientific management thus
reinforced the logic of established forms of institutionalised paternalism, whilst rendering them
more systematic (Miller 1981). Additional resources were invested in health care, pensions, sick
pay, sports and social facilities and paid holidays; whilst in the 1900s Shepard’s of Providence and
Filene’s of Boston were amongst the earliest stores to appoint managerial staff with specific wel-
fare responsibilities. A minority of businesses, including John Lewis of London, went further by
instituting employee profit-sharing (Cox 2010). But pay scales generally became more regular,
promotion processes more transparent and discipline less arbitrary (Belisle 2007; Benson 1986).

From America to the world

Retailing’s embrace of scientific management was initially an American phenomenon, pio-
neered by stores including Macy’s of New York and Filene’s of Boston. Senior business figures
not only refined their own operations, but also encouraged efforts to identify and disseminate
managerial best practice. Major stores sponsored the creation of departments of commerce and
business as centres for research and teaching at American universities, including Harvard and

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New York (Leach 1993). Edward Filene also helped to create groupings amongst stores them-
selves, including the National Retail Dry Goods Association (founded in 1911) and the Retail
Research Association (dating from 1917), aiming to foster interest in scientific management and
to collect data to inform continuing investigation.
Recent research has helped to trace the spread of efforts to promote scientific management
from North America to Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand (de Grazia 2005; Roberts
2003). Although little was published elsewhere during the interwar decades, American writings
on “scientific” retailing were read increasingly widely. A German translation of Mazur’s work on
store management was, for example, published in 1928. Training manuals and other documents
created by stores themselves also circulated internationally; the collection amassed by the per-
sonnel manager of the David Jones store of Sydney, Australia included material from the United
States, Canada and Britain (Miller 2006). At the same time leading department stores in other
national contexts began to strengthen their own institutional links. British stores, for example,
established the Retail Distributors Association in 1920. By the early 1930s the Association was
co-operating with the London School of Economics to produce an annual survey of store
operating costs similar to the pioneering analysis undertaken by the Harvard Bureau of Business
Research (Scott and Walker 2012).
Evidently, too, the interwar years saw a growth in direct international exchanges between
leading industry figures. Store owners and senior managers from Europe, Japan, Australia, New
Zealand and elsewhere visited the United States to study developments firsthand (Champsaur
and Cailluet 2010; Maeda 1998; Roberts 2003). Trans-Atlantic links, along with British and
Swedish influences, were also important in the development of France’s first retail training
school, under the aegis of the Paris Chamber of Commerce (Chessel 1999). Edward Filene,
meanwhile, was an ardent internationalist; in politics as well as commerce. He visited Europe
frequently, developing extensive personal and professional links with department store own-
ers; and championing institutions such as the International Chamber of Commerce. In the
late 1920s, Filene’s own philanthropic foundation supported Emile Bernheim, of L’Innovation
department store in Brussels, in his efforts to establish what would become the International
Association of Department Stores (IADS). Unlike many international projects the IADS was
not wrecked by the deteriorating economic and political climate. Meetings and exchanges of
statistical information were supplemented by a system of critical store visits which aimed to
provide member firms with comprehensive advice about potential operational improvements
(Pasdermadjian 1950).
Yet whilst the general pattern of contacts is relatively well-known, understanding of the
spread of particular ideas and innovations remains partial. Few of the individuals or organisations
involved in early efforts to render retail management scientific have been the focus of sustained
or recent research. Pasdermadijan’s (1950) history of the IADS is dated and reveals more about
the principles of scientific management than it does about the Association’s impact on store
management. In Britain work using data collected by the Retail Distributors Association has
shed new light on the economics of department store trading, challenging claims that stores
failed to match the efficiency gains made elsewhere (Scott and Walker 2012). But in most cases
we still know little about how such gains were achieved, the specific influences which inspired
them, or the degree to which it was necessary to adapt internationally circulating ideas to reflect
specific local circumstances.
There are, however, good reasons to think that change during the interwar years was nei-
ther swift nor universal. Whilst IADS membership was multinational – including representa-
tives from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy and
Spain – it never exceeded ten stores. The Association’s impact was, therefore, limited beyond

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a self-selecting retail elite (Champsaur and Cailluet 2010; de Grazia 2005). Stores, moreover,
were not equally willing to share commercially sensitive information through such organisa-
tions. Communication constraints may thus partly explain why techniques such as the retail
price method of inventory control were not always implemented effectively when first intro-
duced into new national contexts ( Jeacle and Walsh 2008). Even in the United States, smaller
stores such as Bresee’s in New York State changed their managerial structures and practices only
slowly; not necessarily because senior staff were unaware of new thinking, but because they
questioned its relevance for their own business (Howard 2008). Indeed, such a stance was argu-
ably logical, given evidence of the problems created for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada
when scientific management principles were applied without regard for local market conditions
(Monod 1986). Restructuring of the managerial hierarchy was also a source of tensions within
retail businesses. Store controllers’ assertion of their new authority was sometimes accompanied
by attacks on the competence and honesty of departmental buyers. Buyers, in turn, resented
their subordination, so that companies’ efforts to implement new accounting and stock control
systems could turn into long-running battles (Benson 1986; Jeacle and Walsh 2008).
Labour and gender historians also offer an important critical appraisal of the motivations for,
and impacts of, new approaches to personnel management. Such work challenges accounts of
welfarism as evidence of employer benevolence that appear in company histories. Instead a pic-
ture emerges which emphasises managerial self-interest; the desire to create a more docile and
efficient workforce, to deflect external criticism of previous labour practices and the associated
threat of state regulation, and to obstruct the spread of trade unionism.Welfare policies may also
have exacerbated gender inequalities. This was not just because a predominantly male manage-
ment became a paternalistic provider of benefits to a dependent and increasingly female work-
force. Male and female employees were often treated differently, with women being exposed to
a welfare regime which was arguably infantilising in stressing their need for protection (Belisle
2007). Whilst recreation and training for men focused on career development, provision for
women placed greater emphasis on promoting middle-class notions of social respectability and
their future roles as wives and mothers. This is not, however, to imply uncritical acceptance of
these values by employees, despite their enthusiasm for the associated benefits. Sometimes, as was
true of Australian stores studied by Reekie (1987), workers asserted their own control over pro-
vision such as convalescent funds. More generally, staff magazines were used to express employ-
ees’ frustration about the regulation of their working lives. Workers also challenged managerial
expectations about conduct by establishing their own collective standards. Although individual
studies disagree about the extent of such behaviour, practices such as deliberate inattention to
customers and theft of goods from the store sometimes assumed significance as forms of resist-
ance to managerial control (Belisle 2007; Benson 1986).

Managing at a distance – multiple retailing

Early twentieth-century interest in the application of “science” to retail management was not
confined to department stores. Leading multiple retailers were equally enthusiastic advocates of
intelligent purchasing, rigorous stock control, planned allocation of store space and staff, cost
monitoring, and innovations in personnel management (Purvis 2015). Again, ideas pioneered
in the United States found their way to Europe and elsewhere. In part this reflected the over-
seas expansion of American retail capital; Woolworth’s, for example, exported its five-and-dime
store model to Britain (from 1909) and Germany (from 1927) (Godley 2003). A decade under
American ownership also prompted improvements in stock control and the supervision of local
store managers at Boots, Britain’s largest retail chemist (Chapman 1974). But European retailers

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were increasingly active in emulating the formats and managerial methods of popular American
stores.This was evident in the interwar transformation of Marks and Spencer from an ailing for-
mer penny bazaar into a successful variety store chain. But the fixed-price format was also taken
up more widely across Europe, not least by existing department stores in Germany, France, Bel-
gium and Italy, concerned that they would otherwise be excluded from emerging mass markets
(Furlough 1993). A similar story can be told about the later trans-Atlantic journey of self-service
retailing in the grocery trade, and its managerial implications both at company level and in the
individual store (Schröter 2008; Shaw et al. 2004).

Growth and the logic of centralisation

All manifestations of multiple retailing, however, posed distinctive managerial challenges as busi-
nesses considered how best to coordinate the operation of growing, and increasingly geographi-
cally dispersed, branch networks. The individual department stores already discussed were, of
course, sometimes part of retail chains, created by mergers or the expansion of city-centre stores
into secondary shopping districts. But these were often loose alliances, each outlet retaining its
own independence. Multiple retailing, by contrast, usually involves significant managerial cen-
tralisation; with decisions about the location, funding and design of stores, operating practices,
retail pricing, advertising and promotion, financial accounting and, especially, stock acquisition,
being taken at the company’s headquarters (Alexander 1997; Tedlow 1990). Indeed, centralisa-
tion is frequently seen as vital to multiple retailing’s success, given its role in creating a coher-
ent operation with a strong brand identity; in fostering relative organisational simplicity based
on procedures common to all stores; and in securing economies of scale and scope, not just in
sourcing stock, but also in business administration and store construction (Perkins and Freed-
man 1999).
In practice, however, the logic of centralisation was tempered by other considerations. Too
great a degree of uniformity risked demoralising staff and alienating customers by creating stores
which appeared impersonal, and insensitive to consumers’ varying tastes and financial means.
Growth might, moreover, create a business so large and complex that it could not be directed
effectively by a single owner, or central management team. In the early 1900s, Jesse Boot could
still claim personal knowledge of branches throughout his 300-strong chain of chemist’s shops,
located in some 150 English towns. But administrative lapses increased over the following dec-
ade as Boot aged, whilst store numbers increased by 50% (Chapman 1974). The managerial
challenge presented by multiple retailing varied with the commercial and geographical scale of
specific businesses. Multiples operating on a local or regional basis, and selling a limited range of
basic goods, might be dealing with an essentially homogeneous market that could be served by
centrally controlled clone stores. The same was less likely to be true of businesses selling indi-
vidually more expensive items or fashion goods, and of retailers who aspired to trade nationally
or internationally. But, large or small, most multiples faced questions about the distribution of
decision-making power between company headquarters, individual branches and any interme-
diate layers of management. The difficulty which companies experienced in determining the
most appropriate managerial balance between these various levels is an important theme in
Chandler’s (1977, 1990) work on corporate structures. Subsequent research, although uneven in
its coverage, has explored the ways in which businesses addressed these issues, and the impact of
particular geographical contexts, market conditions, company histories and individual personali-
ties on their decision-making.
The multiple retailers which emerged in Western Europe and North America in the late
nineteenth century varied in their origins. Some, some including the British footwear chain

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Stead and Simpson, were established by consumer goods producers as outlets for their products,
and were thus initially managed as divisions of what were essentially manufacturing compa-
nies. Others grew out of earlier franchising systems, as producers, including the Singer Sewing
Machine Company, sought greater control over retail sales. Many consumer co-operatives also
represented a form of multiple retailing, distinctive both in the collective ownership of the busi-
ness by its customers and the consequent potential for conflict over a society’s direction between
paid managers and elected representatives of the consumer members (Wilson et al. 2013). Most
multiple retailers, however, traced their origins back to a single store owned by the company’s
founding family.
Initial branch development was often limited, sporadic and localised. Family members and
trusted assistants were installed as managers of the new stores, working under close proprietorial
supervision (Raucher 1991). The American retailer J.C. Penney was distinctive in adopting a
model of co-ownership in which new store managers became partners in the business, helping
to fund expansion in return for a share of the profits. But here, too, new men were accepted
only at the personal discretion of Penney and his lieutenant E.C. Sams (Curry 1993). Success,
however, encouraged Penney’s to attempt large-scale expansion. Such growth required outside
investment, whilst also making it difficult for any individual to maintain direct control over the
entire branch network. It was at this point, therefore, that many family businesses were formally
incorporated. For Penney’s, which made the move in 1913, this entailed the reconstitution of a
loosely articulated series of overlapping partnerships into a single corporation. At the same time
proprietors drew on the experience of family members and other allies to develop a more sub-
stantial and organised company head office (Kruger 2012; Bookbinder 1993 explores a similar
phase in Marks and Spencer’s development). Such offices would become populated by specialist
staff with expertise in areas including buying, product development and testing, transport and
logistics, advertising and display, property acquisition and finance. With store-level management
no longer in the hands of the proprietor’s close confidents, multiple retailers also invested effort
in standardising branch operations. Store managers and their staff were thus expected to abide
by systems of rules and regulations akin to those which governed department store operations
(Raucher 1991).
The task of ensuring that individual branches maintained expected service and performance
standards was frequently devolved to a new group of experienced staff who functioned as inter-
mediaries between company headquarters and local stores. These inspectors or superintendents
usually oversaw territorially defined districts, paying regular visits to the stores under their
supervision. As well as monitoring the conduct of routine business and advising managers about
store improvements, inspectors also communicated orders and information from head office
throughout the branch network, and ensured the return flow of trading reports. At best this
was a recipe for decisive, if somewhat dictatorial, management, fostering consistent standards
and driving continued expansion. But, as the following section details, companies suffered as
their commercial development exposed the limitations of established operating practices and
managerial structures.

Searching for new structures

By the interwar years some multiple chains, particularly in the United States, had become too
large and geographically dispersed to be managed effectively from a single head office. Rather
than countenance unauthorised operational variations by individual store managers, companies
opted for planned decentralisation. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), which
by the mid-1920s operated over 14,000 grocery stores across the United States, was amongst

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the first to review its structure. From 1925, greater managerial responsibility was devolved to
six operating divisions, each accountable for around 2,500 stores, and charged with ensuring
that day-to-day trading was tailored to local market conditions. Yet the internal distribution of
power remained strongly in favour of a head office dominated by A&P’s owners, the Hartford
brothers. Divisional managers were expected to uphold company policy on stocking, pricing
and advertising, and to defer to head office in matters including the establishment or improve-
ment of stores. The consequent mismatch between the distribution of responsibility and power
would become a focus of discontent within the company (Walsh 1986).
Sears Roebuck, too, experienced protracted managerial uncertainty during the interwar
years (Chandler 1990). The company’s concentration of buying and all other major manage-
ment functions in Chicago – reflecting its origins as a mail-order retailer – proved increasingly
problematic during the later 1920s as Sears reacted to competition by establishing a national
chain of over 300 stores selling furniture, electrical appliances and other consumer durables.
This development strained the capacity of the company’s existing systems. But it also raised
questions which the central management team was ill-equipped to answer; about branch loca-
tion, manager recruitment and the selection of goods to reflect local demand. Efforts to resolve
these difficulties led to extended experimentation with alternative management structures.
Decentralisation during the early 1930s proved abortive as ambiguity regarding the respective
powers of the company’s financial, merchandise and operational managers in Chicago and new
tiers of regional management responsible for the branch network created conflict and duplica-
tion of effort. A brief return to centralisation was followed by an attempt to devolve much
greater responsibility to individual store managers. It was not, therefore, until the 1940s that
Sears implemented an enduring solution which saw full multi-functional authority transferred
to five new territorial divisions. Under this devolved model the centre played a largely advisory
and strategic role; decisions about store development and operation, including inventory, sales
promotion, financial management, personnel, and maintenance were taken at territorial level.
The structure preserved the ultimate logic of multiple retailing as all stock was still ordered
through the merchandise department in Chicago. However, territorial and store managers
gained the freedom to devise stocking plans and pricing strategies that were appropriate for
their particular markets.
The example of Sears Roebuck reveals the difficulties which businesses faced in respond-
ing to managerial challenges unmatched in the previous experience of most retail executives.
Indeed, Chandler (1990) advances the wider claim that companies tend to make significant
changes in managerial structures only when forced to do so by serious threats to their develop-
ment strategy. Chandler’s study also highlights the role of specific individuals in promoting, or
obstructing, change. In particular, he identifies the importance of Sears’ long-serving President,
Robert E. Wood, as the originator of the new retail strategy, but also as someone whose ten-
dency to value the personal abilities of individual managers over the development of systematic
management structures complicated the company’s search for a solution to its problems. The
greater degree of centralisation maintained throughout this period by Sears’s leading competitor,
Montgomery Ward, can similarly be linked to the autocratic tendencies of its CEO, Sewall Avery.
Other examples confirm that there was no singular solution to the challenge of managing at
a distance. As Woolworth’s developed its British operations from 1909 onwards it retained the
divisional structure which characterised its American parent, with district offices in Liverpool,
Birmingham and London (Seaton 2009). The same model was not, however, adopted by their
British rival Marks and Spencer which, although it employed district store inspectors, contin-
ued to stress direct contact between head office and branch managers. But Marks and Spencer’s

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evolution from penny bazaar to variety retailer saw increasing emphasis placed on the experi-
ence of store managers, who were charged with ensuring that their own outlet carried stock
which reflected the specifics of local demand, and with supplying sales intelligence to inform
purchasing by the company’s central buyers. Managers who failed to show the expected judge-
ment and application were just as likely to be reprimanded by head office as those who appeared
too independent (Purvis 2015).
Such diversity survived into the postwar era. As Alexander’s (2015) study of British grocery
chains Tesco and Sainsbury confirms, the histories and circumstances of particular companies,
and the personalities and prejudices of their individual leaders continued to shape management
structures. Only with the development from the 1980s onwards of computerised systems that
allow real-time monitoring of sales and automatically generate stock replenishment instructions
has there been a general shift towards close centralised control over the operations of individual
stores. Yet studies of today’s supermarket chains suggest that store managers value the limited
freedoms which they retain in matters of stocking and product promotion (Fuller et al. 2009).
Some, indeed, seem to seek ways to subvert, at least symbolically, centralised corporate control.
Experimentation and contestation have not entirely receded into managerial history.

Conclusion
Across retailing as a whole there has always been greater variety in managerial systems and com-
petencies – from the ordered to the chaotic; the collaborative to the dictatorial; the simple to
the complex – than any brief survey can convey. The functioning of particular businesses, both
large and small, has often reflected the personalities of individual owners and managers. Retail
development from the eighteenth century onwards has, however, posed a series of common
managerial challenges. For the independent retailer such challenges were largely a reflection of
growing competition, which hastened the end of some businesses, whilst encouraging others to
emulate the efficiencies and scale economies that underpinned the success of department and
chain stores. But the growing scale of retail operations created its own difficulties, which often
saw direct proprietorial control give way to an increasingly complicated managerial hierarchy,
populated by individuals responsible for particular functions within a large store, or for the per-
formance of specific stores within an extensive network. The division of major businesses into
components that could be comprehended by individual managers solved one set of problems,
but often created others; not least regarding communications, and the balance to be struck
between the centralisation and devolution of decision-making power. Attempts to promote
organisational efficiency and coherence led many large retailers to place faith in performance
data, and associated technologies for its acquisition and analysis. Most also sought to redefine
relationships between managers and shop floor staff, through the formal codification of working
practices and the creation of systems of pay and rewards intended to foster company loyalty.
Such managerial changes were, however, often adopted in a piecemeal fashion. The application
of “science” to retail management was, initially at least, a rather hesitant process, sometimes
resisted by vested interests.
So much is clear from the growing body of research on retail history. But, as noted at the
outset, much of this work is the product of a primary concern with the evolution of retail
systems and the history of particular businesses. More systematic study is therefore required
of the managerial systems which underpinned the development of modern retailing; perhaps
particularly to illuminate the part played by the multitude of currently anonymous managers in
the establishment of retail chains and department stores.

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 17
MULTIPLE RETAILERS
David Delbert Kruger

On the rural high plains of Wyoming in 1902, 7,000 feet above sea level and thousands of miles
from the urban centres of London and New York City, a 26-year-old sales clerk named James
Cash Penney unveiled his first department store. The wooden location had no utilities and was
merely 25 x 45 feet in size, the modest fruition of a frugal partnership between Penney and two
older mentors who had trained him for the venture. However, after grossing nearly $29,000
his first year, the young clerk acquired a stake in a second Wyoming store 90 miles away, subse-
quently using profits from both stores to open a third store in Wyoming by 1904. At the time,
the largest city in which Penney operated had just 4,000 residents; the other two locations had
fewer than a thousand. Even so, Penney’s fledgling retail chain was poised to rapidly expand
across the United States over the next three decades. By 1914, the New York Times had taken
notice of his then-fifty store chain, tracking Penney down for a personal interview on one of
his buying trips to the city (Kruger, 2017, pp. 11–29, 83). Seven years later, Penney’s network of
312 small-town J.C. Penney stores were collectively outselling what was then the largest single
store in the world, Macy’s behemoth flagship in New York City. The difference, of course, was
that it had taken Penney and his small-town stores only nineteen years to reach that mark. By
1929, James Cash Penney had successfully created North America’s first transcontinental depart-
ment store chain, replicating 1400 of his stores across every state, in cities as large as Chicago and
agricultural towns as small as Shamrock, Texas, with total sales of nearly $210 million (Lebhar,
1963, pp. 12–14; J. C. Penney, 1985).
When it comes to examining department stores in the twenty-first century, multiple opera-
tions have clearly become the rule as opposed to the exception. Since the 1980s, they have
accounted for nearly all of department store sales in the United States, as opposed to just 17%
in 1929 (Howard, 2015, p. 193). Around the world, mass retailers such as Walmart and Carrefour,
each begun as a single store in the early 1960s, have replicated their retail stores on a global level,
with Walmart operating 11,500 supercenters and discount stores across twenty-eight countries
worldwide, and Carrefour adding the same quantity of its own hypermarkets across thirty coun-
tries (Walmart, 2017; Carrefour Group, 2017). Walmart has clearly become the world’s largest
retailer in volume and revenue, generating $482 billion in sales, nearly $366 billion more than
its next closest global competitor, Costco. Despite its rural Arkansas origins, almost 26% of
Walmart’s revenue now comes from outside the United States (National Retail Federation,
2017). Traditional department stores of the nineteenth century have also evolved, for better or

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for worse, from autonomous monolithic flagships into formidable multi-unit chains today. J.C.
Penney has since retreated from its apogee of more than 2000 locations in the 1970s while it
and upscale competitor Macy’s still operate roughly 800 stores apiece, while younger competitor
Kohl’s operates nearly 1,200 and upscale discounter Target nearly 1,800 (Macy’s, 2017). Within
the United Kingdom, Britain’s House of Fraser operates in a similar fashion to Macy’s, though
on a comparably smaller scale, with sixty locations throughout the United Kingdom and Abu
Dhabi, while Canada’s Hudson’s Bay company envelops 460 stores on both sides of the Atlantic
(House of Fraser, 2017; Hudson’s Bay Company, 2017). Even British grocer Tesco has evolved
into the realm of a chain department store, with nearly 500 Tesco Extra hypermarkets concur-
rently functioning as some of the largest physical stores in England, complementing Tesco’s more
than 6,000 other units across eleven countries (Clark and Chan, 2014). German grocer Lidl
likewise operates 10,000 units across twenty-seven countries, with aggressive plans to enter the
United States no later than 2018 (Wilson, 2017).
While single-unit retailers have existed since the beginning of commerce, they have become
an almost microscopic entity in this chain store dominated world of the twenty-first century.
Nevertheless, the genesis of multi-unit retailers is anything but a recent phenomenon, pre-
ceding the current retail scene by anywhere from 400 to 2,200 years. Retail historian John
P. Nichols noted in his early history of chain stores that the multi-unit concept was actually
utilised by Chinese merchant On Lo Kass as early as 200 B.C., as well as through the early
efforts of the Mitsui group of Japan and later the wealthy Fugger family of Germany. Even
current department store chain Hudson’s Bay Company began its operation as a multi-unit
retailer from its 1670 inception, originally as a network of fur trading outposts around North
America (Nichols, 1940, p. 13). In many ways, Hudson’s Bay Company can be seen as one
of the first global retail chains as well, authorised by a British charter under King Charles II
encompassing present-day Canada as well as the Pacific Northwest of the United States. These
early retail units of Hudson’s Bay Company were certainly not chic department stores, but they
did provide basic retail services and merchandise for both early European immigrants as well as
indigenous people of the First Nations (Newman, 1989).
By the nineteenth century, however, a different type of customer began to emerge on both
sides of the Atlantic, far more affluent with a propensity to pay with currency over pelts or goods
in trade. In response to the decline of its fur trading operations, Hudson’s Bay Company gradu-
ally began to evolve into the conventional department store chain for which it is known today.
Similarly, the seeds for many of today’s successful department store chains were likewise sown
throughout the nineteenth century. Dickins & Jones, an upscale British store most recently sub-
sumed by House of Fraser, can trace its origins as far back as 1790 while House of Fraser’s Jolly’s
department store dates to 1830 (Clark, 2013). Lord & Taylor, now operated as a subsidiary of
Hudson’s Bay, has its roots in New York City in 1826. Harrods of London and Holt-Renfrew of
Canada can both trace their origins to the 1830s, while a number of American department store
operations currently enveloped under the ubiquitous Macy’s nameplate long predate the 1858
founding of R.H. Macy’s initial store in New York City, much less Macy’s Herald Square flagship
of 1902. One of Macy’s more recent acquisitions, the F.R. Lazarus chain, had its multi-unit roots
in a singular Ohio department store originating as early as 1832, while another, Thalheimer’s,
dated back to a Virginia department store established in 1842. Across the Atlantic, Arnott’s, a
department store nameplate now under Selfridge’s, likewise began as a single Irish operation as
early as 1843, while British department store Lewis’s of Liverpool came into being thirteen years
later. Contemporary American chains like Belk and J.C. Penney can likewise be traced back to
a single department store in the nineteenth century as well, with William Henry Belk’s first
location originating in 1888 and Penney’s chain indirectly emerging from his mentor Thomas

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Callahan’s first Golden Rule location in 1889 (Covington, 1988; Penney, 1931, pp. 20–25; Curry,
1993, pp. 65–79, 98–100; Kruger, 2017, pp. 18–22).
Despite the large number of modern department stores with origins in the early 1800s, chain
store historian Godfrey M. Lebhar delineates the first significant era of multiple retailers as a his-
torical period of 1859–1900, when retail pioneers of multi-unit operations truly got their start
as single-unit proprietors. ‘The history of the chains’, wrote Lebhar optimistically in 1962, ‘is
replete with instances of merchants who, once they realised the limitations of single-store opera-
tion, found that the road to unlimited volume presented practically no obstacles’ (p. 14). The
beginning of this first era certainly coincided with the disruptive innovation of one particular
American merchant, George F. Gillman, and his partner, George Huntington Hartford. Gillman
was never in the department store business, but the expansion of his retail operations from one
single location into the formidable Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company is what set his retail
efforts apart from any predecessor, and largely served as an example for multiple retailers that
followed his lead. By 1865, just six years after Gilman had opened his first store, he had suc-
cessfully expanded its retail operations across twenty-five separate locations. By 1880, his Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, or “A&P” as its stores were commonly known, had topped 100
locations, and by 1900 had reached 200.Yet Gillman and Hartford were far from finished with
this multi-unit strategy for A&P. Over the first three decades of the twentieth century, the A&P
chain would go on to reach unprecedented heights beyond such modern titans as Carrefour and
Walmart, with more than 10,000 locations by 1924, and more than 15,000 by 1927. By 1929,
the A&P chain had topped $1 billion in annual sales. The sheer scope and success of the Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company is impressive even by today’s standards, and it certainly shattered
the limitations for what retail operations could ultimately become (Lebhar, 1963, pp. 33–36;
Walsh, 1986; Levinson, 2011).
Early American discount stores and their respective chains were typically not considered or
classified as department stores until the late twentieth century. However, like the multiple retail
outlets of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, they provided a multi-unit blueprint for
department stores to eventually follow. One of the most notable, Woolworth’s, began as a sin-
gle “five-and-dime” store in 1878, first failing in New York before successfully retrenching in
Pennsylvania the following year. Unlike its retail counterparts, Woolworth’s stores offered a less
upscale yet vastly broader selection of merchandise for a clientele largely comprised of factory
workers, farmers and immigrants – its chief appeal being wider varieties and lower prices. Large
selections of tinware, notions, novelties, and candy were grouped in each store according to fixed
prices of either five cents or ten cents. Woolworth’s best-selling items included pots, pans, toys,
wash tubs, towels, handkerchiefs, and ladies hair ribbons and accessories. Mass production inno-
vations in manufacturing continued to drive down the cost of potential merchandise, and Wool-
worth’s was subsequently able to incorporate additional five and ten cent product lines into its
already vast store inventories (Winkler, 1940, pp. 15–16, 53). As the number of Woolworth stores
exponentially grew, brothers Frank and Charles Woolworth soon realised they could each effi-
ciently operate their own Woolworth chains, as friendly competitors sharing resources and tak-
ing advantage of merchandise discounts through volume purchasing. Rather than each brother
expanding entirely on his own, however, Charles Woolworth teamed up with friend Fred Kirby
to branch into the nearby city of Wilkes Barre, while Frank Woolworth partnered with their
cousin Seymour Knox to branch into nearby Reading. Around the same time, in 1882, competi-
tor John McCrorey founded his first discount store in Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, re-spelling it as
“McCrory’s” and rapidly expanding to five Pennsylvania locations by 1885. Across the Atlantic
in 1884, Michael Marks likewise opened the first of his retail establishments under the name
“Penny Bazaar”, teaming up with cashier Thomas Spencer to launch their Marks and Spencer

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chain of stores in 1894 (Tse, 1985, pp. 13–25). By 1912, the Woolworth brothers had created an
organisation of nearly 600 separate locations in the United States, consolidating them under the
“F.W. Woolworth” name, while McCrory’s operated ninety-three.
More importantly, however, both Woolworth’s and McCrory’s inspired other entrepreneurs
to follow their leads, with competitor Samuel H. Kress beginning his S.H. Kress stores in 1896,
also in Pennsylvania, while former McCrory partner and Kmart founder Sebastian Kresge began
his S.S. Kresge chain the following year in Michigan and Tennessee. Despite the later starts of
Kress and Kresge, their chains had each expanded to more than eighty stores by 1912, with
Kress exceeding McCrory’s by the end of that year. Like Woolworth’s and McCrory’s, these
chain stores of Kress and Kresge also catered to a price-conscious customer base, with wide
varieties of merchandise priced no higher than 10 cents, including pots, pans, home furnish-
ings, fashions, novelties and candy (Kresge, 1979, pp. 7, 31). The successes of these four discount
chains spawned similar additional chains. In 1906, former McCrory clerk George Murphy had
already unveiled his first G. C. Murphy store in Pennsylvania while Pennsylvania native William
T. Grant unveiled the first of his W.T. Grant stores in Massachusetts. By 1912, Murphy and Grant
had expanded their chains to eighteen and twelve locations, respectively, with many more to
follow in the years ahead. Former S.H. Kress clerk John Josiah Newberry likewise branched out
on his own in 1911 with his Pennsylvania-based J.J. Newberry chain. All of these early discount
chains would eventually have a formidable presence across the United States. Frank Woolworth
had even taken his chain to the United Kingdom in 1909, successfully expanding from one
location in Liverpool to six locations in England by the end of the year, with more than twenty-
eight Woolworth’s locations operating across the Kingdom in just three years. Woolworth even
referred to his first global locations as “3 pence and 6 pence” shops to translate the value of the
American “five-and-dime” concept to British consumers (Lebhar, 1963, pp. 36–43).
Multi-unit organisation came earlier to the department store field outside of the United
States. David Lewis of Great Britain, not to be confused with the John Lewis department store
chain today, was in many ways ahead of his contemporaries in the United Kingdom as well as
his American counterparts. After creating his Lewis’s of Liverpool department store in 1856,
Lewis eventually augmented his longstanding flagship with another location in Manchester
in 1877, followed by additional locations in Sheffield and Birmingham the following decade.
Even after the death of Lewis in 1885, his department store chain would likewise remain ahead
of its American counterparts in the early twentieth century, expanding to additional stores in
Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester and Hanley in Stoke-On-Trent, a full fifteen years before the chain
acquired Selfridge’s in 1951 (Patterson, Hodgson, and Shi, 2008, pp. 29–45).
While John Wannamaker of Philadelphia and the Hecht brothers of Baltimore had each
opened additional department stores outside of their flagships during the nineteenth century,
with respective locations in New York City and Washington, DC, these moves were largely aber-
rations within the United States. Likewise, Colorado-based May Company’s 1899 acquisition
of E.R. Hull & Dutton of Cleveland, Ohio, which it later re-branded under the May name, was
equally unusual for its time. Prior to the twentieth century, most of the family-run department
stores in the United States, along with Harrods and even House of Fraser in the United King-
dom, remained autonomous retail institutions, with operations primarily centred on a single
flagship department store within its respective city. Typically, the flagship location existed within
the same city where the department store founder had humbly begun, though these majestic
singular stores grew increasingly larger and more opulent as the nineteenth century progressed.
Although some – like Wannamaker’s and its Philadelphia competitor Strawbridge & Clothier,
Virginia’s Thalheimer’s, Liverpool’s Owen Owen and Northern Ireland’s Austin’s of Derry –
remained autonomous family operations for well over 100 years, an overwhelming majority

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inevitably joined or were absorbed by department store conglomerates in the twentieth century,
retail consolidations that would eventually lead to the “Macyfication” of hundreds of American
department stores in the twenty-first century (McDonald, 2016).
Multi-unit retailing took shape differently across rural and urban regions over the nine-
teenth century. In urban America, the modern department store was certainly well in place by
1890, with palaces of consumption such as Macy’s, Marshall Field’s and Wannamaker’s evolv-
ing far beyond utilitarian outlets that simply sold necessities to their customers (Howard, 2008,
p. 459). By contrast, emerging agrarian towns in the Midwest and West were largely served by
autonomous country or general stores, with limited selection and inventories typically provided
through merchandise jobbers, “middlemen” that brokered merchandise to these outlets at a
typically higher cost (Kline, 2000). Mining companies in boomtowns throughout the Ameri-
can West likewise tended to control the entire retail scene for any community adjacent to and
dependent upon their industrial operations. Credit was freely available in these existing rural
stores, a perk over Thomas Callahan’s cash and carry philosophy in his Golden Rule syndicate,
though it certainly came at a price for rural customers, who were often subjected to higher costs,
limited selection, and perpetual debt, all for lack of a better shopping alternative (Setzer, 1985).
If rural shoppers wanted variety, service and value beyond what their local retail establishments
were offering, they were typically forced to utilise mail order catalogue warehouses such as Sears
Roebuck or Montgomery Ward to span the retail gaps of their bucolic communities. Ironi-
cally, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward had absolutely no interest in operating physical
department stores as a result of their extensive mail-order business in rural America, functioning
essentially as the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century equivalents of Amazon.com until
the mid-1920s (Lichtenstein, 2009, pp. 16–17; Moreton, 2009, p. 17). Yet, as historian Nelson
Lichtenstein points out, ‘farmers and small-town folk always preferred to fondle, squeeze, and
handle the products they bought, rather than just imagine how they would feel’ (p. 17).
Multi-unit organisation provided particular advantages for rural retailers in the United States.
As a sales clerk in the rural Golden Rule stores of Thomas Callahan, James Cash Penney realised
that such limiting retail conditions in smaller cities and towns provided an amazing opportunity
for multiple locations across those communities. From 1897–1900, Callahan had provided both
mentorship and inspiration to the younger Penney through his own fledgling Golden Rule
chain and the roughly six stores he was operating, particularly selecting and selling quality mer-
chandise at the then lower markup rate of 20%, while maximising the number of times his small
stores could turnover their inventories each year. Although he was not in the five-and-dime
business, Callahan’s focus on sales volume and inventory turnover was in many ways a precursor
to modern discount merchants who likewise embraced high volume on low profit margins for
their multi-unit chains (Kruger, 2017, p. 20). By 1901, Callahan and his partner William “Guy”
Johnson, a former sales clerk Callahan had mentored in Colorado, were collectively grooming
Penney to open his first department store in rural Wyoming, a location which came to fruition
in the town of Kemmerer the following year. Ultimately, the two partners put up 2/3 of the
initial investment, with Penney providing the remaining third out of personal savings and loans.
Penney would then run his Golden Rule store as part of their chain, entirely on a cash and
carry basis, with profits divided among the three owning partners and future expansion com-
ing through the reinvestment of store profits. By 1904, at the age of twenty-eight, Penney was
operating two additional Wyoming locations for Callahan and Johnson, and by 1907, he had
completely bought out their interests in the three stores, preparing to expand his own chain in
the years that followed. ‘Three stores were much more responsibility than I had imagined shoul-
dering at that stage of my experience as a merchant’, Penney (1950) later reflected. ‘Along with
managing, I had to select and train men, and more, and more, men’ (p. 58).

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 David Delbert Kruger

Figure 17.1 J.C. Penney Store #3 (Cumberland, WY).

Source: J.C. Penney Company Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas

In the United States, rural markets and small-town entrepreneurs were central to the rise
of the multi-unit retail format. Several merchants associated with the early development of J.C.
Penney played a significant role in chain store development. One in particular, a Kansas farmboy
named Earl Corder Sams, had been fascinated by retailing since early childhood and, at the age
of seventeen, even convinced his father and two local businessmen to finance a local department
store under his management. After successfully managing the single-unit store for a few years,
however, Sams became discouraged with the limited opportunities for personal or professional
growth. ‘In looking around for a much bigger opportunity’, Sams (Seventy-Sixth United States
Congress, 1940, p. 559) later reflected, ‘an employment agency told me about a man named J.C.
Penney who had a store in the little coal camp of Kemmerer, Wyo., and who had a vision of
something beyond a single small store’ (p. 559).
Out of curiosity, Sams began corresponding with Penney, eventually securing an interview in
Wyoming. Although Penney had scaled his retail operation back to just two locations in 1907,
Sams was intrigued by Penney’s ambitious vision for its future, particularly the idea of his store
clerks not only becoming managers for additional store openings, but partnering with Pen-
ney in sharing store profits and training additional employees, whom Penney explicitly called
“associates”, for the same opportunities. By 1909, Earl Corder Sams had opened a new Golden
Rule store for Penney in Eureka, Utah, the fifth location in Penney’s retail chain. By the end
of that year, Sams was able to reinvest his profits from their Eureka store in additional locations
Penney planned to open, typically through partnerships between Penney, Sams, and the young

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Figure 17.2 J.C. Penney Store #300. J.C. Penney exiting antique car at new (re)location. (Kansas City, KS).
Source: J.C. Penney Company Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas

sales clerk they had trained to manage the new location. By 1910, the two men had doubled the
size of Penney’s chain to fourteen locations. By 1912, they had added twenty more, generating
$2.1 million in annual sales across the chain. Five years later, Penney’s company was operating
out of a New York City headquarters with 177 locations generating $14.9 million in sales, with
some of these stores established more than 3000 miles away from Penney’s office (Kruger, 2012,
pp. 164–185).
From 1917, the year Penney recommended Earl Corder Sams as company president, until
Sams’s death in 1950, he quietly led the J.C. Penney Company behind the enigma of the com-
pany founder, a period in which Sams concurrently mentored a young J.W. Marriott, Sr. into
the global entrepreneur Marriott would ultimately become.Yet the impact of Earl Corder Sams
on J.C. Penney stores and chain stores in general was undeniable. Over the course of his thirty-
three years as president and chairman of the board at J.C. Penney, he took Penney’s company
from 177 department stores to more than 1,600, increasing company sales from $8.4 million to
nearly $1 billion, a growth rate of more than 10,000% ( J. C. Penney, 1985; Lebhar, 1963, p. 17).
Even the company founder himself was quick to give credit to his younger partner in making
his enterprise the nationwide chain it ultimately became. ‘If I had insisted on keeping personal
control of the Penney Company’, Penney would later write in his 1950 autobiography, ‘we
would still be merely a small chain of stores scattered through the Middle West’ (p. 95). Sams had
long developed a reputation as a skilled merchandiser, selecting not only attractive inventories

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Figure 17.3 E. C. Sams and J. C. Penney

Source: J.C. Penney Company Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas

but making the stores themselves a pleasant shopping environment. He held enough credibility
and clout to criticise Penney’s earliest stores as “junky” and lacking uniformity, upgrading and
standardising such elements as merchandise buying and management training as well as store
layouts and appearances. His 1917 creation of a company magazine, the Dynamo, promoted
a corporate culture and shared outstanding management and merchandise presentation ideas
among stores and associates across the expansive chain; British variety chain Marks and Spencer
would take a similar approach in 1927, beginning their Management Bulletins and later Sparks
magazine to be distributed to their numerous employees across their many stores (Purvis, 2015,
pp. 63–81). In a pre-digital world, such forms of communication were essential to standardising
and co-ordinating best practices from the home office across multiple units, and in many cases
eliciting feedback from disparate store employees in response to the content of the publications.
In the case of J.C. Penney, it was quite common for Sams and even Penney himself to personally
follow up with individual store managers during their period of rapid expansion, even as their
department store chain approached more than a thousand locations.
Aside from establishing a corporate real estate department, one of Earl Sam’s particular inno-
vations during the 1920s was the creation and replication of a store prototype known as the
“Cortland”, a J.C. Penney store with departments easily identifiable from the front entrance,
under a high-ceiling sales floor augmented by an additional merchandise balcony elevated above
the back of the store.
J.C. Penney stores utilising the Cortland layout could be adjusted to fit new or existing
buildings in the disparate main streets of their respective communities, serving cities of more
than 50,000 residents or farm towns with populations barely above 1,000 ( J. C. Penney,
2001). By 1929, a year in which he planned to open 500 additional J.C. Penney stores, Sams

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was quick to emphasise the company’s multi-unit identity as well as the localised service
and selection from each store manager in press releases and advertisements. Throughout the
interwar period, Penney and Sams continued to work in tandem on developing company
policy while empowering each local store manager within their growing chain (Kruger, 2012,
pp. 175–182).
In many ways, the management approach and leadership arrangement of Penney and Sams
was strikingly similar to that of Britons Simon Marks and Israel Sieff, particularly as the latter
duo transformed Marks and Spencer from the Penny Bazaars of Simon’s father into a chain of
respectable variety stores poised to dominate the retail landscape of Great Britain (Tse, 13–26;
and Purvis, 67, 74–75). Even with the economic setbacks of the Great Depression across the
United States, Earl Sams continued positioning J.C. Penney department stores for additional
locations and markets throughout the 1930s, notably large metropolitan cities the company had
traditionally avoided. By the end of the Great Depression, Sams was bringing J.C. Penney stores
to customers in farm towns of hundreds and urban cities of millions, giving the company more
department store locations than any retail chain in the world (Kruger, 2012). Likewise, Simon
Marks and Israel Sieff had moved Marks and Spencer stores into considerably larger facilities,
even referring to them as “superstores” long before the term became commonplace among later
retail chains (Tse, 1985, pp. 24–25; Purvis, 2015, pp. 67–68).

Figure 17.4 J.C. Penney Store #113. Cortland prototype layout. (Williston, ND, 1941).
Source: J.C. Penney Company Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas

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Figure 17.5 J.C. Penney Newspaper Ad, 1929
Source: J.C. Penney Company Records, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas Texas
 Multiple retailers

Within the United States, the J.C. Penney chain had already been in operation before large
conglomerates of multiple flagship department stores began to surface in the early twentieth
century. Of course, each of the flagship department stores within these conglomerates had previ-
ously functioned as single-unit retail enterprises, nearly all of them autonomously originating
in the nineteenth century. However, the success of a national department store chain like J.C.
Penney illuminated the operational efficiencies and growth that could certainly come from a
multi-unit operation. Not only could management, merchandising, training, customer service
and store design be standardised and streamlined, but economies of scale could likewise be
achieved through the increased buying power of multiple stores (Kruger, 2017, pp. 18–26, 83).
The visible success of J.C. Penney’s department store chain across rural America had also
forced the mail order giants of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward to transition into depart-
ment store chains as well, rather than continuing solely as catalogue warehouses. Sears would
finally unveil its first retail store in 1925, twenty-three years after Penney had opened his first
store in Wyoming. Montgomery Ward would follow the next year (Lebhar, 1963, pp. 16–17;
Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 338–357; Weil, 1977, pp. 993–994; Latham, 1972, pp. 70–73). Nei-
ther company, however, had any interest in remaining single-unit operations. From 1925 to 1930,
Sears had expanded from just eight department stores to 351. Over that same period, Montgom-
ery Ward had gone from ten to 554. Nevertheless, even these impressive numbers were greatly
eclipsed by J.C. Penney, which was operating nearly 1,400 stores at the time. Despite the fact that
J.C. Penney had no catalogue operations until 1964, the collective buying power of its small-
town department stores allowed it to competitively match that of Sears and Wards, who were
still trying to perfect their physical retail locations. In early 1929, Montgomery Ward and Sears
Roebuck both proposed merging with J.C. Penney to capitalise on their respective strengths
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 652–653; Beasley, 1948, pp. 126–137). Although Earl Sams declined
merging J.C. Penney with either company, he continued to advocate on behalf of the entire
chain store industry, even in congressional testimony, arguing that chain stores were an inevitable
component of American progress, the commercial agents for perpetually improving the quality
of American life (Sams, 1929, pp. 17–18).
Despite the immense growth of department store chains like Sears, Montgomery Ward and
J.C. Penney during the early twentieth century, chain stores were far from being universally pop-
ular across every public sector, particularly during the 1920s and especially during the 1930s. As
early as 1920, American author Sinclair Lewis (1920) had already articulated his own disdain for
their presence in his satirical novel Main Street. By 1923, growing widespread opposition to their
pervasive expansion organised into what later became known as the anti-chain store movement.
Independent merchants were largely behind the anti-chain store movement, seeing the growth
of chain stores not just as a threat to their own economic viability, but a replicated, homogenous
blight against the unique commercial environments within their local communities. By 1927,
the anti-chain store movement had gained enough popular and political traction that four states
successfully passed anti-chain store laws, essentially in the form of additional taxes levied against
these multi-unit operations.To a lesser extent, labour unions also lent their support to the move-
ment primarily to improve wages and the standard of living on behalf of unionised retail work-
ers themselves. By the 1930s, negative reactions against this “chain store menace” had garnered
significant media attention and publicity, and more than twenty additional states, along with
a number of local municipalities, began passing their own anti-chain store laws as well. Texas
Congressman Wright Patman was perhaps the most prominent anti-chain store crusader on a
national level; after successfully advocating federal anti-chain legislation on behalf of smaller,
independent retailers, Patman ambitiously proposed a nationwide chain store tax in 1938, which

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failed to pass Congress but nonetheless caught the attention of chain store supporters and oppo-
nents alike (Scroop, 2008, pp. 925–949).
Historian Daniel Scroop would later describe the anti-chain store movement as a “species
of populist anti-monopolism”, a grassroots political effort against the large-scale tendencies that
were increasingly concentrating economic and political power in empires of production as well
as consumption (pp. 925–938). While the anti-chain store movement did notch a number of
successes during its apogee in the early 1930s, notably behind the support of Wright Patman as
well as Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, it was ultimately unable to counter the grow-
ing power of organisations such as the American Retail Federation, which aggressively lobbied
for influence on behalf of the increasingly powerful chains of stores (Scroop, 2008, pp. 932–938).
Chain store advocates like Earl Corder Sams had also helped turned the tide of popular support
for chains, advocating low prices for consumers, better opportunities for employees, improved
distribution for producers, and enhanced economic development for communities in which
chain stores could freely operate (Kruger, 2012, pp. 178–181).
Although chain stores accounted for only 17% of the nation’s trade in 1929, more than half
of all department stores in the United States had become multi-unit operations by 1948, with
Montgomery Ward operating 621 of its own locations, Sears Roebuck operating 623, and J.C.
Penney overseeing a whopping 1,600 (Lebhar, 1963, pp. 409–410, 415). A similar rise of multi-
unit operations was likewise taking place within the United Kingdom during that same interwar
period, with the percentage of chain store sales doubling in the nineteen years leading up to
1939 ( Jefferys, 1954; Purvis, 2015, p. 64). Over the next three decades, the conquest of the inde-
pendent department store in the United States would become a fait accompli, with nearly 100%
of department stores being chain stores in nature by the 1980s (Howard, 2015, p. 193).
With the anti-chain store movement all but neutralised by 1940, the multi-unit retail for-
mat was readily poised to become a central player in postwar suburban development. Prior to
World War II, retail activity across the United States had been anchored primarily to the central
business districts of cities and towns. The prominence of these “downtown” centralised retail
districts, in many cases the only shopping districts these cities had ever known, was a continued
validation for independent flagship department stores that essentially anchored them. Yet the
concept of suburban branch department stores augmenting downtown flagships had already
begun to emerge among a few department store firms. In 1941, twelve of fourteen department
store executives believed that developing branch suburban stores would become a major trend
in American retail. Lord & Taylor had already unveiled one of the first suburban branch depart-
ment stores that year, more than 20 miles east of New York City in the Long Island suburb of
Manhasset. Dorothy Shaver, a female Lord & Taylor executive, had been instrumental in estab-
lishing this branch store, significantly larger than any of its predecessors. Once Shaver assumed
leadership of Lord & Taylor in 1945, she not only became one of the first women to ever lead
such a firm, but continued the process of successfully opening similarly large branch stores
(Oakes, 1957; Smithsonian, 2012). By 1948, Earl Corder Sams had likewise begun preparing
J.C. Penney for suburbia with his first J.C. Penney store prototype outside of a central business
district, in a shopping centre along the outskirts of St Louis, Missouri (Kruger, 2017, p. 264).
Multi-unit retailers significantly contributed to the growth of the postwar suburban shop-
ping centre. In 1950, for example, retail conglomerate Allied Stores made the unusual move of
hiring prominent Seattle, Washington, architect John Graham, Jr. to design a shopping centre
around one of their proposed Bon Marché branch department stores, creating what became the
first suburban shopping centre in the Pacific Northwest. Four years later, Austrian-born archi-
tect Victor Gruen began designing massive shopping malls to accommodate booming suburban
populations and particularly, the automobiles and freeways that took them to and from their

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suburban homes. Large department stores such as J.L. Hudson in downtown Detroit capitalised
on Gruen’s ideas by financing and anchoring one of his first centres twelve miles north of its
flagship store, a retail development called “Northland Center” that showcased a massive four-
level, 470,000 square foot Hudson’s branch department store as its centrepiece. In 1956, Min-
nesota-based Dayton’s department stores enlisted Gruen to create what is arguably regarded as
America’s first indoor shopping mall in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, anchored by a 238,000
square foot branch department store nine miles southwest of Dayton’s flagship store. Given the
immediate success of these large suburban locations, Hudson’s and Dayton’s were naturally eager
to open additional stores in similar suburban centres. By the end of the 1960s, Hudson’s would
operate twenty-one stores in Michigan alone. Other flagship department stores previously con-
fined to city centres likewise began financing the development of suburban shopping centres
throughout the United States, opening prominent branch stores to augment their downtown
locations (Hardwick, 2008). By 1959, Sears Roebuck created its own subsidiary, Homart, chiefly
to carry out many of the ideas Victor Gruen had pioneered. Homart then began planning and
developing regional shopping malls throughout the United States, creating gigantic new spaces
not only for its suburban Sears stores, but competing department store chains as well, while
other suburban shopping mall developers such as A. Alfred Taubman, Ernest Hahn and Edward
DeBartolo, Sr. continued to woo additional department store branches and chains into their
proposed centres (Howard, 2015; Longstreth, 2010).
Even as branch locations outside of the local flagship became en vogue for larger cities and
their burgeoning suburbs, department store firms themselves were not entirely at the vanguard
of suburban shopping. In many ways, such innovations were largely led by discount stores in
the 1950s, pioneering the massive suburban operations that have become so commonplace in
twenty-first century retail. One of the first of these discount chains had the unwieldy name
of “Two Guys from Harrison”, a sprawling superstore started by the Hubschman brothers in
Harrison, New Jersey, which offered full lines of appliances and later hardlines, softlines and
grocery items at discount prices. By 1948, 27-year-old entrepreneur Eugene Ferkauf unveiled
E. J. Korvette, his first attempt at creating a suburban discount store. Six years later, Ferkauf
unveiled an unusual 90,000 square foot store on what had previously been a potato field in
Long Island, New York, and the success of that store led to four additional Korvette’s locations
by 1956, which Ferkauf multiplied to twelve by 1958. Ferkauf referred to E.J. Korvette as a
Discount Department Store, but in contrast to its traditional predecessors, his locations took
the then-unusual approach of sprawling spartan sales floors, virtually no personalised customer
service, and an expansive free parking lot to keep cars and customers coming and inventories
turning (Barmash, 1981). ‘If [Ferkauf ] could make a one-dollar profit selling a refrigerator’,
explained historian David Halberstam, ‘he could make a million-dollar profit selling a million
of them’ (Martin, 2012). Ferkauf ’s highly unusual and successful stores quickly inspired fellow
entrepreneur Carl Bennett to create his own Caldor discount chain in suburban New York.
Ferkauf would likewise become a significant influence for Sam Walton in rural Arkansas during
the following decade (Lichtenstein, 2009, pp. 26–29).
Throughout the latter half of the 1950s, an American discount retailing period that predated
Walmart, Kmart and Target, a number of formidable discount chains began to emerge nation-
wide, eager to replicate the success of early chains like E.J. Korvette, Two Guys and Caldor.
Within the Northeast, chains such as Zayre, Topps, Twin Fair, Ames, Mammoth Mart, Bradlees
and Turn Style all began to roll out their large suburban prototypes. Gibson’s Discount Center, a
Texas-based chain, likewise established itself with locations across the Midwest and South, while
California-based chains White Front and GEMCO emerged along the Pacific coast. Although
each of these firms were clearly chains of suburban discount stores, some, such as Ann & Hope

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of Rhode Island, King’s of Massachusetts and Hills of Ohio, explicitly referred to themselves as
department stores. By 1962, discount chains like Korvette’s and its many competitors had gained
so much credibility in American retail that Time Magazine put Eugene Ferkauf on one of its
covers, along with the headline “Consumer Spending: Discounting Gets Respectable” (Time,
1962).
By the 1960s, traditional department stores were not only opening branch locations in sub-
urban malls, but creating their own multi-unit subsidiaries that could compete with the grow-
ing numbers of suburban discount stores. Indianapolis-based L.S. Ayres was one of the first
American department stores to develop its own discount chain; the 1961 opening of their first
Ayr-Way store was significant in that it predated Sam Walton’s first Walmart location by nine
months. Minnesota-based department store Dayton’s likewise developed Target as their “upscale
discount chain” the following year, virtually the same time as traditional discounters S.S. Kresge
and F.W.Woolworth unveiled their respective Kmart and Woolco suburban discount stores. Even
J.C. Penney got into the discount store business with its Treasury and Treasure Island outlets.
Of all the significant American discount chains that opened their doors in the 1960s, Arkansas-
based Walmart and Wisconsin-based Shopco (now Shopko) were among the few spearheaded
by single entrepreneurs. Most of the others had grown out of existing retail chains dating back
to the nineteenth century.
The openings of shopping malls and discount stores in burgeoning American suburbs cer-
tainly provided additional multi-unit possibilities for single-unit retailers, especially department
stores that had previously been confined to one flagship location. However, such suburban
proliferation had also come at the expense of the urban retail core where most department
stores had begun and thrived. Without the capital to expand, the ongoing vulnerability of
many local department stores led to their increasing absorption by prominent retailing syndi-
cates such as Allied Stores, Associated Dry Goods, Federated and Mercantile, as well as Macy’s
and May Company. Even non-retail companies such as British American Tobacco, through
its Batus subsidiary, were positioning themselves to become major department store syndicates
by the 1970s, eventually acquiring such formidable chains as Gimbell’s, Saks Fifth Avenue
and Marshall Fields. Shopping mall developer A. Alfred Taubman also began acquiring entire
department stores such as Wannamaker’s and Woodward and Lathrop in order to vertically
integrate them into his own ongoing real estate activities. Upstart merchant William T. Dillard
likewise began expanding his fledgling retail chain by acquiring Arkansas competitors Gus Blass,
Pfeiffer’s and Oklahoma department store Brown-Duncan (Rosenberg, 1988, pp. 46, 61–62).
Within the United States, rising newer department store chains such as Wisconsin-based
Kohl’s and California-based Mervyn’s became nimble multi-unit operations with a clear pref-
erence for suburban locales and growth. Even Arkansas-based Dillard’s, while buying up flag-
ship and branch stores across the Midwest and South, increasingly worked with Homart and
other shopping mall developers after 1964 to ensure their new stores were well-positioned in
suburban centres as well (Rosenberg and Rao, 1989, pp. 230–236). Montgomery Ward, which
had conservatively opened almost no new stores since the early 1940s, likewise renewed their
expansion in the 1960s with an emphasis on becoming a shopping mall anchor. And under the
leadership of CEO William “Mil” Batten, J.C. Penney aggressively began developing massive
store prototypes specifically to anchor suburban shopping malls, selling full offerings of hardlines
merchandise as well as softlines, and providing multiple services from beauty salons to automo-
tive service centres. With sales floors exceeding 200,000 square feet, some of these J.C. Penney
stores were more than 200 times the size of the first one James Cash Penney had opened in 1902
(Kruger, 2017, pp. 251, 264–265).

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Within Ireland, businessman Arthur St. John Ryan concurrently began his own “Penney’s”
department store chain in 1969, initially in Dublin before rapidly opening additional locations
throughout the country. However, Ryan’s successful department store chain was a completely
separate entity from that of the eponymous American merchant, who happened to still be alive
and active in his company at 94 years of age. As Ryan began eying expansion into the United
Kingdom and beyond, he was soon forced to open his non-Irish locations under the new name of
Primark; J.C. Penney had apparently registered the “Penney’s” name across other European coun-
tries in the event of his own worldwide expansion (Finn, 2015). Ironically, J.C. Penney would
never open a store in the United Kingdom, but Primark would eventually cross the ­Atlantic into
North America, taking over the former Filene’s flagship location in Boston as its American flag-
ship location in 2015, and even anchoring a shopping mall opposite the very first of James Cash
Penney’s own full-line stores in a shopping mall outside Philadelphia (Di Stefano, 2015).
Suburban discount store chains had already surpassed conventional department stores in sales
volume since 1965 and continued to leave department stores behind throughout the 1970s
(Howard, 2015, p. 171).Within the United States, S.S. Kresge’s Kmart stores had quickly emerged
at the head of this dynamic group, largely through the innovation and direction of Kresge execu-
tive Harry S. Cunningham. Cunningham not only created the Kmart store prototype in 1962,
but successfully replicated its low-margin, high volume, and self-service locations across eight-
een additional states and Canada by 1963, with 338 Kmart locations across the United States,
Canada, Puerto Rico and Australia by 1969. By the time Cunningham retired from S.S. Kresge
in 1972, he had increased company sales from $450 million to more than $3.8 billion, a financial
windfall that facilitated the company’s move to a new headquarters complex in suburban Detroit
(Kresge, pp. 248–49). Cunningham’s successor, Robert E. Dewar, would continue Cunning-
ham’s momentum by aggressively opening a thousand more Kmart locations across the United
States and abroad from 1972–1979 (Eichenwald, 2000). By contrast, Sam Walton kept Walmart
a largely regional discount chain over that same period, slowly expanding from eighteen stores
in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas to nearly 300 by the end of the 1970s (Schuster, 1981). Target,
the discount arm of Dayton-Hudson department stores, had likewise expanded to roughly 100
stores over the same decade, though its atmosphere as an upscale discounter allowed it to anchor
regional shopping malls that might have otherwise snubbed a discount store in their centre. By
1975,Target stores were generating more revenue than Dayton’s and Hudson’s department stores
combined, and by 1977, Kmart stores were accounting for 95% of S.S. Kresge’s sales, prompting
the eponymous company to change its name to Kmart Corporation, a prelude to a similar name
change Target would eventually bring to the Dayton-Hudson Corporation at the close of the
twentieth century (Kresge, 1979, p. 372; Dow Jones Newswire, 2000).
Throughout the 1970s, the rise of multi-unit suburban discount chains continued to eat
away at the remaining market share of traditional department stores. By the 1980s, a stagnant
American economy further weakened many department store chains, making longstanding
operations and even entire department store conglomerates extremely vulnerable to takeover
or permanent closure. The “Macyfication” of American department stores in the twenty-first
century, where the homogenised Macy’s nameplate, merchandise, management, culture and
shopping atmosphere subsumed previously autonomous department stores from Abraham &
Straus to ZCMI, was merely the fruition of seismic retail consolidations that began occurring
in the 1980s. Throughout that particular decade, conditions in American banking, commerce
and government had largely been shaped by a spirit of neoliberalism that enabled such dras-
tic and ultimately destructive “mega-mergers” of entire retail conglomerates to finally occur
(Howard, 2015, pp. 203–218). By 2006, the aftershock from this neoliberalism on the American

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department store landscape was visibly evident, as once-independent retail institutions had not
only been acquired by Macy’s, but completely re-branded under the Macy’s nameplate and its
iconic red star. From 2006–2017, Macy’s additionally began shutting down nine of the historic
flagship locations it had recently acquired, many of them department store locations more than
150 years old. Unfortunately for Macy’s and the many stores it absorbed, declining sales and
profits in recent years now threaten to make the entire chain a victim of its own appetite for
conquest and expansion. In February 2017, Hudson’s Bay Company, the global department store
conglomerate that predated the existence of Macy’s by nearly 200 years, announced plans to
aggressively takeover the longstanding American retailer (Kestenbaum, 2017). Macy’s capitula-
tion to Hudson’s Bay Company is not yet a certainty, but if it does come to fruition it will finally
give Hudson’s Bay Company the title of world’s largest department store chain – in addition to
their historic mantle of being the world’s oldest.
Gigantic hypermarket stores have likewise come to dominate the twenty-first century land-
scape of multi-unit stores, competing with department stores, discount stores, grocery stores, and
even entire shopping centres as one-stop shopping destinations. While the concept of merging
grocery, hardlines and softlines under one roof was already evident as early as the 1940s, when
the Two Guys from Harrison chain incorporated such disparate merchandise into their massive
New Jersey locations, such comprehensive merchandising has now become the primary thrust
of global retailers like Carrefour and Walmart. Within the United Kingdom, traditional grocers
such as Tesco have expanded their hypermarket prototypes as well, with Tesco Extra locations
rivalling the size and scope of Carrefour’s Hypermarkets and Walmart’s Supercenters (AEW
Architects, 2012). Even Groupe Casino, a French firm dating back to a nineteenth century
grocer, has likewise morphed into a formidable hypermarket competitor, with nearly 130 of its
own Hyper Géant Casino locations to complement its network of 12,000 other stores across
Europe and South America (2017). Michigan grocer Meijer has likewise become a competi-
tor for Walmart Supercenters and Super Targets among six Midwestern states, with 231 Meijer
superstores now in operation (2017).
In conjunction with hypermarkets, the prominence of large membership warehouses in
multi-unit retailing is also a relatively recent phenomenon, with Costco becoming not only
the leader of that store category within the United States, but the second largest retailer in sales
across the entire world. Costco itself was not created until 1983, but the roots of the membership
warehouse industry, and really Costco itself, technically date back to 1954, when entrepreneur
Sol Price created Fedmart, a membership-only retail store operating out of a former warehouse
in San Diego, California. Price, an attorney by trade, had inherited the warehouse and devel-
oped Fedmart after being impressed by an unusual competitor, Fedco, then a single non-profit
membership store that had opened in 1948. Sol Price’s first Fedmart store was so successful that
he opened a second location in Arizona the following year, followed by a third in Texas the year
after. Under Price’s leadership, Fedmart continued its multi-unit expansion into seventy stores
over the next two decades, while pioneering his innovative ideas such as in-store pharmacies
and optical centres, as well as selling gas to its member-customers at wholesale prices. When Sol
Price was forced out of Fedmart in 1976, he responded by creating Price Club, a new chain of
membership stores that fully embraced his concept of warehouse retailing, with merchandise
sold in bulk quantities inside a utilitarian warehouse atmosphere. By 1982, Fedmart had gone
out of business, while Price Club had nearly doubled its earnings every year, spawning ambitious
competitors imitating Sol Price’s membership warehouse model.
In 1983, James D. Sinegal, one of Price’s former employees at Fedmart, created Costco while
Walmart founder Sam Walton unveiled Sam’s Club, each of them multi-unit membership ware-
house chains explicitly inspired by Sol Price’s ideas and concepts. When a journalist asked Sol

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Price how it felt to be considered “the father” of so many retailing innovations for his own
emerging competitors, he humorously replied, ‘I really wish I had worn a condom’ (Stone,
2013). By 1984, Massachusetts-based BJ’s Wholesale additionally began similar warehouse club
operations as a successful subsidiary of Zayre discount stores. Sam’s Club had already acquired a
number of regional membership warehouses as well, and keen competition among other com-
petitors led to the merger of Sol Price’s and James Sinegal’s respective chains in 1993, ultimately
combining them under the Costco name in 1997. By the year 2000, Costco and Sam’s Club

Figure 17.6 Jim Sinegal and Sol Price

Source: Photo courtesy of ©Michael Christmas Photography.

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had established their membership warehouses throughout the United States, while regional
competitor BJ’s Wholesale operated primarily along the Atlantic region, outperforming and
outliving its parent company Zayre.
Today, Costco clearly dominates the membership warehouse industry within North Amer-
ica, with more than 600 locations across the United States, Canada and Mexico. In addition,
Costco’s retail empire has likewise transcended the Atlantic and the Pacific, with nearly thirty
stores in the United Kingdom, as well as multiple locations across Spain, Japan, South Korea,
Taiwan and Australia. With nearly $120 billion in annual sales along with a reputation for treat-
ing its employees with dignity and respect, Costco has become the second largest retailer in
the world, ahead of fellow global competitors Carrefour, Schwartz and Tesco (National Retail
Federation, 2017). While Walmart remains significantly ahead of Costco in number of stores
and total sales worldwide, its Sam’s Club warehouses have continued to lose ground to Costco
and to a lesser extent, regional competitor BJ’s Wholesale. Despite Sam’s Club operating more
than 600 locations across the United States, nearly half of the total number of membership
warehouses nationwide, Sam’s Club accounts for just 37% of the total sales within that category.
Even with 200 locations across Mexico, Brazil and China, slumping sales have forced Walmart
to withdraw Sam’s Club operations from both Canada and the state of Rhode Island, and
increasingly shut down additional locations across the United States since 2010 (Ritter, 2010;
Campbell, 2016; Wahba, 2016).
In the twenty-first century, when postmodern retail institutions like Amazon.com have
clearly ascended as merchandising dynasties, the multi-unit demise of prominent “bricks and
mortar” predecessors is glaringly self-evident. Long gone from the scene are such household
names as Montgomery Ward in the United States, Eaton’s in Canada and Lewis’s of Liverpool.
Likewise absent are the pioneering multi-unit discount chains of F.W. Woolworth and innova-
tive discounters such as E.J. Korvette. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, in many ways
the model for the modern, multi-unit chain, itself fell into bankruptcy and ultimately went from
a high of 15,737 “A&P” locations in 1930 to a grand total of zero by 2016 (Lebhar, 1963, p. 365;
Barron, 2015). Other once-dominant industry titans such as Sears Roebuck and Kmart, the top
two retail chains in the United States until Walmart overtook them in 1990, have not only been
forced to merge with each other as Sears Holdings Corporation, but desperately hold on for
their very survival as their sheer numbers of stores, sales and market share continue to erode. In
2013, J.C. Penney nearly fell into bankruptcy as a result of its own $4 billion loss in sales and
$1 billion net loss on the year due to poor company leadership, forcing the company to shutter
nearly eighty department stores from 2014–2016, with plans to close at least 130 more by the
end of 2017 (Kruger, 2017, pp. 280–281; Loeb, 2017). In late 2016, Macy’s likewise announced
plans to close roughly 100 of its nearly 800 remaining locations by the end of 2017. Even retail
juggernaut Walmart is not impervious to change and occasional failures across its own multi-
unit empire, with failed global ventures into Germany, India, Russia and South Korea (Berfield,
2013). In 2016,Walmart was forced to close about 1% of its global store fleet, and shut down 152
stores of various formats within the United States as disparate competitors continue to provide
time-saving shopping alternatives to visiting Walmart’s massive Supercenters (Wahba). Dollar
General, despite its modest Tennessee roots and exponentially smaller stores, already has 13,000
locations in the United States alone, outnumbering both Walmart or Carrefour worldwide; its
$22 billion in revenues also place the tiny discounter ahead of department store chains such as
Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Dillard's, and nearly on par with Macy’s (Mergent Online, 2017).
The poet T.S. Eliot, a cosmopolitan resident of both the United Kingdom and the United
States, once penned the line that ‘Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time
future, and time future contained in time past’ (1943).Through the retail lens of the twenty-first

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century, Eliot’s twentieth-century statement certainly appears to be apropos for multiple retailers
on both sides of the Atlantic. Most notably, the Hudson’s Bay Company, brought to life by the
efforts of Prince Rupert and the 1670 signature of King Charles II, today oversees 461 depart-
ment store locations across North America as well as Europe, including Germany’s Galeria
Kaufhof chain and such American institutions as Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, with a
takeover bid of the Macy’s empire still in play at the time of this writing (Kestenbaum, 2017).
Walmart, the world’s number one retailer with 11,500 locations and more than $482 billion
in annual sales, likewise has its own historical roots in James Cash Penney’s rural Wyoming
enterprise, a 114-year-old department store chain that first employed and inspired Sam Walton
and his younger brother Bud in the early 1940s (Kruger, 2017, pp. 9–10, 285). Ironically, of the
thousands of department stores Penney would ultimately open, his first one within the remote
Wyoming community of Kemmerer still remains in operation at the time of this writing, com-
peting against the likes of both regional Walmart Supercenters and global online retailers such as
Amazon.com (Kruger, 2017, p. 296).
In hindsight, the history of multiple retailers can really be seen as a succession of innova-
tive merchants perpetually responding to the needs of ever-changing customers, adapting and
borrowing new ideas from each other in the process, and creating and replicating new types of
stores to better meet those needs. As chain store innovator Earl Corder Sams remarked in 1929,
‘We could not bring all of our customers to one store so we have taken the store to the custom-
ers’ (Kruger, 2014, p. 331). Nearly eighty years later, global retail visionaries like Jeff Bezos are
additionally proving that a retail firm with virtually no physical stores can generate more than
$100 billion in annual sales worldwide. Amazon.com is but one example of the postmodern
convergence of technology and multi-unit retailing, where anyone anywhere can be a customer,
and any screen in front of that customer can be a number of stores. Such infinite possibilities in
multi-unit retailing were well beyond even the wildest dreams of earlier masterminds such as
James Cash Penney, David Lewis, George Gilman, Frank Woolworth, Simon Marks and Dorothy
Shaver – and yet, for better or worse, the present and the future of multiple retailers is merely
the continuance of retailing ideas and methods they each set in motion.

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 18
CO-OPERATIVE RETAILING
Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger and Greg Patmore

Introduction
In its most basic form, consumer co-operation is a form of resource pooling. Individuals – often
though not exclusively those of limited means – contribute to a common fund, which can
then be used to purchase goods in bulk and thus at a discount, for redistribution between the
members (van der Linden 2008: 133). As such, consumer co-operatives may be small-scale and
informal, for example when members of a shared student household pool their resources to buy
a 20kg sack of rice in preference to each individual buying their own 500g bag. But consumer
co-operatives may also become very large organisations manufacturing, distributing and retail-
ing goods to millions of members and handling annual volumes of trade turnover that easily
rival that of any other retailing business.
Most of the consumer co-operative societies discussed here began as small community
initiatives but later grew into regional or national federations. Often referred to by popular
names – such as the “Co-op” or “Brugsen” to give the English and Danish examples – it is
these established co-operatives that are the main focus of this chapter. The chapter draws on
our knowledge of consumer co-operatives in different national contexts, but above all on the
examples presented in our volume A Global History of Consumer Co-operation since 1850: Move-
ments and Businesses (Hilson, Neunsinger and Patmore 2017). While as far as possible we try to
consider co-operative retailing in a global perspective, a Eurocentric bias has to some extent
been unavoidable, reflecting the much better developed historiography on European consumer
co-operation (in languages that we can read).
As Marcel van der Linden has noted, the pooling of resources in a co-operative is one strat-
egy available to consumers of limited means to resist market failures in a capitalist system and
secure supplies of scarce essential goods (van der Linden 1994).1 For this reason, consumer co-
operatives have often been conceived as alternatives to capitalist systems for the distribution and
supply of goods. Moreover, consumer co-operatives are also often characterised by the idea of
members’ democratic influence and a bottom up approach.There are also examples of consumer
co-operatives started and operated by the state, such as those in the USSR and the socialist states
of Eastern Europe, but consideration of these is beyond the scope of this chapter. Consumer
co-operatives were sometimes associated with liberal self-help strategies in the second half of
the nineteenth century, but around the turn of the twentieth century they became aligned with

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working-class socialist movements in many countries. In 1910, the Second International for-
mally recognised co-operatives as a means in the class struggle, though the question of political
affiliation has remained deeply controversial for many co-operatives. Co-operatives have gener-
ally needed to operate within the market economy and to compete with other retailers, even if
their leaders were often ambivalent about the strategies which this implied.
This ambivalence forms a central theme for our chapter.We consider co-operatives as organ-
isations that combine the features of businesses and social movements, with varying degrees of
balance between the two ( Jensen 2016). To what extent are consumer co-operatives part of the
capitalist retailing sector and to what extent have they tried to provide an alternative to it? How
have they sought to reconcile their functions as businesses operating in a competitive retailing
market with their aspirations to challenge capitalist retailing, distribution and consumption?
How have they adapted to changes in the sector and how successful has this been?

The growth of co-operative retailing c.1860–1914

The story of the Equitable Rochdale Pioneers Society founded in December 1844 is well-
established in the mythology of the international co-operative movement. The consumer co-
operative movement in nineteenth-century Europe was however a multi-centred phenomenon
which emerged more or less simultaneously in a range of different contexts. Examples of co-
operative stores could be found in France, Switzerland and Britain during the 1830s and Italy
from the 1850s. Often these were relatively short-lived experiments, formed in response to
temporary periods of high prices or food shortages, but they were also linked to the radical
political movements of the 1830s and 1840s (Battilani 2017; Degen 2017; Hilson 2017a; Lam-
bersens et al. 2017). Similar initiatives also appeared outside Europe, for example in Canada
(MacPherson 2017).
The main period of growth for consumer co-operatives in Europe started in the 1860s, as
a result of several factors. First, it was stimulated by the transnational circulation of ideas and
innovations in response to economic and social change. Often these exchanges were mediated
through personal contacts and many of the national histories of co-operation reserve a special
place for the individual pioneer who ‘discovered’ co-operation abroad and transplanted the
idea to his [sic!] national context. Knowledge of co-operative ideas also moved across borders
with migrants. Examples include Belgium, where co-operatives were established by labour
migrants and political refugees from northern France during the 1850s (van Goethem 2017)
but above all in the Americas and Australia, where consumer co-operatives were the result of
“white” trans-Atlantic migration and part of the resources used by immigrants to help them
establish new lives (Balnave and Patmore 2017; MacPherson 2017; Patmore 2017;Vuotto et al.
2017).
Secondly, and often triggered by these transnational exchanges, the establishment of a suitable
legislative framework for co-operatives was an important stimulant to co-operative organisation.
Early nineteenth-century co-operative societies tended to be formed as associations or mutual
(friendly) societies, or as joint-stock companies. Legal arrangements varied considerably in how
co-operatives were defined and the extent to which the legislation defined co-operative princi-
ples. For example, the flexibility of Belgium’s 1873 law did little to shield co-operative societies
from the effects of bad management, while Germany’s co-operative law in 1889 improved the
statutory arrangements for auditing co-operative businesses but at the same time banned them
from trading with non-members (van Goethem 2017; Prinz 2017). In some cases co-operatives
developed in the absence of legal recognition of their businesses as co-operatives, for example in
Italy where such legislation was not introduced until 1911 (Battilani 2017).

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What then was a consumer co-operative according to the various legal codes? Finding a
definitive statement of co-operative principles before the International Co-operative Alliance
(ICA) established one in 1937 is difficult, but most co-operatives shared several distinctive fea-
tures. First, co-operatives were a form of business partnership, but in contrast to the other
nineteenth-century innovation, the joint stock company, they generally placed limits on the
individual ownership of share capital. Second, most co-operatives contained within their rules
some provision for democratic control, usually expressed in the principle of “one member one
vote”. Third, even before the Rochdale Pioneers consumer co-operatives had begun to adopt
the practice of distributing the trading surplus to members in proportion to patronage. The
advantage of this approach, as Michael Prinz has noted, was that ‘it was set against the logic of
spontaneous co-operation’ (Prinz 2003: 19); in other words it contained a built-in incentive for
members to patronise the co-operative stores. It was also favoured by social reformers for help-
ing to encourage thrift and in some parts of Europe, such as Britain, the quarterly dividend or
“divi” became an extremely important part of working-class household economies from the
second half of the nineteenth century (Gurney 1996). The dividend was sometimes a source of
friction between co-operative societies and their opponents: co-operators argued the surplus
generated through mutual trading was not technically profit and thus should not be taxed but
during the interwar period many governments, under pressure from the lobbies of private trad-
ers, insisted that this was not the case (e.g. Gurney 2015).
From the 1860s therefore co-operative stores became part of the retailing landscape in many
European towns and cities. In most cases they started very modestly as small and simple stores,
sometimes located in temporary premises and trading for limited hours only. Their stock con-
sisted above all of essential foodstuffs and many co-operative societies, such as the famous Vooruit
society in Ghent and Solidar in Malmö, began trading as co-operative bakeries (van Goethem
2017; Friberg 2005). With bread as with other goods, co-operatives were partly a response to
concerns about the quality and safety of food in industrial cities and co-operative societies made
much of their ambition to supply pure, unadulterated food at fair weights and measures.
Consumer co-operation was by no means exclusively an urban phenomenon, however. In
Scandinavia co-operative development was stimulated by new legislation in the 1860s and 1870s
which ended the monopoly of the towns on retail trade. By the early twentieth century the co-
operative store was as much a feature of the villages of rural Denmark and Finland as it was of
the working-class neighbourhoods of cities like Hamburg, Manchester or Turin (Hilson 2017b).
This meant that the line between agricultural and consumer co-operatives was often blurred, as
for example where co-operative societies supplying agricultural equipment also offered grocer-
ies to their farmer members. Elsewhere, however, consumer co-operatives faced apathy or even
hostility in the countryside, for example in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands (King and Ken-
nedy 1994; Watts 2017). Meanwhile, especially in settler societies such as Canada and Australia,
co-operative stores often emerged to serve the needs of particular occupational communities,
such as those associated with mining areas or railway junctions (Balnave and Patmore 2017;
MacPherson 2017).
It is difficult therefore to generalise about patterns of co-operative success and failure in the
nineteenth century. Consumer co-operation flourished in Ghent, where the Vooruit society had
developed an extensive network of stores and other activities, but as Geert van Goethem has
shown attempts to transplant this system to the other Flemish cities of Antwerp and Zele ended
in failure (van Goethem 2017). Co-operatives could be strengthened through their connection
to already established working-class “networks of solidarity” as was the case in Portugal (Freire
and Pereira 2017), but attempts to link them more closely to the labour movement were a
source of controversy and division in many parts of Europe.There are also examples of consumer

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Figure 18.1 Bakers Lennart Lindmark and Åke Granström with the ‘Derby’ baking machine. Co-­operative
bakery, 17 July 1946. Many consumer co-operatives began trading as bakeries and prided
themselves on their use of the most modern, hygienic and efficient equipment.
(Courtesy of the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library)

co-operatives that reflected ethnic or linguistic solidarities, for example in North America where
they were associated with Finnish settler communities or in Bohemia where there were separate
German and Czech-speaking co-operative federations (Patmore 2017; Reich 2006).
By the turn of the twentieth century consumer co-operatives were expanding rapidly,
not only in the size of their membership and trade, but also in the nature and ambition of
their businesses. The largest urban co-operative societies served tens of thousands of mem-
bers. Their share of retail trade in any particular locality is difficult to measure accurately, but
one estimate suggests that the British consumer co-operatives accounted for between 7 and
9% of national retail trade, rising to about 17% of the grocery sector (Wilson, Webster and

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Vorberg-Rugh 2013: 99). The co-operative proportion of trade was probably significantly
higher in particular localities.
Co-operative expansion was facilitated by three innovations. First, with some exceptions
where legislation prevented co-operative societies opening more than one store, co-operatives
pursued horizontal integration, so that many larger cities had multiple branches of stores run
by a single co-operative society. Second, co-operative societies expanded their trade beyond
the initial focus on basic foodstuffs: they had specialist departments for butchery, dairy produce
and groceries; they also sold non-food goods such as clothes and larger items such as furniture
and bicycles. Many offered a range of other services to their members, including insurance,
banking and savings, pharmacies, funerals, recreational activities, education and even holidays.
Third, co-operative societies were pioneers of vertical integration, establishing central organisa-
tions for the wholesale purchase of goods and also for their manufacture. Spearheading these
developments was the English Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), founded in 1863. The
CWS’ foundation was possible only after a legislative amendment allowed co-operatives to form
federal structures, but thereafter it grew rapidly from its beginnings in the north of England.
By the turn of the century it had developed an extensive network of depots and warehouses
not only across England and Wales (there was a separate wholesale society for Scotland) but also
internationally, including bases in Denmark, France, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand (Web-
ster, Wilson and Vorberg-Rugh 2017). It also manufactured branded goods at its own factories,
including biscuits, sweets, boots and shoes, soap and tea, to name just a few (Wilson,Webster and
Vorberg-Rugh 2013: 80–81). Its impressive headquarters in Manchester became a destination
for co-operative visits from abroad, so much so that its influence deserves to be considered as
important as that of Rochdale.

Co-operative retailing in the interwar period

World War I was a turning point for consumer co-operatives in many parts of Europe. Even
in non-belligerent countries the food shortages and consumer price rises caused by the war
necessitated government intervention in the regulation and distribution of the food supply.
Co-operatives were incorporated into these efforts, in recognition of the fact that they had an
infrastructure for food distribution that private retailers lacked. This also meant that their mem-
bership and volume of trade rose substantially. But the situation also sharpened conflicts over the
production and distribution of food and many European countries saw a mobilisation of con-
sumers – especially working-class women – protesting against what they saw as profiteering by
the producers and distributors of food (Davis 1996; Hunt 2010). Some consumer co-operatives
found themselves on the frontline of these conflicts. In Finland for example the unity of a co-
operative movement containing both producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives could no longer
be sustained, and the movement split in 1916 with the formation of a new co-operative union
for the working-class consumer societies (Hilson 2017b). In Britain, co-operators’ dissatisfac-
tion with the government’s treatment of their movement led to a decision to engage directly in
political action and the formation of the Co-operative Party in 1918 (Adams 1987).
Leaving these political difficulties aside, from the end of the war co-operatives faced new
challenges. First, the disruption to international trade threatened the international supply chains
on which co-operatives relied to secure many of their goods. Many co-operators accepted free
trade as an article of faith, which they hoped would be restored as quickly as possible as normal
activities resumed after the war. For this purpose, efforts were made within the ICA to found
an International Co-operative Wholesale Society (ICWS) to promote trade between co-oper-
ative societies in different countries, but this proved difficult and despite various initiatives the

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ICWS did little more than undertake some limited bilateral activities during the interwar period
(Friberg 2017). But there was one notable example of success in international co-operative trad-
ing, namely the Scandinavian Co-operative Wholesale Society (Nordisk Andelsforbund, NAF)
established by representatives of the three Scandinavian co-operative wholesale societies in 1918
with the aim of creating a stronger position for the Scandinavian co-operative wholesales in
international markets.2 NAF established a trading office in London in 1921, and during the
interwar period it was to become a significant importer of goods such as coffee and dried fruit
to the Nordic region (Hummelin 1998).
Second, although the acute trade disruptions immediately following the war subsided, co-
operators were widely aware that they were also facing new challenges resulting from longer-
term changes in the capitalist economy. In terms of co-operative retailing these can be summed
up in terms of three related developments: concentration and the rise of trusts and monopolies;
increased horizontal integration with the rise of large retailers and chain stores; increased verti-
cal integration which in turn implied the rise of marketing, branding and advertising. All of
these changes had been evident before the war of course and at times they had brought the co-
operative movement into conflict with its capitalist rivals. An example is the Swedish margarine
manufacturers’ attempted boycott of Kooperativa Förbundet (KF) in 1909–10, which led KF to
establish its own production of margarine, while the English CWS fought a similar battle with
Lever Brothers in 1910–11 (Kylebäck 1974;Wilson,Webster and Vorberg-Rugh 2013: 115–120).
Historians of the co-operative movement have been divided in their assessments of how
successfully co-operative retailers responded to these challenges. Pessimists have highlighted the
difficulties co-operatives faced in maintaining their market shares without losing their distinc-
tiveness as co-operative businesses.Thus, Furlough (1991) describes how the French co-operative
movement gained in membership and volume of trade following the war, but its concessions to
‘waltzing with the capitalists’, as she put it, amounted to a defeat of the co-operative aspirations
to establish an alternative culture of consumption that had flourished before the war. Similarly
in Britain, although the interwar period marked in many ways the high point of the movement
in terms of its membership and influence it was already showing some signs of the problems that
were to beset it after World War II: fragmentation and local rivalries between societies; difficul-
ties in adapting its products to the demands of mass consumerism. While co-operation was able
to make some advances in the south, including London, there were also ominous signs of falling
sales in its traditional strongholds in the north of England (Purvis 1999, 2009). The decision to
embrace political activism was seen by some as a defeat for the movement and a sign of its loss
of confidence in the power of voluntarism to effect social and economic change (Youngjohns
1954; cited in Carbery 1969).
As this suggests, while co-operation was forced to respond to changes in commercial retail-
ing, it also faced political challenges. Firstly, the growth of state welfare benefits such as pensions
and accident insurance removed what was in some cases an important incentive to join the
local co-operative society (van Goethem 2017). Secondly, especially in the wake of the Great
Depression, co-operatives were threatened by the political mobilisation of their commercial
opponents. In some parts of Europe this took the relatively mild form of legislation that was
hostile to co-operative trading, for example making co-operative trading surpluses liable to
taxation (Gurney 2015). But elsewhere these challenges were far more serious, where attacks
on co-operatives formed part of the wider challenges to democracy and the eventual fall of
democratic regimes. In Austria, Germany and Italy for example there were examples of vandal-
ism and attacks on co-operative stores, with the co-operatives eventually incorporated directly
into the authoritarian regimes with a consequent loss of autonomy (Battilani 2017; Brazda et al.

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2017; Prinz 2017). Likewise, consumer co-operatives were also incorporated into the distribu-
tion structures of new authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal (Freire and Pereira 2017;
Medina-Albaladejo 2017).
Against this rather gloomy picture there are also grounds for a much more optimistic inter-
pretation of co-operative history in interwar Europe. First, there is evidence to suggest that
co-operative retailers were able to respond to the challenges and to maintain both the strength
of their businesses and their significance and influence as social movements. As Robertson
(2010) has shown, during the interwar period consumer co-operative societies flourished as a
ubiquitous part of everyday life in Britain, not only through their network of stores, but also
through the broad range of social, recreational and education activities that they provided.
Robertson also finds evidence that the co-operative aspiration to offer an alternative to capi-
talist trading persisted. These included for example the movement’s ambitions to operate as
a model employer, or its continued emphasis on the quality and trustworthiness of its goods
(Robertson 2010).
Second, there are also examples of how co-operative businesses were able to respond with
some success to the new business challenges in the retail sector, including vertical and horizontal
integration and the branding and advertising of co-operative goods. Even before World War I,
some of the larger urban co-operative societies such as Vooruit constructed lavish central stores
to rival the capitalist department stores (Scholliers 1999; see also Morrison 2003: 153–155). Co-
operative thinkers were initially hostile to advertising, which they regarded as symptomatic of
capitalism’s tendency to mislead consumers and create false desires. But they could not afford to
ignore it. Jonsson (2017) shows how from the early twentieth century Swedish KF began to take
seriously the need not only for advertising but also related questions, including the packaging
and branding of its goods and the design and layout of its stores. Unlike the efforts of its capitalist
rivals, co-operative advertising was conceived not as manipulative or misleading but as part of
strategies to educate its member-customers in rational consumption ( Jonsson 2017; Aléx 1994).
Co-operative advertising campaigns were thus designed to draw attention to the quality, purity
and trustworthiness of co-operative goods, in other words to give consumers information about
the goods that they bought.
KF can be considered a leader not only in this field but more generally as an example of
a highly successful co-operative retail business during the interwar period. For Brazda and
Schediwy (2011a), comparing the business successes and failures of co-operatives across Europe,
KF epitomised the switch towards the professionalisation of management in the co-operative
movement after 1918, which in turn emphasised the need for business efficiency and rationality
alongside the more traditional co-operative values of solidarity and community. In the case of
KF this can be seen in its efforts to centralise the movement and co-ordinate its development, for
example through promoting the mergers of local co-operative societies; its investments in adver-
tising, stock display, staff training and shop design; its strategies for co-ordinating its purchases
internationally through NAF and above all the extension of its own manufacturing undertak-
ings as part of a conscious and highly publicised strategy to tackle the problem of monopoly.
Beginning with its successful defeat of the margarine boycott in 1909–10, and continuing after
the war with the establishment of its own manufacturing plants for flour, sugar refining, matches,
galoshes, linoleum and lightbulbs, KF was able to resist successfully the attempts of international
cartels to monopolise the market and in doing so to force consumer prices for these commodi-
ties down. Its success in doing so was used by its leaders as an argument for how co-operation
contributed to maintaining competition and thus business efficiency in free markets that were
increasingly threatened by monopolies (Hilson 2018).

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Third, the 1930s also saw a resurgence of interest in consumer co-operation outside Europe,
including Canada, which Ian MacPherson (2017) has described as a golden age of Canadian
co-operatives, and the US (MacPherson 2017; Patmore 2017). The Great Depression generally
encouraged criticism of the prevailing business system and the search for alternatives based on
service rather than profit. The Co-operative League of the USA (CLUSA) estimated that the
membership of US consumer co-operatives grew 40% from 1929 to 1934. Central associations
of local co-operatives and regional federations were formed to undertake joint purchase and
to market bulk items such as petrol, while youth leagues and women’s guilds were founded to
encourage young people and women to join the movement. African Americans formed co-
operatives in locations such as Chicago and Harlem, which was also the headquarters for Young
Negroes’ Co-operative Leagues (Gordon Nembhard 2017). Examples of external influences
on these developments include a visit to the US by the Japanese Christian co-operator Toyo-
hiko Kagawa, which attracted considerable interest, and publicity surrounding the co-operative
educational work of the Reverend Dr Moses Coady at Antigonish in Nova Scotia (Fitzpatrick-
Behrens and LeGrand 2017; MacPherson 2017; Patmore 2017).
The US co-operative movement also faced a favourable political situation, with support
from President Roosevelt and renewed interest from the labour movement. In 1933, Roosevelt
issued an Executive Order exempting all ‘bona fide and legitimate cooperative organization’
from the prohibitions of rebates and discounts under the National Industrial Recovery Act
(NIRA) (Patmore 2017). The President sent a mission to Europe in July 1936 to report on
co-operative developments in Europe, especially in Sweden where they were regarded as a
“middle way” (Knapp 1973: 391). The US co-operative movement also found a renewed level
of support from the trade unions. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) welcomed the
resurgence of the consumer co-operative movement, noting the benefits of co-operatives for
workers in cutting out the middle-man and ensuring the quality of goods and reducing prices
by minimising waste. Meanwhile, business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce of the
United States watched the growth of consumer co-operatives with concern, noting that it was
‘improper for government agencies to extend preferential treatment’ to them, as they were ‘but
another form of competitive force’ seeking to win the patronage of consumers (Patmore 2017).

Co-operative retailing since 1945

Espen Ekberg has noted that in the postwar years some consumer co-operative movements were
able to survive or strengthen their market share while others went into decline. The survival
of consumer co-operatives is linked to their ability to confront three major transformations or
revolutions in the food retail market. Ekberg focuses on the German, British and Nordic expe-
riences to illustrate his argument, with the German experience being one of failed adaptation,
the British case being one of delayed adaptation and the Nordic cases being ones of partially
successful adaptation, albeit in different ways (Ekberg 2012a, 2017; Balnave and Patmore 2015:
1134–1138).
Firstly, co-operatives have had to adapt their store formats to meet the “supermarket revo-
lution” with the growth of self-serviced supermarket and hypermarket retailing. Before these
changes co-operative stores were small and specialised, located close to the consumer and relying
upon personal counter service. Now food is largely sold on a self-service basis and the average
size of stores has increased, while the overall number of stores has fallen. Meeting this challenge
successfully requires sufficient capital formation to purchase the land required to build super-
markets and hypermarkets, with sufficient space for car parking.While the German co-operative
movement was quick to launch self-service stores, they failed to consolidate these gains and

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transfer trade to larger supermarkets and chains (see also Prinz 2017). There was also declining
shareholder capital and an increased reliance on borrowed capital. The British co-operatives,
despite having also had an initial lead, lost their initiative. There were also problems with raising
capital for extension and in both the British and German co-operatives there was some hostility
to the supermarket format. The Norwegians by contrast were able to retain their initial lead in
self-service and raise sufficient capital for extension through a co-operative savings programme
launched in 1954. Unlike Germany and the UK, the competition from conventional retailers
was less fierce in Norway (Ekberg 2012a: 1006, 1009–1015).
While Ekberg does recognise the importance of shareholder capital, Menzani and Zamagni
(2010) have suggested that improved capitalisation has been an important factor allowing Italian
co-operatives to flourish since the 1970s. A favourable legal environment has assisted this, for
example with laws that exempt undistributed profits set aside in indivisible reserves, which are
the assets owned by the co-operative that can never be divided among members, from corporate
taxes. This allowed co-operatives to fund further expansion from self-financing (Menzani and
Zamagni 2010: 105–106).
The second important challenge according to Ekberg was the ‘chain store revolution’, which
related to the growth of large standardised, integrated and centralised retail chains. In the 1950s
West European independent retailers would own one or more stores and operate them on a non-
standardised and autonomous basis, receiving supplies from a variety of stores. This organisation
had fundamentally changed by the end of the century with retail chains having several hundred
branches marketed under the same brand. Inflationary pressures in the 1970s increased the costs
of holding stocks on the premises and improvements in delivery techniques reduced the need
for on-site warehousing. Large supermarket chains in the US and UK developed Regional Dis-
tribution Centres or centralised depots. Technological developments at the cash register, such as
price scanning, allowed better supply forecasting and an emphasis on “demand pull” rather than
supply push. The headquarters of the chain store supermarkets became responsible for buying
and negotiated on behalf of all stores in the chain. These developments paved the way for large
cost savings, the increased efficiency and productivity of operations and cheaper prices (Ekberg
2012a: 1006; Hallsworth and Bell 2003).
According to Ekberg, the German co-operative movement’s two national associations, its
wholesale and union, failed to co-ordinate their activities and had very different attitudes to
key issues such as logistics and amalgamation. There was also a breakdown in the relationship
between the wholesale society, GEG (Grosseinkaufs-Gesellschaft Deutscher Consumvereine)
and the retail societies, with the latter developing their own warehousing and buying procedures.
The British co-operative movement also remained highly fragmented until 1993 when the
CWS with three other societies formed the Co-operative Retailing Group to buy supplies for
the member organisations (see also Secchi 2017). However the regional societies soon formed
a separate buying group, the Consortium of Independent Co-operatives, a development which
highlighted continuing tensions within the movement. By contrast the Norwegian co-operative
movement did not face the impact of the chain store revolution before the 1980s, but these
changes were already underway in the Norwegian co-operative movement, which launched
Norway’s first fully integrated retail/wholesale chain in 1990 (Ekberg 2012a: 1009–1015).
Ekberg has also developed three organisational models to explain the success or failure of
co-operative movements since World War II in the face of competition from large, centralised
conventional retail chains.These are the federal, hybrid and non-federal models.The non-federal
model involves merging all independent consumer co-operatives into one organisational unit.
Examples of this included Konsum Austria and Co-op AG in Germany, which were formed
to avoid financial difficulties. The hybrid model involved the amalgamation of societies into

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Figure 18.2 New co-operative convenience store in Årsta, 1948. In many parts of Europe co-operatives
were the pioneers of retailing innovations such as the introduction of self-service during the
1940s, but later lost out to their capitalist rivals.
(Courtesy of the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library)
 Co-operative retailing

larger units with a national wholesaler having centralised control over commercial operations.
This type of model was a transitional model for the UK, which since 2000 has moved towards
a fully centralised non-federal model. The federal model emphasises merging small local co-
operatives into larger regional units, with the national federations focusing on wholesaling and
manufacturing and ensuring the integration and standardising of operations through contractual
arrangements. An example of this can be seen with the NKL in Norway. This approach rein-
forces a traditional federal model that has served the consumer co-operatives since the nine-
teenth century (Ekberg 2012b).
The successful Italian experience reinforces Ekberg’s recognition that the organisational
structure of co-operatives can be important for the survival against competition from conven-
tional large retail chains. In Italy the smaller co-operatives merged into larger co-operatives in
order to have sufficient capital to manage the modern supermarkets and hypermarkets. Battilani
(2017) argues that this process transformed the Italian consumer co-operatives during the 1950s
and 1960s and made the second half of the twentieth century the golden age of the Italian con-
sumer co-operative movement. Menzani and Zamagni (2010) view co-operative networking as
another strategic factor that allowed the Italian movement to flourish.The networking between
co-operatives has allowed them, for example, to achieve a critical mass in the market.
Outside Europe there were some examples of decline and major collapses of significant
co-operatives, in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the US (Balnave and Patmore
2008: 103–104; Cooper and Mohn 1992). One particularly notable example of collapse was
the Berkeley Consumer Co-operative, which was the largest consumer co-operative in the US,
formed in 1937. Following rapid expansion during the 1950s and 1960s, during which it also
became a centre for consumer activism and education, the co-operative’s finances deteriorated
during the 1980s and in 1988 it had to file for bankruptcy (Patmore 2017). The reasons for its
decline and collapse are indicative of the problems faced by many consumer co-operatives in
the postwar period. They include: problems resulting from its expansion policy and attempts
to incorporate non-co-operative businesses after 1962; bitter political divisions within the co-
operative; the turnover of co-operative management; difficulties in relationships with wholesal-
ers and problems with the quality of produce; the competitiveness of the retail sector and the
loss of member support (Patmore 2017).

Survival and revival

While there has been an emphasis of the significance of networking among co-operatives,
some co-operatives have survived where co-operative movements and networks have collapsed.
One factor that Ekberg does not highlight is the links between co-operative societies and their
local communities. Several scholars have recently attributed the continued appeal of surviving
consumer co-operatives to their link to the community, particularly in rural areas (Balnave and
Patmore 2015: 1138). As Nicole Robertson has noted ‘for some of its members, the role of a
co-operative society within a community extended beyond the realms of grocery shopping’
(Robertson 2010: 213). The survival of what Balnave and Patmore describe as ‘outsider co-ops,
which are not linked to any co-operative retailing networks’ can be seen for example in Ger-
many, where the co-operative eG operates more than 200 supermarkets in five states, and the
Community Co-operative Store (Nuriootpa) in the Barossa Valley of South Australia (Balnave
and Patmore 2015: 1133).
The Nuriootpa co-operative was able to survive the “supermarket challenge” and highlights
the need to focus on capitalisation as an important explanation for the survival of retail co-
operatives. The Co-op successfully retained sufficient capital to expand and update its facilities

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Figure 18.3 An example of recent success: the Barossa Co-operative Mall in South Australia, 2009.
(Courtesy of Richard O’Leary).

to build modern supermarkets and provide a range of services. Its funds also gave it sufficient
capital to purchase suitable property for both the required supermarket floor space and appro-
priate car parking facilities. This also allowed it to buy-out land that could provide potential
floor space for competitors. It successfully tightened up the provision of credit facilities so that
this did not become a major liability for the Co-op. Second, the Co-op was able to survive the
‘chain store revolution’. Like other surviving Australian consumer co-operatives, as an outsider
co-operative the Nuriootpa Co-op does not fit the organisational models developed by Ekberg.
The Nuriootpa Co-op represents a fourth model of co-operative organisation built around
non-co-operative business brand franchising. The Co-op became a franchisee for the Foodland
and later IGA (Independent Grocers of Australia) supermarket chains to ensure access to sup-
ply chains and broader marketing campaigns. It became a franchisee for a range of products
including hardware and carpets and franchising also became a mechanism for blocking other
potential franchises setting themselves up in the Barossa Valley. The Co-op also rapidly adopted
innovations such as computerised price scanning to ensure minimal inventories and respond
to consumer demand. Third, the Nuriootpa Co-op survived the “consumer revolution”. The
appeals of co-operative ideology and dividend payments became less important in attracting and
retaining members. The Co-op found it necessary to rely on sales and promotions to maintain
custom and compete with other retailers. While there was a declining level of participation in
the Co-op through AGMs for instance, Co-op members would take advantage of the demo-
cratic governance of the Co-op if there were major issues of concern. The Co-op’s survival was
also linked to its close association with the local community. The Co-op’s origins lay in a com-
munity movement formed in Nuriootpa in 1936 to develop local facilities such as parks and
swimming pools.While there was a major early disagreement within the Co-op as to how much

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of the Co-op’s surplus should be diverted into community projects, the Co-op Committee
of Management provided funding for a range of activities, including sporting associations and
youth services. They also promoted the retail profile of the Barossa Valley by forming alliances
with other retailers. The Co-op through its advertising broadened its appeal by highlighting
the importance of members shopping locally for the economic survival of Nuriootpa and the
Barossa Valley (Balnave and Patmore 2015: 1150).
While the established consumer co-operatives collapsed in a number of countries follow-
ing World War II, there have also arisen smaller community-based co-operatives. These focus
on organic, natural and local foods, rekindling the nineteenth-century co-operative concerns
with the provision of quality and safe food. Disillusion with capitalism during the late 1960s
and 1970s led to the formation of new consumer co-operatives in Australia and the United
States. Protestors against the Vietnam War, environmentalists, community control advocates
and civil rights activists saw co-operatives as a symbol of the counterculture. Some of these
co-operatives have been able to prosper by specifically focusing on organic foods and locally
produced goods. In the United States current examples include the GreenStar Co-operative
Market at Ithaca, which was founded in 1971 and had 8,000 members in 2011, and the New
Pioneer Food Co-op in Iowa City, which was also founded in 1971 and has more than 11,000
members. The growth of these consumer co-operatives followed the earlier pattern of estab-
lishing regional associations and then forming the National Co-operative Grocers’ Associa-
tion (NCGA) in 1999. By 2012 there were 121 food co-operatives, which operate 160 stores
in thirty-four states and have combined annual sales of approximately over $1.4 billion. The
states that have largest numbers of these co-operative stores in 2011 were Minnesota (nine-
teen), Washington (seventeen) and California (eleven) (Patmore 2017). By contrast, against a
background where two leading conventional retail supermarket chains control 80% of the
Australian grocery market share, there are only a small number of these food co-operatives in
Australia and there has been no attempt to form an organisation on the scale of the NCGA.
A notable example in Australia is Alfalfa House in Sydney, which is a member-based co-
operative with a one-off joining fee. The co-operative provides discounts for members who
volunteer their labour in the store (Balnave and Patmore 2015: 1139; Battilani, Balnave and
Patmore 2015: 65).
Outside of Europe and Western countries, there has been a continuing interest in consumer
co-operatives in developing and less industrialised countries. In Argentina the Sociedad Coop-
erativa Obrera Limitada (CO) began a regional expansion in 2006 that was still continuing
in 2016. Against the background of extreme state neoliberal reforms and consequent rising
unemployment in Argentina during the 1990s and 2000s, a movement of worker-owned fac-
tories commenced in 1998 when 190 workers occupied Metallurgical and Plastic Industries of
Argentina, a medium sized factory, to stop its closure and turned it into a workers’ co-operative.
This movement grew rapidly and by 2010 there were approximately 205 occupied factories,
which were mainly small to medium sized companies, in industries ranging from chocolate
manufacturing to metallurgic products. The worker co-operatives have linked up with con-
sumer co-operatives in 2016 to construct an online purchasing platform that will allow the two
co-operative sectors to interact and trade with one another. In South Korea, political democrati-
sation in 1987 and economic growth provided a favourable climate for the growth of consumer
co-operatives.The total number of co-operative members increased from 70,000 in 1999, when
the consumer co-operation law was enacted to 630,000 by late 2010. They have played an
important role in promoting ethical consumerism, support for domestic wheat production, fair
trade and trade with other co-operatives (Kim 2017; Rossi 2015; Voinea 2016; Vuotto, Verbeke
and Caruana 2017).

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An important event that raised the profile of the co-operative movement generally was the
declaration of 2012 by the United Nations as the International Year of Co-operatives. One
country where the Year had an impact was Australia, where national co-operative organisation
was weak and co-operatives had a low political profile. In July 2013, a new organisation called
Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals (BCCM) was launched to represent the whole
sector, including consumer co-operatives.The BCCM successfully lobbied the Australian Senate
for the first major federal inquiry into Australian co-operatives and mutuals, with a favourable
report delivered in March outlining seventeen recommendations including the need for national
statistics and the better representation of the sector in government policy discussions. All major
Australian political parties, with the exception of the Liberal Party, adopted the recommenda-
tions without qualification as part of their policies for 2016 federal elections (Balnave and Pat-
more 2017: 466; Commonwealth of Australia Senate 2016).

Co-operative retailing: between movements and businesses

Co-operative movements started to become a global phenomenon in retailing during the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century, during a period of European expansion that implied the
adaptation of local models of co-operation to European models. Ideas of co-operation were
circulated through different media: international organisations, political and social movements,
migration and trade. The co-operative movement’s democratic ideal of shared responsibilities
and rights with a set of relatively simple rules meant that it was easy to adapt to places of white
settlement. Co-operative retailing was also seen as an important strategy for self-help, especially
during periods of scarcity.
Although there are many similarities between consumer co-operatives worldwide we need
to analyse their development in relation to specific historical contexts in order to understand
the diversity of forms that they take. Consumer co-operatives have been started not only as
grassroots initiatives, but also with the support of the state or other institutions. State interven-
tion could mean support for the movement, such as in those cases where laws facilitated new
initiatives, but also demanded formalised auditing of co-operative businesses. State interven-
tion could also mean oppression of the democratic elements of the movement, or even in some
cases that consumer co-operatives became illegal or were forced to abandon co-operative
principles.
Much of the historiography has been rather pessimistic about the long-term possibilities
for consumer co-operatives to present a lasting and viable alternative to capitalist retailing.
Writing in the 1990s, Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda acknowledged the importance of
co-­operation as an historic alternative to capitalist retailing, but argued that the significance of
this alternative had declined in the late twentieth century, due to the inability of co-operatives
to respond to ‘the powerful commercial and cultural challenges of capitalist consumer culture’
(Furlough and Strikwerda 1999: 5–6).This thesis of decline seemed to be borne out by the high-
profile and sometimes terminal difficulties of once-powerful consumer co-operative businesses
in for example Germany, Austria, France and Britain during the 1980s (Brazda and Schediwy
2011b [1989]). Our comparative study suggests a more diverse picture. First, co-operative
­businesses – just like any form of business – are never static but constantly evolving and adopting
new forms. In many communities in Europe and North America in the early twenty-first cen-
tury there were examples of new types of consumer co-operatives, often local, small-scale and
formed in response to new consumer preferences for goods and especially food that was locally,
ecologically or otherwise ethically produced. Second, the picture of drastic decline in consumer
co-operatives after 1945 is profoundly Eurocentric. We still lack research about the history of

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consumer co-operatives in many parts of the world, but there is plenty of scattered evidence to
suggest that they continue to play a role, especially in helping consumers of limited means secure
scarce goods in the market (Birchall 1997; Shaw 2014).

Notes
1 Other strategies include boycotts and unilateral (often illegal) actions to adjust the price or quantity of
goods, for example through looting or appropriation.
2 The two Finnish wholesales joined in 1928; the Icelandic wholesale in 1949.

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 19
BY MAIL AND RAIL
A history of mail order commerce
Howard R. Stanger

Mail-order houses revolutionised distribution in the decades after the Civil War and contributed
to the rise of consumer society in the United States (Chandler, 1977; Strasser, 1989; Barron,
1997; Ayers, 1992). Mail-order catalogues (often called “Farmer’s Bibles”), along with country
stores and county fairs served as important modernising “agents of change” in rural buying and
selling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By using the expanding railroad
and telegraph networks, the steamship, and improved postal services, they extended their reach
nationally to sell manufactured consumer goods to a growing population with rising incomes.
By 1910, roughly 10 million Americans annually shopped by mail (Schlereth, 1989, 1992).While
mail order businesses emerged in other western nations, it developed first and most extensively
in the United States (Nystrom, 1919, p. 292; Nystrom, 1930).

The origins of mail order

Mail order became big business very quickly after the Civil War, with two names dominating
the field: Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears. Ward started with the prosperous dry
goods firm of Field, Palmer & Leiter, out of which grew the famous Chicago department store
Marshall Field’s. After clerking there, he worked as a travelling salesman for a St Louis dry goods
wholesaler, which gave him the opportunity to hear farmers’ dissatisfaction with limited selec-
tions and prices high. He also saw how the use of middlemen added to the final cost of goods
sold. Ward returned to Chicago with the idea of selling goods a different way – through a mail-
order general store (Latham, 1972, 1872–1972: A Century of Serving Consumers; Boorstin, 1973a).
Along with his partner and brother-in-law George R.Thorne,Ward established the first general
mail order company – Montgomery Ward & Company (Montgomery Ward or Ward), in 1872.
Mail order firms relied upon their catalogues to do the selling. Montgomery Ward’s single-
page price list contained 163 items shipped “subject to examination”. Dissatisfied customers
could return items free of charge – “Satisfaction or your money back!”The company also gained
the trust of distant consumers by offering testimonials from representatives of farmer organisa-
tions like the Grange and other satisfied customers, and with personally signed correspond-
ence. Early customers were concentrated in the Midwest. When settlers pushed west in search
of cheaper land, the catalogue followed them. Over the years, the “Big Book” grew in size,

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such that by the end of the 1880s Ward offered over 24,000 items in a fat 540-page catalogue.
A workforce of over 300 clerks handled 750,000 letters and transactions worth over $1 million
in Ward’s seven-story “bee hive” on Michigan Avenue. By the turn of the century, the catalogue
grew to 1,200 pages with 17,000 illustrations that required 2,000 clerks to handle two million
customers (Thorne, 1920; Boorstin, 1973a, 1973b, p. 123; Cronon, 1991, pp. 335–336; Tedlow,
1990, p. 285; Miller, 1996, pp. 246–247).
Montgomery Ward’s rapid success outraged merchants and wholesalers who doubted the
firm’s legitimacy. On November 8, 1873 the Chicago Tribune published an article titled, ‘Grangers
beware. Don’t Patronize Montgomery Ward & Co. – They are Dead-Beats’. But under threat of
lawsuit and its own investigation, the newspaper issued a retraction writing that its attack was
“grossly unjust” and that the company ‘is a bona fide firm, composed of respectable persons,
and doing a perfectly legitimate business in a perfectly legitimate manner’ (quoted in Cronon,
1991, p. 335). Ward’s low prices came from the high volume of goods purchased at a discount,
the absence of a retail store and a salesforce. Its money-back guarantee made buying through the
impersonal mail and personal correspondence earned consumers’ trust. At maturity, mail-order
houses and chain stores were also able to lower their selling prices with centralising buying
and management, turning over inventory rapidly and employing modern accounting systems
(Cronon, 1991; Koehn, 2001, pp. 99–100).
For almost two decades Montgomery Ward stood alone as the nation’s mail-order gen-
eral store until Sears, Roebuck & Company (Sears Roebuck, or Sears) overtook it early in
the twentieth century. (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Tedlow, 1990). Founded by Richard War-
ren Sears, as a mail order firm selling watches, it quickly expanded. In 1887, Sears hired
Alvah C. Roebuck, a skilled watchmaker from Indiana, expanded his product line of jewellery
and started advertising in magazines and newspapers. (Boorstin, 1973a; Strasser, 1989; Tedlow,
1990; Miller, 1996). After a few years in and out of business, Sears reconnected with Roebuck
to start a new firm, Sears, Roebuck & Company, in 1893. (Two years later, complaining of
stress and illness, Roebuck sold his share to Sears for $25,000.) In addition to watches and
jewellery, they sold silverware, firearms, sewing machines, clothing and other merchandise
from a 196-page “wish book” that advertised the company as the “Cheapest Supply House
on Earth”. A year later, when the firm moved back into a five-story building in Chicago, its
catalogue expanded to over 500 pages and to almost 800 pages in 1897. In 1895, the year that
saw Roebuck’s departure, the company sold $750,000 worth of goods. By 1900, Sears passed
Ward to become the largest mail-order house in the world (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 39;
Strasser, 1989: Miller, 1996, p. 249).
The Sears catalogue is an iconic part of American culture now, but it changed over time,
reflecting the increasing corporatisation of business. From 1887 to 1895, both the company and
the catalogue reflected Sears’s personality, ‘with all his flamboyance, his almost intuitive feeling
for the farmer’s idiom, his knowledge of what items would sell and what would not’. From 1895
until 1908, according to the firm’s historians, the catalogue reflected the

new-found corporate stature of the company and its steadily expanding size, the
trend towards “truth in advertising” with somewhat more accurate and more detailed
descriptions of the merchandise, and the great systemization of the entire business of
producing the book.
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 85)

By 1900, Sears was the largest advertiser in the world via its catalogue, with related expendi-
tures rising from $400,000 in 1898 to $3.5 million in 1908. The catalogue was the main mode

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of advertising, but there were others like circulars and probably newspapers. Advertising con-
tributed to the company’s financial success. In 1891, the first year of available data, sales were
almost $138,000 with profits slightly over $30,000. At the end of June 1908, a depression year,
sales jumped to almost $41 million and profits to over $2 million. In 1908, the year that Rich-
ard Sears sold his share of the company for $10 million (he died six years later at age 50 with
an estate valued at $17.5 million or $436 million in 2016 dollars), Sears Roebuck employed
8,500 employees and had close to five million customers. Sales passed $100 million in 1915 and
profits crested in 1919 at $18.9 million. By 1920, at mail order’s peak, sales topped $245 million,
slightly more than double Montgomery Ward’s. Staffing levels more than doubled between 1908
to 1920 to 21,652 (Casson, 1908, p. 514; Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 290, 295; Tedlow, 1990,
pp. 264, 273, 280).
Organisational and operational changes also contributed to Sears’s early success. One imme-
diate problem executives had to solve was how to handle the sheer volume of orders that arrived
daily.The high volume overwhelmed the firm’s capacity to handle them and led to delayed ship-
ments, errors and excessive product returns, high employee turnover, and inter-departmental
coordination problems. The solution came in the form of a “scheduling system”, the brainchild
of plant superintendent and later vice president Otto C. Doering, who benefited from the
opening of a much larger and more modern mail-order plant on Chicago’s West Side, in 1906.
Using principles of scientific management, special-purpose machinery, assembly lines, a network
of train tracks, gravity chutes, conveyors and other devices, and a new methods department
that continually refined the system, Doering pulled off and engineering triumph that enabled
employees, in twenty-seven discrete steps, to ship orders within 48 hours. The sophistication
and efficiency of the scheduling system attracted Henry Ford’s attention, who visited the plant
to personally inspect Doering’s methods (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 131–136; Mahoney and
Sloane, 1966, p. 230).
Sears Roebuck also made a number of organisational changes beginning in the first decade
of the twentieth century. It launched a buying office in New York City (1902) and its first
branch plant (1906) in Dallas, which published its own catalogue. Two others followed before
1921 – Seattle (1910) and Philadelphia (1920). It also began selling through an agent in Mexico
City in 1908. By 1899, the company sold an increasing array of goods from twenty-four differ-
ent departments and four divisions – wearing apparel, domestics, hardlines and miscellaneous
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950).
As the largest marketer in the world, Sears Roebuck took the risk out of manufacturing for
its suppliers by guaranteeing steady demand, allowing manufacturers to increase plant capacity,
lower unit costs, and limit marketing expenses. Sears also assumed financial interests in at least
nine factories by 1906 and thirty-one by the end of World War I. It integrated backward only
out of necessity (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Tedlow, 1990).
In addition to operating efficiencies, Sears also was able to lower selling prices by an average
of 22% by removing middlemen from the distribution process. It also continued to experiment
with selling techniques. In 1905, it shipped two dozen catalogues to customers in good standing
in Iowa who agreed to distribute them to twenty-four neighbours and supply their names to
the company. In return, they received premium gifts. Personalised selling work well enough that
Sears chose to “Iowize” the nation. Circulation of the catalogue – along with its heft – grew
from about 1.6 million in 1902 to 3.8 million in 1905 and to almost 6.6 million in 1908 (Ted-
low, 1990, pp. 269, 273–274). Beginning in 1910, Sears began offering instalment buying on
some of its hardlines like pianos, cream separators, gas engines, and farm implements.The period
between 1917 and 1921 was known as the “No Money Down” era at Sears. Over the next
decade, additional items were added to the list of items eligible for instalment purchases. New

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to Sears, instalment buying was becoming increasingly popular during this time. For example,
‘Montgomery Ward sold on instalment (sic) terms, and another Chicago mail-order concern –
Spiegel’s – specialised entirely in instalment selling by mail. Many department stores, however,
and so-called “quality” retailers held back on instalment selling until the 1930’s’, when Phila-
delphia department store Wanamaker’s initiated a revolving credit plan that became the standard
department store credit plans (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 274).
Montgomery Ward also thrived from its founding into the twentieth century and settled in as
the second largest mail-order house in the nation.Ward tallied $8 million in sales in 1900, the year
that Sears surpassed it. One year earlier, Ward completed a new office building on Michigan Ave-
nue. The Ward Tower, at twenty-five stories, was taller than any building west of Philadelphia. The
company also built a massive mail-order plant along the Chicago River, which, at the time, was
the largest commercial building in the world.Ward continued to do well through the 1910s, when
sales reached $62 million. They exceeded $100 million in 1920 (Latham, 1972, pp. 44–47, 62–64).
Overall, the American mail-order industry did very well in the years before 1921. Total sales
rose from $31 million in 1899 to $165 million in 1909 and further to $543 million in 1919.The
two general merchandisers were in a class by themselves. For example, Sears (43%) and Ward
(18%) combined for over 60% of national mail-order volume in 1919.The next largest firm,The
National Cloak & Suit Company, also of Chicago, was a distant third (7.3%). Other prominent
mail-order houses included Chicago-based Spiegel, and the Buffalo’s Larkin Company, whose
administration building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, his first commercial commission.
In addition, there were about 1,200 mail-order concerns operating in the country in 1900 and
2,500 in 1919, including many specialty firms and large urban department stores that had mail
order units. Yet even with 10 million mail-order customers, mail-order sales registered only
about 4% of total retail sales at their apex (Nystrom, 1919, pp. 290–291; Chamber of Commerce
of the United States, 1931, pp. 28–33; McNair, 1931, p. 31; Smalley, 1961, pp. 384–385; Leach,
1993, p. 45; Stanger, 2000).
Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck were the leaders in general merchandise mail order,
but there were other important companies that made significant contributions to the develop-
ment of mail order. One of them was the Larkin Company (Larkin) of Buffalo, New York.
Established by John D. Larkin in 1875 to manufacture soaps, the company initially sold its
goods through the normal channels of middlemen. In 1885, it retired all its salespeople and
began selling via the mail in support of its new “factory-to-family” strategy whose motto, “The
Larkin Idea: save all cost that adds no value”, was widely advertised through multiple channels.
Because it was a hybrid manufacturer-mail-order house, contemporary retail scholar Paul
Nystrom referred to Larkin as a firm of “unique character”.
Around 1890, the company created the Clubs of Ten, a selling plan run by “Larkin Secretar-
ies” – mostly married women who used their social networks – family, friends, neighbours – to
solicit bulk orders in return for valuable premiums for club members, including additional ones
for club organisers. The premiums were more valuable to members than the soaps and house-
hold products that Larkin sold for cash. (Nystrom, 1919, p. 185; Stanger, 2000, 2008).The success
of Larkin Clubs is revealed in the growth of sales, from about $220,000 in 1892 to $15.3 million
in 1906. In addition to innovative selling techniques, the company’s success can also be attrib-
utable to its progressive employee relations and the creation of a strong corporate culture of
“Larkinites” – employees, managers and executives and customers. Larkin executive Darwin
Martin, head of mail-order operations, hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design a modern office
building for the company that opened in 1906. It was Wright’s first commercial commission.
Similar to the mail-order giants, Larkin Company’s sales grew steadily during the first two
decades of the twentieth century and peaked at $28.6 million in 1920. Despite adding a chain of

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Figure 19.1 Larkin Company Catalog, 1917. Whereas most of the large mail-order houses were head-
quartered in Chicago because of its extensive railroad network and access to its rural con-
sumer base the Larkin Company was headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., also a significant railroad
town. Larkin’s “Factory-to-Family” business model relied on an extensive network of unpaid
“Secretaries” who organised buying clubs through which they took bulk orders in exchange
for premiums to stock a middle-class family.
Source: Author’s Collection.
 Howard R. Stanger

food stores, department stores, and other retailing ventures beginning in 1918, sales and profits
continues to trend downward during the 1920s and 1930s (Stanger, 2000, 2008, 2010).
Another innovative mail-order firm that opened for business in Chicago, in 1882, as a retailer
of furniture and household furnishings was Spiegel, May, Stern Co., originally known as Spiegel
House Furnishings. Spiegel combined aggressive selling and instalment buying mainly for its
mostly foreign-born lower-middle and working-class customers who lived in industrial south-
side districts, where it operated two branch stores, populated by mostly foreign-born residents.
It expanded its geographic reach over time and employed the motto “We Trust the People –
Everywhere” to reflect its ambitions. While national mail-order sales declined by $89 million
between 1919 and 1929, Spiegel’s rose 204 per cent even though it faced direct competition
from Sears and Ward, which also adopted instalment credit plans (Smalley, 1961, p. 401; Smalley
and Sturdivant, 1973, pp. 123, 129–130, 149). According to company historian Orange Smalley,

The role played by Spiegel, May, Stern . . . in providing the preliminary education in
modern installment credit, making it easy to obtain and relatively painless to use, and in
helping to overcome the ethical and moral barriers to the use of credit for improving
living standards must be regarded as being fundamentally important,

and was largely responsible for the company’s success heading into the challenging years of the
1920s and 1930s (1961, p. 401; Smalley and Sturdivant, 1973). Spiegel moved in and out of retail-
ing a few times during the twentieth century and emerged primarily as a successful mail-order
firm by the mid-twentieth century.
In addition to Sears,Ward, Larkin and Spiegel, there were many smaller ones scattered around
the country that specialised in areas such as household goods, plows, auto supplies, jewellery,
sporting goods, and more. Department stores and wholesalers also operated mail-order units.
Montgomery Ward’s Robert E. Wood surveyed his firm’s competitors in 1920. Among the
department stores he identified included Altmans, Gimbels and Wanamakers in the East, and the
Boston Store of Chicago. Other prominent department stores that operated mail order included
Wanamaker’s Philadelphia Strawbridge & Clothier, Chicago’s Marshall Field’s and New York’s
Macy’s. More worrisome to Wood were the growing chain stores, particularly J.C. Penney,
whose stores were concentrated in small Western towns. Writing about department stores’ early
mail-order business, a contemporary department store-executive noted,

The mail-order trade as associated with Department Stores began in a very small way;
it began with a few requests from customers out of town asking for samples and prices
of certain goods, a few letters of enquiry regarding one thing and another.

While there is evidence that department stores scaled back mail-order operations in the 1910s,
department store historian Vicki Howard points out that large urban department stores added
mail-order divisions during the 1920s (Phillips, 1901, p. 62; Wood, 1920, “Past, Present and
Future of the Mail Order Business”, Robert E.Wood Papers, Montgomery Ward and Company,
1919–1923, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA; Worthy, 1986).
One former mail-order executive noted in 1928,

When you stop to think about it, there is hardly a class of merchandise that is not being
sold through the mails, the chief reason is that this method is proving most economical
for the distribution of merchandise to the ultimate consumer.

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 By mail and rail

Among the most common goods were books and magazine subscriptions, jewellery, seeds and
garden products, medical preparations, cosmetics, clothing and accessories, tools, novelties, foods
and musical instruments (Wadsworth, 1928, p. 28; Nystrom, 1930; Cherry, 2008, Catalog: The
Illustrated History of Mail-Order Shopping). One of the most expensive and unique items sold
through the mail was homes.
Houses were an important marker of middle-class status. By removing middlemen, mail-
order firms were able to lower the price of a home permitting more families to purchase them
(Moskowitz, Standard of Living, 2004, p. 5). Houses that arrived by train were marketed on a large
scale through catalogues between the years 1906 and 1983, although their origins can be traced
to architectural plans books that were sold by mail after the Civil War. New York City-based
architects Palliser and Palliser, which published its first book in 1876, were the industry’s pio-
neers, but Robert Shoppell of New York City perfected the Pallisers’ techniques and established
mail-order house plans as a major business. Plans books permitted homeowners to acquire the
benefits of trained architects without paying their fees. The industry matured during the 1890s
and helped to create America’s suburbs. As significant,

The mail-order plan brought high standards of design and the latest architectural trends
to countless middle-class homeowners and builders. Houses built from such plans
reflect not only the aesthetics of their era but also the new technologies that placed in
the hands of the middle class those amenities formerly reserved for the wealthy.
(Garvin, 1981, p. 334; Schweitzer and Davis, 1990; Culbertson, 1992)

The first large mail-order company to sell pre-cut homes was the North American Con-
struction Company, founded by brothers William and Otto Sovereign, of Bay City, Michigan,
in 1906. In 1913, after ownership changes, the company changed its name to Alladin, after the
mythical genie who built a castle overnight for his master. Equating the family unit to a small
business, Alladin advertised its homes as good investments. Its cash-only policy kept prices low,
but Alladin also offered financing options. Former Larkin Company advertising innovator Elbert
Hubbard wrote promotional materials for the company: ‘Here is an absolute safe deal for the
financier. A good workingman should own his own home. By doing so, he becomes a better
citizen and a better workman’ (Moskowitz, 2004, pp. 137–138; Hunter, 2012).
Alladin was also able to keep home prices affordable through scientific management and
thriftiness. Its 1915 catalogue declared: ‘What Henry Ford has done for the motorist, ALLA-
DIN has done for the home builder’. Standardisation did not prevent Alladin from offering
homebuyers sixty possible design options. Similar to Sears, Ward, Larkin and others, Alladin
promoted the absence of middlemen – “Manufacturers Create Value – Middlemen Add Cost” –
in its appeal to its rural customers. As well, Alladin shared with other prominent mail-order
houses its desire to make the company part of its customers’ extended family. In the 1910s,
Alladin requested of its homebuyers to provide the names of potential customers who might
join the Alladin “family” in exchange for cash and other rewards. These methods proved suc-
cessful for Alladin, which remained in business until 1983 (Moskowitz, 2004, pp. 143, 156, 169,
173; Hunter, 2012).
Sears Roebuck was the largest mail-order home seller during its time in that segment between
the years 1908 and 1940. It claimed to have sold 30,000 houses by 1925 and nearly 50,000 in
1930. Its 1939 catalogue bragged that, ‘over one hundred thousand families, or approximately
half a million people, are living in Honor Bilt Modern Homes today’ (quoted in Stevenson and
Jandl, 1986, p. 19). By comparison, Alladin sold a little more than 50,000 units in its 75-year

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 Howard R. Stanger

history. Until 1928, it sold three-fourths as many homes as Sears (Schweitzer and Davis, 1990,
p. 14).
Sears began selling building materials by mail in 1895 and, around 1900, created the Modern
Homes Department. It issued its first mail-order home catalogue, called Book of Modern Homes
and Building Plans, in 1908. The 1915 edition offered 109 plans, with five of them pre-cut kits.
By 1917, most of Sears’ plans were for pre-cut kit houses. As its business expanded, Sears pur-
chased lumber and millwork facilities. Its Philadelphia branch provided an eastern base for the
Modern Homes operations. Beginning in the 1910s, it offered financing terms for its homes –
typically five years at 6% interest. Sears and others also sold homes to corporations and organisa-
tions. To provide more personal service to buyers, it opened ten sales offices between 1919 and
1925. Sears capitalised on the national urban housing boom during the 1920s, and by 1930 it
employed 350 salespeople in forty-eight sales offices, all east of the Mississippi River and north
of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Depression hurt Sears when many of its financed homes went
into foreclosure. Sears ceased financing homes in 1935, but it never fully recovered and ended
its mail-order homes business in 1940 (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Schwartz, 1985; Stevenson and
Jandl, 1986, pp. 20–23; Hunter, 2012, p. 24).
Not to be outdone by its larger rival, Montgomery Ward began offering home building plans
in a catalogue in 1909 or 1910.Ward’s 80-page 1912 catalogue showed sixty-six home designs. It
adopted the Wardway Homes name in 1918. Unlike Sears, Ward did not own or operate housing
production facilities, but subcontracted for them. Ward’s early homes were manufactured in Bay
City, Michigan. Beginning in 1917, the well-known mail-order homes company, Gordon-Van
Time, produced Ward’s homes. The last known reference to Ward’s home catalogue appeared
in 1931 when, like Sears, unpaid mortgages brought down the Wardway Homes division (Sch-
weitzer and Davis, 1990; Hunter, 2012).
The Great Depression spelled the end of mail-order home sales for Sears and Ward. Addi-
tional factors contributed to the demise of other companies in subsequent decades.

With a declining market due to demands for on-site delivery, the development of tract
housing, and the growing popularity of prefabricated and mobile housing, the pre-cut
(mail-order) home gradually faded away. . . . Alladin, the pioneers of the mass-marketed
kit home, hung on until 1983: the first company in business also had the distinction
of being the last.
(Hunter, 2012, p. 59)

Accounting for the rise and success of mail-order commerce

The rise and success of mail order between the years between 1870 and 1920 can be attributed
to a constellation of factors, both external and internal to these firms. Beginning in the last
quarter of the nineteenth, new technologies and production methods enabled factories to turn
out a high volume of standardised goods at increasingly lower costs. Total private production
rose a phenomenal 318% between 1900 and 1920, with almost two-thirds of the gain occurring
between 1915 and 1920. Demographics also proved to be significant. Population growth –
natural and immigration – and lower household size created demand for factory-made products.
Many of these people were concentrating into cities. The US population rose from 31.5 mil-
lion in 1860 to 92.4 million in 1910, with the overwhelming majority living on farms. The
rural population continued to grow in absolute numbers until 1920, although as a percentage
of the total population it fell from 71.8% in 1880 to 48.8 in 1920, the first year the percentage
of Americans living in urban areas exceeded those living in rural areas. Rural consumers were

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mail order’s main customers. Moreover, a high degree of literacy and new printing technologies
facilitated the high circulation of printed matter, including catalogues, newspapers and maga-
zines, all of which carried lots of advertisements for consumer goods (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950,
pp. 12, 194; Smalley, 1961, pp. 378–379; Tedlow, 1990; Strasser, 2006). According to business
historian Susan Strasser,

The economic effects of these demographic changes were compounded with a general
rise in disposable income, with the rising expectations and standards of living pro-
moted by the new products and by the developing advertising industry, and with the
triumph of a culture of mass consumption. Increasingly, Americans satisfied their needs
entirely through the market.
(2006, p. 33)

As with other mass retailers – the department store and later the chain store – mail order
also benefited from mid-nineteenth century developments in transportation and communica-
tion, especially the expansion of railroad and telegraph networks. Extensive rail networks made
the Windy City the mail-order capital of the nation after 1870. By the end of the nineteenth
century, there were almost 200,000 miles of track in the United States. A decade later track-
age increased by another 25%. Unlike department and chain store customers who arrived on
foot or a variety of wheeled conveyances, mail-order customers lived in distant rural areas and
could only be reached by mail and rail (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 11; Chandler, 1977; Cronon,
1991).
Railroad development speeded up and made mail delivery more reliable, which led to sharp
reductions in postal rates and increased mail usage for business correspondence, catalogues and
packages. The one-cent postal card was established in 1873, while the two-cent rate on first-
class letters began in 1883. Both aided mail-order companies, as did the federal government’s
permission to allow them to send their catalogues and other advertising materials at very low
second-class mail rates (Nystrom, 1930; Chandler, 1977, pp. 195–196). Still, as late as 1890, fewer
than 20 million of the 75 million people who lived in the United States had mail delivered free
to their doors. The rest had to visit their local post office to pick up their mail. After free deliv-
ery was tried in cities, in the 1860s, farmers began agitating for the same service (Fuller, 1964;
Boorstin, 1973b; Gallagher, 2016).
It was not until the Philadelphia department store merchant John Wanamaker became Post-
master General in 1889 that the movement for free rural delivery mail service accelerated.
Wanamaker believed that connecting the rural population with modern society was important.
He argued that, by allowing farmers to work their farms instead of taking long breaks to pick up
their mail at the nearest post office was crucial to their economic viability. As a businessman who
traded by mail, he also saw the possibility of economic stimulus by drawing more potential cus-
tomers into a national marketplace through newspapers, magazines and catalogues. At the same
time, the government could close thousands of small, unprofitable post offices. The Grange and
newspaper publishers also supported free delivery, while country merchants, small-town news-
paper editors, mail-carrier contractors and postmasters in small offices, and the express compa-
nies and their congressional allies opposed it (Boorstin, 1973b; Gallagher, 2016; Leonard, 2016).
Wanamaker left office in 1893, but the momentum he helped to create led Congress to
authorise funds in 1896 for the creation of a few experimental rural free delivery (RFD) routes.
Within a year there were forty-four routes operating in twenty-nine states. In 1902, President
Theodore Roosevelt made RFD a permanent postal service. Initially costly to operate, RFD
became a highly successful addition to the postal system. Historian Daniel Boorstin contends

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that it was ‘one of the greatest administrative achievements of the later nineteenth century’
(1973b, p. 132; Gallagher, 2016, p. 131; Leonard, 2016).
The success of RFD concerned its opponents, primarily the private express companies –
which feared that once rural Americans had free home letter delivery, they would agitate for
home parcel delivery. The express firms – Wells Fargo, American Express, United Express Com-
pany and Adams Express – were only permitted to drop off packages at the nearest freight train
station, which might be miles away from one’s home. In addition, the maximum weight for an
individual parcel permitted to be sent through the US Mail was four pounds. The express com-
panies handled heavier packages. Wanamaker lobbied for a government parcel post but he was
unsuccessful in the face of stiff resistance from the express companies, rural merchants, Parcel
Post League, and the Chicago-based organisation American League of Associations (ALA), which
had Marshall Field’s as a member. The ALA represented mercantile interests who feared their
businesses would suffer in the face of expanded mail-order markets. Presidents Roosevelt and
William Howard Taft, rural congressmen, and Western and Midwestern farmers endorsed parcel
post legislation to benefit farm families. The mail-order giants remained silent during the five
years of debates (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Fuller, 1964; Boorstin, 1973b; Simon, 1974). In general,
the conflict over parcel post – and mail order in general – that peaked between 1910 and 1912
‘provoked one of the most vigorous policy debates of the early twentieth century’ (Kielbowicz,
1994, p. 81).
After intense congressional debates, the farmers’ lobby prevailed when President Taft signed
the Parcel Post Act in August 1912 that enabled packages weighing up to eleven pounds be sent
via US Mail.The Act went into effect on 1 January 1913. John Wanamaker sent the first package
from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s West Philadelphia Station to Taft in the White House. Within
the first year, 300 million packages were shipped. Parcel post legislation spelled the doom of
the rural merchant and was a boon to mail-order houses, which saw their profits climb from
$40 million in 1908 to $250 million in 1920. The Post Office Department reported in 1938
that Parcel Post rose to second place in postal revenues and was ‘the greatest extension of Postal
facilities in world Postal history’ (quoted in Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 189; Boorstin, 1973b,
p. 134; Simon, 1974; Gallagher, 2016; Leonard, 2016, p. 85).
Parcel Post, more than RFD, became one of the two key ingredients to mail-order’s strong
market during its “golden age” between 1908 and 1925. The other was the strength of the farm
sector, which was stimulated mainly by industrialisation and urbanisation in both the United
States and Europe. Its golden age, between 1900 and 1920, overlapped and reinforced with mail
order’s. According to rural historian David Danbom,

The years between 1870 and 1900 were a time of dramatic expansion for Ameri-
can agriculture. By virtually every measure, agriculture doubled in size during that
remarkable period. The number of farms increased from 2.66 million to 5.74 million.
Acres of land in farms jumped from 407,735 million to 841,202 million. And the total
value of farm property rose from $9.4 billion to 20.4 billion.
(1995, p. 132)

In addition, between 1900 and 1910 the prices of agricultural products increased by nearly half.
World War I further raised farmers’ material wealth. The index of wholesale farm prices more
than doubled between 1915 and 1920. Combined with good harvests, farmers’ cash receipts
rose from $5.7 billion in 1910 to a peak of $14.6 billion in 1919. Farmers spent their new-
found wealth improving their farms, making their homes more livable, updating community

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infrastructure and purchasing new consumer goods from mail-order catalogues and elsewhere
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 191–192; Danbom, 1995, Kline 2000).
In addition to the economic benefits that mail order millions of customers – lower prices, a
money-back guarantee, a wide assortment of useful and stylish goods, speedy delivery, browsing
and shopping convenience – there were also social and cultural ones. In the late nineteenth, early
twentieth centuries when Montgomery Ward’s and Sears Roebuck’s catalogues made their way
into rural southern homes via RFD and Parcel Post, they not only increased purchasing options
for both whites and blacks, but they also ‘placed the consuming practice of blacks beyond local
white knowledge and control’ and gave them cover to make private purchases free of discrimi-
nation in stores. Upset that blacks might patronise mail-order houses instead of local, white-
owned shopkeepers spread rumours that Ward’s and Sears were black-owned and sold by mail
to avoid being seen by the public (Rips, 1938; Hale, 1998, p. 179).
Catalogues also touched other aspects of daily life on farms and in small towns by reducing
they and their families’ isolation: ‘To many farmers and their families the catalogue was magazine,
newspapers, radio, movie – all rolled into one – providing entertainment, education, and excite-
ment’ (Rips, 1938, pp. 57–58). The “Farmer’s Bible” also acted as general store and an encyclo-
pedia in many rural schoolhouses. Children learned math by calculating orders, geography from
postal zone maps, and drawing by tracing the products and models.The “Big Books” also as served
as home almanacs because they often contained inspirational stories, poetry, short stories, poetry,
and household and farming tips. In 1946, the Grolier Society, the prestigious book and graphic
arts club, selected the mail-order catalogue as one of the 100 outstanding American books of all
time. Catalogues also has been the subject of novels, songs and parodies (Schlereth, 1989, 1992).

Small retailers rise up: opposition to mail-order

The success of Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, and other mail-order firms inspired pro-
tests and general opposition that peaked during the debates over parcel post legislation between
1910 and 1912. Opposition to mass retailing was nothing new. During the 1880s and 1890s,
urban shopkeepers protested department stores, calling for special taxes and laws that would
restrict the number of lines of merchandise department stores could carry. The phenomenal
growth of chain stores during the 1920s and 1930s also stimulated fierce opposition from shop-
keepers and their allies to stop the “chain store menace”. These attempts to tax, regulate, and
legislate these larger and more efficient businesses out of existence generally failed, as did those
directed at mail-order houses (Strasser, 1989; Bean, 1996, p. 26).
Around 1900, small-town merchants went on the offensive against the mail-order giants.
Refusing to call Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck by name, they instead referred to them
as “Monkey Ward” and “Shears and Rawbuck”. They claimed they sold shoddy merchandise
and employed slave labour. Southern merchants also spread rumours that Ward’s and Sears were
black-owned. Other mail-order houses also met various forms of resistance. Local newspaper
editors railed against them for “making commercial graveyards of once prosperous towns”, while
local “trade at home” campaigns encouraged residents to patronise local businesses. Midwestern
commercial associations banded together in the Home Trade League of America, while local
newspaper editors railed against these “foreign” firms. Relying less on political action, the mer-
chants and their allies used moral suasion and public demonstrations, such as catalogue burnings
(Rips, 1938; Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Strasser, 1989; Bean, 1996, pp. 23–24; Barron, 1997).
In general, these campaigns achieved very little. Farmers were not natural allies of the coun-
try merchant, whose prices were high and selection low. Farmers lobbied for parcel post, while

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 Howard R. Stanger

Figure 19.2 “You Stay Away from Here”, 1914. Small retailers and their allies organised and railed against
the market power and size of the large mail-order houses, ultimately with little success owing
to the benefits consumers derived from them.
Source: Library of Congress, mph.3b 43886, ca. 1914, Lot 7690.

merchants opposed it. Mail-order firms protected customers and suppliers by shipping goods
in plain brown paper wrapping and refusing to print their suppliers’ names in their catalogues.
They also effectively employed public relations against false claims, invited the public to inspect
their operations, and sold the virtues of their business methods to an accepting public. In gen-
eral, as business historian Jonathan Bean observes, the

verbal heat generated by the controversy over department stores and mail-order cata-
logues was out of all proportion to the amount of market share that small retailers lost
to these mass-marketers. As late as 1920, (they) accounted for less than 10 percent of
total retail sales.
(Rips, 1938; Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Strasser 1989; Bean, 1996, p. 25; Barron, 1997)

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Trouble on the farm: the declining fortunes of mail order after 1920
Mail order declined after 1920 for a number of reasons. Changing demographics cut into mail
order’s traditional rural markets. Farmers’ economic troubles combined with the attractiveness of
cities during the 1920s to quicken the pace of rural-to-urban migration (Emmet & Jeuck, 1950;
Danbom, 1995; Neth, 1995; Kline, 2000; Abbott, 2007). The growth of suburbs also hurt mail
order firms. The suburban population rose from 9.1 to 15.2% of total population. Both urban
and suburban residents had increasing access to department, chain and specialty stores. These
stores attracted consumers with print and radio advertisements, dazzling store and window
displays, updated styles, branded products, low prices and frequent sales events. Between 1919
and 1929, chain stores increased their market share from 4% to 20% of total retail sales. By 1935,
they received 23% of all retail sales (Emmet and Jeuck, 1950; Bean, 1996, p. 26; Spellman, 2016,
pp. 151–52). And of course, the automobile increased shopping options, expanded the trading
zones and brought mail-order businesses into direct competition with other types of retailers
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, p. 317; Abbott, 2007).
In addition to more intense retail competition, mail-order firms were beset by a number of
problems, such as the high cost of catalogue production and distribution, the most profitable
use of catalogue space, increasing sales per catalogue, addressing customer complaints, process-
ing returns, and reducing the time period between when a customer first views the catalogue
to the actual purchase of items because the typical life of a catalogue was only six months.
The latter issue made it hard to carry extensive lines of fashion items that changed rapidly.
In addition, in a period of falling prices, fixed catalogue prices were injurious to the bottom
line. Store-based retailers were better suited to capitalise of the latest fashions and could attract
potential customers with show window displays and discounted merchandise (Nystrom, 1930;
Tedlow, 1990).
By the first half of the 1920s, the major mail-order houses had responded to their declining
competitiveness by opening retail stores and making changes to their mail-order operations.Yet
even with these adjustments and with store sales included, mail-order, in 1928, comprised only
3 to 5% of total retail sales, with Sears and Ward’s accounting for 40% of that total (Nystrom,
1919, p. 291; Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1931, pp. 28–33). By 1939, Mont-
gomery Ward’s retail and catalogue sales were strong, although it took the latter ten years to pass
their 1926 peak. At the outbreak of World War II,Ward operated 650 retail stores, nine catalogue
houses and 183 catalogue stores (Latham, 1972).

Postwar mail-order in the United States

On the eve of World War II, there were 434 firms classified as “mail order”, which comprised
only 1% of total retail sales. Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward accounted for the majority
of mail-order sales, with the next two largest firms – Spiegel and Chicago-based Aldens – taking
a significant share of the rest. The other 430 concerns were mainly small, specialty houses, that
combined for a small percentage of total sales but would grow in the decades after World War II
(Emmet and Jeuck, 1950, pp. 2–3; McNair and May, 1976, pp. 36–37).
By the latter part of the 1970s, catalogue sales comprised only a tiny part of Sears’s total sales,
even though it distributed 315 million catalogues annually (Worthy, 1986; McNair and May,
1976; Weil, 1977, pp. 252–255). During this period, Sears’s historic competitor, Montgomery
Ward, saw its relative standing decline. In 1945,Ward held 41.7% share of the mail-order market,
while Sears captured 50.7%. By 1951, Sears increased its share to 66.1%, while Ward’s declined
to 28%. Overall, Sears’s sales volume was two-and-a-half times that of Ward’s and had almost

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twice the net profits. By the mid-1950s, according to historian Richard Tedlow, ‘Ward was only
a shadow of its former self. It would never rise again’ (Tedlow, 1990, pp. 332–336; Michman
and Greco, 1995, pp. 27–28). In 1985, the company closed its 113-year-old catalogue business
(Montgomery Ward, 1972; Michman and Greco, 1995).
While traditional retailers were affected by new forms of retail and the rise of suburbs and
regional shopping centres, mail-order firms experienced a comeback as a growing number of
urban consumers had greater access to catalogue desks and phone service available in urban and
suburban retail stores. Overall, catalogue sales rose from $608 million to $1.2 billion between
1944 and 1954. This growth exceeded that of general merchandise sales. The large catalogue
houses – Sears,Ward and Spiegel – accounted for the major share of aggregate sales, but specialty
mail-order firms who sold books, records, and novelties expanded their share of the market after
1945 (Smalley and Sturdivant, 1973, p. 272).
The experiences of Sears, Montgomery Ward and Spiegel since the late 1960s, however,
reflected the rapidly changing retail environment brought about by the entrance of large dis-
count retailers, the blurring of retail segments, the expansion of specialty catalogues, a slowdown
in the macro-economy, technological changes in operations and distribution and business trends
such as conglomeration and financialisation. While Montgomery Ward has vanished from the
scene and Sears limps along as a struggling company- and Internet-based retailer, Spiegel, after
150 years, is now a female-owned company that operates catalogues and online businesses under
the Spiegel, Newport News and FX brand names.

Mail order outside the United States

Mail-order commerce has existed in a more limited form in other Western nations since the
nineteenth century. Experiences have been determined in part by land mass size and demo-
graphics, as well as infrastructural developments, literacy and consumer demand. Mail order
in France, Germany and England shared some similarities to the American and former British
colony model in terms of infrastructure, consumer culture and roots in department store-based
retailing, but there also were differences.
Canada’s experience with mail order paralleled the United States to some degree. Canada was
the home of two major mail-order houses – Eaton’s and Simpson’s – whose origins were in small-
shop and department store retailing. Founded by Timothy Eaton and Robert L. Simpson, respec-
tively, these businesses benefited from the constellation of factors noted above (Glazebrook et al.,
1969; Benson 1992a, b; Belisle, 2011). According to historian John Benson, ‘(d)epartment store
entrepreneurs (played) a leading role in the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­
century retailing. But they did so less by their opening of city-centre shops, than by their estab-
lishment of nationwide systems of mail-order selling’ (1992b, p. 193). As in the United States,
Canadian mail-order retailers encountered serious competitive threats and declining sales in the
1920s and 1930s owing to economic depressions, the rise of chain and other types of retail stores
and wider automobile ownership (Monod, 1996, pp. 211–214, 342; Kopytek, 2014, pp. 112–114).
Canada’s postwar growth in population and the economy fueled Eaton’s general expansion
into Canada’s major cities, and in the suburbs and smaller towns, but retailers faced a chang-
ing business environment. Department stores pushed into the suburbs beginning in the 1950s.
In response, Eaton’s opened catalogue desks and stores like Sears and Ward. But by the 1970s,
Eaton’s catalogue business was unprofitable and in trouble. By January 1976, after merger talks
with J.C. Penney collapsed, Eaton’s shuttered its mail-order business, including 400 catalogue
sales offices (Kopytek, 2014).

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The history of mail order in Australia is similar to Canada’s. Both nations were former Brit-
ish colonies, which retained cultural and commercial connections to England. Both were geo-
graphically large countries with mainly rural and farm populations who were mail-order’s target
customers.The largest mail-order businesses had origins as city-based retail shops that grew into
large department stores that established separate mail-order businesses. In addition, the success of
mail order was enabled by similar infrastructural developments in transportation, postal services,
communication and rising literacy and incomes (Kingston, 1994; Webber and Hoskins, 2003;
McArthur, 2005). Australia’s main mail-order houses were units of Sydney’s largest department
stores, such as Anthony Hordern, which, like most large department stores, had their roots as
draperies and ironmongeries. According to historian Howard Wolfers, ‘Horderns’ large red cata-
logue was probably the best known of the catalogues. It is said that some country people viewed
it as a shopping “Bible”’ (1980, p. 25). Other prominent Sydney-based department stores with
significant mail-order units included David Jones, McDowell’s, Walton’s, Farmer’s and Clark’s.
Around 1900, these stores were expanding to become “universal providers” or “emporia”. Col-
lectively, these family-owned stores were referred to as the “kings of Fortune” (Pollon, 1989;
McArthur, 2005).
While mail-order commerce reached their zenith around 1920 in the United States in Can-
ada, mail order in Australia was more resilient through two World Wars and the Great Depres-
sion. This was partly attributed to the country’s scattered population, relative social isolation,
and limited access to goods. It was only after World War II when takeovers obliterated Sydney’s
family-run big stores that the catalogue trade weakened. During that period, the influx of
variety stores and shopping centres into country town also adversely impacted the trade of the
country stores, which responded by updating and modernising their businesses. Their depart-
ment store analogues faced growing competition during the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury from chain stores and other retailing formats (Pollon, 1989; Webber and Hoskins, 2003;
McArthur, 2005).
Mail-order commerce in continental Europe developed in similar fashion to the countries
once part of the British Dominion, especially in France and Germany where it was derivative of
department stores. The 1844 Petit Saint-Thomas catalogue might be one of the first in France,
but it was Paris’s Bon Marché, the largest department store in France, where mail order was most
developed. Aristede Boucicaut, a former employee at Petit Saint-Thomas, joined with Paul Vid-
eau as co-proprietors of the Bon Marché in 1852. Backed by a financier, Boucicaut bought out
Videau’s share in 1863 and transformed Bon Marché into one the world’s first department stores
in 1869 (Miller, 1981). The Bon Marché developed an extensive mail-order business beginning
around 1871. For the 1894 winter season, the store mailed 1.5 million catalogues, with 700,000
targeting potential provincial customers, and 260,000 sent abroad. For a white sale only, Bon
Marché distributed almost one million catalogues in 1910. The store had customers in four
continents (Miller, 1981, pp. 61–63).
Alfred Chandler (1990) noted that while modern transportation and communications net-
works precipitated a revolution first in distribution and then in production in both the United
States and Britain, in Germany it was the other way around – infrastructural developments
spurred innovation in production, while changes in distribution were more derivative than
innovative. He also suggested that there were more mail-order firms in Germany than in Britain
but they were smaller in size. The same was true for German mass retailing in general compared
with the United States and Britain.
Germany’s retail market was transformed rapidly during the period between 1871 and 1914,
a period of similar transformation in other major western nations. Industrialisation, urbanisation,

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population growth, rising literacy, an improving standard of living and transportation and com-
munication developments enabled the growth of large-scale retailing. As occurred in other
countries, the rise of large retailers sparked intense opposition from small retailers and their allies
(Gellately, 1974; Shaw, 1992).
German mail order was rooted in department stores and emerged in the second half of the
nineteenth century. In some cases, it accounted for close to one-third of a store’s total sales. In
the interwar years, the specialty mail-order house arose in Germany and in other parts of Europe,
although some existed prior to 1914. By the late 1920s, specialty mail-order firms were active
in Germany as well as in Sweden, Switzerland and Britain. In Germany, and to some extent
throughout Europe (with the exception of Britain and Sweden), mail-order houses tended to be
small and confined to a narrow group of merchandise, such as textiles and cigars. Still, they relied
on economies of scale, small price markups and fast stock turn to offer lower prices and a greater
variety of goods than traditional retailers ( Jefferys and Knee, 1962, pp. 62–63; Gellately, 1974).
Mail order in Germany achieved the biggest growth in sales and share of the retail trade
after World War II, rising to 4% of total retail sales (versus 1% in the typical European nation).
The large general mail-order house was largely responsible for this growth. Typically employing
roughly 3,000, it used the catalogue and a system of agents who called on potential customers,
who were increasingly urban residents, a noticeable shift from its historic rural base. By the early
1960s, new developments in mail order occurred, including a move by some food voluntary
chains and buying groups into catalogue and order desk sales ( Jefferys and Knee, 1962).
By contrast, British mail order showed the greatest deviation from other countries
because of its urban, working-class customer base that relied on instalment payments to
make purchases through part-time selling agents bound to customers through different types
of social networks. It also is the only country for which there has been a comprehensive
study of the history of mail order (see Coopey et al., 2005). The relatively large general mail-
order firms that developed in Britain began selling a narrow set of goods, typically watches,
clocks and jewellery in the 1880s. A few had origins as department stores. The pioneers were
Fattorini and Sons in Bradford which, as early as the 1850s, encouraged relatively affluent
working men to establish “watch clubs” where each member was required to make a weekly
payment, and Kays of Worcester. William Kilbourne Kay, Kay’s founder, took control of an
established firm of jewellers and watchmakers in the early 1880s and began to sell watches
to railroad workers. The club system eventually transitioned into general mail order selling.
(This also occurred at Fattorinis beginning around 1890.) By 1907, Kay’s success led it to
create a separate business and warehouse to support mail order. Club organisers gradually
became travelling agents who recruited part-time, commission-based agents. Kay’s estab-
lished an agency department in 1886. By 1908, Kay’s had about 500,000 customers (Coopey
et al., 1999, p. 263).
Fattorinis and Kays soon met competitive challenges from Freemans – established in 1906 –
John Myers and John Enrico Fattorini, who left his family’s company to create Grattan Ware-
houses in 1912. By this time Fattorinis had changed its name to Empire Stores. The interwar
years witnessed additional growth in British mail order, which, like in other Western nations,
also began to be challenged by chain stores. Two important new mail-order entrants during
these years included Great Universal Stores (GUS), which had its origins in Manchester in 1900
and established a mail order business in 1920. Under the leadership of Isaac Wolfson, GUS grew
significantly. The second important firm was Littlewoods Mail Order Stores, founded by John
Mores in 1932. Littlewoods began selling by mail in 1937. Despite the growth of mail order into
the 1930s, total mail order sales in Britain were estimated to be only about 1% by the decade’s

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end. However, the “Big Five” “universal providers” – Empire, Freemans, Grattans, GUS – which
purchased Kay’s in 1937 – and Littlewoods – accounted for over 80% of mail-order sales by
the early 1960s, during mail order’s heyday between the 1950s and 1960s (Coopey et al., 1999,
pp. 262–263; Coopey et al., 2005, p. 37).
As in other countries, infrastructural and economic developments facilitated the growth of
British mail order. Changes in postal services were critical. First, in 1881, the creation of postal
orders provided people without access to a chequebook a secure way of paying for goods by
mail. By the end of the century over 80 million postal orders were being issued annually. Sec-
ond, the Post Office (Parcels) Act of 1882 offered reliable, low-cost parcel delivery service to
home-based consumers. In its first year, the Post Office transported 20.6 million parcels; by the
early 1890s, the number almost doubled. In addition, economic conditions benefitted mail-
order firms. Real wages for workers rose and food prices stabilised, enabling working families
to devote more disposable income to consumer goods (Coopey et al., 2005, pp. 15–17).
By the early 1900s, British mail order’s distinctive features were clear. Watch clubs grew to
become universal providers. Club organisers became part-time sales agents who earned com-
missions – roughly 10% of sales. Travellers canvassed working-class neighbourhoods to recruit
local agents, and urban working-class customers purchased a wide variety of goods on instal-
ment plans. Mail-order houses exploited social networks between agents and customers to limit
bad debts. The agency system suited British conditions where firms were selling to consumers
who already had easy access to small retail shops and larger co-operative stores (Coopey et al.,
1999; Coopey and Porter, 2001; Coopey et al., 2005).
British mail order firms developed largely independent of American influence because the
large American mail-order houses operated under conditions quite different from their Brit-
ish counterparts. None was of comparable size to the American giants. In 1919, for example,
Britain’s largest mail-order firm, Kay’s, handled 1,200 parcels a day, or about 1% of Sears’s
daily volume. Differences in customers – rural in the United States and urban in Britain – dis-
tance from customers and the scale of operations (both greater in the United States) led British
mail-order companies to borrow from the Americans only on a piecemeal basis, mainly in the
areas of systematising and rationalising business operations and labour management via scientific
management and the Bedaux incentive pay system (Coopey and Porter, 2001).
British mail order also deviated from the American experience in that it reached its zenith
in the decades following World War II, not around 1920 as in the United States. World War
II caused hardships in Britain and limited consumer spending on non-essential items. It was
not until the early 1950s that normalcy returned and workers’ newfound affluence led them to
spend more on a growing bounty of consumer goods. In the late 1950s, conservative British
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (1957–1963) declared that British workers ‘had never had it
so good’ (Coopey, 2012, p. 117).
British mail-order houses successfully accommodated this wave of consumer demand and
experienced a “golden age for catalogue” between 1950 and 1980. Two significant trends ena-
bled mail order to thrive during this time. The first was a shift from male to female catalogue
selling agents. By 1967, there were an estimated 2.5 million active part-time agents. Related,
social changes at home gave women more power over the purse. The second was the establish-
ment of new, often modernist-inspired, housing complexes. According to Coopey,

(i)n these new environments, new groups of women reassembled and formed new
friendships, new social groups. In this burgeoning world which was to see the devel-
opment of new configurations of social interactivity amongst couples and families, the

335
 Howard R. Stanger

catalogue took its place alongside the Tupperware party as an opportunity to shop, but
also an opportunity to be sociable.
(Coopey et al., 2005, p. 56; Coopey, 2012, pp. 117–118)

Conclusion
In the 1990s, mail order was significantly restructured with the arrival of the home computer –
the PC – and the Internet. Old-line mail-order houses, however, failed to initially capitalise on
these technologies. They did eventually adjust to the world of Internet commerce, though the
field is currently in flux and the future remains unknown (Coopey et al. 2005; Coopey, 2012,
pp. 125–126).
The emergence and flowering of mail order in the last few decades of the nineteenth century
was dependent upon a number of economic, demographic, cultural and political factors. Among
the most significant ones that were common to a number of Western nations included improve-
ments in transportation and communications, new and expanded postal services, population
growth, rising literacy and disposable income and mass production. The role of entrepreneurs
who imagined and created mail-order businesses must not be underestimated.
The success of mail order provoked opposition from small retailers and their allies. Despite
their efforts, consumers preferred the cornucopia of lower-priced goods available to them in
large catalogue books. Initially, buying goods sight unseen from a distant mail-order house raised
suspicions, but entrepreneurs gained consumers’ trust with folksy messages and money-back
guarantees.
Compared with those in other western industrialised nations, the American mail-order
houses – Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel and Larkin, in particular – were signifi-
cantly larger and often served as inspiration or as models to mail-order entrepreneurs in other
countries. Mail order reached its zenith around 1920 in the United States, Canada and New
Zealand, while German and British mail order peaked after World War II. Old and especially
new forms of retail forced mail-order firms to respond by moving into store retailing, modernis-
ing their mail order operations and making other strategic and tactical decisions. They generally
adapted to their competitive environments, but their “pure” mail-order operations declined
relative to other marketing channels.
The experiences across nations reveal that mail-order sales comprised only anywhere
between 1 and 5% of total retail sales.Yet mail order’s impact was far greater in helping to spread
a culture of consumption, make available many new kinds of products, improve retail manage-
ment across multiple sectors and to reduce the urban-rural divide countries with large land mass
and scattered populations.
While the traditional form of mail order has long ceased to exist, mail order continues to live
on through the billions of catalogues that find their way into people’s mailboxes, and especially
through Internet commerce. Instead of writing and mailing a hand-written order form to a
mail-order house, consumers now order goods by a click of a computer mouse or a tap on the
screen to place their orders. Those orders can now be processed almost immediately and, in
some cases, delivered the next day. While mail order is dead, the catalogue lives on.

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 20
AT THE MARGINS? ITINERANTS
AND PEDLARS
Laurence Fontaine

Introduction
In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure, hard to fit into straight-
forward categories. In France, the word was first used to mean one who traversed the town
selling pictures and loose printed sheets. Second, it was applied to the itinerant rural tradesman
who had been known up until then as a petit mercier, porte-balle, marcelot or mercelot. The first
meaning refers to a recognised trade – albeit an unimportant one – whereas the second is noth-
ing more than another way of saying “tramp” or “trickster” (Furetière, 1690). It was only from
the second half of the eighteenth century that rural peddling acquired the status of a trade; in
the 1762 Dictionnaire de l’Académie it appeared as mercier rather than just petit mercier. Nonetheless,
the pedlar remained a disturbing figure who was on the fringes of society and someone to be
guarded against.
In England, the word developed in the opposite direction. Chapman was originally a generic
term for anyone who bought and sold merchandise. Often the word was modified by the addi-
tion of the adjective “petty” which denoted the beginnings of a hierarchy between the well-off
merchants of Manchester and Yorkshire, who rode all over the country to deliver their wares to
shopkeepers, and the lowliest pedlars who, pack on back, travelled cross-country to far-flung
villages. In the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, petty chapmen
were described as those who ‘buy up commodities of those that sell by wholesale and sell them
off dearer by retail, and parcel them out’. This term had an equally pejorative connotation:
‘Hawking . . . has its derivation from the spying, thievish habits of the bird and man. They also
acquired a reputation for ruffianism and brigandage’ (Westerfield, 1915, pp. 314–315).

In Spain the pedlar was known as gabacho, the coarse man from the mountain of the North;
in Italy he was the merciajuolo or merciajo; and in the Ticino region he is variously recorded in
legal records as mercante, girovagho, trafficante, pertegante or cromero (Corominas, 1954; Pecori, 1980,
Fietta, 1985). In Germany each town had its own name for him; as well as the more general
term of Hausierer, he was also known by the fashion in which he plied his trade – hence, Gänger,
he who walks; Ausrufer, he who shouts in the street; and Hockerer, he who squats down. Some
pedlars were associated with small luxuries, and were thus called Tündler, or they were known
quite simply as Gaukler or charlatans (Augel, 1971).

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Echoing these definitions, right up to the end of the nineteenth century, the pedlar was
depicted in literature as a rogue or trickster, half merchant and half thief. He was someone who
belonged to another world, who sold both the stuff of everyday life and the stuff of dreams.
He came from far away and possessed secret knowledge; his misdeeds were compensated by his
clever trickery. If names and images reflect the diversity of their figures they can however be
regrouped in two different categories: one is embedded in a larger network of people from the
same origin; the other encompasses poor local men and women of the places, who, for lack of
work, survived through reselling all kind of food and clothes.

Pedlars and networks of migrants

From the time it first appeared right through to the mid-nineteenth century, peddling was
primarily dominated by the mountain dwellers. Indeed, for Western Europe, a map showing
the origins of the first migrant merchants reveals three main places: the Alpine curve, the Pyr-
enees and Scotland. Since the Middle Ages, pedlars from the high Alpine valleys had established
a presence on the trade routes. Savoyards from the North and men from the Valle d’Aosta
moved to the centres of commerce on the Swiss plateau and the mid-Rhine region (Martin,
1942; Gothein, 1892). The east-west trade movements, between Italy and Spain, had swept the
Southern Alp valleys (Fontaine, 1996). In the sixteenth century, the migrant merchants from the
great Italian lakes moved on – some towards the North and others towards Southern Italy and
Sicily (Merzario, 1984). Finally, from the seventeenth century onwards, the migrants from the
South – the “welches” – met up with an influx of northern European merchants from Brabant
in Holland (Hemmert, 1979). Scotland scattered her merchants, pedlars, leather craftsmen and
weavers across all of northern Europe to Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The first set-
tlements date back to the second half of the fifteenth century when Scots were to be found on
both sides of the Channel, in western France, Norway and the Baltic (Riis, 1988; Grosjean and
Murdoch, 2005). Quantifying these pedlars is an impossible task given the inexact and debatable
nature of the statistical evidence. However, the fact that the confusion between geographical
origins and professional activity ran so deep that a German merchant would find himself called
der Deutscher Italiener and that in Denmark the word scot meant a pedlar provides us with another
means of measurement.
These commercial organisations operated on two levels. The first was made up of familial
relatives, supported a family banking system and, through opening warehouses and shops in
the city, created a vast geographical web. The second level was a distribution network linked
to migratory movements. It had a rigid hierarchical structure and was based upon temporary
migration and the labour of men from the home village. At the first level, the Giraud fam-
ily, originally from La Grave in Oisans in the Dauphine, were part of a Protestant merchant
network which can be partially reconstructed from Jean Giraud’s record book, kept at the end
of the seventeenth century. It extended over Switzerland, northern Italy, southern France and
Spain: between Lyon, Geneva, Mantua, Perpignan and Cadix. The Brentano family originally
came from the valleys surrounding Lake Como and relied on four family branches: the Bren-
tano-Gnosso, the Brentano-Toccia, the Brentano-Cimaroli and the Brentano-Tremezzo. In the
Tremezzo branch of the family, the first Brentano to come to Frankfurt was Martino. In 1662,
he obtained permission to sell his citrus fruits from a table, as a Hockerer, sharing this privilege
with the old and infirm. His son Domenico, born in 1651 in Tremezzo, developed the busi-
ness in partnership with his brothers-in-law and in 1698 opened a shop in Frankfurt. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, members of the Brentano family established themselves in
Amsterdam, Bingen, Brussels, Koblenz, Cologne, Constance, Cracow, Diez, Frankfurt, Fribourg,

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Heidelberg, Mannheim, Mainz, Nuremberg, Rothenburg, Rotterdam and Vienna. If we also add
to the above the towns where their relatives had opened shops, then their establishments cov-
ered all of northern Europe (Augel, 1971). Scottish merchant migration proceeded along similar
lines (Spufford, 1984). Mathew Cuming, for example, travelled in England between 1683 and
1686. Profiting both from his income and from the credit to which he then had access, Cuming
loaded up his ass with bundles of material, which he then took to London to sell in order to
finance the importation of dyes from Holland, and to get a share in a boat bringing sugar and
tobacco from Virginia. He thus broke into the world of “big business” and prepared to venture
onto the Continent.
At the core of many networks at this upper level of activity was a family banking system,
which bound the network together and enabled it to maximise resources, since each member
invested the best part of the family fortune into the firm. Commercial inter-marriage was there-
fore one of the cogs in a mechanism which aimed to protect the banking system and the loyalty
that each member felt towards the merchant network. Exceptions to this rule were the result of
compromises that the migrants had to make in order to gain access to markets in the countries
where they settled. These family networks organised themselves into very flexible firms, which
could be set up and disbanded in response to commercial necessity, death and the relative wealth
or poverty of its members. Therefore, despite settlement in the towns, it was still a question of
temporary migration: progressing imperceptibly from one activity to another more important
and remunerative one, the length of absence being in proportion to these variables.
In order to develop their businesses, these merchants relied on village migration. At the top
of the hierarchical structure were generally relatives of members of the organisation who, hav-
ing completed their apprenticeship, remained in the service of the business until they had the
capital necessary to set up their own business or take a share in the company employing them.
Alongside the relatives, the merchants had numerous apprentices. These young men, sons of
members of the organisation or of their relatives, came to undertake their apprenticeship as
packmen.There were sometimes a fair number of them in the host town, generating complaints
from native merchants, who complained that all these young men not only were not registered
with the town authorities but also peddled their wares with impunity.
On the lower level of commercial organisation were a great many pedlars. A hierarchy also
became apparent within this group. At the top were travelling merchants who did not have
shops, but who were always referred to as “merchants” and numbered amongst the richest
inhabitants of their home villages. From the end of the seventeenth century, notaries’ deeds
concerning travelling merchants demonstrate the essential role of these men as a pivot between
the two halves of the organisation. In the lowlands they were part of the network developed by
shop-owning merchants from whom they got their supplies. One only needs to examine the
stocks held by the merchant shopkeepers, and all is revealed. In the two shops and the stockroom
he had opened in Lyon, Jacques Berard had 195 pairs of stockings, twenty dozen bonnets, 360
woollen bootlaces, lots of braid, ribbons, laces of all possible colours and fabrics: cordillat, cadiz,
serge, drugget, calico, canvas, ratine, muslin, wool, woollen cloth and homespun. Documents
confirm the pedlars as clients since most of Berard’s debtors were the same rich pedlars from the
Alpine valleys himself came from.
In the mountain villages, the wealthy travelling merchants acted as intermediaries through
whom one could trade in winter. Pierre Gourand, from Clavans in the Dauphine, owed more
than three hundred livres to Jean and Daniel Horard, merchants of Mizoen in the form of four
obligations dating from 1665, 1668, 1670 and 1672. The Horard family, linked by marriage to
the Berards and other trading families, were responsible for the Burgundy link in the network
of upper Dauphine merchants. In his turn, Gourand acted as a link between the families in the

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village and the merchant network of which he himself was part. He did so by finding work
for other migrants, providing them with merchandise and acting as banker and intermediary
between them and more important merchants with whom, as with the Horard brothers, he
enjoyed a special relationship.These pedlars, who were very much a part of the economic life of
the village, were the pivots of the village migratory system.
In their turn, the packmen, who stocked up from the factories and warehouses estab-
lished in the town by their compatriots, employed servants and apprentices. However, unlike
other members of the company, the pedlar’s employees were not allowed any opportunity to
line their own pockets: they were forbidden to act as wholesalers or retailers on their own
behalf or to lend money (the other method of building up one’s own business); moreover,
any social activities likely to divert them from their work – such as dancing, playing bil-
liards or going to the theatre – were forbidden. The Perroman company from Savoy made
use of this structure from the end of the fourteenth century to distribute textiles, scythes,
metals, saffron and saltpetre, which they imported in bulk; the packmen collected fresh
supplies from a storehouse set up by their employer in the shop or hostel of a compatriot
(Guichonnet, 1948).
Even allowing for exaggeration, the complaints that the German towns and guilds made
regularly to the Diets indicate how far the peddling hierarchies had extended. At the Diet of
Zurich in 1516, Schwyz, from German Switzerland, denounced

those persons who travel around the region, hawking their cheap goods, from village
to village, from farm to farm and from house to house, up hill and down dale. So much
so that no home is safe: they worm their way in with their servants and children – even
the lowliest of them has three or four. They also beg and live off the backs of the poor,
without paying a pfennig to a single innkeeper.
(quoted in Augel, 1971, pp. 193–194)

In the seventeenth century, the local spice merchants took every opportunity of denounc-
ing Italian and Jewish organisations that used five or six boys to distribute their products, on
public holidays as well as working days. The boys stopped off in inns, wriggled their way into
the houses of the middle classes on wedding days and knocked on every door. Danish rulings
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries forbidding Scottish merchants to send their apprentices
and servants to hawk their wares in the surrounding countryside also bear witness to the exist-
ence of links between the now sedentary business community and the trade done by itinerant
pedlars who originated from the same village. From North to South, the existence of peddling
reveals the extent of recruitment which bound the migrant community together and included
even its poorest members.
These small business networks had a certain number of common characteristics. They relied
on commercial diversity: merchants and pedlars traded in all types of merchandise, depending
on demand and commercial opportunities, although most families had a specialty which often
had its roots in the produce of their home region – the southern Tyrol for carpets, Lake Como
for citrus fruits or the Upper Dauphine for gloves. Three factors forced them to offer a wider
selection of goods: the desire to reach a larger clientele by offering the widest possible range of
products; methods of payment in which exchange and barter played a large part; and the search
for new or forbidden goods, which would mean larger profits. Thus, in 1692, the stock list for
Antonio Brentano’s shop in Nuremberg revealed that he had on sale salted herrings, salmon,
beef, cheese, tobacco and prunes. At his death eleven years later this also included 1537 pounds
of coffee, 67 pounds of tea, 65 pounds of truffles, potatoes, oil, candy sugar, cotton, paper, Spanish

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and Rhenish wine, and Dutch and Spanish tobacco. During the same period, Carl Brentano’s
shop contained casks of capers, figs, salted lemons, Parmesan, bay leaves, rice, nuts, almonds,
olives, oil, lemonade, 180 pounds of chocolate, a cask of dried truffles, four barrels of truffles in
oil, Spanish wine, Brazilian tobacco, 34 pounds of Spanish snuff, two boxes of rubber, a barrel
of indigo, a small cask of cochineal, 140 caskets of blue and pink wood, three bales of cotton
and sixteen bales of silk. Moreover, the peddling organisations turned trade circuits to their
advantage. Pedlars sold their goods on credit, demanding repayment in the form of buying or
renting fields or as a share of the harvests which they stored there in the village in rented cellars
and barns. In this way they multiplied their access to other markets and short-circuited a certain
amount of trade between town and countryside.
One final aspect of these merchant organisations is that both men and merchandise cir-
culated and worked on the fringes of the law. This constant is, of course, the most difficult to
establish, even if one can hazard a guess at the profits gained from the skill with which these
men manipulated the rules. Goods were transported along routes where it was possible to avoid
customs and tolls, especially when some of the goods were of smuggled origin, as was the case
with raw wool and, in particular, tobacco which was grown on a large scale (despite the ban on
this) in the Alpine valleys of Lombardy and processed in the towns of the Rhine where the laws
were more flexible (Caizza, 1965). As soon as a new market opened up or circumstances allowed
(in particular during times of war), smuggling and illicit warehouses multiplied. The wealthiest
pedlars tried as hard as possible to avoid paying costly registration fees in cities, thus confusing
both urban and peddling hierarchies. A society based on order and status here came up against
the organisational logic of the peddling network; thus, as soon as one or two members of the
family firm were legally established in the city, the others saw no advantage in paying duties and
taxes which they would have to add to the sale price of their goods. It was also a sign that they
did not yet share urban values. These same merchants were careful not to register with the local
administration the vast number of young men who came to work for them several months of
the year, nor to purchase status for them. A substantial amount of the profits no doubt came from
the accumulation of all such fraudulent practices and irregularities.

The eighteenth century: a return to the regional areas

The balance between locations was the basis of the migratory structure, at the centre of which
were several powerful families from the home villages. Because of this structure, despite the
constant friction with the sedentary merchants and in defiance of the political moves to contain
them and change their trading practices, the links established at the end of the Middle Ages
between town wholesalers and itinerant pedlars from the same region lingered until the end
of the eighteenth century. Long before this, however, the vast peddling networks had become
fragmented and withdrew to regional areas. The chronology of this withdrawal, a result of the
encounter between internal changes in the adopted country and those in the home villages,
had its own logic and periods of inertia: the break-up was sometimes abrupt and sometimes the
result of a gradual change, depending on the region. But by the end of the eighteenth century,
this transformation had been accomplished everywhere.
In the French and Savoyard Alps, the first crack in the migratory system was a political one.
In France the affirmation of royal sovereignty, centred on religious unity and the war, upset
the balance of the mountain economy between 1685 and 1715. The decision to go into exile
taken by the majority of the peddling elite and a significant proportion of the Protestant popu-
lation of the villages threw the networks into disarray. The war brought its own difficulties
and the Treaty of Utrecht established for the first time a border between the two sides of the

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mountains. In Savoy, the conflict between the Sardinian states and the French monarchy forced
the merchants to choose sides. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars completed
the process of fragmentation, but the flow was already greatly reduced through the combined
effects of national politics, municipal obstacles and the merchants’ growing lack of interest in
the highlands. The networks which had been built up between Scotland and the Baltic States
suffered the same fate, despite renewed activity during the Jacobite uprisings of 1715–1745.
The dominant position occupied by the Dutch in Baltic commerce for over a century and the
opening up of the English market following the Act of Union with Scotland had already sig-
nalled the decline of Scottish merchant and pedlar migration: since emigration was no longer as
widespread, men gradually integrated into new communities and, towards the end of the eight-
eenth century, the transformation was accomplished in Poland and Denmark. The renewed
activities of the sea adventurers can be traced in the customs records, where names changed
after a number of decades (Smout, 1968). The same phenomenon had occurred a century ear-
lier in Sweden where political expediency had led to gradual integration into native families via
settlement and marriage.
Conversely, those peddling networks that were organised around the east-west commer-
cial axis and that looked towards Mediterranean Europe, benefited from the shift of the main
trade movements towards the Atlantic coast and continued to profit from commercial structures
which remained weak in the Iberian peninsula. Families from Briançonnais and Queyras, for
instance, forced to abandon the Italian market in the eighteenth century, now directed their
attention in the opposite direction, towards Spain, Portugal and their American colonies. Other
migratory movements took advantage of the change of direction in the peddling networks to
set up their own commercial organisations, as did men from the Auvergne and the Bas Limousin
in Spain (Poitrineau, 1985). Similarly, ethnic minorities – particularly Jews – took a further step
towards integration by moving into the place left vacant by the Italians and Savoyards and by
extending their activities towards Western Europe.
The break-up of many large networks brought about change within the profession of travel-
ling merchant. Although the timing varied from country to country – starting from the early
seventeenth century in England and in the eighteenth century in France and in the Rhine
regions – the geography was always the same, with border mountain regions or outlying areas
providing most pedlars. In France, pedlars came from the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Massif Cen-
tral area as well as from the Jura mountains and from Brittany. In Britain, although migration
was less dominated by the highlands because of the existence of a peddling structure organised
around the industrial zones, nonetheless Scotland still accounted for the largest number of ped-
lars, In Belgium it was the Hainaut region which upheld the old tradition, and in Italy, pedlars
always came from the Alps or the central region of the Apennine mountains. Whilst the origin
of pedlars had changed little, however, the new structure very different. It was distinguished by
an increase in the number of pedlars; by the use made of pedlars by all urban commerce and
no longer just by the village elite who had settled in the towns; by the wider range of goods
offered by the pedlars; and by the disappearance of the multiple transactions involving the pedlar
(in which payments in foodstuffs and goods bypassed other markets) in favour of credit alone.
The increase in the number of pedlars was evident everywhere, although it is impossible
to determine precise numbers. That England had an early start is obvious, as much from the
upsurge in numbers as by the subsequent decline, which had begun even before peddling in
France really took off. England thus had a century’s head start over the Continent: from the
end of the seventeenth century the distribution network covered by the travelling merchants
had reached the furthest corners of the land, whilst on the Continent the rural areas had only
been partially conquered. In France, the growth in numbers was significant from the 1760s

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onwards: whilst notaries’ records had referred only to ‘merchants’ in the seventeenth century;
from the eighteenth, ‘pedlars’ appeared in droves. There was a commensurate hardening of defi-
nitions, merchants being distinguished from merchant-pedlars and from pedlars (Fontaine, 1991,
pp. 43–46). This upsurge was the consequence of the general development of urban business;
pedlars no longer worked solely for merchants who came from the same valleys as themselves
but also bought their stock from other city merchants who used pedlars to further their own
business concerns. This new development brought with it other changes: the better-off pedlars
neglected the products of family industry to devote themselves solely to the resale of goods; the
less well-off, who were selling their craftsman’s knowledge, gradually abandoned this in favour
of city goods. Thus the knife-grinders and scissor-sharpeners tended to give up these humbler
professions and concentrate solely on trading.
Eventually large quantities of a new product – printed material – became part of the ped-
lar’s range of wares. Initially this was distributed from centres of production in eastern France
and the German regions of the Rhine, from Paris and Lyon; by the mid-eighteenth century
it had reached most rural areas. Before specific peddling networks were built up around it,
printed matter was an extra commodity much valued by pedlars of haberdashery. Trading in
prohibited books became a very attractive business for the pedlars since there were large profits
to be had. Paul Malherbe, a Norman pedlar linked to the Société Typographique de Neuchatel,
ordered books from Neuchatel, stored them in a secret warehouse and resold them to pedlars
because they were

the goods with the biggest turnover at the moment . . . the pedlars are extremely eager
for this type of book; they earn far more than on other works, because the price is
perfect, a snip given the demand for the book.
(Darnton, 1987, p. 130)

The same appetite for prints can be traced for England (Spufford, 1981, pp. 111–128).
In the mid-eighteenth century, most large towns in northern and central France boasted a
bookseller-cum-printer who catered for pedlars. At the same time as printed material was find-
ing its way into the haberdasher’s backpack, certain regions were beginning to specialise in this
type of peddling: Cotentin and Briançonnais in France and the Ticino valley in Italy. Indeed, in
the eighteenth century, peddling on a large scale – where the entire population of the home vil-
lage benefited from the network of shops established by the wealthiest families – was only made
possible by the market for printed material.This durability is explained by the choice of product:
printed material was a new commodity, very much sought-after, likely to bring in substantial
profits and one where there was a market for both legal and smuggled goods. In 1754, François
Grasset, formerly chief clerk with the Cramer booksellers in Geneva, wrote in a letter to the
director of the French library that:

The bookselling trade in Spain and Portugal, as well as that of many Italian towns, is
totally controlled by the French; all of them from a village in a Briançonnais valley in
the Dauphiné. Active, hard-working and moderate, they make successive trips to Spain
and almost always marry amongst themselves . . . not only is the bookselling trade in
their hands, but also the market for geographical maps, prints, clock-making, cloth,
printed calico, stockings, hats and so forth.1

And Grasset was right: they dominated the market for print material in Portugal and Spain and
hold a good share of it in Italy (Fontaine, 1996, pp. 50–72). However, if the network emanating

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from the Briançonnais appears to be the most important, it was not by any means the only one.
The Remondini publishers of Venice, originally from Bassano, made their mark in the second
half of the eighteenth century by means of a similar network. De Lalande, in his book Le Voy-
age en Italie, points to the printing operation run by the Remondini family as the largest estab-
lishment of its kind in Europe and the only one to have a completely integrated production
process, from the paper manufacture to the sales network (Lefrançois de Lalande, 1769). The
firm employed a thousand workers, 1,500 business correspondents in Italy and a further fifty in
Europe and more than 2,000 travelling salesmen, all originally from the Ticino valley. Similarly,
a peddling network for books and other printed material developed in northern France around
Cotentin. It also had an international dimension especially strong in northern Europe (Casselle,
1978, pp. 84–85; Sauvy, 1967).

A flexible typology
The best criterion for distinguishing between types of travelling merchant during this period
concerns the way in which the trip was financed.This allows us to identify three groups of ped-
lars in terms of the security they could offer to the city merchants in return for the goods sup-
plied.The importance of the amount of credit allowed thus serves to distinguish the half-starved
pedlars with nothing to offer from the regular pedlars who had enough property to guarantee
their loans and the merchant-pedlars who, with a solid financial base, could travel by cart and
open shops. A typology such as this has two distinguishing features. On the one hand it is flex-
ible: the pedlar who carried a pack could hope to attain the higher ranks of the profession; for
many, it was seen as a career with scope for progression, even as far as opening a shop in the city.
On the other hand, these different types of pedlar were bound together as much by family ties
as by the business links that existed within the profession. Alongside these three a new model
emerged in England: the “Manchester Man”, who heralded a radical innovation in that his ties
with his home community were relaxed in favour of the firm for which he worked on a virtu-
ally exclusive basis. Four groups then, each with their own methods of selling, obtaining their
supplies and attracting customers.
The sociological diversity was greatest amongst the destitute pedlars, since they had nothing
to offer as security against goods and credit. Their trade thus slipped easily through the net of
interdependency and restraints which bound other pedlars together. Three sub-groups can be
identified: those who, in villages where there were craftsmen and pedlars, had been expelled
from credit circles; those who came from villages which specialised in the sale of devotional
images, where the profession came within the framework of family interdependency, like the
santari from Campli in Italy or the chamagnons from the Jura; and finally, the blind, who in Spain
succeeded in obtaining a virtual monopoly for themselves in the sale of printed sheets (Trifoni,
1989, pp. 113–120; Darmon, 1972; Botrel, 1973, 1974). The first group took any work which
came along, and in between jobs went hawking their wares and begging. Their ties with the
home village had not been broken and their temporary itinerancy was primarily an economy
of absence – a saving of the bread that they would not be there to eat in the village in winter.
For these pedlars, who were half-beggar, half-tramp, more important than the goods was the act
of selling itself. They put on a show and sold entertainment and dreams. They were not seek-
ing one-to-one contacts with purchasers nor the intimacy of the home, but public square and
fairs – places where people passed through, times of festivity when a crowd might form around
them. The cantastores, the charlatans, teeth-pullers, hernia-shrinkers and Bergamasque maskers
spread prophecies as they travelled from one town square to another in Italy. Those from the
Ticino region who sold pictures and small booklets threaded them onto a piece of string and

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told their story using a hazelnut twig to illustrate the tale. In Germany such pedlars resorted to
large illustrated boards (Bild ) the tale of which he told as he sold his booklets; as did his French
counterpart (Niccoli, 1987; Passamani and Manfredi, 1972; Duval, 1991). On these fringes of
entertainment were to be found the destitute vagrants who exhibited curiosities, such as the
marmot which accompanied the mountain dwellers of the Savoy region; the bear which certain
dwellers of the Pyrenees brought with them; or the Mohawk Indian put on display by a Jew-
ish pedlar from England in 1765. Acrobats, organ grinders and bear-tamers from the mountain
villages of Tuscany all became familiar figures in the city (Endelman, 1981, pp. 113–126; Sarti,
1985).
The regular pedlar, who had established suppliers, faithful customers and enough of an inher-
itance to guarantee his credit, was the pedlar par excellence. Generally speaking, he set out between
the end of August and the end of November, depending on the demands of farm labour, the
dates of the livestock markets and the number of people in the household.These pedlars stocked
up primarily at the shops opened by émigrés, then made up the rest of their stock from other
merchants. They made the bulk of their purchases from the former and borrowed from them
much of the money they would need for their campaign, forging strong relationships that were
often built up over successive generations (Fontaine, 1996). In contrast to the scattered nature of
suppliers of goods in France, London was the place where many minor English merchants filled
their packs. At the end of the seventeenth century, over three-quarters of the supplies of fabrics
were still bought there. The city was also the major centre for the redistribution of porcelain
imported from China (Weatherill, 1986, pp. 51–76). To the supplies purchased in London were
added more specialised products from the provinces. At his death, Thomas Teisdale of Lincoln
owed £192 to five London merchants; he made up the rest of his stock in Glasgow (for Scot-
tish cloth), Manchester (for needles and small articles of ironmongery) and Newport (for braid).
Long-standing personal relationships developed between pedlars and London suppliers to the
point where certain among the latter remembered their “faithful” pedlars when they died and
left them some money so that they might buy a mourning ring in memory of them (Spufford,
1984, pp. 79–80). These packmen generally undertook one or two small-scale predetermined
trips.They kept account books. Knowledge of the places and the people went hand in hand with
another relationship, one as much economic as cultural – that of credit. This was the basis of the
relationship between the pedlar and the villagers: they paid him back over the year, in dribs and
drabs, payment being made when the pedlar turned up again, and always coupled with a further
purchase and thus further credit.
The merchant-pedlar who rented a shop seldom withdrew from the migrant network or
abandoned his former practices; on the contrary, he was prepared to go back on the road if busi-
ness went badly. However, to consolidate his success, he employed the newest sales technique,
using for instance the press as an advertising medium and if he was a bookseller he would have
catalogues printed (Da Gama Caeiro, 1980; Fontaine, 1996, pp. 140–163).
The new figure to emerge in seventeenth-century England was the Manchester Man. He
could be distinguished from the traditional pedlar by the way in which he obtained his supplies,
through his customers and sales techniques. The Manchester Man was a pedlar working for a
factory, who did not travel from door to door but from shop to shop, He remained an itinerant
merchant, but the vital difference was that he operated as a middleman between manufacturers
in the north of England and retailers, shopkeepers and pedlars across the country. As early as
1685, the existence of the Manchester Men was well-established. They criss-crossed England
with their mules or horses loaded with cheap fabrics and clothes, ironmongery and cutlery, to
which assortment they also added watches and almanacs. A bell worn by the lead horse sig-
nalled the arrival of the convoy. As an intermediate stage in the distribution network, they sold

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in bulk to shopkeepers and to pedlars who they met when visiting fairs, thus competing with
London merchants for the custom of itinerant merchants. They all attended the fairs, which
became places where deals were struck between, on the one hand, the London merchants or
their agents and the Manchester Men and, on the other, the pedlars, who took this opportunity
to settle their previous debts and to obtain the necessary goods for their next campaign. The
London merchants, like the Manchester Men, offered extensive credit to the packmen. In addi-
tion, the Manchester Man, who in the eighteenth century was one of the preferred agents of the
manufacturers as they set out to create a mass market, played on his respectability, creating the
illusion that he had the same social status as an established merchant. To lend substance to this
impression, he had ostentatious decorated visiting cards and headed notepaper printed, which
he left with businesses to indicate that he had called, or published in the local newspapers to
advertise his imminent arrival (McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, 1982, pp. 77–89; Westerfield,
1915, pp. 313–314).

The demise of the profession

Marginalised in the business world and discredited in the home villages, peddling began to
decline as early as the eighteenth century in England and from the middle of the nineteenth
in France. Following the rejection of organisations based on extended family groups and the
withdrawal into a narrower family structure, the end of the profession was marked by a double
breakdown which put an end to all future development: both family tradition and credit struc-
tures were demolished.This final stage reveals that, behind the continued use of the term pedlar,
there lay a radically different way of thinking and of operating as a migrant merchant.
During the twenty years that followed the great agricultural crises seen in mid-nineteenth
century France, definitive emigration supplanted seasonal emigration and the basis of peddling
fundamentally shifted. An analysis of the censuses of 1896 and 1901 for the peddling villages
in the valleys of the Oisans reveals that the profession, which up until then had been passed
down from father to son, now only survived on the margins of families. Only single men who
belonged to atypical families still practiced the profession: brothers living together or men who
were the only wage-earners in the family. Moreover, an analysis of the records for military con-
scription for this same group of villages highlights another aspect of this marginalisation: one-
third of the conscripts who had been pedlars had engaged in the trade only occasionally and the
majority only peddled for a year or two before or after military service, or returned home and
became packmen after having failed in other careers (Fontaine, 1991, pp. 43–68).
Certain traditional pedlars, however, managed to continue in their profession for a few dec-
ades longer. In each peddling region there were a few families who turned their attention to a
new specialisation or by selling new or luxury goods. In the Dauphine, haberdashers became
opticians, seed merchants or florists; in the Pyrenees they became booksellers; in the Auvergne,
wine merchants; in the southern parts of the Black Forest they peddled glass jewellery; on the
other side of the Rhine it was pictures. In the Apennine valleys of Lucques, pedlars became
known as figurinai because they sold plaster figures. There was a wide range of specialities and
the organisation of itinerant trade was not confined to one single model since, depending on
the markets canvassed, the goods offered and the village traditions, either the old way of doing
things was resurrected, or original ways of selling were invented to fit in with the new economic
constraints of the end of the nineteenth century.
The most profitable forms of specialisation combined luxury goods with the conquest of
new markets. The florist-pedlars from the Oisans in upper Dauphine offer an excellent exam-
ple. Originally from traditional families of cloth merchants and haberdashers, they gradually

349
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discovered new markets, new customers, and new ways of selling and financing their expedi-
tions. The florists sold all sorts of fruit and ornamental trees, decorative plants, rosebushes and
various sorts of bulbs and seeds.They packed them in sturdy wooden boxes, added a few baskets,
and picked a destination, depending upon the time of year when they were setting out. Those
who set out in autumn headed for Latin America, the Mediterranean basin or the Middle East;
those who could only leave at the beginning of winter went to countries where spring came
later: the Northern States and Russia. Jean-Pierre Magne, one of the first great florists, born in
1806 in Mont-de-Lans in the Dauphine, travelled all over Europe from Ireland to the Baleares,
North Africa, Egypt, Russia and Brazil; he also took over seven trips to the eastern part of the
United States, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans. Claude Chouvin, born in 1853 in the
neighbouring village of La Garde, travelled to Mexico, North America and Canada and then
specialised in trading with Latin America. Others went as far as the borders of Russia and of Iran.
Their target customers were dignitaries and the rich middle classes: their sales pitch combined
evocations of luxury and the exotic. Once they had reached their chosen destination, they set
out to look for a shop to rent in a busy shopping street and went about advertising their pres-
ence. In Latin America, where the rich middle class was relatively large, they placed advertise-
ments in the newspapers; in Russia and Egypt, where those in power constituted a limited elite,
before putting their wares on display they first presented them to the local dignitary in the hope
that by gaining favour with the prince they would attract the small number of people of stand-
ing into their shop.Whatever the circumstances, they had to make a sale quickly: customers were
few and the plants either withered or demanded too much attention. They hoped to sell most
of their stock within a month at most, off-loading the remaining plants at one or two smaller
towns on the way back.
As well as the plants, they offered dreams to the bourgeoisie. Their sales pitch primarily tar-
geted the imagination: they had calling cards and invoice slips printed which created the impres-
sion that their shop was a branch of a large business which counted amongst its customers the
most important people in France; they hung pictures of flowers in their shops, generally painted
with stencils, reproducing the descriptions in the advance catalogues they published. The flow-
ers, seeds, bulbs and the bare trees advertised as being on sale took on surprising and unexpected
shapes and colours in their promotional material: green and blue roses in the shape of a turban,
up to 14 centimetres wide, three-coloured hyacinths, gentians with thousands of red flowers,
strange orchids, flowering ferns and so on.
The financial structure of their business was similar to that of other pedlars, in that they
approached the important people in the valleys for backing. However, there three were impor-
tant differences. First, their suppliers were outside of this circuit, the merchant-pedlars borrowed
money, but never merchandise. Second, because the initial capital outlay was large and involved
cash payments for stock, business associations involved more people than for other types of
peddling: the florists set out in groups of three or four, and sometimes more; their partner-
ship was usually agreed verbally and lasted for the duration of the journey; two months after
the merchants returned home they settled their accounts and dissolved the partnership. Third,
this type of business made use of nascent banking services, whether for insuring their goods or
transferring money. More than any other type of peddling, the flower trade was an extremely
risky business with uncertain profits. The merchant could lose his merchandise at any point in
his campaign; but profits were in proportion to the risks taken and sometimes enormous. These
pedlars thus managed to get round the major problems which beset pedlars who travelled in
France: by choosing countries with loose business networks and a rich clientele who were
able to pay cash, they were able to continue practicing the profession profitably without being
constrained by the traditional shackles of debt. However, the economic slump that hit South

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America at the end of the nineteenth century was the final factor in dissuading florists from a
profession which had been depreciated despite the potential earnings: families wanted no more
itinerancy but saw success in terms of a settled life and a fixed income, even if it was a small one
(Fontaine, 1996, pp. 152–156).
The death of peddling in Europe, marked by the great variety of pedlars, can be seen as sym-
bolic of the migrant merchants’ final attempts to adapt to the explosion of new sales methods,
which were forcing them to the fringes of the market. The increasing number of sales outlets,
new distribution networks, the opening up of the rural areas and, of course, the rapid develop-
ment of mail order all made them redundant as intermediaries.

Peddling as a resource for the poorest everywhere in

early modern Europe
The migrant pedlars have never been the only ones to sell in the streets since reselling small
goods was the first survival strategy for the unemployed and for people who were rejected from
trade organisations. Moreover, many shopkeepers sent their wives and servants to peddle their
merchandises illegally in other districts of the city or at its outskirt (Montenach, 2013; Van
den Heuvel, 2007). Street vendors were part of two important markets: food and second-hand
objects. Indeed, next to the official food markets, myriads of hawkers criss-crossed streets and
markets, went up and down staircases and entered inns. The housing conditions of most people
were such that they had no place for storage or even for cooking and all kinds of small traders
sold meat directly from slaughterhouses outside the capital, as well as cheese, milk, fruit and
vegetables (Reynald, 2002). Some stood behind a table, others moved with a basket or tray,
and still others sold from a cart. Furthermore, cities developed a vast chain of sellers and resell-
ers, both men and women, who recycled leftovers from well-to-do houses. Water carriers and
drink vendors completed the picture (Fontaine, 2014).
The peddling of foodstuffs was largely handled by women. In Nuremberg in the sixteenth
century, the market was full of women selling food, candles, even books and pictures. Their
small-scale retail operations included the distribution of household production, but they also
sold exotic items of long-distance trade such as citrus fruits, dyestuffs and spices. They shared
this market with the networks of Italian peddlers and, like in Paris, they were active in the urban
peddling of books, engravings and news (Merry Wiesner, 1981, pp. 3–13; Beauvalet-Bout-
ouyrie, 2001, p. 282). Permitting these small traders to exist was a political strategy employed by
the city to give them the means to support themselves and thus avoid falling back on charitable
institutions. This strategy of reserving to the poor segments of small retail was very common
in European cities, but they were generally allowed to sell only one kind of merchandise – the
distribution of official news being the most common.
To access the needed capital to buy their merchandise, most of them had to borrow from
usurers on a day to day basis. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, an acute observer of the small Parisian
economy, recounted that the latter set up their agencies around markets and that the women
merchants were to accept collective liability:

He [the usurer] then goes to an out-of the-way house, to a room where there is only
one bad carpet, a pallet, three chairs and a crucifix. There he grants an audience to
sixty women, – vulgar food sellers, street hawkers and fruit sellers. Then he speaks to
them in a stiff voice: “My friends, as you can see, I am not better off than you; here is
my furniture, here is the bed I lie on when I come to Paris; I give you my money and
rely on your conscience and religion; as from you I have no signature, you know, I can

351
 Laurence Fontaine

ask nothing of the law. I am useful for your trade; and when I lavish my trust, I must
have my surety. So be all of you jointly liable, and swear in front of this crucifix, the
image of our divine Saviour, that you shall do me no wrong, and that you shall faith-
fully return to me that what I shall entrust to you”. All the vulgar food sellers and fruit
sellers raise their hands, and swear to strangle the one who would not be faithful in
payment: dreadful oaths are taken and long signs of the cross made.
(Mercier, 1994b, pp. 548–551)

Caught between the will to let the poor earn a living and the desire to keep prices low for
the working-class population, urban authorities have tried to regulate the activity of numerous
resellers and fought against the immediate resale of goods. In France, the hours during which
resellers could operate in the market were regulated to give people the time to buy, carry and sell
their small produce (Petrowiste, 2004, pp. 316–320; Duval, 2001, p. 327). In Spain, small resellers
and regraters (regatones) were either not permitted to sell in the market or strict restrictions
were placed on them to avoid the very widespread practice of purchase and immediate resale. In
London and urban Holland restrictions were also taken against food hawkers (Blasquez, 1996,
p. 118; Van den Heuvel, 2016, pp. 94–95).
As consumer credit was formally forbidden in many parts of Europe, pawn broking was the
major tool to access it, creating a micro-economy in which clothing circulated as a form of
currency, and was rented out and pawned according to need. Women were at the heart of these
markets: their social roles, in an incompletely monetarised economy and in a legal environ-
ment which marginalised them, explain why they were active, along with recognised guilds and
migrant networks in the sale and resale of used clothes. In Paris, for instance, in 1725 the female
second-hand dealers were between 6000 and 7000 (Fontaine, 2008, pp. 104–111; Roche, 1989,
pp. 328–344).
From the eighteenth century, in these societies where the poor hardly counted, new values
marginalised them even further. Health and safety requirements were imposed, requiring more
capital investment to adhere to the new standards. As and when they were imposed, women
would, for lack of rights and capital, be replaced increasingly by men and by sedentary mer-
chants. On the other hand, city dwellers pushed municipal authorities to domesticate the street
and the market by facilitating the movement of people so that the air and the water could be
cleansed of unpleasant smells and noxious air, and the street and pavements cleared of cumber-
some street vendors. Louis Sébastien Mercier echoed these new values in his description of the
markets of Paris in 1799. Not a single one found favour in his eyes: on top of their ‘hideous and
repulsive appearance’, he lamented that to access the merchandise, ‘you have to lay yourself open
to the sharp tongue of sellers, resellers and sub sellers’. He then denounced the links between the
official merchants and the vendors from the countryside which spoiled the only pleasant market
of Paris: ‘Why does the quadrangular Marché des Innocents, so vast and so airy, with easy exits,
only present to the people a forbidding row of umbrellas that eager farmers rent at a hundred
louis per year from wretched rag dealers?’ (Mercier, 1994a, pp. 1296–1299).
Finally, the establishment of a patent law in France obliged all sellers and resallers to pay a
tax which the poorest could not afford. One of two women accused of selling clothes without
a patent at a fair in 1796, invoked the paltriness of her business: ‘of such little value that she
had not been liable for a patent’. The counsel for the two women stated that they had no other
choice to survive because

the woman Moreau, a housewife and mother, who owned nothing and who only
put on sale her own meagre belongings as well as those of her husband and goods

352
 At the margins? Itinerants and pedlars

entrusted to her by a female patented trader . . . that she is obliged to sell to feed her
family.

As for her sister, the counsel explained,

indigent and crippled, she is not in a position to earn her living in any other way but
by making rags for children out of old clothes . . . that she is in the habit of going to
the markets of Paris and the areas nearby and that she was never asked whether she
had a patent.

In his conclusion, he emphasised the extent to which such practices were common for

the Moreau women and the girl Toutain are like many other citizens from all the com-
munes of the Republic who like them made children’s rags with the old clothes they
get as they are in no position to pay for the least patent, most of their businesses not
even being equivalent to the price of the smallest patent.2

These women and all the petty street vendors were also victims of the official merchants’
determination to keep their monopoly on trade (Fontaine, 1991, pp. 85–95; Van den Heuvel,
2015). Mercier castigated the confiscation of goods of men and women trying to benefit from
the market to earn their livelihood:

There is nothing more common and nothing which dishonours our legislation more.
One often sees a commissioner with bailiffs running after a rag seller or a small iron-
monger carrying a portable shop. A woman is publicly stripped of the forty odd pairs
of breeches she is carrying on her back and her head. Her old clothes are confiscated
in the name of the majestic community of secondhand clothes dealers . . . a man in a
jacket carrying something wrapped in his coat is arrested. What do they confiscate?
New shoes that the poor man had hidden in a teatowel.The shoes were taken away by
order, this sale becoming prejudicial to Parisian cobbling.
(Mercier, 1994b, pp. 143–144)

This tells us clearly that the survival of men and women living hand to mouth depended on
the market and trade, for at the time everyone was more or less a trader. But this access to the
market was one thing the big players always wanted to keep for themselves. From the Middle
Ages, they obtained regulations directed at excluding migrants, women and all those looking to
derive from selling a small additional income or simply the means to survive. At the end of the
Anciene Regime and in the nineteenth century, the new standards of hygiene requiring greater
capital reinforced the dominance of the sedentary traders, for the poor, who lived on small trans-
actions and small productions, could not conform to them.The fact that market activity was the
livelihood of the poorest mattered little at that time and the State compounded matters further
by taxing them to meet its monetary needs and to control the itinerant sellers and their ware.

Notes
1 Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Fr. 22130, fo. 37, November 1754.
2 Archives Nationales, BB 18822 Justice Seine et Marne, quoted by Cobb, R. (1985). La Mort est dans Paris,
Paris: Chemin Vert, pp. 170–171.

353
 Laurence Fontaine

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 PART IV

Geographical variations
 21
RETAIL HISTORY
United States and Canada
Bettina Liverant

Today it is the ability to sell things and not the ability to make them that drives consumer goods
manufacturing and propels the economy forward. In both the United States and in Canada, the
barriers of time and space that used to constrain selling and buying have disappeared. Driven
by the search for profit, entrepreneurs evolve their business practices and competitive strate-
gies. New retail formats emerge and older ones adapt. Before the 1860s, most retailers served
local and regional markets. Selection was limited, transportation expensive, and the availability
of goods determined in large part by the dealings of a wholesalers and middlemen. Now we
occupy “landscapes of consumption” that provide for and encourage spending. Having internal-
ised our role as consumers, we are comfortable spending our leisure time in shopping environ-
ments even when we are not shopping (Ritzer, 2010). Airport terminals have been reconfigured
as shopping centres; the store is a critical component of many museum operations; fitness clubs
sell “wellness” including classes, equipment and clothing. Non-store retailing has expanded dra-
matically, changing what as well as how we buy.
The processes of making, distributing and selling have been systematised and standardised.
The American discount model has driven down wages and levels of service as well as prices
and profit margins. Competition for consumer dollars has also generated counter movements
to rationalisation in the form of “enchanted” settings, including stores with elaborate themes,
personalised shopping experiences, and warehouses piled to the ceilings with goods, a fantasy
of abundance presented as great bargains (Ritzer, 2010). The largest chains account for the most
sales by retail dollar but small store formats have proven highly resilient and account for more
transactions. Approximately 95% of American retail businesses employ fewer than fifty people
and operate only a single location (National Retail Federation, 2017). Even as large-format
retailers restructure and close, small store ownership, whether as an independent owner or as a
franchisee, remains a dream for many, driven by the desire for independence as well as income.
For all its success, retail is experiencing a “malaise”. Although the retail sector is one of
the largest private employers in both countries, labour productivity lags behind other sectors.
Median real hourly wages of retail workers have declined since 2007. Retailers require fewer
workers even as more things are being sold: indeed the gap between retail sales and retail jobs
is growing. There is an over abundance of physical stores, a problem exacerbated by the rapid
growth of e-commerce. Canada is a smaller, less wealthy market that generally lags behind devel-
opments in American retailing by a decade or more. Disparities in the penetration of innovations

359
 Bettina Liverant

and consumer preferences between two countries seen as substantially the same highlight the
importance of demographics, location, government policy, culture and even weather in shap-
ing the particulars of retail at any time. All this is to say that retailing as it has developed in the
United States and Canada is complex, heterogeneous and now ever present.

Colonial narratives
In recent decades, widely held images of self-sufficient pre-industrial households living in rela-
tive isolation have been contradicted by new evidence found in store account books, tax rolls,
court cases, probate inventories and diaries. Colonial consumers and early retailers lived on
the margins of Atlantic capitalism but they participated in extended, often global, networks of
exchange. Indeed rural retailers are increasingly being cast as ‘economic and cultural innovators,
the central agents of social transformation in their communities’ (Nobles, 1990, p. 113; Perkins,
1991; Bushman, 1994; McCalla, 2015).
There was broad similarity in retailing across British North America and the American
colonies before urbanisation and industrialisation. Retailing in the pre-industrial period did not
follow the European model. There was no transfer of medieval markets, market squares, or craft
guilds from the Old World to the New.The term “store” as a place of commerce where supplies
and goods were kept and sold was unfamiliar to the British, who used the term “shop” as the
place where goods were made and displayed for sale. The difference in terminology is signifi-
cant: most storekeepers were involved in both retailing and collecting goods for export. Dual
purpose stores appeared where the staple trade was strongest: collecting cotton in the tidewater
south, furs in the north, and wheat in the middle colonies in the early decades of the eighteenth
century. In more settled regions, or where the staple trade was less important, back country
general stores collected surplus agricultural produce and home production, sometimes for the
personal use of the shopkeeper, but often to be resold locally or exported beyond the commu-
nity, placing shopkeepers in the role of marketing agents. Purpose-built retail stores appeared in
the more settled regions of New England as early as 1750, but in less developed or back country
regions it was common for stores to be owned and operated by the “great man” or “principal
man” in the community alongside other commercial enterprises. Running a general store adja-
cent to, for example, a mill or forge, on a plantation (in the southern colonies), or alongside a
woollen mill (in Upper Canada), attracted customers and generated income and employment
for the community.The chain store format was also present in the colonial period. Some chains
were family based, but some partnerships were much larger, including those opened by Scot-
tish and English merchants in Virginia and Maryland and fur trading posts-cum-general-stores
operated by the Hudson’s Bay Company. By the late eighteenth century, then, retailing already
involved salaried employees and managers keeping accounts for distant head offices (Shammas,
1990; Perkins, 1991; Benson and Shaw, 1992; Carlos and Lewis, 2002; O’Leary et al., 2002;
McCalla, 2015).
Careful studies of day books kept by early country stores challenge assumptions about book
credit, payment in kind and pricing. Once seen as evidence of underdevelopment, book credit is
now regarded as evidence of economic diversification, allowing for complex transactions when
currency and banks were in short supply. Credit was extended to individuals and also to com-
mercial operators and innkeepers. Credit might be repaid in cash or by a wide range of goods
in kind, including labour, wood and home production undertaken specifically for commercial
exchange. Book credits facilitated exchanges between third parties, as when person A owed
a debt to person B, but instead paid the storekeeper who recorded a credit for B. Credit was
especially important in Canada, where winter slowdowns routinely meant that 10 to 20% of the

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workforce was unemployed for six months at a time, complicated even more by fluctuations in
the resource-based economy (Mancke, 1995; McCalla, 2015).
Although the volume of business during the settlement period certainly fluctuated, the
emphasis on producing goods for export and the relatively high ratio of men to women inhib-
ited household self-sufficiency. As a result, regardless of class or location, early North Americans
were shoppers. Geographic concentration varied considerably: a large country store in the mid
nineteenth century might see 200 or 300 people a year, while a small store might have a cus-
tomer base of fifty. With a limited customer base and slow stock turn, there was little incentive
to innovate bookkeeping methods. Account books recorded “who owed how much to whom”
but were not used to calculate profit or loss (Craig, 2009, p. 125). Debts could be carried for
years with little payment. Although prices were not marked, recent studies of account books
show that prices for regularly purchased basic commodities such as sugar, tea, coffee, salt, flour
and after mid-century a growing number of brand name goods, were consistent from customer
to customer well before the era of the mass merchandizer: as early as the 1830s in at least some
country stores in the American Midwest and rural Upper Canada. Bargaining was common
for goods such as imported cloth, dishes and hardware where variations in quality allowed for
negotiation, but contrary to long held assumptions, not all prices were determined by haggling
(Norris, 1962; Shammas, 1990; Deutsch, 2010; McCalla, 1997, 2015a, 2015b).
Colonial consumers, including First Nations consumers, were discerning and selective, with
choices in what to buy and where to buy it. Most storekeepers faced competition, whether from
nearby stores, peddlers or retailers in larger towns where farmers took produce to market. Carole
Shammas calculates that although most stores were very small, there were more retail outlets
per capita in mid-eighteenth century New England than existed in the United States in 1929,
in 1967 or in 1985 (Shammas, 1990, pp. 275–276). Even in the north, Hudson’s Bay Company
managers complained of competition, particularly from independent merchants who left the
Company to set up their own stores. The competitive advantage of one store over another lay
in the willingness to extend credit, the acceptance of goods in lieu of cash, and in the selection
of goods for sale, but not generally in price (Shammas, 1990; Martin, 2000; O’Leary et al., 2002;
McCalla, 2015a). Stores served a broad range of customers. Women are present in account ledg-
ers, charging goods as wives and daughters to the accounts of husbands and fathers, and also as
economically independent widows and single women. In the American South and Midwest,
African American slaves purchased goods on book credit in back country stores. First Nations
consumers were listed by name in the ledgers of the Hudson’s Bay Company.This is not to over-
state equalising nature of shopping. Country stores were primarily places of male sociability; and,
as historian Ann Smart Martin observes, participation in retail commerce did not change status
in other arenas of life. However, commercial transactions bound people together. When goods
were behind the counter and a high percentage of sales depended on credit, each purchase rep-
resented a personal exchange between storekeeper and customer (Perkins, 1991; Monod, 1996;
Martin, 2000, 2008; Carlos and Lewis, 2001, 2002; McCalla, 2015a).
In hundreds of villages and small towns and in sparsely populated regions on the frontiers of
settlement, itinerant peddlers supplemented the country general store. Historians have crafted
different, although certainly complimentary, narratives of peddling north and south of the border.
Surveying the Canadian scene, John Benson stresses the importance of peddling (and also of
small shops) as a way of life as well as a source of goods. Street-selling persisted, even in the face
of legal restrictions, well into the twentieth century in urban Canada, filling gaps in the retail
system and in the job market, providing income to those on the margins of society. Most often,
Benson asserts, the ‘decision to sell was born of poverty and misfortune . . . [peddling] was the last
resort of the unskilled, the unemployed, the very young, and the very old, the sick, the injured

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 Bettina Liverant

and the victimized’ (Benson, 1985, p. 80). It was also often the first resort of European and Asian
immigrants with few alternatives. Peddling required little start up capital and held significant
competitive advantages: selling at the door, charging low prices (often for lower quality goods),
dealing in small volumes (desirable in cities where cash and ice box space were often limited) and
operating when stores were absent or closed.
American historians have been more interested in peddlers as agents of commercial develop-
ment and social change. David Jaffe and Jackson Lears discuss peddlers as the advance guard of
consumer society, pointing to thousands of young men peddling clocks and tinware across the
United States in the decades following the War of 1812. By mid-century, many peddlers were
travelling regular circuits as salaried employees and commissioned agents, selling for wholesal-
ers and manufacturers, bringing news, new kinds of goods and cosmopolitan market culture to
rural homesteads, building up demand where none existed, and promoting the message of social
transformation through bought goods. A successful wagon peddler might begin the autumn
season with goods worth $300 to $2,000 (about the same value of inventory as a small country
store) and turn a 100% gross profit over two or three months before returning home to settle
debts and arrange for new supplies. As population densities rose and rural transportation net-
works improved, peddling developed into a primarily urban occupation, involving pushcarts and
semi-permanent stalls rather than packs and wagons.
Tensions between fixed stores and peddlers were endemic. Storekeepers regularly demanded
the imposition of regulations and licensing fees, objecting that peddlers, who did not have to pay
taxes or store upkeep, were unfair competitors. High fees simply encouraged evasion. Peddling,
unlike waged labour, promised adventure, opportunity and the possibility of social mobility.
Many peddlers did achieve modest economic success. A few rose to open department stores
or scrapyards; a very few became retail manufacturers or financiers ( Jaffee, 1991; Lears, 1994;
Blackford, 2003; Howard, 2008; Diner, 2015).

Pre-industrial urban
Greater population densities allowed for specialisation but store formats prior to the 1830s were
much the same in town and countryside, shaped by similar needs to store, protect and display
inventory, to serve customers, and keep records. In towns with populations of 1,000 or more,
small specialty shops clustered along Main Street. Prices were not posted; however, notices in
colonial newspapers might list prices when announcing the arrival of new shipments. Although
small urban retailers were less likely to take goods as payment in kind, they still made anywhere
from one-half to two-thirds of their sales on credit and continued to grant credit long after
chain stores had stopped doing so. Goods that did not sell became dated and dusty. Clearance
sales were not unheard of but were not common. Much like peddling, storekeeping was an
occupation with relatively low barriers to entry. Inventory holding costs could be significant but
storekeepers could live where they worked, operating from an open window or a front parlour.
Women were active in colonial retailing. Indeed small business historian Mancel Blackford pro-
poses that gender imbalances during the settlement period created opportunities for women.
Blackford estimates that perhaps half of all American retailers in this early period were female,
although restrictions on property ownership often meant they operated shops as partners of
husbands or as widows. Steady economic expansion after 1830 widened possibilities for women
as independent storekeepers but by the late ninetenth century changing social expectations, lack
of capital and the burden of low credit ratings began to constrain opportunities in both Ameri-
can and in Canada. Growth in female entrepreneurship was increasingly limited to small shops,
often in sectors like dressmaking, stationary, millinery and fancy goods already under threat

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Figure 21.1 Peddler E.H. Farrell with his cart. Inscribed on back: “This Load, when ready for Fall Busi-
ness, weighs about 6000 pounds/Makes four trips a year./I have driven this for 20 years/over
same ground, striking 15 villages./E. H. Farrell”. c.1910.
Source: The Connecticut Historical Society, 2000.198.34.

from mass merchandisers. As the size of business enterprises continued to grow, businesswomen
were often shouldered aside by better financed and better connected male entrepreneurs. By the
later decades of the 19th century, women entering the retail labour force found jobs as salesgirls
and department supervisors, but seldom in the ranks of management or owners (Monod, 1996;
Blackford, 2003; Baskerville, 2008; Deutsch, 2010; Hodge, 2014).

Mass retailing: more customers, more goods

Retailing changed dramatically between 1860 and 1920 as new formats emerged in response to
changes in production, distribution and demand. Industrialisation in manufacturing and food
processing increased the amount of product to be sold and made new kinds of goods avail-
able in new ways. Immigration accelerated in both America and Canada. In the United States,
only fourteen cities had more than 100,000 residents in 1860; by 1920 the number had risen
to sixty-eight. Prior to 1871, Montreal was the only Canadian city with a population greater
than 100,000 and 84% of the population lived in rural areas. By 1921 the population was
evenly divided between urban and rural dwellers, six cities now had populations in excess of
100,000. Although purchasing power in both countries was concentrated in rapidly growing
urban centres, rural dwellers, no less than urban dwellers, were interested in new consumption

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 Bettina Liverant

opportunities. Business historian Alfred Chandler emphasises a third factor: modernisation of

transportation and communication systems made it possible to co-ordinate flows of materials
and goods at speeds and volumes required to achieve economies of scale (Chandler, 1984).
As productivity rose, manufacturers confronted the prospect of over-production. Compa-
nies such as Procter & Gamble, Libbey Foods, General Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Singer Sew-
ing Machines and Coca-Cola devised mass market strategies to sell higher volumes at lower
markups by hiring travelling salesmen, publishing catalogues, and developing new styles of
packaging and recognisably modern advertising campaigns. The mechanics of bottling, canning,
packaging and labelling improved and became less costly. Literacy rates rose. Legislation passed
in 1905 protected trademarks, making them a clearer indication of quality. The transition to
prepackaged branded products was critical in “unleashing retailing’s potential”, to use business
historian Barry Boothman’s phrase, lowering costs in transportation, storage, labour and display,
and opening the way to self-service (Strasser, 1989; Livingston, 1994; Carden, 2013; Isenstadt,
2014; Boothman, 2016, p. 135).
Some new products replaced goods that had been locally produced or homemade; others
were technologically complex and required explanation. The Singer Sewing Machine Com-
pany, for example, pioneered the franchised selling agency and the consumer instalment plan
to finance sales of its new sewing machines, and devised new types of accounting and statisti-
cal controls to maximise the benefits of vertical integration. By 1905, Singer employed twice
as many workers in the marketing of its machines as it did producing them (Chandler, 1962;
Bucheli et al., 2010).
Individual merchants also recognised that the economics of retailing were changing. There
were more goods to sell and more customers to buy them. In the 1860s and 1870s, dry goods
and general store merchants in the largest cities began adding new departments, services, and
flare to the selling process. In the 1870s and 1880s, other entrepreneurs recognised that improve-
ments in railroads made it possible to reach out to customers in farms and small towns through
catalogue sales. Closer to the turn of the century, other visionary businessmen recognised the
advantages that could be gained by aggregating the operations of many small stores and began
to aggressively add new units in locations with high foot traffic. These new formats emerged
separately and exploited the opportunities of growing markets differently, but their innovators
all understood that turnover and cash flow rather than high profit margins were the key success.
Each time a good was sold, the capital invested was freed up and could be reused to buy more
goods, which could in turn be sold and replaced (Strasser, 1989; Jacobs, 2005).
Often dubbed “machines for selling”, department stores, chain stores and mail order houses
transformed the economic exchanges that lay at the heart of retailing. With large staffs, growing
inventories and more customers, transactions were necessarily depersonalised. Customers could
of course enter country general stores and urban specialty stores freely, but there was an implied
obligation to buy. Exchanges in mass retailing were more anonymous, changing the selling pro-
cess. Set, marked prices simplified transactions and lowered costs. Staff was specialised and pro-
fessionalised if needed, but generally low-waged and unskilled. The discretion to extend credit
to unfamiliar customers shifted to new credit departments or was stopped altogether in favour of
cash-only sales. Liberal exchange policies helped build consumer confidence in unknown and,
in the case of mail order, unseen sellers.
All mass merchandisers adopted some form of departmentalised organisation. With better
organisation and fixed prices, retailers had a better sense of which goods generated the highest
profits. Management of labour, inventory and operations were centralised and became more
sophisticated. Efficiency became the watchword of business enterprise. Advances in transporta-
tion and communication improved the flow of goods, reducing delivery times and shipping

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costs. The ability to buy goods from manufacturers and wholesalers in large quantities enabled
retailers to negotiate better prices and sell branded goods more cheaply. Mass manufacturers
such as Singer integrated forwards, becoming involved in marketing to increase the volume and
predictability of sales. Mass merchandisers integrated selectively backwards into manufacturing,
creating private-label brands to insure supply and control the costs of key products. By 1906,
Sears owned wholly or in part sixteen manufacturing plants (Chandler, 1962). Modernised
accounting systems tightened control over costs.
Price consciousness was built into mass merchandising ( Jacobs, 2005). Whether displayed
on store tags or listed in catalogues, all goods had clearly marked prices. Although department
stores positioned themselves as upscale environments, they aggressively advertised loss leaders,
clearance sales and promotions. Macy’s was famous for its price wars. Filene’s was known for its
bargain basement. The Montgomery Ward mail order company maintained that its low prices
were possible because the company paid no rent, employed no “high-priced salesmen”, sold
nothing on time and eschewed all fakery in favour of simple business efficiency (Blanke, 2000,
p. 195). Chains promised and delivered no frills shopping and lower prices. Mass retailers edu-
cated consumers about economies of scale. Department store founder Edward Filene explained
that he could offer fur coats at low prices ‘Because we are unusually large dealers . . . we sell
on the basis of a small profit on a large volume – rather than a large profit on a small volume’
( Jacobs, 2005, p. 22). The Maze, a San Francisco department store, put it even more directly in
a 1891 advertisement,

We are with the people first, last and all the time . . . the more we can sell the larger
we can buy, and the larger we can buy the cheaper we can sell, and the cheaper we can
sell the more you can save.
(Whitaker, 2015)

The additional characteristic that mass merchandisers shared was physical size. In 1902, Mar-
shall Field’s (Chicago) and Macy’s (New York) opened new flagship stores, each with over one
million square feet of floor space (more than five times the size of a 2016 Walmart Supercenter).
In 1904, Marshall Field’s had a workforce of between 8,000 and 10,000 employees, and served
250,000 customers in a day. Filene’s new 1912 store, designed by a reknown architect, fea-
tured thirteen elevators carrying an average of 10,000 shoppers from floor to floor every hour.
America’s largest mail order companies operated vast plants in the middle of the continent.
Sears Roebuck’s new 1906 plant – the largest business building in America at the time – used
assembly line methods to process 100,000 orders each day – more than an early American mer-
chant would have filled in a lifetime. By the 1920s, A&P, the largest of the grocery chains, had
almost sixteen thousand stores reaching from coast to coast. Operating organisations of great size
and complexity, mass merchandisers mobilised capital at a scale not previously associated with
retailing. Over time, as they organised the distribution and sale of mass production to consum-
ers, retailers integrated rural and urban consumers into a vast and largely homogeneous market,
differentiated more by the purchase of good/better/best than by differences of kind (Boorstin,
1973; Chandler, 1984; Strasser, 1989, 2014; Tedlow, 1990; Koehn, 2001, Boothman, 2016).
Mass retailing also changed the culture of shopping. Emphasising the shopping experience,
department stores strengthened the association between shopping and leisure. Customer ser-
vice was handled strategically, with amenities added to give more reasons to visit, linger and
socialise. Department stores promoted themselves, and rapidly gained acceptance, as a new kind
of community institution with social and cultural significance beyond mere commerce. Their
restaurants became meeting places; their exhibition spaces held educational events. Purchasing

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 Bettina Liverant

modern clothing in a department store was a rite of citizenship for many immigrants (Leach,
1993).
Ordering goods by mail from limited range catalogues circulated by specialty stores dated
back to colonial times; but in the 1860s, Aaron Montgomery Ward began to aggressively pro-
mote the general merchandise catalogue as a saver of time and money to rural and small town
“consumers in waiting”. Like department stores, mail order companies grew by adding new
lines of goods. By 1904 Montgomery Ward was distributing three million catalogues, over 1,000
pages nationwide, each weighing 4 pounds (1.8 kg), selling everything that could be packaged
and delivered. The arrival of the latest catalogue, soon nicknamed the “the wish book”, became
a highlight of rural life.
The third “machine for selling” was the chain store. Renting small spaces in high-traffic
locations, chain stores focused on a limited range of fast-selling goods, undercutting their com-
petition on price and convenience. In the chain store business, price policies and merchandise
policies were one and the same. Chains did not stock much in the way of apparel; instead they
sold small necessities like canned foods, boxed cereals, cigarettes, gum, toothpaste, pots and
pans, and other household goods with brand name labels that urban customers valued. The
key to low prices was standardisation: in goods, advertising, store layout and work routines.
These in turn opened the way to the most significant innovation of the chain store format:
self-service.The greatest benefits of the self-service format turned out to be cultural: given free-
dom to browse without pressure to buy or wait for service, shoppers bought more. Moreover,
customer satisfaction increased: no one felt that some customers received better service than
others; and the tensions associated with personal scrutiny, class, race and ethnicity between
storekeepers and customers were reduced (Chandler, 1977; Deutsch, 2010; Hamilton et al.,
2011; Levinson, 2011; Carden, 2013; Hamilton and Phillips, 2014).
Despite early similarities, Canada industrialised later than the United States; markets remained
smaller and more dispersed. Smaller retail formats had longer staying power. Department stores
diversified earlier, reaching out to working-class as well as middle-class customers, circulating
catalogues to urban as well as rural households, and opening branch stores decades before most
of their American counterparts. Eaton’s opened its first branch in 1905. By 1930, it was oper-
ating a network of forty-seven retail stores and a nationwide catalogue sales system with over
100 order offices. Eaton’s was Canada’s third largest employer and one of the largest retailers in
world (measured by revenues). Marshall Field’s did not open its first branch store until 1928;
Wanamaker’s and Bloomingdale’s did not open branches until the late 1940s (Wright, 1992;
Monod, 1996; Belisle, 2011; Boothman, 2016).

Consolidation, new prototypes and resistance

As the rate of conventional growth slowed in the 1920s and 1930s, retailers responded in a
number of ways.The drive to increase efficiencies of scale fuelled a wave of mergers and acquisi-
tions financed by the selling of common shares. Large grocery chains began consolidating stores,
combining five or six small stores to create a single, more sophisticated supermarket. As store
counts shrank, sales figures actually rose. Recognising the growing impact of urbanisation and
automobile ownership, Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward opened their first fixed stores in
the mid-twenties, following their customers to new suburban locations with low land costs, to
become the first nation-wide department store chains in America (Chandler, 1962, pp. 233–234).
New pro-types appeared, laying the groundwork for postwar innovations. In California, fill-
ing stations added grocery sales to create super service stations. In the American Midwest, a few
property developers began building small “community” shopping centres adjacent to upscale

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 Retail history

residential developments, with storefronts set back from the street to allow for automobile park-
ing. On both coasts (and about a decade later in Canada), independent local retailers began
opening large stores outside of the central business district, adapting self-service “no-frills” shop-
ping to non-fashion staples and household goods. Unencumbered by management systems and
willing to ignore government regulations and middle – class shopping conventions, discount
warehouses extended opening hours and attracted customers with ample free parking, fanfare
and festivities, selling brand merchandise below the accepted retail price. When investment rose
again after World War II, chains of grocers and real estate developers would seize on these dif-
ferent precedents (Longstreth, 1997).
The rise of mass retailing generated strong opposition from independent merchants who
began forming associations in the 1880s, calling for limits on store hours and fair trade acts to
prevent large retailers from using advantages of size to sell goods at reduced prices. Loss lead-
ers, for example, were condemned as morally objectionable. Independent retailers did, on an
individual basis, go bankrupt; however, there was no transition from small to large formats. In
the face of competition from mass retailers, independents adapted, often borrowing techniques
developed by mass merchandisers to better organise, display and manage their businesses. Some
independents formed voluntary chains, buying collectively and operating under common poli-
cies and brand names. Neighbourhood grocery-cum general stores also flourished, opening in

Figure 21.2 Interior view of Jenkins’ Groceteria, Calgary, Canada, c.1918. Henry Jenkins brought self-
service to Canada, in part as a solution to labour shortages created by World War I. By 1929,
Jenkins Groceteria Ltd was a vertically integrated corporation operating a chain of thirty
stores across southern Alberta known for self-service and low prices.
Source: Glenbow Archives, NA 4501-4.

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 Bettina Liverant

working class and ethnic communities well into the interwar years in America and even later in
Canada, where patterns of distinct ethnic neighbourhoods continued longer.
During the depression, some shoppers shifted to less expensive goods, buying in small lots,
and on credit – practices that helped sustain neighbourhood retailers through difficult times.
Others, dependent upon relief vouchers, favoured the anonymity of chain stores. The growing
burden of government regulation during depression and wartime also favoured larger retailers.
This was particularly the case in America, where retailers faced new demands for record keeping,
collecting sales taxes, and compliance with pricing codes mandated by New Deal legislation.
Larger stores and chains were also better able to manage wartime labour shortages. The differ-
ence between small stores and large stores, many historians have argued, was not adherence to
tradition but access to capital. Ultimately chains had more staying power, greater managerial
expertise and the funds to implement innovations on an ongoing basis (Walden, 1989; Cohen,
1990; Benson and Shaw, 1992; Monod, 1996; Haupt, 2012; Deutsch, 2010; Krulikowski, 2014;
Scott and Walker, 2011, 2014; Boothman, 2016).
After the war, conversion back to a peacetime economy occurred very rapidly in the United
States, with the government supporting mass consumption through a broad range of policy
initiatives, including G.I. benefits, mortgage insurance and highway construction. The Cana-
dian government implemented similar policies but at reduced levels, instead prioritising growth
through exports and capital investment. Both countries experienced postwar prosperity but
American growth was more rapid and widespread, boosted by increases in the supply of goods
as well as rising incomes. New household formation and postwar expectations, fuelled by tel-
evision, generated widespread demand for consumer goods in both countries. Car ownership
exploded: by 1960, 79.5% of American and 66% of Canadian households owned at least one
motor vehicle, 20% of American and 10% of Canadian households had two or more (Owram,
1996, p. 70; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2016, Table 8.5).
As late as 1950, most shopping precincts were still pedestrian oriented, with parking sepa-
rated from the store. Within twenty-five years, the way most Americans and Canadians shopped
was largely transformed. Retailing decentralised as investment flowed towards supermarket gro-
cery stores, shopping centres, “big-box” or warehouse styled stores and small franchises – all part
of the distinctive new geography of postwar suburbia ( Jackson, 1996; Longstreth, 1999).
Chain and independent grocery stores rapidly converged on a common “supermarket” for-
mat, growing in size to accommodate a full range of packaged products (including dry goods,
meat, fish, and greengroceries traditionally sold in bulk in different stores), brightly lit, with
automatic doors and wider aisles to accommodate shopping carts, rows of open shelving to
display packaged, prepared and canned goods, and new cases for refrigerated and frozen foods.
A successful supermarket, historian Sandy Isenstadt observes, was the outcome of “packaging,
pricing, and parking” (Isenstadt, 2014, p. 25).The pursuit of low overhead and high volume sales
drew retailers to suburban locations where land costs were lower and ample parking ensured
a large customer base. Food was produced, packaged and marketed to be sold in supermarket
settings, transforming what people ate as well as how they shopped. New stores opened with tre-
mendous fanfare.The 1952 opening of a Dominion Store in a mid-sized Canadian city featured
a string quartet, guests arriving by limousine and an orchid for each female customer. Between
1948 and 1958, the number of American supermarkets doubled; overall grocery store sales rose
more rapidly than either population growth or per capita income (Hamilton and Phillips, 2014).
Growth was more moderate in Canada, where the level of expenditure rose in tandem with
gains in personal income (Boothman, 2011, p. 12; Marling, 1994; Shapiro, 2005; Deutsch, 2010).
In the late 1950s, Cold War rhetoric positioned the grocery supermarket as symbolic of
the American way of life and the superiority of American capitalism. The ‘freedom to touch,

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see, smell and feel merchandise’ was celebrated as ‘a form of economic democracy’ that would
increase sales and in turn reduce costs and prices, expanding markets, creating jobs and improv-
ing nutrition (Hamilton 2014). Cold war rhetoric was less pronounced in Canada, but newspa-
pers and magazines similarly celebrated modern abundance and conveniences.
The rise of the American shopping centre as a new retail format depended upon the needs
of suburban households, widespread automobile ownership and the decisions of property devel-
opers willing to make large investments with extended payback periods. The non-selling spaces
were attractively designed to entice shoppers. Developers preferred to fill the retail spaces with
well-known specialty chains rather than local independents, reasoning that chains provided
greater financial stability, attracted tenants for multiple locations and helped draw customers.
Canada has had a somewhat different shopping centre experience.With stronger downtowns,
less freeway development, less racial tension, somewhat better public transit and more restrictive
land use policies, a greater proportion of shopping centres were built in the city core (10% in
Canada versus 1% in the United States). Canadian developers also benefited from differences
in land use regulations and business practices that limited direct competition and overbuilding.
Because less than a dozen development corporations control the majority of Canada’s regional
malls, centres are carefully spaced in relation to one another in a pattern of “mutual avoidance”.
Moreover, when compared with the United States, Canada has 25 to 35% fewer malls, generat-
ing significantly higher sales per square foot of mall space (Simmons, 1991).
In terms of mall design, Canada was a leader in the development of urban indoor shop-
ping networks that connect retail centres, office towers, apartment buildings, hotels and enter-
tainment venues. These networks grew incrementally: underground in Montreal (beginning in
1962) and above ground in Calgary (with construction beginning in the 1970s). The world’s
first freestanding megamall, West Edmonton Mall (WEM), was also Canadian. Built in stages
beginning in 1985, WEM was designed with a then unique combination of large-scale recrea-
tion, shopping, hotel and convention facilities, including indoor amusement and water parks, an
NHL-size ice skating rink, a small lake with mini-submarine rides, a scale replica of Columbus’s
Santa Maria and a marine show with dolphins and sea-lions.WEM was developed for consumer
tourism as well as to compete in the local retail market. All three retail formats emerged as dif-
ferent responses to the challenges of a northern climate.
Traditional shopping malls faced increased competition beginning in the 1970s from a popu-
lar new retail format: the big-box store. The formula was straightforward: a large, freestanding
single-story building surrounded by ample parking, selling a wide range of product loosely
arranged in departments. Customers enter stores that are little more than “big-boxes”, collected
goods in shopping carts with minimal assistance, and took them to a single point of sale. Spe-
cialised “big-box” chains soon followed: Toys ‘R’ Us, Home Depot, Chapters, Circuit City and
others. Although not every big-box retailer positioned itself as a discounter, selling a broad range
of goods in a focused category in a warehouse-like setting created efficiencies of scale and lower
prices that turned them into “category killers” in the 1980s and 1990s, eliminating most of their
traditional small store competitors. The big-box shopping experience was and remains largely
private, focused on the “anonymous experience of commodity acquisition” based primarily on
price.The pursuit of low prices eroded the long-term relationships that once characterised retail
exchanges, replaced by minimum-wage “greeters” and extended warranties (also a retail profit
centre), commodifying the bonds of trust that once linked customer and storekeeper (Isenstadt,
2014, pp. 26–27).
The discount chain Walmart became the sector leader though its relentless commitment to a
regime of everyday low prices (EDLP) rather than sale prices, achieved by eliminating, reducing
and re-organising every stage of the retail process. Since the opening of its first store, Walmart

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 Bettina Liverant

Figure 21.3 West Edmonton Mall. The world’s first freestanding megamall, combining large-scale recrea-
tion, shopping, hotel and convention facilities, opened in Edmonton, Canada in 1985. It is still
North America’s largest shopping mall.
Source: Daniel Case, GNU.

has made low prices the centre of its brand identity, aggressively cutting budgets for interior
decor, shelving, store exteriors, parking lots, advertising, maintenance and above all payroll. As
these stringencies were combined with innovations in logistics,Walmart gained substantial price
advantages over its competitors. Streamlining the checkout process with scanners and bar code
technology made it possible to operate much larger stores; more importantly, the point-of-sale
data was used to analyse purchasing patterns and refine product ordering. By the 1980s, sophis-
ticated computer networks, a private communications satellite and the world’s largest retail data
warehouse connected all operating units and suppliers directly to Walmart’s corporate headquar-
ters. Warehouses were replaced by distribution centres and innovations in cross-docking, reduc-
ing the time goods spent on the road. In the late 1980s, Walmart began to side-step traditional
wholesalers, building direct relationships with vendors and sourcing goods wherever cheap
labour and lax government regulation lowered costs, most notably China. Walmart benefitted
from and accelerated the shift to container shipping, disempowering long-shore unions by mov-
ing goods directly through to its distribution centres. Walmart became America’s largest retailer
in 1990. By 2002, Walmart was America’s largest corporation by sales revenue and America’s
largest private sector employer, an indication of changes in the composition of the American
economy as well as the company’s strategic prowess. Global chains like Walmart no longer
“push” what manufacturers make but determine what they make. Jay Fitzsimons,Walmart senior
vice president and treasurer, explained, “The misconception is that we are in the retail business,

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but in reality we are in the distribution business” (Khade and Lovass, 2009, p. 1; Bonacich, 2006;
Lichtenstein, 2006, Hamilton et al., 2011; Carden, 2013).
Walmart and similar big-box chains were at the forefront changes in quantity, pricing and
speed, but they were not alone. In the 1970s, retail warehouse clubs appeared, selling a lim-
ited array of products at highly discounted prices in wholesale quantities to customers willing
to pay an annual fee to simply walk through the door. Costco, now the dominant warehouse
club, never advertises, seldom carries multiple brands of the same product and offers little or
no customer service. Off-price retailers like T.J. Maxx (in America), Winners (in Canada) and
department store discount branches like Nordstrom Rack rapidly gained market share after the
1980s recession. By obtaining product from cancelled orders, overruns, retailer returns, end-of-
season closeouts and their own private labels, off-price retailers move a high volume of inven-
tory quickly in bargain basement settings, cultivating a treasure hunt experience by offering a
changing assortment of recognised brand name, fashion-oriented apparel and household goods
at below regular store prices. The success of these formats, now seen by many as convenient
alternatives to traditional department stores, suggests the normalisation of discounting – and the
commitment to branded goods – by consumers struggling to meet expectations with stagnant
wages through periodic recessions (Kaikati, 1985).
Big-box and warehouse club stores began as stand alones but much of their growth since
2000 has been in vast “power centers” located adjacent to major highway interchanges on the
urban peripheries of large cities. This is a new retail format, accessed almost entirely by private
transportation, that groups together half a dozen or more freestanding super-sized boxes with a
sprinkling of small boxes and small strip plazas housing smaller retailers, fast food chains, banks
and professional offices. Collectively, stores gain visibility and improved regional access, but
each remains its own destination, reached directly from a common expanse of parking. Power
centres typically draw on a 100 km radius, attracting business away from older malls, big-box
stores, and downtowns (Hernandez and Simmons, 2006).
For decades, competition on the basis of price led to bigger stores and increased concentra-
tion of ownership. In the 1990s, over expansion, changing shopping patterns, excess debt taken
on to finance expansion, and periodic recessions forced many of the original big-box chains
into bankruptcy (Lal and Alverez, 2011; Boothman, 2016). As store sizes grew and competition
intensified, many of the largest retailers responded by becoming less specialised: grocery giants
like Loblaw’s Superstore introduced general merchandise; discount stores like Walmart and Tar-
get moved into food sales; drugstores added cosmetics, electronics, consumer goods and con-
venience foods in attempt to grab a larger share of consumer spending. The use of private-label
store brands increased, promising consumers equal quality at lower prices by reducing marketing
costs.With little room to cut further, some discounters took the opposite approach: upscaling to
present better quality goods in more compelling ways.
Meanwhile non-store shopping was on the rise, including a resurgence in catalogue shop-
ping in the 1970s and 1980s among specialty retailers (e.g. Land’s End, L.L. Bean, Restoration
Hardware), the expansion of television shopping (including infomercials and dedicated home
shopping channels), more vending machines and by the 1990s, multiple forms of e-commerce.
The rapid growth of non-store formats was made possible by a succession of digital innovations
that reduced costs and increased transaction speeds and consumer capabilities, beginning with
bank-issued credit cards (1950s), 1–800 numbers (1960s), delivery times shortened by UPS and
Fed-EX (1970), the Internet (1980s), personal computers (1980s), graphic web browsers and
smart phones (1990s).
E-commerce grew dramatically after 1990. Entrepreneurs devised new ways to sell tradi-
tional products (including both department store-style sites like Amazon.com and specialised

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niche retailers); new ways to sell entirely new products that displaced traditional products (e.g.
Netflix, ITunes); new market-making sites that allowed anyone to become a seller as well as a
buyer of goods (e.g. eBay and Craig’s List); and online sites operating as extensions of physi-
cal stores. Freed from physical stores, consumers access goods without regard to store hours or
geography and in quasi-anonymity. Online shopping also provided new capabilities in research,
including price matches and access to detailed product information, such as videos and product
reviews. From the perspective of the retailer, pure online selling reduces fixed overhead costs
and broadens the market. E-commerce especially lowered barriers for small players, enabling
them to reach out globally. However, as many established retailers discovered, e-commerce also
has drawbacks, reducing opportunities for impulse buying, upselling and bundling sales that
traditionally increased profits per visit.
Canadian consumers embraced the Internet but lagged in their acceptance of online shop-
ping, preferring to use the web for research and buy in-store. Several explanations have been
suggested: American consumers perceive they can buy anything online, in part due to the pres-
ence of thousands of small online retailers. Canadian retailers have been slower to establish an
online presence, likely due to smaller markets and higher shipping costs. Meanwhile, Canadian
consumers ordering goods from outside the country face additional import taxes and fees.
Small format retailing did not disappear in the postwar period; there was, however, a shift
from independent ownership to franchising. Franchising offers many of the advantages of the
chain store format, including brand recognition for an increasingly mobile population, bulk
buying and support in developing a clearly defined business, albeit one with high start up costs.
Franchises multiplied rapidly after the war, driven in part by veterans using their separation
pay to open small businesses. Fast food chains, convenience stores, pet supplies, photo shops,
hardware stores and many others sprang up along major roads, in strip plazas and later in power
centres. By 2010, one in twelve businesses and nearly half of all retail sales (broadly defined) in
the United States occurred in a franchise.

Market saturation and emerging technologies

Decades of expansion, slow economic growth, changing demographics and transformative digi-
tal technologies raise questions about retail saturation. Mall visits are declining at a stunning rate:
from 35 million in 2010 to 17 million in 2013, according to the real estate research firm Cush-
man and Wakefield. By 2012, nearly 35% of empty retail space in America was in the big-box
format. Growth in store size seems to have peaked, with customers resisting the inconvenience
and overall unpleasantness of the experience. How much square feet is enough? In 1999, Amer-
ica averaged 18.45 square feet of retail space per person. By 2017, America had approximately
24 square feet of retail real estate per person, while Canada has only 16 square feet per person
(Lal and Alvarez, 2011; Hernandez and Lau, 2014; Rupp and Smith, 2017). Retailers are shift-
ing from mass to targeted marketing, selling identities and experiences rather than simply cheap
goods. Engagement is seen as the key to making sales and building customer loyalty. Retailing
is becoming omnichannel: physical stores and websites offer different but complimentary shop-
ping experiences with opportunities for customisation. As retailers become brand managers, the
physical store becomes only one part of the brand experience, designed to create memorable
customer experiences. Some companies that began as online only retailers are opening brick
and mortar showrooms, where consumers can “try before they buy”.
For decades American retailers focused on productivity at the “back end”, using information
technology to improve the logistics of inventory management, supply, distribution and staffing.

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Reducing costs and adding square footage were fundamental to high volume, low-margin strat-
egies. Many of the productivity gains associated with digital technologies are in the customer-
facing “front end” of retail: websites, social media, click and collect, the use of mobile phones to
research merchandise, compare prices and pay without waiting in line (Hortacsu and Syverson,
2015).
There are also new kinds of brand-oriented retailers. In the 1980s, American manufacturers
began to close their factories, outsource their manufacturing, and concentrate on design and
merchandising. Companies such as Nike and Stuart Weizmann used to actually make shoes;
computer companies like Apple used to make computers. As the profit margins in manufac-
turing shrank and became increasingly dependent upon labour costs and working conditions
problematic from a customer relations’ point of view, manufacturers began to open retail
stores and sell product through their own online platforms as well as through other retailers.
The largest profits in many consumer goods are to be had in retailing rather than in manufac-
turing (Klein, 2009; Hamilton, 2014). With domestic markets approaching saturation, retail-
ers have internationalised, looking to carry their competitive advantage to new markets and
achieve economies of distribution on a global scale. Competition for mall space is driving rents
upwards. Following the passage of the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994,
huge American companies competing on the basis of price and marketing savvy overwhelmed
Canadian retailers, many still operating as small family-run firms. American retailers now dom-
inate significant segments of the Canadian market, including the general merchandise (e.g.
Walmart and Costco), electronics (e.g. Best Buy), and home improvement (e.g. Home Depot
and Lowes). Canadian-based retailers continue to dominate the pharmaceutical and grocery
sectors. In the early 1990s, foreign controlled firms represented less than 3% of Canadian retail
sales; by 2011, 53% or sixty-six of the top 124 retailers in Canada were foreign owned, the
majority American based. Of the retail chains that closed in Canada between 2008 and 2014,
77% were Canadian owned, while 62% of stores that opened in that time were American.
Internationalisation has also seen large European and Asian retailers (including H&M, Zara,
Ikea and Uniqlo) enter American and Canadian markets, selling on-trend goods at affordable
prices. Adopting the just-in time lean inventory model pioneered by American retailers these
companies developed a new category of “fast fashion” (Burns and Rayman, 1995; Industry
Canada, 2013; Freeman, 2014; Boothman, 2016).
The value proposition for consumers is changing. Shoppers are making decisions on price
and quality in multiple formats: buying some goods online, with or without visiting a physi-
cal store, patronising discounters for some goods and luxury retailers and local small shops for
others. The increasing diversity of retail formats has been a consistent theme. Meanwhile, the
share of total consumer expenditures spent on material goods has declined while that spent on
leisure time, entertainment, travel and self-enhancement has increased dramatically. As a sector,
retail has traditionally been one of low labour productivity and low wages. Most gains come
through the entry of new, more efficient firms and the exiting of less-efficient firms, and suc-
cessful firms adding new stores. Once established, retailers, for the most part, have been slow
to recognise changing circumstances. More than 75% of the top fifty retailers in Canada and
the United States during 1980 were no longer in the group, or no longer existed three decades
later (Boothman, 2016, p. 146). For 150 years, larger floor areas (in single stores and in growing
chains) were associated with more customer trips and increased sales. Transformations in supply
chain management, the rise of e-commerce and changes in consumer preferences and shop-
ping patterns are challenging long held models, demanding new strategies and forcing change
(Stephens, 2013, Lutz, 2016).

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 Bettina Liverant

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 22
WESTERN EUROPE
(INCLUDING SCANDINAVIA)
Ilja Van Damme

Introduction
For anyone browsing through forecasts on shopping trends and consumer behaviour, the future
of the European retail sector looks gloomy. Predictions of the effects of an online retail boom
and simultaneous decline of high streets and town centres, loom large in both specialised reports
and general news coverage. Future shopping is believed to become weightless, effortless, time-
less and placeless. In the meantime, our individual consumer preferences will be ever more
effectively tracked, analysed and catered for in a brave new world of big data management and
social media advertising. It is curious how, in predicting the next-step in retailing, the past is
often evoked as ultimate proof and justification. After all, does not history tells us how, every
fifty years or so, retailing undergoes a significant disruption and change: a “retail revolution” of
some sorts? Well, not necessarily: the history of retailing also tells quite another story. Although
talk of revolutions certainly abounds in historical retail narratives, such interpretations are not
necessarily insightful in comprehending the future of retailing, let alone its past. In fact, it can
be seriously questioned whether dividing retail history into something before and after will
move any understanding of retail change fundamentally forward. It blots out strong continuities,
complexities and contradicting variations in time and place. Moreover, by casting retail history
in a traditional–modern dichotomy, historians fail to study and appreciate the act of shopping in
its long-term and changing social and cultural contexts.
The last twenty years, however, have seen a liberating revision in approaches. Long-term,
comparative knowledge regarding Western European retail diversity has matured enormously
in empirical breadth and conceptual precision (for instance: Blondé et al., 2006; Furnée and
Lesger, 2014). We now understand better how retailing fitted into medieval and early modern
societies, and how shopping in the past differed from today. Important to such reinterpretations
has been an acknowledgement of the centrality of the urban framework as both backdrop of
retail development and agent of urban lifestyles centred around market-oriented exchange and
consumption (Stobart, 2008; Blondé and Van Damme, 2013: 251–253). With estimated mean
urbanisation percentages of more than 75%, contemporary Western Europe is believed to be
one of the most densely urbanised regions in the world (Clark, 2013: 16). The long-running
importance of cities and towns, indeed, has been a mainstay in Western European history; and
starting in the Middle Ages, but gaining in significance from the renaissance-period onwards, the

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retail sector is believed to have been crucial for the continuous social and economic livability of
European cities. Part of this dynamism, it will be argued in this chapter, was precisely related to
the emergence of shopping as distinct lifestyle or habitus of the social and cultural milieu that
is the Western European city. The fact that these strong and long-running ties between urban
lifestyles and market-oriented exchange and consumption continue to dominate and structure
modern life until today, at least partly explains why inner-city, recreational shopping still thrives
in Western Europe. It has continued to do so, despite the actual and predicted revolutionary
disruptions caused by large-scale, “out-of-town” retail sprawl and the arrival of the Internet age
(Weltevreden et al., 2005: 824–841).
This chapter provides a broad chronological overview to explain how shopping unfolded
and developed against an emerging urban Europe between roughly 1000 A.D. and today. Its
geographical focus will be on Western Europe as a whole, trying to flesh out generic evolutions
and trends. In doing so, however, certain strongly urbanised regions – England, France, Italy, the
Low Countries – will pop up more frequently as others, which is due to their historic impor-
tance in retail developments and our more advanced knowledge of these places in general. The
European countryside remains under-theorised and under-researched within retail history; but
it was also later and less commercialised than European cities and towns. What follows, then, is
a straightforward chronological account of the European entanglement between shopping and
urbanism. It begins by questioning why certain European regions and places had more elaborate
and multidimensional retail landscapes than others, and how consumption and shopping needs
to be interpreted in the medieval period. It then looks at the centrality of shopping for emerging
urban lifestyles from the renaissance period and onwards into the nineteenth century. In a third
and last section, it questions the extent to which shopping practices altered during the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, what was driving such changes and how these evolutions will
affect our retail futures. The chapter does not go so far as claiming that the level of urbanisation
and spread of urban consumer cultures is the only or even the most important causal variable in
engendering retail change in Western Europe. In the following, we also touch on other generic
variables like political interference, institutional and economic embedding, cultural change
and rising standards of living, among others. However, focusing on the history of shopping as
being essentially part of an emerging urban lifestyle, does have the advantage of simultaneously
describing change and assigning meaning to more than 1,000 years of retail development.

Shopping and the rise of cities

Three persistent myths still haunt commonsensical interpretations of retailing in the past. The
first of these starts from the assumption that living standards before 1800 were basically stuck at
a persistent low level, making the material conditions for all but a wealthy few ‘no higher than
for our ancestors of the African savannah’ (Clark, 2007: 38). Following up, a second claim states
how pre-industrial consumers nurtured only basic subsistence needs and desires. Notwithstand-
ing evidence of markets, shops and commercial buildings in Ancient and Classical sites, the basic
mode of living of our rural predecessors in Western Europe is believed to have been one of pov-
erty, self-sufficiency and making do. Hence, and finally, retailing – if existent at all – was thought
to be traditional, meaning ill-developed, small and aimed at distributing necessities ( Jeffreys,
1954: 1, 5–6). In short, the reasoning goes that before the nineteenth century, people simply
provisioned themselves and bought goods in a “natural” manner, that is straight from produc-
ers. Only modernity and its ensuing “retail revolutions” nurtured shoppers: hedonistic pleasure
seekers with the means and mentality to consume an ever-growing material plenty provided by
an ever more extended sales machinery (Campbell, 1987: 77–96).

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The word “shopping” in this modern sense – with its social and cultural overtones of lei-
surely browsing, publicly and spatially interacting with people and seeing and being seen by an
urban crowd – only starts appearing in European dictionaries and lexicons from the middle of
the eighteenth century onwards (Cox and Dannehl, 2007: 145–147). Yet, the phenomenon to
which one commonly refers with the term was obviously of a much older date than is some-
times assumed. For Western Europe, shopping, and all its associated social and cultural meanings,
had come of age in the centuries following 1000 A.D. This happened first in northern and
central Italy and somewhat later in the cities and towns situated around important waterways
like the Themes, Loire, Seine, Scheldt, Meuse and Rheine in North-West Europe. These fertile
and well-connected lands were becoming, from an early date, the commercial and urbanised
heartland of Europe, clearly evolving differently from the more rugged and isolated terrains in
the north (parts of Scotland and most of Scandinavia) and the south of Europe (Spain and Por-
tugal).The eleventh-fourteenth centuries were crucial for the European “blue banana” (the early
urbanised regions stretching from Italy over the Alps towards the Rhineland, the Low Counties
and the south of England), since it saw the rise of a dynamic, hierarchical network of central
places: a system of small towns and rapidly expanding urban centres where markets, shops and
shopping became truly quintessential “hallmarks of urban life” (Carlin, 2007: 491).
The old-idea that the manorial system of early medieval Europe lacked any commercial
embedding and was essentially autarkic in nature, has long been abandoned. The sporadic
mention of local artisans – smiths, potters, thatchers – leads us to the conclusion that fewer
households and agrarian settlements were as self-sufficient and subsistence-oriented as once
thought (Devroey et al., 2013: 49). Yet it was mostly from the eleventh century onwards that
European settlements (as in England or the Low Countries) received market and fair rights,
commodity staples and commercial legislation, sometimes also city rights. This strengthened
government control and taxation of existing trades and, even more importantly, stimulated the
European market-oriented economy more generally (Britnell, 2009). In the bigger European
centres – scattered between the Loire and the Rhine, and in northern and central Italy – retail-
ing extended both in time and space, markets being organised at least twice a week in different
places in town and arranged by specialisation (fish, grain, vegetables, dairy products, meat, etc.)
(Stabel, 2001: 797–817). Evolutions like these were not only a reflection of population size,
which was always lower in the more remote and rural regions of Europe like Scandinavia or
inland France and Spain. They also attested to regional wealth accumulation in the wake of the
expanding European textile trades, growing and diversifying household demands for marketed
goods, and intense and longer trade connections that brought in luxuries from further away.
The largest cities, such as Paris, London, Ghent or Venice, distributed valuable and fashionable
comparison goods for which customers were willing to cross larger distances and for which
retailers needed a minimal high demand to supply them. An English Latin teacher, John of Gar-
land, walking along the streets, quays and bridges of early thirteenth-century Paris, for instance,
noticed shoe sellers, girdlers, saddlers, shield makers, buckle makers, soap sellers, knife peddlers,
hatters, glovers and all sorts of specialised food sellers; his list of professions goes on page after
page, listing in total over sixty different trades and multitudes of small-sale activities (Carlin,
2007: 509–517).
It would be wrong, however, to equate the nature and character of medieval consumption
and shopping with present-day practices and sensibilities. Most buying and selling still took place
outside, in broad daylight; and this was no different in the urbanised and more rural and isolated
pockets of Europe. Retailing in European medieval towns and cities was not only concentrated
around specialised open-air market squares (see the chapter of Guardia et al. in this volume),
but widespread along residential streets, at bridges or in any other highly frequented urban

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corridor between the centre and the gates that opened up to the food-producing countryside.
At mid thirteenth-century Winchester, in southeast England, retailers could use the entire net-
work of streets within the walls, including the cemetery of its cathedral during the markets and
fairs (Keene, 1985: 579–580). Sellers set up stock at fixed locations during market-days, often
just in front of people’s houses, and sale-places were organised around different food categories
and artisanal specialisations. Similar developments in other cities and towns indicate that provi-
sional market stalls on the street began to take on a semi-permanent character and sometimes
had moved inside. A city like thirteenth-century Antwerp in the Low Countries – at the time a
middle-sized town of around 10,000 inhabitants – had solid market facilities in civic buildings
for almost every important sale-category: bread, meat, butter and cloth (Van Damme and Van
Aert, 2014). Food houses or halls – and the Paris example is probably the most famous one –
offered retailers opportunities to stock up, customers shelter for bad-weather and protected the
wares from the sun and rain. Other functions could also be combined: in the rooms above the
Broodhuyse (Breadhouse), the Antwerp urban government took up its first permanent residence,
symbolically presiding over trade in the most important food category of the medieval menu.
In the meantime, shops also started to materialise in the best trade-connected European
cities and towns, often for specific, imported product categories that were not sold on the
market (fine cloth and fashion accessories, groceries, wine) or linked to the workshops of
jewellers, silversmiths, tailors and the like, catering for wealthy urban classes. Most durable
and valuable goods, including the widespread resale of used, second-hand belongings – an
important way for stocking-up households – were distributed out of shops. By the thirteenth
century, even the smallest European towns were dotted with shops of retailers and craftsmen
selling on a year-round basis, although it would again be wrong to compare these spaces with
their modern counterparts (Keene, 2006: 131). Shops were tiny and resembled in many ways
the fixed booths on market places or market halls, and customers were not supposed to enter,
the shop often being too cramped and stuffed with merchandise anyway. Sale transactions
normally took place through an open window facing the street, with external shutters, that
could be closed and locked up at night, functioning both as stall board for displaying wares
and as canopy above.
Differences with present-day shopping, however, reach deeper than architectural and spatial
aspects. Everyday buying and selling in medieval towns and cities in Western Europe took place

Figure 22.1 Market scene with sale of fowl, taking place on the Meir of sixteenth-century Antwerp,
Belgium.
(Courtesy of Museum Plantin-Moretus | Prentenkabinet, Antwerpen)

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along the lines of a flexible and adaptive set of rules, regulations and morals that owed much to
the European-wide spread of Christian beliefs and ideals. In larger towns and cities, rules and
regulations reflected, firstly, the emerging guild ordering of production, trade and commodity-
sales during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially in countries like Italy, France,
Germany and the Low Countries. It fragmented the retail landscape in a multidimensional
structure of trades and professions of a formally recognised or informal kind, each with their
own specialisations and privileged access to and control of the market (or precisely a lack of
it). However, many of these guild codes also pointed towards deeper and much older conven-
tions and ethics: norms, ideologies and agreements about the nature and character of market
exchange and consumption. The moral order of the European medieval market economy –
enshrined in canonical and statutory laws – was replete with Christian dogma and beliefs about
fairness, justness, honesty and trust.Within this shopping ontology, commerce and consumption
had to be reconciled with a moral mode of virtuous behaviour that, in principle at least, steered
the individual actions of both buyers and sellers (Stabel, 2007: 53–69; and the chapter by Dyer
this volume).
For good moral conduct, open-air market trading was taken as the quintessential ideal of
honesty and transparency, both in town and country. In his Livre des métiers from around 1270,
the Paris official Etienne Boileau described how goods that were sold on the market could be
compared, inspected and weighed against each other, thus leading to a ‘fair and just price for
both the rich and the poor’ (cited in Braudel, 1979: 15). Moreover, urban markets were always
closely controlled by urban officials and guildsmen supervising the use of weights, measures and
money being used during the exchange. Tellingly, the openness of dealings also extended to the
customer, who could be publicly sanctioned as well if his shopping behaviour flaunted social
norms and codes. It is no coincidence that central market places were also used for public trials
and punishments throughout Western Europe by both the Church and secular authorities. The
kind of semi-public shops that were common in medieval towns also stood open to inspection
by guildsmen and customers; not to be trusted – although frequently part of commercial deal-
ings – were inns, taverns and other more private, domestic spaces. Trade here was often associ-
ated with forestalling, artificial price arrangements, hoarding and shady affairs – accusations
which extended well into the early modern period.
Despite its strikingly different social and cultural embedding compared with today, shopping
and consumption had become firmly part of the urbanised landscape of Western Europe by
about 1350, especially in the regions from central Italy to the Midlands of England. Both profit-
seeking conduct of retailers and individualised material desires centred around an expanding
world of goods, and were mediated and discussed in the growing urban centres. All of this took
place amidst a world that remained predominantly characterised by its Christian beliefs and
noble ranks and by a fragile but all-important and dominant agrarian economy. Nowhere better
could such curious concord be observed than at fairs. As a “high mass” of commerce, entertain-
ment and material plenty, these events often coincided with religious festivities (like Ascension
Day or Pentecost) and usually followed the rhythms of the dominant agrarian cycles – at the end
of the summer, after harvesting and at the end of spring, when the wool of sheep was brought
to town. During fair times peddlers and international traders flocked to town and brought in
small luxuries and exotic goods not readily available for the rest of the year. Moments like these
also attracted noblemen and their extended court retinues. Rather than having their servants
do the day-to-day shopping, the elites went to see the available goods in person as part of an
enjoyable stroll through town, and they did so in groups: to see and to be seen (Keene, 2006:
138–142). Most famous are the many descriptions of La Sensa, the fair associated with the feast
day of the Ascension in Venice. In 1493, Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Bari and married to the

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important Sforza family of Milan, reported in a letter home how she had enjoyed the dazzling
sights of plenty:

shops of spices and silks and other merchandise, all in good order and in great quality
and quantity of the most diverse goods . . . we saw everything piece by piece, which
was a great pleasure, for there was an infinite quantity of most beautiful jewels . . . and
found such a magnificent show of beautiful glass, that we were fairly bewildered and
were obliged to remain for a long time.
(Welch, 2006: 47)

Significantly, while the duchess looked, touched and sighed over the exquisite merchandise, she
did not buy or bargain: she was there performing a social ritual of viewing and being viewed by
urban Venetian society. Goods could always be paid for and delivered later at her palace.
When compared to the rest of Europe – even the more urbanised and economically well-
developed places – Venice played in a league of its own in the fifteenth century. However, the
behaviour of Beatrice does have broader significance since it points to important social and
cultural changes that had begun influencing the conduct of Italian and other Western-European
urban elites from the end of the Middle Ages. As will become clear in what follows, shopping
and market-oriented consumption became increasingly linked to the social and cultural habitus
of emerging renaissance cities and early modern towns.

The pleasures of shopping

The late Middle Ages were not only a time of warfare, hunger and pestilence on the European
Continent; in many ways, it was also a gilded age of wealth concentration, blossoming arts and
luxury industries, and one of changing mores and morales around shopping and consumption
(Blondé and Ryckbosch, 2015: 105–124). Described as the first age of fashion, this period saw a
growing concern about increasing materialistic lifestyles in European cities (Welch, 2005). Sig-
nifying these paradoxes and tensions, countries like Italy, France, England and Germany issued
sumptuary laws – as early as 1157 in the case of Genoa. These grew in frequency throughout
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but gradually petered out afterwards. Such a legisla-
tive offensive indicated rising urban wealth and a willingness of more citizens to spend their
money on conspicuous expensive and eye-catching goods and designs – the traditional symbolic
domain of the feudal elites (Howell, 2010: 208–260). However, if the Church and the State were
alarmed by the flagrant flaunting of material identifiers of social standing, their justifications for
doing so were simultaneously eroded and out-of-date. The moral dogmas and ideologies of the
medieval Church were now re-interpreted and complemented – if not challenged – by compet-
ing humanistic discourses on the proper handling of luxury goods and worldly desires. In the
opinion of the Venetian renaissance writer Giovanni Fabrini, writing in 1547, avarice was con-
demnable, but so was prodigality, the ‘excessive spending, without order, without method, with-
out measure’ (cited in Guerzoni, 1999: 336). Consumption, comparison shopping and worldly
display had to become a pleasurable and aesthetic pursuit, a cosmopolitan and elitist, civilised
pastime which demanded both restraint and indulgence, study and refinement and above all
taste. Being recognised as a la mode – something which was done in the open and judged by a
knowing and inquisitive urban crowd – became de rigeur in renaissance and early modern cities
and towns. These evolutions lifted the important advisory function of retailers and commercial
middlemen in finding the right piece of attire or fashionable set of furnishings.

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Retailing and commerce in general was rescued from its odium that had inspired age-old
negative perceptions about profit-making and the widespread use of credit, practices that took
centre stage in everyday contacts between buyers and sellers (Howell, 2010: 261–297). City
governments of fifteenth-century Bruges, sixteenth-century Antwerp and seventeenth-century
Amsterdam simply linked their urban policies and futures to the interests of the merchant com-
munity at large. In astrological prognostications circulating in sixteenth-century Antwerp, for
instance, it was clearly stated how peaceful and good trading concurred with heavenly align-
ments that promised social peace and prosperity. Such an outspoken ideology of commerce
(Kint, 2000: 213–222) eventually gave way to a proper elevation of the commercial classes into
ruling urban bodies, a practice which was also widespread along the coasts of North-Western
Europe and the Baltic area, with the rise of the Hanseatic League, uniting cities like Lübeck,
Hamburg, Bergen, London, etc. It was in places like these that commerce and lifestyles built
around consumption and shopping were forcefully engraved in the material, institutional and
socio-cultural fabric of cities.
The net effect of all this was a booming retail sector which, in the wake of an expand-
ing and globalising international trade in the sixteenth century, grew and diversified as never
before. Newly market squares, impressive market halls and purpose-built commercial ­buildings –
exchanges with ground and upper floors fitted for shopping premises and specialised arcaded
salerooms or courtyards for luxury trades – appeared in growing Renaissance cities from Seville
to Augsburg and from Copenhagen to Florence. Although figures are difficult to come by,
fragmentary evidence for this period indicates how the total number and relative importance
of shopkeepers in urban societies was also on the rise, and this for both expanding and declin-
ing economies in Western Europe (Blondé and Van Damme, 2010, 2015). Overall, however, the
physical environment and shopping experiences found in cities began to diverge. At the top of
the shopping hierarchy sat the important European court and capital cities and the international
and financial trading hubs. The much humbler provincial towns and rural market centres in
the north of England, parts of France, Germany and for most of the Iberian and Scandinavian
peninsula, only started to cast off their medieval veil from the middle of the eighteenth century
onwards or even later. In the meantime, London had evolved into a shopping world of its own,
while Paris took over from smaller fashion producers in Italy and the Low Countries from the
late seventeenth century onwards as Europeans’ ultimate fashion and luxury house.
An intensification of both retailing and shopping in the renaissance and early modern times,
grew from the basic infrastructure and institutions that had already taken shape in the centuries
before. Markets that were once situated at the outskirts of the medieval town had now taken
on a central position and fixed location within an expanding urban area. The busy retail activ-
ity taking place in the centrally located main streets – with peddlers also circulating through
market areas and adjacent streets – remained the rapidly pumping heart of cities and towns until
well into the nineteenth-century (see Mitchell’s chapter in this volume). When population
growth continued, new market squares became integral to renaissance and baroque plans of
urban extension and Italian inspired renevatio and improvement (Calabi, 2004: 40–91). These
new markets functioned mainly as central provisioning places for foodstuffs on a neighbour-
hood level; other types of commercial exchange and shopping had moved indoors in shops,
halls, shopping galleries and arcaded salerooms. Shops and market-trade did not grow at the
detriment of each other in the early modern period, but fulfilled complementary functions and
catered for additional needs and desires. Previously, certain regulations in Italy and the Low
Countries had existed about shops being ordered to close their doors during market-days and
fairs, but such prescriptions were less common and adhered to as early modern era progressed.

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Close connections between markets and shops could be observed in early modern retail
geographies, with the busy market centre being perceived as a prime location for shopkeepers
to intercept potential customers. As Jacques Savary (1675, vl.1: 247–248) indicated in his widely
read treatise on Le Parfait Négociant, a good location was crucial for a retailer to prosper. He
cleverly observed for seventeenth-century Paris how the growth of cities created recognisable
locational patterns and spatial clusters following retail specialisations. This meant that modern
notions of the general accessibility of the city centre were already understood and recognised by
early modern retailers of durable, upmarket products and luxury goods. Similarly, seventeenth-
century retailers also acknowledged the special accessibility of, for instance, crossroads, bridges
and prestige buildings, and the arterial accessibility of major thoroughfares and access routes
leading to and from the centre (Lesger, 2011). Meanwhile, retailers of daily necessities like bread
and groceries had dispersed evenly over town, catering regularly from corner shops to the adja-
cent streets and neighbourhoods. Workshops and ateliers of producing guildsmen, for which
contacts with passers-by were less essential, had moved to cheaper and less visible side- and
back-streets. Socially differentiated zones and main shopping streets had also taken shape in and
around the medieval centre of Paris, with the opulence and splendour of the Rue Saint Honoré
in the wealthy northwest contrasting starkly with shops in the less affluent south-eastern quar-
ters of the city (Coquery, 2014).
Variety in shopping locations also corresponded with differences in the outlook, form and
interiors of early modern shops which had much in common with their medieval predecessors:
in Seville, as in other towns in Europe, they were narrow and with low ceilings, but sometimes
had a mezzanine or second room above (Calabi, 2004: 104). However, as early modern times
progressed, shops became recognisable sites of display, seduction and exchange, especially again
in the more populated, wealthier and noble court-connected cities and capitals of Europe (Sto-
bart et al., 2007; Walsh, 2014). Shops signs signalled their presence to passers-by, the shop nor-
mally being on the ground floor facing the street, with the retailer often living above and behind
their commercial premise. These types of fixed shop differed in design and display of goods,
which normally corresponded to conventions in the various branches of the retail industry,
and to social pressures to keep up appearances with the broader area. Thus, a grocer’s shop was
different from a magazin à la mode, while a baker in a wealthy neighbourhood had to conform
to other norms and rules to one in a poorer street. In general, shops had grown bigger, with a
growing tendency to service clients within the shop rather than through the window. Window
display, decorations and fashioning of the interior space were the subject of growing attention.
Particularly in bigger cities like Paris and London, early eighteenth-century commentators like
Daniel Defoe and Louis-Sébastian Mercier ridiculed the wasteful frivolousness of shopkeepers
who invested in glazed windows, opulent furniture, gilded cornices, mirrors, chandeliers and
glass-fronted cases simply to make ‘a show to invite customers’ (cited in Blondé and Van Damme,
2007: 336). In smaller provincial towns and in the countryside, shops had a more functional
outlook with a counter dominating its interior and various cupboards, containers and shelves
displaying the merchandise.
For a modern onlooker, most early modern shops probably looked spartan, dull and unat-
tractive, but such interpretation misses the social and cultural context of what shopping was
all about in this period. Whether taking place at a market, in a hall, on the street or in a shop,
an extended and vivid intercourse between buyer and seller always took centre stage and was
mainly aimed at negotiating such abstract notions as trust, probity, order and reputation (Van
Damme, 2015). Goods had to be unwrapped or unpacked; explanations given about their prov-
enance, quality and quantity; prices had to be negotiated, and in many cases credit arrangements
agreed. For overcoming crucial information asymmetries relating to both creditworthiness and

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a heterogeneous and opaque product market, building up at least some personal bonds between
buyer and seller was of key importance. Such social ties – which at least had the potential of
being vested on mutual, long-term beneficial grounds – helped to mediate consumer com-
plaints in the case of fraud, product defects or complaints, and assured the retailer that out-
standing bills would be periodically paid. It can even be argued that direct contacts between
consumers and their trustworthy providers became more important as material choice widened
via a proliferation of fashions and new goods during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Within a socially intricate and increasingly fashionable Western European urban context, the
retailer could become the much-needed guide, steering the customer away from the perils of
bad taste and social failure.
As the eighteenth century drew to its close, shopping had become a publicly accepted and
celebrated leisure pursuit of a polite and worldly elite living within an urban framework (Berry,
2002; Stobart, 2008: 92–96). Undoubtedly, well-to-do households still employed servants to
do their daily provisioning and called upon trustworthy craftsmen, tailors and upholsterers to
refashion their eighteenth-century bodies and abodes at home. Advice literature of the time,
however, also makes clear that performing out-of-doors shopping was increasingly considered
an acquired skill of good household management (Walsh, 2008). In travel guides as well, upper
tier readers were invited to delight in pleasurable window shopping and polite browsing. In a
time when Enlightenment authors like Mandeville were declaring private vices to have pub-
lic benefits, growing numbers of European citizens – both man and women – threw off any
remaining religious and moral fetters for an unapologetically materialistic pursuit of happiness
through shopping and leisure in the urban public space.
Urban governments all over Europe responded to these widening sensibilities by stimulat-
ing urban renewal and redesign for leisure consumption: new pavements, street lighting, cleaner
streets, and sports facilities, promenades, operas, theatres, coffeehouses and adjacent shop-
ping streets were laid out in towns across Europe, from Bath in England to Naples in Italy to
Norrköping in Sweden (Borsay and Furnée, 2016). Thus, eighteenth-century urban lifestyles
centred around consumption and shopping not only altered urban space in Western Europe
and more rural Scandinavia, but also changed the very notion of time as well: leisure and non-
working hours were “consumed” by strolling in shopping streets and visiting recreational places
for theatre, music, reading, drinking, walking and sports. The urban flaneur needed only to speed
up his pace to become that much talked about persona of the nineteenth-century city (Blondé
and Van Damme, 2013: 253).
Not everywhere in Europe were these changes as visible and as pronounced. Norwich in
England or Besançon in France had not changed much during the eighteenth-century, and both
looked around 1800 very much like the centuries before (Furnée and Lesger, 2014: 5). But over-
all, small cities everywhere boosted a greater number and variety of shops with a wider range of
goods on offer. A growing segment of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century population
in Leuven, a small university town in what soon would become Belgium, engaged in shopkeep-
ing. Tellingly, this growth included craftsmen who had switched from manufacturing to resale
and food sellers (such as butchers) who had abandoned collective forms of sale via markets and
halls for retailing through individual shopping premises (De Wilde, 2015: 105). In the country-
side as well, village shops started popping up more frequently (Van den Heuvel and Ogilvie,
2013). Annual fairs had lost much of their commercial appeal for both rural and urban dwell-
ers or had transformed into more entertaining affairs aimed at showing and selling livestock
or drinking and eating local staples. But the demographic boom in the European countryside
after c.1750 triggered urban shopkeepers to extend their business of selling coffee, tea and other
imported small luxuries to their rural surroundings on a quasi-permanent basis.Whereas before,

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many urban based hawkers and petty chapmen had supplied rural consumer needs and desires,
fixed village shops – nothing new in themselves – started multiplying in number and enlarging
their stock at the same time as agricultural enclosures, rural modernisation and proto-industrial
activities were transforming the European countryside. The material wants and desires of rural
households thus became part of a widening and in origin urban consumer culture and “habitus”
(De Vries, 2008). With commercialisation spreading everywhere and a countryside prepped to
become an appendage to a once restricted and urban consumerism, a new age of mass provi-
sioning and recreational shopping was duly in the making.

Shopping for the masses

As cities spilled over in the countryside due to industrialisation and suburbanisation, and mod-
ern transport and communication networks drew rural and urban worlds together, age-old
retail provisioning systems had to respond to growing product supply and consumer demand
(Benson and Shaw, 1992; Alexander and Akehurst, 1998). This urge to innovate and change
business practices and retail management in the nineteenth-century was felt most acutely in the
European food trades. Initially, with food being essential to the growing labouring poor and
aspiring middle classes, boomtowns and expanding cities reacted similarly to previous rounds of
European population pressure in the past. New (covered) markets and impressive glass-and-steel
market halls were erected from Barcelona in the south of Europe to Odense in the north as a
clear expression of civic pride and changing shopping sensibilities (Mitchell, 2014: 153–170;
Fava et al., 2016; Toftgaard, 2016, and the chapter by Guardia et al. in this volume). Although,
in the vision of nineteenth-century urban reforms, public markets needed to comply to new
rules regarding sanitation and social order, their continuous functioning and even proliferation
at the neighbourhood level attested to their success and efficiency in selling fresh foods to the
urban masses.
Soon, however, the organised and regulated tradition of open-air and covered market trading
had to be supplemented more intensely by decentralised and more “liberal” ways of selling food.
“Old-school” urban peddlers, streets-sellers and other peripatetic retailers – the much maligned
“pushcart evil” – were only part of the solution, and not a very respectable one at that. Some-
how, peddlers never succeed in fencing off their medieval odium of being untrustworthy and
a nuisance. With growing nationalist anxieties about vagabondage and migration in the nine-
teenth century, their continuous existence in the modernising Western European consumption
landscape was eventually doomed. Instead, with the abolishment of guilds and their restrictions
at the end of the eighteenth-century, food selling could be taken up more freely through indi-
vidual and fixed butcher’s shops, bakeries, grocers, fish-shops and so on. Food shops – and shops
in general – multiplied, diversified and dispersed throughout growing nineteenth-century cities
and suburbs. In Antwerp in 1838, for instance, there were fewer bakeries active than around
1567, at the height of the city’s expansion in the early modern period. However, when popula-
tion started rising again in the second half of the nineteenth-century in the wake of resurgent
port activity and incipient industrialisation, the number of bakeries tripled in less than twenty
years.
More fundamentally, food shops and grocers could become organised under the umbrella of
retail chains and co-operatives from c.1870s onwards. These were new forms of retail organisa-
tion and management that tried to offer a large-scale solution to a large-scale problem, namely
catering standardised and sometimes branded foodstuffs and groceries (including newly “indus-
trialised” wares, like meat extracts, margarine, conserves and canned food) in a recognisable and
trustworthy shopping environment. In Belgium, for instance, a family of local grocers became

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one of the pioneers of the European multiple food retailing by founding Delhaize Frères &
Cie ‘Le Lion’ (Van den Eeckhout and Scholliers, 2011). Their principle was simple: multiplying
their grocery stores in each city and town by using recognisable architecture, well-trained staff
and an easy to spot logo of a lion. Local branches were supplied by the new steam boats and
trains from a central depot, which allowed for economies of scale, and eventually cheaper prices
for customers. In other countries as well, the combination of aggressively advertising quality at
lower prices proved successful for many a long-lived retail chain like Sainsbury’s, Maypole Dair-
ies and Lipton’s.
As with retail chains, co-operatives bought in large quantities or started to produce their
own food themselves (like bread) to secure, first and foremost, standardisation, trustworthiness
and quality at a time of rapidly changing and industrialising product markets (see the chapter
of Hilson et al, this volume). As one of the first co-operative societies in England, the Rochdale
Society of Equitable Pioneers, put it: they existed ‘to secure un-adulterated food, goods of pure
quality and guaranteed weight, at the regular trade prices’ (cited in Stobart, 2008: 134). The
secondary objective of co-operatives – and in this they clearly differed from the more commer-
cially-oriented retail chains – was to improve the material conditions of the struggling working
classes. Customers had to become members of the co-operative and any commercial profits
were directed to programmes of social and moral improvement. Co-operatives thus became
entangled in social politics and were powerful instruments in the hands of late nineteenth-
century dominant political ideologies (Chatriot et al., 2004).
Increasing mass standardisation, advertising and branding of commodities, controlling the
quality and prices of goods: all had a huge impact on the role of small shopkeepers. Whereas
the eighteenth century had seen the rise to pre-eminence of shops in almost all branches of the
retail industry, this shopping growth had taken place with only modest productivity gains (De
Vries, 2008: 170). Households in the city and in the countryside made use of shops not because
they reduced transaction costs – buying at shops was normally more expensive than goods
offered at markets, at household auctions or from peddlers – but because they provided essential
information and assistance to consumers adrift amidst a rapidly globalising and changing world
of goods. In the nineteenth century, however, the crucial and long-running advisory function
of small shopkeepers started to change, as did their social position and standing. The training,

Figure 22.2 Exterior of the multiple retailer Le Lion Delhaize Frères & Cie, Huidevettersstraat 49 Ant-
werp, Belgium, c.1905
(Courtesy of the Archives Delhaize Group, Brussels)

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 Ilja Van Damme

Figure 22.3 Interior of Le Lion Delhaize Frères & Cie, Huidevettersstraat 49 Antwerp, Belgium, c.1905
(Courtesy of the Archives Delhaize Group, Brussels)

knowledge and skills of keeping shop declined, since standardised, homogenised and institution-
ally protected and guaranteed product brands began to carry goods into the minds and homes of
the customer, especially from the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards (Van Damme,
2015: 100). If they wanted to survive in this competitive, post-guild-organised, nineteenth-
century retail business, individual shopkeepers needed to attract attention and become much
more efficient in doing business.
The result of these evolutions was most clearly noticeable in the rise of bigger shops that
attached growing attention to style and service. Bigger glazed windows – a technique that
became more manageable and affordable after 1840 – opulent interiors and well-behaved, well-
dressed and well-spoken shop assistants made a great show to attract wealthy customers. In such
premises, prices could be fixed, ticketed and advertised because customers were expected to pay
upfront in cash. Although these practices were not unfamiliar in the eighteenth century, shop-
keeping in the nineteenth century increasingly relied on cash sales to reduce prices and rapidly
turnover stock; because the risk of outstanding credit debts was reduced, the shopkeeper aimed
for smaller percentage returns, but higher turnover. Shipping in new goods, trends and fashions
each year – and in bigger cities like London and Paris even each season – became the norm.
Shopkeepers also began to use the newspaper advertisements more regularly and persuasively
than before, calling attention to their address and existence and the alluring, new and wide
variety of stock they had for sale (Stobart et al., 2007: 171–188; Lyna and Van Damme, 2009).
Enterprising and ambitious shopkeepers sought out new, fashionable locations of urban
improvement, such as around the new market halls or within the new covered arcades and
galleries that first appeared in capital cities like Paris and London at the end of the eighteenth
century, and became the rage from Prague to Berlin and from The Hague to Madrid in the last

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quarter of the nineteenth century. Along the main street or newly built boulevards and shop-
ping streets of Brussels and Berlin, nineteenth-century shops jockeyed for more space and for
the most lavish and eye-catching étalages (Spiekermann, 2000).
Around these improved shopping streets one could find the first department stores in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, including Au Bon Marché, La Samaritaine, Harrods, Swan
and Edgar (see Elvins’s chapter in this volume). Far from being revolutionary, department stores
grew organically out of fashionable and large textile shops or bazaars, although they changed
the game completely by being bigger, more lavishly decorated and architecturally astonishing
and innovating, introducing, for instance, escalators and elevators at the turn of the century
(Crossick and Jaumain, 1999: 1–45). The world of the department store was aimed at bringing
in many branches of business within huge and impressive premises. Its intention was to impress
its mainly middle and upper-class visitors with a dazzling “dream world” of goods and fashions:
a high-charged commercial, yet luxurious atmosphere that was heavily commented upon for
inciting frenzy and fatigues with the feeble-hearted, usually stereotyped as women. In reality, the
“shopping machines” as described by Emile Zola, H.G. Wells and other Victorian commenta-
tors, were top-heavy, costly and not infrequently suffered from bankruptcies.The most successful
and long-lived of their kind soon realised that cutting costs and aiming at a less wealthy clientele
was the way forward. Especially from the beginning of the twentieth century, department stores
started offering goods in more diverse price ranges to attract mass audiences, a trend which
continued and crystallised further in the economically precarious Interbellum with the rise of
discount retail chains, penny bazaars and dime stores.
The most significant change, however, had again taken place in the minds and behaviour
of the shoppers themselves. With gradually improving living standards and rising wages from
c.1870 onwards – the precise date varying from country to country – the old, elitist leisure pur-
suit of shopping was transformed into an altogether more democratic, recreational pastime for
the masses.The character and meaning of shopping as urban habitus was once more transformed
in the course of the nineteenth century, with its dated stress on respectability and politeness giv-
ing away to an altogether more brash commercialism and unapologetically materialism.This was
the world that Karl Marx famously despised in Das Kapital for being obsessed with “commodity
fetishism”: a society fixated with the aesthetic and pleasurable characteristics of goods and alien-
ated from moral and socio-ecological considerations like labour-relations, ecological costs, etc.
In the rising Fordist mode of production at the start of the twentieth century, spending wages
on a rapidly expanding material output became in a sense more ethical as saving for hard times.
Deficit spending, institutionalised in society by the growing popularity of instalment credit and
in the Interbellum by Keynesian welfare policies, became the new dogma of Western societies.
In retrospect, much of the late nineteenth century and Interbellum attitude to the pleas-
ures of spending and shopping was crucial in transforming the European retail landscape into
one of quintessentially mass consumption. The Cold War climate after WWII was not likely to
alter such materialistic mentality ( Jessen and Langer, 2012; Trentmann, 2016: 272–354). In a
propagandistic display of capitalistic superiority, money needed to roll when people were going
out and rising incomes needed to be spend on an ever-expanding consumer output. During
the economic growth spurt of the 1950s and 1960s, this newly acquired affluence in Western
European countries was not to be questioned; rather, it should be wholeheartedly endorsed
and promoted by the nascent welfare states. The coming of this age of mass consumerism was
symbolised on the retail scene by the arrival of American-style big-box supermarkets (Lescent-
Giles, 2005: 188–211).These were architecturally uninspiring buildings, both outside and inside;
their real miracle was the way in which they stocked, apparently effortlessly, an ever-growing
plethora of products in a maze-like ordering of abundance. Within supermarkets customers

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learned not to ask questions and not to be served, but to embrace the freedom of self-choosing,
self-assessing and self-servicing their preferred product brands in individualised shopping trol-
lies. The age-old contact with the retailer was normally only to be reserved for cashing-out, but
even that moment of interaction began to be replaced from the 1970s onwards by systems of
electronic, and eventually computerised checking-out and self-payment. By pioneering auto-
mation and information technologies, successfully managing increasingly global and complex
logistic-chains, and collecting a mass of data on consumer behaviour, supermarkets could stock
their shelves in spectacularly cost-efficient ways that initiated further price declines. As a result,
powerful retail consortia and supermarket chains like Tesco in the UK, Carrefour in France and
Ahold in the Netherlands started dominating the overall distribution system, squeezing out or
absorbing smaller retailers and neighbourhood grocers in cities and suburbs alike. In 2000, for
instance, more than 70% of all food sales in Germany, Austria and Belgium were handled by up
to five big supermarket companies (Lescent-Giles, 2005: 207).
Supermarkets, in combination with an increased personal mobility born of growing car
ownership, changed post-WWII shopping in other ways. Physically and geographically speak-
ing, supermarkets created a world in which shopping and dwelling became separated from each
other, with supermarkets – and later the even bigger hypermarkets and shopping centres and
shopping villages – increasingly being erected in no-man’s-land at the outskirts or even outside
cities and towns; only reachable by motorised transport. Retail sprawl was accelerated in the
1960s and 1970s by suburban consumer demand, concomitant growth ambitions of investors
to build bigger and bigger retail spaces, and local politicians wanting to boost employment
in their municipalities. The arrival of all sorts of retail parks, constructed alongside high-tech
hubs of production, and conveniently situated near highway and motor exists, provided late
twentieth-century buyers with an unrivalled abundance of car park space and opportunities for
single-purpose shopping trips. Whereas before, provisioning had been part of an almost daily
work-schedule, families now economised on shopping trips by overloading their cars and newly
arrived household fridges and freezers with all that supermarkets could offer.Thus, retail decen-
tralisation in Western Europe pushed consumers in ever larger herds to peripheral, off-centre
located mega-stores, which also started selling furniture, electronics, hardware and so on.
The effects of these centripetal evolutions on the old inner-city cores of Western Europe were
varied and depended largely on the preventive actions taken by national governments (Davies,
1995; Guy, 1998: 953–979). In Belgium and France, for instance, socio-economic restrictions
to protect urban and suburban small-scale retailing proved eventually ineffective against retail
sprawl. Germany, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent the UK adopted stricter urban planning
policies to uphold much more successfully the historically grown shopping centrality of Euro-
pean cities and towns and the protection of open green spaces. In general, shopping in European
cities and towns has suffered from retail decentralisation in the last fifty years, but not to such an
extent that the historically grown liveability of cities and towns was as seriously threatened or
hollowed-out as in the United States.
Within cities and towns, things were also changing. Large-scale destruction in WWII – as
in Rotterdam or Dresden – gave modernist planners and retail developers ample scope for
rebuilding the city centre in accordance with their aesthetics, ideals and principles. Even with-
out wartime damage, retail modernisation and modern urban rebuilding became a rallying call
in the 1950s and 1960s, from Sweden to England to Switzerland. Uniform and often all too
clinical inner-city shopping malls and high streets were the result of this. In form and function
this postwar rebuilding, ironically enough, transposed off-centre retail formats to the centre, but
without the car convenience and ample retail space that an out-of-town location could provide.
From the 1980s and 1990s onwards the deteriorating, but always picturesque historic core itself

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Figure 22.4 Front cover of the Grand Bazar supermarket annual report 1957–1958, Antwerp, 1958. The
skyscraper and car complement post-WWII shopping.
(Courtesy of Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, Antwerpen)

was increasingly thought to have tourist value for visitors and shoppers.With urban heritage and
rejuvenation becoming linked to economic policies attracting fresh investments and tourists and
gentrified newcomers, luxurious and pedestrian friendly shopping precincts, leisure and cultural
quarters were created. These consisted typically of a variety of shops, restaurants and cafés, with

391
 Ilja Van Damme

a mix of cultural and recreational amenities brought in. Shopping in the centre of Amsterdam,
Barcelona or Milan had to equal a sort of recreational and experience-rich environment that
no dull retail park or out-of-town shopping centre could hope to imitate. However, upscaling
of historical city centres also had its downsides: with real estate prices skyrocketing all over
Europe, small corner shops and residential functions gradually disappeared from the historic core
altogether, which now increasingly concentrated the same exclusive and fashionable food and
shopping outlets of the same big, international branches and retail conglomerates (from Apple to
Zara). These evolutions again created a situation where shopping became detached from dwell-
ing, with the city centre transforming into one giant, clean and video surveillanced consumer
theme-park (Miles, 2010: 142–163).
Due to this growing spatial polarisation of the European retail landscape between a shop-
ping centre and shopping periphery, all the residential neighbourhoods in between – and even
smaller towns and villages – saw a decline in even the most basic retail functions. In certain less
wealthy urban districts, empty shop-space was taken over by a very active, but also quite specific
form of ethnic and migrant entrepreneurship (for example halal butchers, Turkish bakeries,
Polish delis, oriental furniture stores) who equally began to claim their right to the European
cities and towns from the 1970s onwards. But aging, middle-class consumers saw their habitual
tobacconist, butcher or greengrocer succumb to the combined pressures of centralisation and
peripheralisation of shopping.
For these older people – living in villages, small towns or retail-depleted urban neighbour-
hoods – it is still unclear if the new computer and Internet-driven modes of shopping will
improve their personal access to goods. Internet shopping can in a sense be seen as a warped
offspring of mail-order shopping that has been institutionalised in Europe since at least the end
of the nineteenth-century. However, post or mail-order shopping never enjoyed the same sort
of popularity that buying through the Internet now enjoys, especially with younger generations
of European. Internet sales on websites like Amazon or eBay are growing at such a pace that the
very existence of the physical act of going shopping is now openly being questioned. Research,
however, indicates that the use of the Internet is often complementary and additional to the
actual performance of going to shops and streets, markets and malls (Stobart, 2008: 232–235). In
hindsight of more as 1,000 years of entanglement between places and shopping, such conclusion
probably comes as no big surprise.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued how shopping, understood as meaningful public and spatial activ-
ity, flowered in medieval times as a direct result of fervent urbanisation and rapid economic
development in the so-called “blue banana” of Europe. In Italy, France, the Low Countries and
England, new market and shopping space was created to provision a growing, dense and socially
diverse urban population. More fundamentally, shopping connected daily and weekly routines
of commercial exchange and consumption to the social and cultural life of cities. Shopping, so
to speak, became part and parcel of an urban habitus: a market-oriented lifestyle which became
common and was increasingly also tolerated and refined within an urban milieu. Whereas the
classic feudal forces of church and nobility were initially hesitant to embrace, such evolutions in
what was still very much an agrarian world – and even tried to stop the tide by way of moral
creed and sumptuary legislation – the new urban elites eventually appropriated and justified
shopping as a civilised, renaissance pastime.
Within an expanding and globalising commercial economy, retail, shopping and consumption
formed the structural backbone of many European towns and cities in the early modern period.

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 Western Europe (including Scandinavia)

This was most evident in the court and capital cities which formed part of the much older, densely
urbanised and economically areas of Europe. Thus, a clear urban hierarchy became recognisable
with Atlantic ports and European court and capital cities having the most extended and multidi-
mensional shopping infrastructure and consumption-based economy in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. From the eighteenth century onwards, increasing commercialisation of leisure
time and leisure space, and growing and diversifying consumer demand in general, also changed
smaller towns and even rural settlements.Village shops popped up everywhere and urban fashions
became something to be acquainted with, whether living in a capital city or in the provinces.
Modern times again brought significant changes in the sense that shopping was transformed
into an altogether more democratic and mass-oriented pursuit. The basic retail infrastructure
showed strong continuities with the early modern period in both location and practices, but
became increasingly geared towards cost- and time-efficiency. Economies of scale became
important to respond to growing, standardised supply and increasing consumer demand. The
social and cultural paradoxes that have arisen after WWII are related to the fact that, within the
mass affluence of societies today, more people in Europe can consume more goods than ever
before with increasing ease and convenience. Never before, however, has the alienation from
the wider social and ecological consequences of shopping and market-oriented consumption
been so great. Whereas throughout history, direct, physical contacts between buyers and sellers
dominated shopping practices, the role of the retailer has gradually diminished and is now on
the verge of entirely vanishing behind the pixels of an anonymous computer screen. Shopping
has also become largely spatially divorced from dwelling, with cities and regions being divided
in strict commercial and residential zones. Of course, many overlapping worlds continue to exist,
testified, for instance, by the periodic popularity of neighbourhood and farmers’ markets, and
the rise of a multitude of ethnic shops in increasingly diversified Western European neighbour-
hoods and suburbs. Often, however, such local markets and shops are provisioned by the same
dominant global commodity streams and powerful retail concerns that have a suffocating grip
on distribution. The current global distribution system has become enormously cheap, efficient
and convenient, but only the future can tell if what be seen as alienating retail and spatial organi-
sation will be tenable in a time of worldwide urban change and reordering.

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Welch, C. (2006), ‘The fairs of early modern Italy’, in B. Blondé, P. Stabel, J. Stobart and I.Van Damme (eds.)
Buyers and sellers: Retail circuits and practices in medieval and early modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols) 31–50.
Weltevreden, J., Atzema, O. and Frenken, K. (2005), ‘Evolution in city centre retailing: The case of Utrecht
(1974–2003)’, International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 33, pp. 824–841.

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 23
RETAILING IN RUSSIA AND
EASTERN EUROPE
Marjorie L. Hilton

Scholars of retailing and consumerism in non-Western countries likely have encountered the
skeptical question, “Did a consumer culture even exist there?” After all, the traditional narrative
of the emergence of a retail industry and culture that privileges the consumer supposes a nec-
essary historical link between capitalism and mass consumption, and presents the department
store as the foundation. This conventional view holds that any proto-, quasi- or non-capitalist
society cannot possibly qualify as a consumer society. Within this school of thought, the idea of
socialist consumerism is especially absurd, because citizens of the formerly communist Eastern
Europe are assumed to have consumed little indeed, besides the spectre of empty store shelves
and long queues for shoddy, unfashionable goods. But this narrow definition excludes the rich
history of buying, selling and consuming in socialist countries, and more recently historians of
the region have complicated our understanding of how societies of all kinds are shaped by these
seemingly prosaic activities. Every society engages in trade and all individuals consume and, as
they do, political structures and social relationships are established, norms and values constructed,
and group and individual identities formed. If we think of the retail sector as a cultural system,
not merely governed by ideology or economic laws, with the power to act as both agent and
medium of social organisation and cultural training, the study of retailing and shopping can
reveal the patterns of people’s everyday lives and the societies in which they lived, regardless of
ideological bent.
As more scholars have explored the history of retailing and consumption in Eastern Europe,
they have also challenged the dominant view of life in communist societies. For decades,
research was influenced by the totalitarian model, a top-down approach developed during the
early Cold War, which assumed that political rhetoric and state policies primarily defined social-
ism in practice. Reliance on the totalitarian model contributed to a perception of citizens as
subjected to the singular will of the communist party-state, unable to resist leaders’ determina-
tion to control their every move and thought. More current research has shown that, although
the communist state’s one-party system, censorship, and planned economy certainly imposed
constraints and hardships on citizens, the centralised management of retailing and consumption
was as significant to the survival of communism in Eastern Europe, as to its collapse (Reid, 2002;
Crowley and Reid, 2010; Stitziel, 2008). It has become clear that as citizen-consumers strug-
gled to cope with the material realities of daily life, they re-interpreted, appropriated or rejected
the state’s ideological claims and frequently circumvented laws or forced state officials to make

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concessions. Thus, state and society shaped each other. On one hand, the reinvention of the
retail economy provided communist officials a means of “selling socialism” to the masses, with
the goal of material progress, and fostering unity, especially in multi-ethnic countries (Hilton,
2012, p. 10; Patterson, 2011, p. xvii). On the other hand, promises of a higher standard of living
raised and later frustrated consumers’ expectations when the policies officials pursued failed to
deliver the goods (Chernyshova, 2013, pp. 202–203; Patterson, 2011, p. 17). Given these stakes,
any attempt to understand Eastern European communism would be incomplete without a con-
sideration of the social, political and cultural roles played by retailers and consumers.

Origins of the retail industry, 1750–1914

The development of the retail industry in Russia and Eastern Europe largely mirrored trends
that unfolded in Western Europe and North America, at least prior to World War I. Permanent
retail shops date to at least medieval times. For example, in cities and towns of the Russian
Empire, small open-ended shops called lavkas carried a limited inventory of similar kinds of
goods. Affluent urban residents could also order custom-made clothing, shoes, boots and hats
from artisans’ workshops. Outside of cities and towns, rural dwellers produced most of the
things they consumed, only travelling to markets for things they could not make or occasion-
ally purchasing novelty goods or small luxuries from travelling peddlers. In such rural settings,
a lavka operated like a general store, stocking a wide assortment of goods. Whether urban or
rural, shopkeepers usually displayed merchandise haphazardly, seldom devising elaborate displays
or advertising in newspapers. Instead they “called” to passers-by, pressing them to enter their
shops, and haggled with them over prices (Hilton, 2012, pp. 14–30; Ruane, 2009, pp. 115–138;
Patterson, 2011, pp. 49–51).
By the late eighteenth century, larger, well-appointed stores with more formal operating
procedures opened to sell stylish clothing, furs, toiletries, crystal, jewellery and specialty items to
the emerging prosperous classes. These Eastern European variants of the magasin appeared first
in Russia in the fashionable quarters of Moscow and St Petersburg, and initially were operated
by German, French and Jewish merchants. Later, leading Russian companies, including Perlov
tea merchants, Sorokoumovskii furriers and Abrikosov confectioners opened magasins along-
side their non-Russian colleagues. To be sure, Eastern Europe had fewer magasins than Western
Europe, due to the smaller number of urban residents and relatively smaller amount of business
investment; however, over time dozens of stylish boutiques and haberdashers lined the central
streets of Warsaw, Kiev, Odessa and other major cities (Ruane, 2009, p. 119; Hilton, 2012, p. 20).
As shopping districts emerged, some magasin owners clustered their stores under one roof,
forming arcades. The idea to house several shops within one structure was not an entirely novel
concept, though. In Ottoman South-Eastern Europe, bezistans, covered retail venues made of
stone with vaulted ceilings and domes, had been built in market squares since the mid-six-
teenth century (Sarajevo Museum, 2016). Russia’s “rows” existed centuries before the advent of
the arcade. St Petersburg’s Gostinyi dvor dated to 1785 and Moscow’s Upper Trading Rows on
Red Square had served as the city’s major commercial site since the reign of Ivan the Terrible
(Bogdanov, 1988; Hilton, 2012, p. 34; Razmadze, 1893). Over time, these forerunners of the
arcade transformed into the reinforced steel and glass structures admired throughout Europe in
the mid- to late nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, department stores arrived
in Eastern Europe’s major cities. Moscow’s Muir & Mirrielees began as a haberdashery and
grew into a department store by 1885 (Pitcher, 1994). In Germany, the Jewish Wertheim fam-
ily opened a haberdashery in 1875, later expanding the sales floor to make room for elabo-
rate merchandise displays and adopting policies of cash payment, fixed prices and exchange

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and return privileges. Several others, including Karstadt and Kaufhaus des Westens opened later
and did a thriving business (Ladwig-Winters, 2000, pp. 1–2). In 1894, two Czech businessmen
opened Kastner & Öhler, the first department store in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Kastner &
Öhler, 2016). Jabłkowski Brothers operated Poland’s largest department store in Warsaw and
later opened one in Vilno (Dom Towarawy Bracia Jabłkowscy, 2015). Many department stores
caused a sensation when they opened and some became urban landmarks, as famous for their
architecture and attractions as merchandise. Budapest’s Paris, for example, featured a rooftop
café, which was converted into a skating rink in the winter (Hungarian Architecture, 2016).
The rebuilding of Muir & Mirrielees in 1908, following a fire, as an elaborate three-story edifice
on Theatre Square reflected its pretension as the “The Leading Department Store in Russia”
(Hilton, 2012, p. 86).
As conspicuous symbols of a nascent urban mass culture that promoted leisure, material-
ism, individuality and social mobility, department stores provoked debate. Middle-class liberal
thinkers tended to extol the department store as a rational, efficient business model and argued
that department stores could educate customers in good taste, thereby elevating the popula-
tion’s aesthetic sensibilities and minimising the potential for poor purchasing decisions. Some,
including Paul Wöhre, author of a book on Wertheim, applauded the mixing of social classes
on sales floors, where “all were equal before the cash register” (Breckman, 1991, p. 490).
Mikhail Sobolev, a Russian political economist, made similar arguments (Sobolev, 1900). Con-
servative social commentators, who viewed the department store as a foreign import and a
threat to tradition, a stable social order and national identity, however, argued that department
stores drove small shopkeepers out of business and warned that the desire to emulate the lifestyle
of wealthy elites would financially and morally ruin the working class. In fact, despite the size
and high-profile of department stores, small retailers and specialty shops continued to account
for more than 80% of total retail sales well into the twentieth century (Ladwig-Winters, 2000,
p. 6). Social critics also worried about the department store’s effect on women, whom they
deemed most vulnerable to its perils and temptations (Breckman, 1991, pp. 495–496; Hilton,
2012, pp. 124–131; Felski, 1995). Anti-Semitism also manifested itself in these debates. Chris-
tian German merchants perceived in the department store an instrument of Jewish domination,
and they defamed Wertheim and others as “bazaars” and hazardous workplaces. The persistence
of such criticism eventually prompted Prussia and other German states in 1900 to impose a tax
on department stores whose annual sales exceeded 400,000 marks. Kaufhaeusers, whose owners
were mostly non-Jewish, were exempted, even though some had an even higher sales volume
(Ladwig-Winters, 2000, p. 3) In the Russian Empire, the charter of the Upper Rows Trading
Company forbade Jews to purchase shares in the company (Hilton, 2012, p. 55).
Despite concerns, Eastern Europe’s retail sectors developed customs, idioms and rituals that
gave rise to a distinctive culture of exchange. One of the most striking elements of Russia’s retail
culture was the blending of commerce, Orthodoxy and tsarism. Icons hung inside stores and on
the front of market stalls and booths. Orthodox merchants set their businesses by the Church
calendar, traditionally ending the retail year during Easter week and undertaking new business
ventures on auspicious religious dates. Even after the Upper Rows reopened and traditional
ways of buying and selling were disallowed, religion remained ensconced, in the form of four
large icons embedded over the arcade’s main entrances. Any milestone that a firm reached – the
beginning of construction of a new building or an anniversary – was celebrated with a formal
ceremonial blessing. Even non-Orthodox Christian merchants, for example, the French Catho-
lic owners of A. Ralle & Company and Protestant heirs of Muir & Mirrielees, staged ceremonial
blessings. Moreover, as time went on, the ritual became more elaborate and publicised in news-
papers, thus making the connection more visible. In addition, the retail trade was also deeply

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intertwined with the Russian state, and the public display of the affiliation was common. Some
merchants, including Smirnov & Sons, eagerly sought and won the title “Purveyor to the Court
of His Imperial Majesty”, an honor that essentially served as a royal endorsement and entitled a
firm to display the Romanov seal on storefronts and product packages and in ads. Rather than
subjugating national identity through Westernisation and secularisation, Russia’s leading retail
merchants immersed their firms in religion and politics, creating a uniquely Russian entity (Hil-
ton, 2012, pp. 87–91; West, 2011, pp. 63–71).

War, revolution, and the invention of socialist retailing, 1914–21

With the start of World War I in 1914, trade relationships and commercial networks were dis-
rupted. Russia’s “continuum of crisis” (Holquist, 2002, pp. 2–3), which began with the outbreak
of war, followed by two revolutions in 1917 and a civil war lasting until 1921, which wrecked
the economy and drastically altered retailing and patterns of consumption. As supplying and
equipping the army took priority in Russia, consumer goods of all kinds disappeared from
stores and, as war wore on, many retail businesses closed. Consumers adapted through panic
buying, speculation, queueing and the formation of co-operatives. When rumours of profi-
teering circulated and inflation spiralled, stores sometimes became sites of conflict, rioting and
looting (Alpern Engel, 1997). The tsarist state also engaged in extraordinary measures during
the war, confiscating and nationalising businesses owned by German and Austrian nationals,
deemed “enemy subjects”, and searching and closing stores owned by other foreigners such as
the American company Singer. Some expropriations were carried out with the help of crowds,
and sometimes they attacked stores with foreign-sounding names, including Kunst & Al’bers,
owned by two German-Russian subjects (Lohr, 2003, pp. 77–81).The state also targeted Jewish-
owned businesses, including an Odessa firm categorised as a “foreign Jewish firm” (Hilton, 2012,
p. 178). In all, more than 1,000 businesses, mostly small- and medium-sized commercial firms,
voluntarily closed, changed ownership or were forcibly liquidated (Lohr, 2003, p. 67).
Marxists had based the idea of a centralised, planned economy on an industrial base, giving
scant attention to retail distribution or consumption.Yet, since communism’s ultimate goal was
the redistribution of wealth and resources, the retailing of consumer goods could not remain
in private hands. The new communist government, which took power in October 1917, began
with the seizure of the buildings, merchandise and equipment of the largest private firms, includ-
ing retailers like Muir & Mirrielees. In November 1918, private trade was abolished and shortly
thereafter the Upper Trading Rows were closed. The takeover of prominent, successful retail
premises aimed to destroy the old power structure, and writers for the state newspaper depicted
these acts as the joyful overthrow of a bourgeois, feminine realm and installation of a collective
enterprise where working-class men engaged in the task of rebuilding the economy on behalf
of the previously disenfranchised (Hilton, 2012, pp. 84–85).
Civil war broke out in 1918, bringing more store closings and expropriations, as well as fam-
ine, extreme shortages, class-based rationing and widespread deprivation. The population also
declined, due to the emigration of many wealthy merchants and millions of deaths from war
and famine, and urban dwellers fled to the countryside. As a result, most retail businesses ceased
to exist, and norms of buying and selling were rendered obsolete. Consumers learned to obtain
scarce goods through unconventional or illegal means and to navigate or circumvent new, state-
imposed commercial regulations and protocols. Buying on the black market or from “bagmen”,
men or women who went to the countryside to procure goods and returned to the city to sell
them, became most people’s primary source for bread, food and manufactured goods, many
stolen from state inventories. Despite frequent raids and arrests, black-market trade persisted

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throughout the civil war. Citizens also relied on acquaintances with connections, sold their own
personal items, and queued in front of stores hours before they opened. Over time, these new
tactics became normalised and integral parts of a Soviet citizen’s daily life (Ball, 1987, pp. 33–34,
110–118; Hessler, 2004, pp. 49–50).
As the civil war wound down in early 1921, V.I. Lenin announced the Party’s New Economic
Policy (NEP), which sought to restore the economy by allowing limited private manufacturing
and retailing, alongside state-owned businesses, and permitting peasants to sell surplus produce
at markets. Later that year, state and municipal authorities organised state-run manufacturing
and retailing enterprises. Mossel’prom sold foodstuffs via an extensive and diverse network of
outlets, including stores, kiosks and mail-order, as well as through vending machines and street
vendors. At the same time, the state resumed its nationalisation campaign and began to reor-
ganise, rename, and operate the largest, most successful pre-revolutionary firms. And in Decem-
ber 1921, the Council of People’s Commissars established the State Department Store (GUM)
and located it in the arcade of the Upper Trading Rows. Mostorg, under local party authority,
opened a department store in the Muir & Mirrielees store. Similar processes were underway
in Ukraine, where the state-owned firm Larek opened shops in Kiev, Odessa and other cities.
Private individuals were initially reluctant to start businesses, but after further restrictions were
lifted in 1922, more private stores and restaurants opened, many run by former merchants or
shop assistants (Ball, 1987, pp. 20–24, 90–91; Hilton, 2012, pp. 198–199).
GUM, founded as a model retail enterprise, became the centrepiece of the communist state’s
plan to create a socialist retail economy and working-class culture of consumption. Presenting
itself as a universal provider with “Everything for Everybody”, GUM operated dozens of stores
of varying sizes, most located in cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg and their suburbs,
Saratov, and Ekaterinburg. Some stores opened in the provinces, though most were small and
poorly stocked. The flagship store on Red Square led the campaign to “retail the revolution”, in
other words, to carry out economic struggle against private enterprise, democratise consump-
tion and promote values, norms and behaviours compatible with a modern socialist society. In
essence, GUM was intended to achieve nothing less than economic, social and cultural transfor-
mation (Hilton, 2012, pp. 195–198, 209–211).
The concept of socialist retailing was fraught with ideological and practical complexities,
however. The communist goal of wealth redistribution implied bringing the comforts and
delights of the modern world to those previously denied them. Moreover, mass consumption
was increasingly viewed as an index of economic and socio-cultural progress. Because commu-
nism positioned itself as an alternative to capitalism, fulfilling consumers’ needs and wants was
essential, even though encouraging the accumulation of material possessions posed a threat to
the ultimate goal of equality.This tension between material progress and the ideal of social egali-
tarianism divided communists, and meant that policies towards retailing and consumption were
ambiguous and vacillated. Debates ensued over rational norms of consumption: what exactly did
humans need, and how should they consume in order to create an appropriately socialist life?
State commercial officials also considered how goods should be bought and sold (Hilton, 2012;
Merkel, 2008; Merkel, 2010; Bren and Neuburger, 2012; Crowley and Reid, 2010). Far from
merely imitating capitalist institutions or simply adding socialist slogans to a capitalist mix, they
reinvented retailing, developing new operating principles and procedures that operated accord-
ing to their own logic. New terms signified the changed conditions. “Workers of the counter”
no longer romanced “shoppers” with affable chitchat or drew them into haggling matches. Fixed
prices became the law, and workers “issued” goods to “consumers” or “satisfied” their requests.
A retail transaction was to be a professional, straightforward exchange, without any pretense of

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Figure 23.1  GUM department store in Russia. Citation. Recent photo of the former Upper Trading
Rows, Moscow. The arcade, initially built in the 1880s–90s, was nationalised after the 1917
revolution and renamed GUM (The State Department Store). It is no longer a state-run
enterprise and is now called The Main Department Store.
Source: www.pexels.com

superiority or grovelling. The three-queue system, which required customers to wait in three
separate lines in order to make a purchase, became standard protocol. Finally, the ceremonial
blessing and other religious observances, which had pervaded the pre-1917 retail sphere, disap-
peared from public life. The establishment of Lenin corners inside state stores may have taken
their place, though they do not seem to have been widely publicised. Together, changes in sales
terminology, procedure and devotional rituals highlighted the shift from a retail culture reliant
on personality, persuasion and private profit to one based on collective rights, codified proce-
dures intended to ensure equal treatment, and a mediating state (Hilton, 2012, pp. 228–240).
State retailing was not an easy sell, however. Although the state succeeded in reducing the
private sector’s share of total retail sales from 78% in 1922–23, to 42% in 1924–25, to 37% in
1926–27, the gain was achieved largely through coercive measures and discriminatory tax poli-
cies rather than the merits of its network of stores (Nove, 1992, p. 99; Ball, 1987, pp. 68–82).
State retailers often found themselves outmanoeuvred by more savvy, resourceful private traders
or their bottom lines undermined by inexperienced or corrupt officials and employees. Despite
images of GUM as a first-rate retailer with an extensive reach, retailing remained largely in
the hands of street venders and individuals who sold things from stalls, kiosks or tables (Ball,
1987, pp. 109–121; Hessler, 2004, p. 105). GUM and other state enterprises also suffered from
chronic underfunding, a situation that led to descriptions of many of its stores as dirty, “depress-
ing”, understocked and lacking the most popular goods, and its sales workers as inept, rude and

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dishonest. Not surprisingly then, even those customers served by GUM accused the firm of
failing to deliver on its promises. Complaints of rudeness, pricing irregularities, favouritism and
arbitrary, inefficient and bureaucratic procedures, as well as shortages, poor selection and shoddy
merchandise, were common (Hilton, 2012, p. 251, 260).
After Josef Stalin consolidated power in the late 1920s, a tax on “superprofits” drove most
remaining private companies out of business and GUM was closed (Ball, 1987, pp. 72–79;
Hessler, 2004, pp. 145–147). All private trade was not prohibited, however. The brutal col-
lectivisation drive and strict grain requisitions led to the breakdown of agriculture and famine.
To manage this crisis, the state imposed in 1931 a discriminatory system of rationing, which
assigned larger rations to educated specialists, state and party officials and workers in vital indus-
tries and denied ration cards to peasant producers, who made up 80% of the population. A two-
tiered distribution network further entrenched hierarchy and privilege. “Open” shops sold basic
goods to anyone with the currency to buy them, while “closed” stores and cafeterias served
individuals entitled to scarce and luxury goods. As a concession, in 1932, the state legalised
outdoor markets, renaming them “collective-farm markets” for the sale of peasant produce
and artisanal goods. These markets essentially replaced small private retail stores and shops and
they thrived in the following decades, as consumers spent from one-third to one-half of their
earnings there (Hessler, 2004, pp. 185–193; Hessler, 1998, pp. 521–522). Thus, despite the
ideological contradictions markets presented to the goal of a centralised, state-run, industrial-
ised economy, the production and retailing of agricultural and other consumer goods remained
primarily in the hands of small-scale operators. Likewise, unequal access remained a feature of
the retail economy, even though it undermined the ideal of equality and produced resentment.
At the same time, the state launched another campaign to establish “cultured trade”. Torg-
sin stores, originally founded in the late 1920s to serve foreigners, opened showcase stores in
Moscow and Leningrad that stocked the best Soviet-made products and imports. Soon, Torgsin
expanded to 1,500 locations across the USSR and began to sell ordinary foodstuffs like bread to
anyone with foreign currency, gold, diamonds, antiques or another valuable exchange medium.
Stores outside of the capitals were small, dirty and lacking any exemplary qualities, and devised
to drain citizens of personal assets, which the state needed to buy industrial equipment (Osokina,
1999; Hessler, 2004, pp. 200–201). New model department stores also appeared. Leningrad’s
Dom Kooperatsii and Moscow’s Central Department Store (TsUM), opened in 1933 in the best
pre-1917 buildings, the latter in the refurbished former Muir & Mirrielees. Later, smaller, less-
well stocked TsUM outlets opened in other cities, and plans were drawn up to open branches in
the non-Russian republics (Hessler, 2004, p. 202). Stores designated as flagships operated accord-
ing to a special set of rules. Instead of receiving all of its merchandise from central distribution,
Moscow’s TsUM, for example, had its own children’s clothing factory and fashion atelier, which
created custom-made dresses, tailored suits, hats, shoes and accessories in small quantities. Most
large department stores in cities, as well as factories and trusts, also operated in-house fashion
workshops and clothing factories (Gronow, 2003, pp. 87–97, 101–103).TsUM strived to offer its
clientele a cultured shopping experience. Sales employees were instructed to address shoppers
in courteous tones and to assist them with product information and fashion advice. Incentives
were awarded to employees who achieved heroic levels of sales, delivered high-quality customer
service or created innovative merchandise displays. Commercial officials also sought to upgrade
model stores and stay current with contemporary trends. In the 1930s, delegations travelled to
London and Berlin and to Macy’s in New York to observe store layout, merchandise displays
and customer service. Upon their return, TsUM official introduced home delivery and other
new customer services (Hessler, 2004, pp. 205–207). Gender played a role in this campaign

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for cultured trade. Women comprised more than half of sales workers in urban areas by 1939
because officials assumed they inherently possessed domestic skills and traits like kindness and
consideration that would advance cultured selling (Randall, 2008, pp. 74–81, 91–97).
These premier retailers conveyed the message that Soviet citizens could enjoy “common
luxuries”, though this exclusive world of goods was enabled by gross inequality, exploitation
and violence. The state privileged a new urban elite, showering them with higher salaries, extra
rations, furnished apartments, vacations at health spas, dachas and other material rewards, while
denying access and even food to the majority of the population. While TsUM’s atelier provided
elite urban customers with the latest fashions adapted from French and British magazines and
Gastronom and Bakaleia sold them champagne, chocolate truffles and ice cream, most Soviet
citizens shopped in small, poorly equipped stores that offered little selection and few services.
Things were worse in the countryside, where co-ops selling staple goods and tools were often
the only retail outlets. Peasants had to travel to towns and cities to buy other things. In the worst
years of the famine, when millions died of starvation and disease, many stores lacked bread, pota-
toes and vodka, though efforts to mass-produce cheap luxury goods proceeded apace. Even in
better years, workers spent most of their earnings on necessities, not items for leisure or pleasure,
except perhaps an occasional box of candies. For many peasants, even simple luxuries remained
out of reach (Gronow, 2003, pp. 25, 33, 100–103; Hessler, 2004, p. 209). Markets developed spon-
taneously to meet the majority of the population’s needs. Some, such as collective-farm markets,
had been sanctioned by the state. Others, like the black market, were not. Non-sanctioned out-
lets rectified some of the flaws of the centralised economy by supplying most consumers with
goods and, thus, were grudgingly tolerated by authorities, but they deprived the state of revenues
and resources (Hessler, 1998, pp. 521–522).
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, conservatives and nationalists were also
remaking the retail economy based on rhetoric and policies that advantaged some citizens, at
the expense of others. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, Jewish-
owned department stores were subjected to policies of Germanisation, which meant non-
Jewish ownership, non-Jewish employees and a Germanised name. The Party assigned Nazi
representatives to each department store to ensure that no Jews were employed and launched
a boycott campaign against department stores. The Ministry of Finance issued marriage loans,
in the form of purchase coupons, to German couples, stipulating that they could not be used
at Jewish-owned businesses or at any warenhaeuser, regardless of owner. Despite these measures,
except for the year 1933, Wertheim maintained its sales volume. In Berlin, sales even rose. The
transfer of Jewish-owned department stores to German hands began in 1934, when Georg and
Martin Tietz were forced to resign and sell their shares in Hermann Tietz Company, which was
renamed Hertie. Jewish shareholders were eventually forced to sell their shares at below-market
value, Jewish managers and employees dismissed, and party members took over management of
the firm. Wertheim and Karstadt, Germany’s largest retailer, underwent the same process (Lad-
wig-Winters, 2000). After Austria’s annexation in 1938, the owners of Kastner & Öhler were
similarly dispossessed, and their firm renamed Alpenlandkaufhaus (Kastner and Öhler, 2016).
In some other countries, the retail sector continued to expand and even thrive. In March 1939,
even as Germans began to occupy Czechoslovakia, White Swan, Prague’s only full-assortment
department store, opened. At the time, it was the largest glass-covered space in central Europe
and the only building in Prague with an interior escalator. The store offered many customer
amenities, including a public terrace and child care, as well as a terrace where employees could
spend their lunch break (Bílá labuť). Soon, this vitality would be interrupted, and the entire
region would undergo drastic and devastating change.

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War and postwar reconstruction, 1945–53

The German invasion and occupation wrought unprecedented and widespread devastation
throughout Eastern Europe. Trade relationships were disrupted and transportation and com-
mercial networks destroyed, ushering in extreme shortages and rationing. In Soviet territory,
especially Belarus, Ukraine, Russia and the Baltics, a “freewheeling” expansion of private trade
occurred. Throngs of private individuals sold goods obtained through various, often illegal
means, at markets and even inside state stores such as TsUM, where they competed with sales
workers for customers. In many places, citizens resorted to bartering or sold whatever they
could to purchase basic goods like milk. Most also engaged in “survivalist violations of the law”,
stealing petty amounts from the workplace or travelling to the countryside to buy food to resell
( Judt, 2005, pp. 15–17; Hessler, 1998, pp. 522–525; Hessler, 2004, pp. 280–286). By war’s end in
1945, the production of consumer goods in the USSR had shrunk to 59% of the prewar level
and 85% of retail stores in the occupied territories had been destroyed (Hessler, 1998, p. 527,
522). Many stores outside of the USSR had also been destroyed, including Berlin’s former
Wertheim and Hermann Tietz and Warsaw’s Jabłkowski Brothers. People throughout Eastern
Europe faced hunger, homelessness and a lack of heating, fuel and other basic necessities. As
inflation skyrocketed, many currencies had collapsed. Occupying regimes, seeking to avoid the
postwar deprivation and desperation that had led millions throughout the region to support
extremist politics in the 1930s, tried, above all, to control prices (Landsman, 2005, p. 16; Pence,
2008, p. 289).
When communist states were being established throughout the region in the late 1940s, their
new leaders understood that to win widespread support, they would have to end privation and
reconstruct societies. As the Stalinist model of economic transformation was either imposed or
adopted, communist leaders established central economic organs to carry out rapid industriali-
sation and convert privately owned businesses, farms, and resources into state-owned property.
Levels of development varied throughout the region, but, generally speaking, the impact was
dramatic. In Poland, for example, the number of private retailers fell from 131,218 in 1947 to
7,567 in 1955 (Crowley, 2000, p. 32).To adequately provision the population, in 1947, the Soviet
Military Administration in Germany’s Soviet zone introduced Soviet-style “closed distribution”,
which allowed workers in important industries and offices to buy rationed foods and other
consumer goods in company stores and cafeterias. The following June, officials in the German
western zones enacted currency reform and, seemingly overnight, all kinds of food products and
consumer goods appeared in previously empty shop windows. Even though wage freezes and
the reduction of people’s savings, due to currency reform, prevented most from buying much,
the image of prosperity and abundance set an upbeat tone. (Landsman, 2005, pp. 32, 38–39) To
counter the West’s currency reform and provide a more effective means of distribution, in Octo-
ber 1948, the German Economic Commission in East Germany formed Handelsorganisation
(HO), a state-run commercial enterprise modelled on the USSR’s model ventures and devised
to help establish socialism. HO stores initially sold non-rationed goods like coffee, tea, chocolate,
liqueurs, lingerie, cameras and radios. Rationed goods, for example, meat, eggs, butter, milk and
cheese, continued to be sold at private stores and co-ops. Prices on HO merchandise were set
just below black market prices to discourage consumers from buying goods through unofficial
channels and to prevent privateers from buying and reselling HO merchandise. According to this
strategy, private retailing would eventually be eliminated and centralised state retailing would
triumph (Pence, 1999, pp. 498, 501; Landsman, 2005, pp. 57–58).
Publicised images of “socialist consumption”, intended to signal the move from austerity,
accompanied the opening of the first HO in East Berlin in 1948. According to a newspaper

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report, police were called to control the crowd of thousands impatiently waiting for the doors
to open, and once inside shoppers, grateful for the state’s protection from black marketeers,
snapped up shoes, sweaters, stockings, socks and other goods, despite high prices (Pence, 1999,
pp. 497–500). This idealised story, which neglected to mention the store’s disorganisation and
lack of bright lighting, suggests that officials were aware of the West’s “shop-window politics”
and eager to make a good impression. In reality, most workers could not afford to buy many
things, though some expressed support for HO’s campaign against the black market and con-
fidence that profits would fund reconstruction and life would gradually improve. Others com-
plained that prices were too high, while some doubted that HO would be able to combat the
black market (Pence, 1999, pp. 499–500). By the end of its first year, HO seemed poised to
deliver on its promises. The chain had overfulfilled its sales plan and increased the number of
its retail stores, restaurants, cafes and hotels to 343. By March 1951, that number grew to 2,294
(Landsman, 2005, p. 69). However, HO did not receive the level of funding needed to satisfy
consumer demands and turn stores into showcases of consumption. When Soviet Deputy Pre-
mier Anastas Mikoyan visited the flagship HO in the early 1950s, he praised the selection of fine
watches, typewriters, and stockings, but observed that the store, with its small, dark sales floors
and unfriendly atmosphere, lacked a world-class character (Landsman, 2005, pp. 123–124).
Reconstruction and economic restructuring were also underway in Poland, where, in 1949,
urban planners unveiled a plan to rebuild downtown Warsaw. Architects had designed a multi-
purpose complex of apartment buildings, offices and retail stores to signal the arrival of a mod-
ern collective lifestyle. Stores and shops, to be located on the ground floors of the new buildings,
featured marble and other costly materials, comfortable furniture where customers could relax
while workers attended to them and candelabra in the jewellery shops. By the time the complex
was partially completed in 1952, other state-run stores were opening, including Pedet (short
for Universal Department Store) and Delikatesy, which sold imported coffee, sweets, Soviet
champagne and other delicacies. Jabłkowski Brothers, refurbished and reopened as a state store
in 1951, sold children’s clothing and toys (Crowley, 2000, pp. 34–37; Dom Towarawy Bracia
Jabłkowscy, 2015).
Eastern Europe’s central planned economies managed reconstruction and large-scale eco-
nomic development fairly well in this period, although coercion and force were used to expro-
priate property. Yugoslavia, which by 1948 was communist, but not part of the Soviet Bloc, as
well as Bulgaria and Romania, experienced among the highest rates of growth in the region.
Poland and Hungary rapidly expanded their industrial sectors, while in Czechoslovakia the pre-
existing industrial economy developed further, urbanisation increased, and an educated middle
class emerged. Party leaders in the Soviet Union sought to normalise the economy and daily
life by eliminating the rationing system, increasing production of consumer goods, and reducing
workplace distribution points by building more state stores. As these efforts to create centralised
state-owned retail sectors proceeded throughout the region, many consumers continued to buy
staple foods and other essential goods from market venders and individuals operating illegally
( Judt, 2005, p. 170; Hessler, 2004, p. 304; Hessler, 1998, p. 533).

Building a modern socialist consumer society, 1953–1979

After a series of crises in the early 1950s, several communist states began to seriously address
consumer issues. In East Germany (German Democratic Republic or GDR), anger over long
lines and criticisms of the government’s prioritisation of industrial production precipitated a bar-
rage of complaints and even a few acts of violence against salespeople (Landsman, 2005, p. 105).
In early 1953, the Council of Ministers formed the State Commission for Trade and Supply to

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hear from average shoppers about their concerns and represent their needs to economic officials.
At the same time, the state established the right of consumers to present their complaints to
officials and to receive a response. Over the ensuing years, women, aware of the gap between
the state’s claim of female emancipation and the daily realities of wage discrimination and shop-
ping, wrote the majority of complaint letters. Expressing frustration over high prices and the
lack of good quality, fashionable clothing in a range of popular sizes, they demanded respect for
the rights of consumers. Rural women voiced other complaints, among them the lack of stores
in the countryside and the privileged access of industrial workers (Pence, 2008, pp. 296–297;
Stitziel, 2008, pp. 265–271). Despite these efforts, demonstrations erupted in June, when 300,000
citizens, angry about shortages and HO’s high prices demanded the dissolution of the GDR.
Suppressed by Soviet forces, the protests nonetheless made clear that consumer issues could not
be neglected. That fall, chastened policymakers introduced the New Course, which reduced
prices on thousands of items, meat and milk, as well as clothing and bicycles; however, when
consumption of butter, sugar and other basic goods rebounded a few years later, they shifted
resources back to heavy industry (Pence, 2008, pp. 306–307).
Delivering a higher standard of living became even more important to the legitimacy of
communist governments after a wave of revolts broke out following Joseph Stalin’s death in
March 1953, and again after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s
crimes. After the rebellions were suppressed, Party leaders once again tried to stabilise their gov-
ernments with consumer-friendly policies, and they relaxed travel restrictions that promoted
cultural exchange between Eastern Europe and the West. The Soviet government signalled the
start of a new era with the renovation and re-opening of Moscow’s GUM on December 24,
1953. GUM was less a department store and more a collection of shops and counters selling
everything from men’s and women’s clothing, accessories, fabrics, cosmetics and jewellery to
carpets, bicycles, stationery and school supplies. Still, the retailer became the USSR’s premier
retailer, as evidenced by its Section 100, a clothing store housed on the top floor that was only
open to the party elite (GUM). In Hungary, where a major revolt erupted in 1956, Party leader
János Kádár launched reforms, popularly known as “goulash communism”, devised to “buy
back” the support, or at least compliance, of the population through, among other things, a
promise to deliver the latest appliances and electronics – vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing
machines and televisions. Moreover, Hungary’s commercial officials encouraged manufacturers
to respond to consumers’ wants and needs, rather than simply fulfilling the state’s centralised
plan, and to market their brands in order to spur competition and win customers’ loyalty (Dom-
bos and Pellandini-Simanyi, 2012, pp. 325–326; Greene, 2014, pp. 113–114, 119–120; Pat-
terson, 2012, pp. 122–123). Yugoslavia, arguably, created the most affluent, consumer-oriented
society in Eastern Europe. Tito, Yugoslavia’s leader, had broken with Stalin as early as 1948
and thereafter opened the country to the West, even as private stores were nationalised and the
Communist Party retained a monopoly on politics. In the 1950s, central economic planning
was limited to the establishment of long-term goals and some market mechanisms were intro-
duced (Patterson, 2011, pp. 3–4, 123; Luthar, 2006, p. 235).
Improving the quality of life was also key to Khrushchev’s avowed intention to fight the
Cold War on a new cultural front. Khrushchev and other leaders had, in fact, begun to make
good on this promise. Millions of prefabricated apartment buildings were built, providing tens
of millions of families their own private dwellings and generating demand for home furnishings
and appliances. Moscow’s GUM opened a fashion atelier that turned out tens of thousands of
custom-made items a year, as well as in-store fashion salons that offered personal assistance to
shoppers and shops that specialised in silk, women’s hats, fur coats and perfumes. Fashion atel-
iers also opened in major cities of the Soviet republics, numbering almost twenty by the late

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1960s. Despite their prodigious output, however, ateliers and workshops did not produce nearly
enough items to meet consumers’ growing demand (Bartlett, 2010, p. 139; Gronow and Zhurav-
lev, 2010, pp. 127–129). The construction of high-end stores that represented socialist progress
and a contemporary, prosperous lifestyle were particularly important in the GDR, Hungary and
Czechoslovakia, where downtown commercial districts had previously thrived and suppressed
rebellions left citizens angry and resentful. They were critical in Berlin, where proximity to the
West forced East German officials to try to match the consumerist policies of West Germany.
After West Berlin’s Kurfürstendam shopping avenue dubbed itself the “shop window of the
West”, Khrushchev pledged to make East Germany a “showcase” of socialist splendour (Lands-
man, 2005, p. 12; Patterson, 2012, p. 120). Prague’s House of Fashion opened in 1956 to retail
small collections of high-fashion clothing, imported from abroad or produced by special work-
shops, in a modernist setting of glass walls, Sputnik-style chandeliers and minimalist furniture,
and in 1959, Sibylle – Berlin’s first boutique – was hailed as a “ladies’ paradise”. (Bartlett, 2010,
p. 145, 147, photo, p. 148). These gestures were not enough to stop the tens of thousands of East
Germans who were fleeing to the West each year, or reduce cravings for Western food, cloth-
ing and music on sale in West Berlin, however. In response, in August 1961, communist leaders
closed the border between East and West Berlin.
In the mid-1960s, increased imports and new economic theories stressing profit as an indica-
tor of socialist efficiency renewed an emphasis on consumption (Salmon, 2006, p. 191). In this
atmosphere, the number of department stores and luxury retailers grew rapidly. The HO was
reinvented as two new chains of luxury stores. Exquisit sold high-fashion clothing made exclu-
sively for the chain from imported fabrics and retailed them via hundreds of boutiques named
Yvonne, Jeannette, Chic or Madeleine to invoke Parisian chic. Delikat retailed fine foods at high
prices. These stores’ elegant interiors, discreet window displays, and attentive sales personnel
provided exclusive shopping experiences for elites whose motivation and loyalty the govern-
ment prized. Over the years “Ex” and “Posh Nosh”, as they were known became popular among
average workers, who ventured there to buy something special on occasion (Landsman, 2005,
p. 213; Merkel, 2010, pp. 64–65, 67; Bartlett, 2010, p. 147, 150).
Some countries expanded and diversified their retail economies more fully than others, and
certain cities such as Budapest, with its many boutiques, shops and department stores, earned a
reputation as a shopper’s paradise (Patterson, 2012, p. 123). Budapest’s Skála attracted more than
50,000 customers a day, on average, in its first days. The chain, which operated more than sixty
stores across the country and became a favourite of consumers looking for trendy apparel, styled
itself “One step ahead of fashion – in Skála” (Patterson, 2012, pp. 127–128). The Luxus depart-
ment store, opened in 1963 in Budapest’s prestigious Vörösmarty, specialised in high-priced,
elegant clothing, including fur coats (Dombos and Pellandini-Simanyi, 2012, p. 325; Bartlett,
2010, p. 147). Fehérvár Department Store presented shopping as an exciting venture, with the
claim that “Something is always happening in the Fehérvár Department Store!” (Patterson, 2012,
p. 128). Állami Áruház, Corvin, and Rainbow guaranteed convenience, with the promise that
consumers would find the largest selection and could buy everything in one place (Patterson,
2012, pp. 123, 129). Hungary’s retailers, like those elsewhere, trained sales workers to be courte-
ous and attentive, but they were also encouraged to compete with other stores, even those within
the same chain. As the head of the Domestic Trade Ministry advised, ‘A resourceful, enterpris-
ing seller takes every opportunity to make the buyer or perspective buyer feel that this store is
different than the others, that buying in this store is somehow more favorable’ (Greene, 2014,
p. 120). Czechoslovakia,Yugoslavia and even Poland also established relatively upscale or diversi-
fied retail sectors and attracted shopping tourism (Kotva, 2016; Bartlett, 2010, p. 185; Patterson,
2012, pp. 125, 131; Crowley, 2000, pp. 41–42; Gorsuch, 2006, p. 218). As retail merchants in the

407
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West, created new kinds of retail venues, Eastern European retailers sent delegations abroad to
investigate and often adopted them too. Warsaw’s Supersam, a self-service supermarket opened
in 1959, featured a stylish curved canopy over the entrance and illuminated sales floor (Crowley,
2000, p. 42). The expansion of self-service retailing in the GDR was slow at first, but by late
1961, there were nearly 13,000 such stores (Landsman, 2005, p. 188).When more citizens began
to own cars, the NAMA chain opened an 8,700 square foot store in Zagreb’s suburbs with
parking lots, and expanded to sixteen locations, including smaller cities (Patterson, 2012, p. 125).
More consumer services also became available. In the USSR, Houses of Everyday Living offered
hairdressing and other salon services, as well as a laundry service and custom-clothing atelier
(Gronow and Zhuravlev, 2010, p. 130; Chernyshova, 2013, p. 38). Study groups were also sent to
the West to observe consumer service providers. One East German group travelled to Sweden to
investigate dry cleaners, shoe repair shops and other services (Landsman, 2005, p. 196).
Budding consumerism concerned some within the socialist elite, whose lifestyle debates
questioned whether fulfilling individualist consumer desires was, after all, one of socialism’s
goals. (Dombos and Pellandini-Simanyi, 329–35). Nevertheless, attempts to satisfy ever-chang-
ing consumer demands continued in the late-1960s to mid-1970s, when the Communist Party’s
rhetoric about improving living standards turned into a “consumer boom”, that brought an
unprecedented standard of living to several Eastern European countries (Chernyshova, 2013,
p. 3). New home construction expanded, while rising wages and artificially low prices allowed
most consumers to furnish their new dwellings and equip them with televisions and appliances
(Chernyshova, 2013, p. 176). More people could also afford to buy some fashionable clothing
and enjoy champagne on special occasions, while those with “pull” could acquire televisions,
cars and refrigerators. Indeed, many urban dwellers began to regard the achievement of a better
lifestyle a “right”, and they expected the state to keep prices on basic goods low so that they
could afford to buy “common” luxuries. Leaders, who had learned that shortages and even small
price increases could provoke demonstrations and riots, enacted policies that enabled consum-
ers to fulfil more of their desires. In the GDR, the Soviet Union, Poland and elsewhere, leaders
increased imports, price subsidies, wage increases and spending on social services, financing
it all primarily through Western creditors (Landsman, 2005, pp. 214–216; Chernyshova, 2013,
pp. 2–3, 32; Mazurek, 2012, p. 299). At the same time, these policies raised expectations and
made social status and hierarchies even more visible and more clearly defined by access to and
ownership of status goods. Fur coats and hats, for example, were on prominent display at GUM
and TsUM and became common items of desire among Soviet consumers, with different kinds
of furs a marker of status (Tikhomirova, 2010, pp. 295–297; Chernyshova, 2013, pp. 104–105).
More exclusive specialty shops and boutiques also appeared and sold mini-skirts, paisley fabrics,
platform shoes and jeans to young consumers (Chernyshova, 2013, pp. 154–155). As a result of
these developments, many consumers became more discriminating and more often refused to
buy furniture, clothing and electronics that did not suit their tastes. This tendency was encour-
aged by the black market, which expanded and began to deal mostly in high-quality foreign
goods. More members of the urban middle classes were also permitted to travel abroad, often
for business, and many returned home to sell items they had bought abroad. Over time, as the
number of individuals involved in unofficial sales increased, the state suffered enormous financial
losses (Bartlett, 2010, p. 239; Chernyshova, 2013, pp. 30, 101, 192).
Despite the steady, incremental progress made in raising the standard of living, chronic short-
ages continued, largely because manufacturers had little incentive to produce the “little things”
of daily life or to prioritise consumer goods. The clothing sold in elite shops and boutiques
rarely were mass produced because factory directors preferred to meet their production quotas
by producing standardised goods, instead of upgrading equipment to produce clothing and

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other items that changed according to fashion trends (Chernyshova, 2013, pp. 147–152; Lands-
man, 2005, p. 195). Even model retailers like GUM and CENTRUM repeatedly reported short-
ages of all kinds of desirable goods and, although the 400 Exquisit shops that had opened in the
GDR by the 1980s netted a significant income for the state, they never satisfied demand (Bart-
lett, 2010, p. 239; Patterson, 2012, p. 126). To obtain the clothing they wanted, many consumers
hired dressmakers and tailors to make clothing shown in magazines, or sewed for themselves at
home (Stitziel, 2008, pp. 256–265). Those living outside of cities travelled to urban or regional
centres to shop, and more people throughout the region flocked to Hungary,Yugoslavia, Poland
and the GDR, as well as the West. Yugoslavs, who had the right to travel abroad freely, made
monthly or seasonal shopping tours to Italy, Austria and Greece (Luthar, 2006, p. 230). Residents
of less prosperous countries engaged in other kinds of cross-border trade. Women in Romanian
villages went to Hungary to sell things, either stolen from the state or bought through connec-
tions, at prices lower than average in Hungary, and to buy coffee and other products that, by the
late 1970s, had vanished from Romania’s stores (Chelcea, 2002, p. 23). As the number of people
making such trips grew, so did the number of people who became aware of the West’s higher
standard of living.
Changes in the global economy created even greater problems. When global recession hit,
Western creditors cut off credit to Eastern European states. To make up the deficit, communist
states began to export more goods, resulting in mass shortages. By the late 1970s and 1980s, con-
sumers, who had become accustomed to expect access to an ever-greater variety of shopping
experiences and goods, increasingly encountered empty store shelves. They managed as before,
by impulse and panic buying, hoarding, carrying around an avoska (“just in case” bag), gaining
access to hard-to-get items via connections or relatives living abroad and selling things to and
buying from friends and colleagues (Crowley and Reid, 2010, p. 10).

The 1980s: consumerism and the collapse of

communism in Eastern Europe
Decades of promises of material abundance had raised and then frustrated consumers’ expecta-
tions, and by the early 1980s, disillusionment and dissatisfaction set in, undermining collective
values and the legitimacy of communist governments. The life experiences and conservatism of
most top communist officials played a significant role. Wedded to Marxism, they prioritised the
needs of the working class, even as they strove to satisfy middle-class material desires, and failed
to introduce fundamental economic reforms or invest in new industries, as was occurring in the
West. Each country faced a different set of obstacles and challenges. Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascen-
sion to power in the USSR in 1985 and his introduction of perestroika may seem a necessary
corrective, but economic reforms undermined the “social contract” that had been premised on
the state’s promise to provide, without offering a new one (Cook, 1992; Bren and Neuburger,
2012, pp. 12–13). In the GDR, shortages reappeared at roughly the same time as travel restric-
tions were eased and West Germany opened its Intershops to East Germans, who once again
faced the disparity in retail offerings and living standards (Landsman, 2005, pp. 216–218). The
Polish state’s rationing of meat, shoes and cigarettes contributed to the frustrations that inspired
the formation in 1980 of Solidarity, a Polish trade union independent of the state and even-
tual mass political opposition movement (Mazurek, 2012, p. 299). Even Yugoslavia’s relatively
prosperous, consumerist lifestyle began to unravel after Tito’s death in 1980 (Patterson, 2011,
pp. 20, 42–43). Citizens throughout the region coped by joining any queue, with the intent to
buy whatever was for sale and trade it for something else. In many places, people took a second
job or second shift to cope with inflated prices (Bren and Neuburger, 2012, p. 13; Crowley and

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Reid, 2010, p. 16; Mazurek, 2012, p. 299). The situation became most dire in Romania. Nicolae
Ceauşescu’s nationalist rhetoric and austerity measures, including his policy of paying off foreign
loans through increased exports, led to strict rationing of meat, sugar, cheese and milk, as well as
electricity and gasoline, and the disappearance of the trappings of a modern society, for example,
refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and operational elevators. In this desperate situation, Romanians
became even more dependent on personal connections and the black market, where American
whiskey, jeans and cigarettes served as currency (Massino, 2012, p. 228; Chelcea, 2002, p. 22).
1989 brought the collapse of communism and end of the experiment in socialist modernity.
Retailing did not play a direct role in these monumental events, but retailers played no small
part in exposing the gap between the promise of a modern socialist society and the inequities
and material realities of the majority of people’s lives. Founded to symbolise socialist modernity,
model stores like HO and GUM turned out to be mere facades for the state’s reinstitution of
inequality and hierarchy (Hilton, 2012, p. 284; Pence, 1999, p. 514). Thus, it can be argued that
communist regimes failed to ‘provide a politically stable solution to the problem of consumer
desire’ (Zatlin, 1997, p. 380).

Conclusion
Over the previous centuries, the retail trade played a significant role in shaping Eastern European
politics, society and culture. Despite ideological shifts, ways of buying, selling and consuming
were used to establish power structures and enact socio-economic transformation, and they were
understood to signify social and gender norms, cultural practices, and the meaning of “modern”.
In the years since 1989, the retail industry has helped to define the post-communist era.The for-
mer flagship GUM, now a private enterprise that retains the acronym, but calls itself The Main
Department Store, has become a high-fashion shopping mall, populated by luxury brands such
as Hermés, Louis Vuitton, Manolo Blahnik and Tiffany & Co.The firm’s website vaunts its herit-
age and, in recounting the arcade’s nearly 125-year history, refers to this “monument of archi-
tecture” as an “integral part of Russia’s history” and “symbol of Moscow” (GUM, 2016). TsUM
has also restyled itself as an upscale retailer of brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo
and Valentino (TsUM). Around Moscow, the Ritz-Carlton sits on the former site of the state-
run Intourist Hotel. Jaguar dealerships, Prada boutiques and other luxury retailers line the main
boulevards. Yet, the material world of communism has not been forgotten. Nostalgia for and
curiosity about a bygone era and way of life have even proved saleable. GUM shoppers can take
a break at a Soviet-style café or cafeteria, while tourists in Krakow can sample Polish snacks, beer
and vodka in a communist-era restaurant, tour the city in a vintage Trabant and visit an apart-
ment preserved from the 1970s (Crazy Guides, 2017). Every city seemingly has dozens of stores
selling communist-themed souvenirs and T-shirts. Yugo-Nostalgia celebrates Iskra electronics
and appliances, Ledo and Pekabela ice cream treats, Hambi fast-food restaurants and Konzum/
Unikonzum, Zagreb’s first self-service grocery stores (Patterson, 2011, pp. 323, 326). Clearly, the
retail industry expresses more about a society than its current ideological or political system.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to the editors and to Kala Dunn and Christine Varga-
Harris for their suggestions.

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 24
RETAILING IN AUSTRALIA AND
NEW ZEALAND
Historical perspectives through the distinctive
lens of innovation

Dale Miller

Introduction
At its heart, retailing is about exchange. However, the contexts and consequences of exchange
vary from country to country, region to region and era to era.This chapter explores some unique
aspects of Australian and New Zealand retailing during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
with a particular focus on changes over time. Consistent with Hollander et al. (2005), rather than
a timeline of significant events, the chapter proceeds by discussing innovations and distinctive
forms, particularly department stores, and the shift from the corner store to supermarkets and
superstores. Retailing in Australia and New Zealand has been remarkable for changes over time,
responding to global trends and local needs and introducing innovations large and small, which
are sometimes idiosyncratic responses to the specific retailing context in the region.
The 1800s saw the emergence of retailing in the nascent settlement including in Sydney
(e.g. Pollon, 1989). The scope of this chapter is confined to retailing per se, with less attention
to the broader distribution channel which covers wholesalers, suppliers and shopping centres,
where for example,Westfield, which originated in Australia, is a major global player in the shop-
ping centre/mall domain (Westfield, c. 2000). Moreover, retailing developed in Australia both in
parallel with, and in contrast to, developments in other countries (compare with, for example:
Hower, 1943; Kimbrough, 1952; Miller, 1981; Nasmith, 1923; Nesbitt, 1993; Nystrom, 1915;
Pound, 1960; Resseguie, 1962, 1965; Rees, 1969; Santink, 1990; Siry, 1988).
By drawing on multiple sources, the distinctive features of retailing in Australia and New Zea-
land can be explored. It is noteworthy at the outset, that although relatively geographically and
culturally close, the two countries also display some particular differences. The sources include
a range of academic works, archival materials, celebratory tomes and newspaper accounts and
advertising. There are also oral histories made with retail employees, interviews with retailers
and family memories to add depth to the more formal works. One concern for researchers is the
difficulty in accessing archival materials (Miller, 2006b). The nature of business with intergen-
erational management of private companies, mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies for example,
means that with a few notable exceptions, accessible systematic archival collections are rare in
the Australian and New Zealand context.
Did retailing in Australia and New Zealand develop differently or similarly to the develop-
ment in other countries such as England, Scotland, Canada and the US? The brief answer is yes

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to both parts of the questions. There were many similarities and some distinctive differences.
Does this question matter? The answer here too is yes.Why? Various researchers continue to call
for further studies in retailing history (e.g. Alexander, A., 2010; Alexander, N., 1997; Hollander,
1986). As well, studies are emerging for example such as Alexander’s work on British retailing
(Alexander, 2011; Godley & Hang, 2012), and the examination of European department store
retailing (Crossick & Jaumain, 1999; Miller, 1981). However such studies do not stretch to
include Australia or New Zealand. Notwithstanding, some researchers are examining various
aspects of retailing and marketing in Australia (e.g. Bailey, 2015; Miller, 2005; Miller & Merrilees,
2001, 2002, 2004, 2016). However, the dearth of business history and economic history study
options reduces the scope for advanced research, (see Friedman & Jones, 2012 for example, who
identify only two courses which include Australian business history).
The history of retailing or related aspects such as mass marketing, and the evolution of fash-
ion, featured in various works that emerged particularly in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Kingston,
1994; Lancaster, 1995; Macpherson, 1963; Maynard, 1994; Perkins & Freedman, 1999; Perkins &
Meredith, 1996; Pitcher, 1994; Santink, 1990; Strasser, 1989; Wendt & Kogan, 1952). Many works
about retailing in Australia and New Zealand are more like company biographies or panegyrics.
They are often celebratory in nature and linked to milestones or anniversaries. Examples include
a focus on major retailers like Anthony Hordern and Sons (Hordern, 1985; Redmond, 1938),
Foy & Gibson (Davies, c. 1946), Mark Foy’s Ltd (Mark Foy’s, 1935), David Jones (Bartlett, 1946;
Cullen, 2013; Jones, 1956; O’Neill, 2013) and Georges (Cooper, A., 2014). Various exhibitions
have been curated about shopping heritage (McCann, 2002; Webber et al., 2003).
Many contemporary retailers echo these acknowledgements of the past on their websites, as
a means of building reassurance for their customers and other stakeholders such as suppliers, and
as part of developing their corporate brand (Cooper et al., 2015; Miller, 2011, 2014). The focus
has often been the department store format. Even so, works on specific department stores and
retailers are relatively rare in Australia and New Zealand, although those available offer insights
to the dynamic nature of retailing (for example, Barber, 2005; Brash et al., 1985; Dunstan, 1979;
Hordern, 1985; Marshall, 1961; Millen, 2000; Warrender, 1972).
In the 1990s, several authors noted that only a modest volume of academic research sup-
ported the few Australian celebratory published works on specific department stores and their
owners (Merrilees & Miller, 1996; Perkins & Freedman, 1999; Perkins & Meredith, 1996). How-
ever, related research is emerging, for example about the development of shopping malls in Aus-
tralia (Bailey, 2015; Merrilees et al., 2016: 264–266). While outside the scope of this work, they
provide insight into early innovations in this format, such as their inclusion of supermarkets, a
marked contrast to planned shopping malls in other countries like Canada, where supermarkets
tend to stand alone.While lagging behind developments in the United States by about a decade,
the first planned shopping centres opened with department stores and supermarkets as anchor
tenants, the first Australian mall being Chermside (Queensland) in 1957 and the first New
Zealand mall being Lynnmall in West Auckland. This new format included novel services such
as ‘drive in parking’ (Merrilees et al., 2016). Bailey (2015: 368) notes that while shopping malls
inhabit a significant space in urban and regional landscapes, and they ‘are deeply embedded in
the social and cultural life of communities’, they have not capitalised on their brand heritage as
part of their marketing.
Australian economic historians have tended to focus on commodities produced through
primary industries or related services such as stock and station agencies, and on manufacturing
generally or in specific industries like steel (Ville & Merrett 2000). Kingston (1994) gives an
Australian perspective on the history of shopping overall. She highlights the dramatic changes

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that occurred in the twentieth century for the consumer, the most obvious being the escalation
of mass merchandising.
This study is grounded in the emergence of modern retailing, which is well-documented
(e.g. Alexander & Akehurst, 1999). From the 1850s, or even earlier, the routes to modern retail-
ing were emerging. In some ways, the developments in Australia and New Zealand paralleled
changes in European and North American retailing. However, the relative remoteness of both
countries predicated unique responses including how they offered credit, managed long supply
chains and refined labour practices in an increasingly formal regulatory environment.

Growth of the department store

Historically, the department store was a very successful and innovative form of retailing. Several
authors note that only a modest volume of academic research supports the few Australian self-
congratulatory published works on specific department stores and their owners (Clarke & Rim-
mer, 1997; Merrilees & Miller, 1996; Perkins & Freedman, 1999; Perkins & Meredith, 1996). In
the Australian and New Zealand contexts, the early department store retailers had emigrated
predominantly from England, Scotland and Wales to set up new businesses. They maintained
links with “home” and thus were able to use those relationships to help with sourcing and with
trends. Sometimes, they were able to make visits back to “the old country”, noting in diaries all
the changes and advances that they observed.
In a descriptive work, Ferry (1960) drew on his extensive retailing career as a template for his
department store mini-cases studies focused on department stores in the US, Britain and parts of
the British Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). He provided evocative
snapshots of the histories and features of many department stores, suggesting a familiarity devel-
oped through his business networks, personal connections, and acute observations. In Australia,
two major waves occurred. The early drapers and milliners from the 1820s to 1840s, including
Farmer & Co., Anthony Hordern & Sons, and David Jones, had developed into department
stores by the early 1880s. David Jones began as a Sydney drapery store in 1838, and grew in physi-
cal store size, scope of merchandise and services, and small-scale manufacturing (custom tailor-
ing and millinery for example) during the next five decades (Horton, n.d). The transition from
drapery to department store was gradual but inexorable, with the expansion of selling, storage
and manufacturing spaces through acquiring leases or freehold of adjacent buildings. In 1887,
the opening of a large new store on an expanded original location marked its ascendency to
department store status in terms of size, scope and organisation. Anthony Hordern & Sons had its
roots in Ann Hordern’s millinery shop, and flourished to become the largest physical store in the
country (Barnard, 2015); like its major contemporaries it was an early adopter of new technolo-
gies such as the pneumatic tube for moving cash, change, accounts and orders round the store.
The second wave comprised new Sydney entrants such as Grace Bros and J. Marcus Clarke
from the mid-1880s to the early 1900s, and included Myer in Melbourne in the period from
1910 to 1920.The opening of suburban and rural draperies, some of which developed into inde-
pendent department stores or small chains supplemented these principal waves. Larger depart-
ment store chains later acquired many of the independent department stores, while others failed,
with changing social and economic conditions especially in rural areas. Of the many department
stores that existed as strong and vibrant firms up to the 1960s, only two names remain, David
Jones (forty-three stores) and Myer (sixty-seven stores).
In the early 19th century, David Jones introduced European merchandising methods to
urban markets when he opened the David Jones firm’s first Sydney outlet in 1838, operating it

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Figure 24.1 Interior of Finney Isles store, Brisbane, 1910

Citation: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland Neg: 110549.

as a retail and wholesale drapery. As the business expanded, building renovations and extensions
were frequent. By the mid-1870s, Edward Lloyd Jones I (one of David Jones’ sons) was institut-
ing changes that were appearing in dry goods stores and emerging department stores. His trips
abroad especially to England often stimulated changes. Family members and members of the
former partnership dominated the first Board of Directors on incorporation in 1906 (Horton,
n.d.).
By the late nineteenth century, department store retailing in Sydney increasingly mirrored
Europe and the United States with respect to the architectural and technological advances dur-
ing this period. The store was partly fashioned on British lines, inspired by Whiteley’s and oth-
ers and also American stores including Macy’s. In 1887, an opulent new full-scale department
store replaced its ‘higgledy piggledy’ predecessor (Miller & Merrilees, 2016). There were many
innovative features of the new store, including greater size, more floors (including a third floor
devoted to workrooms) more departments, a modern passenger lift, a semiautomatic version of
the not yet invented pneumatic tubes for moving cash around the store (amusingly, customers’
dogs would chase the wooden balls as the latter tore along the metal tracks) and more innovative
merchandising practices (Miller & Merrilees, 2016). The last included showrooms using new
lighting; showcases with more open displays of merchandise; some areas of “tout ensemble” dis-
play. All of these represented a more customer convenient method of presenting and displaying
merchandise and an enhanced buying experience for the customer (Miller & Merrilees, 2016).
Greater size enabled a greater variety of choice, as a type of one-stop shopping, enabling, in the
words of 1887 advertising, buyers ‘to see in a few moments a larger range of designs than here-
tofore’ (Miller & Merrilees, 2016).

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 Retailing in Australia and New Zealand

Figure 24.2 Electric trams, George Street, David Jones corner

Citation: Tyrrell Collection, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.

Expansion continued under the direction of the next generation of family ownership in the
early twentieth century, and drew in part on British and American influences. Edward Lloyd
Jones II and his brother Eric entered the firm on the death of their father, Edward (1844–1894).
They were relatively junior in age and experience and they depended in part on the other
partners who pursued a status quo approach, continuing rather than changing business practices,
until incorporation in 1906 when E.L. Jones II became Chairman of the Board.The firm moved
into the mail order business, building additional floors at the store and consolidating what had
been dispersed workrooms in a large new factory in 1914 in an inner Sydney suburb (Surry
Hills). World War I and the early 1920s economic recession hindered plans for a new flagship
store. Finally, the dramatic state-of-the-art store opened in 1927, in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, a
few blocks away from the 1887 store, which continued to trade. Saks Fifth Avenue, New York
and Selfridges’ 1909 London store influenced the design of this store significantly (DJA: Horton,
2000; O’Neill, 2013). Percy Best from Selfridges paid a visit to the firm, sharing his expertise
and commenting favourably on some aspects of the operations (DJA; Miller, 2006a: 247). The
new store became the flagship store because of its size, architecture, modernity and the scope
of merchandise, and remains the flagship store in 2018. The George Street store built in 1887
was extended in 1906 and renovated extensively in 1935. In 1938, the firm built a further store
diagonally opposite the flagship Elizabeth Street store, giving it three stores within the city.
As the firm expanded, the management culture changed, bringing contemporary European
methods of merchandise assortment and merchandise acquisition into the firm. In terms of

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Figure 24.3 Anthony Hordern & Sons Palace Emporium, Brickfield Hill, Sydney, 1935
Citation: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

leadership, Charles Lloyd Jones was a complex and charismatic person according to some con-
temporary accounts (DJA Newspaper Clippings) and was widely travelled, with a strong interest
in retail developments worldwide. Clarence Edwards joined the firm in 1901, from Swan and
Edgar, and with experience in the Manchester department of Woollands (Knightsbridge). His
role was General Manager, and Charles Lloyd Jones claimed that Edwards acted as a necessary
brake on some of Charles’ creative ideas. His key contribution to the firm was his understanding
of the nature of the business, particularly merchandise assortment and procurement, and he was
therefore very involved with the firm’s buyers.
The David Jones case indicates American and European influence in terms of architectural
and technological changes between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its labour
practices, however, took place in a different historical context, yet nevertheless some similarities
can be seen. In the Australian context, the notionally egalitarian society with its convict roots
and its anti-servitude creed still exhibited elements of a unique paternalistic management as dis-
cussed by various authors (including Kingston 1994; MacCulloch, 1980; Pragnell, 2001; Reekie
1987, 1993). Charles Lloyd Jones, head of David Jones, described this relationship between
owner and staff in positive terms:

Frankly I believe in the kind of relations between employer and employee which, for
want of a better word, is called “paternalism”, although I know this is anathema to
some people . . . in any case nothing would deter us from treating our employees as
members of a vast ‘family’. There should be more between employer and employee
than the payment of good wages for good work.
Charles Lloyd Jones (DJA)

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In other ways, however, Australian retailers followed a larger industry trend towards profes-
sionalisation and scientific management seen in American department stores by World War I.
In the context of their times, the motivations and practices at David Jones were innovative and
progressive (Miller, 2006a).
At David Jones, the growth of business gave impetus to acquiring expertise to develop and
implement the Board’s visions. Various means were used to obtain this crucial organisational
capability. By the 1920s and 1930s, emerging literatures on popular management and retail-
ing were extensive. They were augmented by seminal academic works such as Nystrom’s work
(1915) on the economics of retailing and his book on retailing operations.The Alexander Ham-
ilton Institute prepared handbooks and courses, and their Modern Business Series contained
twenty-four volumes, including topics on organisation and control and Marketing and Mer-
chandising (McNeill Collection: The Editors & In Collaboration with Butler and Swinney,
1918).The books were designed to be used ‘as part of the modern business course and service of
the Alexander Hamilton Institute’ (McNeill Collection, The Editors et al., 1918). Some of their
publications remain in the McNeill Collection, a collection within the Archive of the books
held by David McNeill the Staff Manager for more than fifty years.Their presence together with
Rydges journals, books on character analysis using phrenology and many other related books
suggests an interest by senior management in, if not a theoretical framework for, a structured
approach to business and staff management.
Other ways in which the firm accumulated corporate expertise included their own bench-
marking activities and general lectures by prominent academics such as Professor G. Elton Mayo
on work stress in 1921 and benchmarking visits to overseas’ retailers. Percy Best from Selfridges
spent some time with David Jones, sharing his expertise and commenting favourably on some
aspects of the operations. In New Zealand, in salesforce training staff were encouraged to focus
not so much on the products for sale but the effects for the customer such as in the case of shoes,
selling comfort and the benefits of walking (Roberts, 2003).
Parallel to the 19th century development of the department store was another major mass
retailer: mail order. The mail order catalogue was a significant innovation, as it met the needs
of the remote rural customers in developing countries such as the US (Emmet & Jeuck, 1950)
and Canada in the late 1880s. With the exception of Waller (1992), little Australian or New
Zealand research has appeared despite the immense importance of this shopping channel to
many customers, and indeed to the retailers’ business growth and success. The introduction of
the catalogue meant that the retailers were operating in multiple channels and the department
stores, or Universal Providers as they were termed, tended to publish their catalogues annually or
six monthly, and to distribute them widely. They also sought to reassure customers with exten-
sive information about policies, returns, warranties, delivery and sizing, and in later years, even
samples of fabrics. The Anthony Horderns catalogue was legendary, being the size of about two
house bricks, containing everything the consumer of the day could want or desire.
The David Jones Mail Order catalogue was the one company publication that bridged the
late 1800s and the twentieth century. It was internal to the firm in terms of its preparation and
the consequences for staff when customers responded to it, but it was targeted at customers,
especially those who could not visit the store frequently. The catalogue became a significant
integrating communication mechanism, linking the Board, the staff and the customers. The
catalogues communicated the essence of the firm to the staff. Various staff were involved in
merchandise selection, the catalogue preparation and the filling of orders. Thus, the catalogue
embodied for staff the firm’s strategies and conveyed concepts of service and fashion, and basic
practices such as how the customers should order goods and what the delivery terms and
arrangements were.

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Mail order was one form of advertising David Jones utilised; Ladies periodicals were another.
Department stores had long been dependent on advertising in other nations and the Austral-
ian industry was no different. In the early twentieth century, Australia saw a shift towards more
graphic and extensive modern advertising. Charles Lloyd Jones had taken over responsibility for
advertising in 1905. Over several years, he drew on his knowledge gathered overseas, his artistic
ability, his growing understanding of the firm and his senior position, to escalate the advertis-
ing effort and budget. David Jones placed advertisements in ladies magazines, selected journals
and newspapers on a regular basis. The very choice of magazines sent a message to the staff.
The firm shunned tawdry or tasteless press, preferring respectable daily newspapers and genteel
magazines, whose perceived readers were consistent with the image the Executive had of the
store’s preferred customers.The messages in the advertisements were about fashion, merchandise
variety, value, quality and service, invoking the store’s longevity and reputation as symbols of
trustworthiness and social standing. Many activities had to support the advertisements, including
previous merchandise selection and acquisition, store displays, selling staff knowledge and poli-
cies about returns, delivery and credit.

The rise of supermarkets as a retailing powerhouse

Supermarkets are the second of the mega trends in Australian retailing history. As of 2017–2018,
supermarkets are a major economic powerhouse, not just in retailing but across sectors. Indeed,
the contemporary retailing landscape is dominated by the two components of supermarkets and
superstore specialist stores. Supermarkets may seem a humble and ordinary part of the shopping
landscape and few people might imagine that they are such a powerful force. However, the timid
image of supermarkets has changed much in recent years with all sorts of community issues
being raised against the large supermarket corporate giants in Australia. In particular, small com-
munities (like Maleny in Queensland) often protest the arrival of large, chain supermarkets that
threaten the peaceful lifestyles of residents, and the viability of small retailers like butchers and
greengrocers. Equally, there is much social unrest when supermarkets squeeze small suppliers, on
the prices paid to dairy and egg farmers.
The modern supermarket emerged in the US in the 1930s, however in Australia it was a
post-World War II development, as the major cities expanded with many new suburbs catering
to the rise in families and the baby boom, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Primarily emerging
from the grocery category, the supermarket introduced modernity and excitement to what was
a small, traditional, personal service format. New technology in the form of modern layout and
refrigeration represented a major innovation effort at the time (Humphrey, 1998). It is hard to
imagine now that more than sixty years earlier, the first supermarkets created excitement and a
party-atmosphere, with large crowds queuing to get in and see for themselves firsthand what a
modern supermarket looked like.
Although most supermarkets emerged from a traditional grocery origin, in Australia the
current two dominant supermarkets had their roots forty to fifty years earlier in the variety
store format [Coles in 1914 (Sydenham, 1993), and Woolworths in 1924 (Murray, c. 1999)].
By the late 1950s, variety stores essentially split into supermarkets and discount department
stores, at first within the one store location and then shifting into stand-alone locations for each.
Other predecessors including the corner store and the self-service grocer, a development which
derived from the full-service grocer prevalent up to the 1930s. More recently, supermarkets have
expanded their product range to include more dry goods and homewares, reminiscent of the
variety store.

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As Humphrey (1998) shows, the emergence of the supermarket was a major format and
technological innovation, a disruptive change. Thus, innovation is critical in explaining the
explosive rise from the staid grocery trade category. Innovation has continued to characterise
the supermarket industry. This fact may seem surprising to many as supermarkets per se seem
the antithesis of entrepreneurship and dynamism. On the contrary, unexpectedly it is one of the
fastest growing retail categories over the past thirty years, despite the limited budget allocation
to food.
A major innovation in the supermarket industry occurred from the mid-1980s. From that
point, mega-size supermarkets were introduced, akin to the superstores in specialist stores. The
average size of Australian supermarkets grew from 800 square metres in 1985 to 4000 square
metres in 1995 (Merrilees & Miller, 1997). The innovation was not merely the greater size, but
also the inclusion of larger fresh food sections and also generally more modern displays and
appearances (Merrilees & Miller, 1997).
The changes through innovations in the supermarket category continue. The two leading
supermarket corporations, Woolworths and Coles, have been particularly innovative. Merri-
lees and Miller (2001a) demonstrate their high level of innovation, including a major role in
ushering in the fresh food revolution to the supermarket category; ever-more creative visual
presentations; online stores (in 1996–97), financial services and insurance services. In contrast in
the Australian context, attempts to introduce European-style hypermarkets have not succeeded,
although warehouse retailers including Costco are finding a niche in urban areas.
A corollary of the rise in supermarkets has been the demise of the traditional grocer. In
1961–62, there were only 200 supermarkets in Australia compared to 33, 000 small grocery
retailers Merrilees and Miller (1996). By 1968–69, there were 650 supermarkets, accounting
for a third of grocery sales. By the mid-1970s the number of supermarkets had grown to 1000.
Further, by the mid-1990s the share of supermarkets exceeded 95% of the grocery sales, reach-
ing 99% by 2000. There are very few small grocers left out of the original 33,000 in the early
1960s. Some small grocery firms operate as part of a broader (more independent) supermarket
chain. However, the traditional grocery trade operator has all but vanished. Occasionally, a cou-
ple of traders open up a new innovative mode of grocery store such as a focus on gourmet food,
but these stores are rare and generally not sustained over time. The period saw the rise of the
convenience store such as 7-Eleven in urban areas, and especially in city centres, and the 2001
arrival of the smaller yet powerful players such as Aldi, which is now in the top three Australian
supermarket retailers, and has over 470 stores (Aldi, 2017; Roy Morgan, 2017).

Superstores
Superstores or category killers in specialised retail categories are the third of our mega trends in
Australian retailing history. Today, as of 2018–2019, superstores are a major economic pow-
erhouse, not just in retailing but across sectors. Indeed, the contemporary retailing landscape is
dominated by the two components of supermarkets and superstore specialist stores.
In the 1990s, the economic recession in Australia influenced consumers to explore a greater
variety of retailers in their quest for value for money. As well, they became more amenable to
destination shopping where they were willing to travel further to gain better prices and greater
ranges of merchandise ( Jarratt, 1998; Polonsky & Jarratt, 1992). This predisposition created a
receptivity to the introduction of superstores in Australia.
In tracing the history of the emergence of superstores, the first major Australian article on
superstores identified 1993 as a watershed in superstore activity (Merrilees & Miller, 1997).

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Prior to 1993 there were just a few superstore categories, including hardware (e.g. BBC Hard-
warehouse), furniture (e.g. IKEA) and sporting goods (e.g. Rebel Sports). The entry to Australia
of Toys ‘R’ Us from the USA ushered in a wave of other categories. Consequently by the mid-
1990s there were ten retail categories where superstore format had twenty or more outlets: toys,
sporting goods, hardware, furniture, cinema, car washes, clothing, stationery, videos and pharma-
cies (Merrilees & Miller, 1997).
The key benefits of superstores include a wider range of goods and lower prices and often a
more interesting design of store that allows more movement and freedom by the consumer. As
such, the superstore is a major, disruptive innovation in the specialty retailing categories. Com-
pared to traditional stores, the superstore is often between five and ten times bigger. So poten-
tially each time a superstore is built, it supplants say ten small traditional stores. The economic
advantage of the superstore is impressive, which explains the rapid development in Australia
from the mid-1990s in so many retail categories. Innovation triggered economic success for the
retailers and acceptance by consumers.
The competitive power of the superstore format is demonstrated in a study where consumer
perceptions were contrasted across superstores and traditional stores in two categories (toys and
hardware) (Merrilees & Miller, 2001c). The superiority of the superstore was evident from the
consumer perceptions. The superior format design was a critical factor. The superstores had
more powerful and interesting visual displays, more use of colour and lighting, more use of
merchandise packaging as part of the displays, more use of in-store price scanners and promo-
tions and so on. The entire character of the shopping experience had changed.
The past twenty-five years have seen the continued advance of the superstore format, not
just in the ten initial categories but across virtually every other specialist category, including
pets, books and baby goods.

Other retail categories

The story so far told in this chapter of Australian retailing history is that of three giants in retail-
ing: department stores, supermarkets and superstores in specialist categories (see Brash et al.,
1985; Miller, 2005; 2006a; Miller & Merrilees, 2002, 2004, 2013, 2016).
A corollary of the emergence of retailer giants in these three dominant areas is the demise of
many small retailers. Specialty retailers have a long history in Australia. In the early stage of colo-
nisation, retailing was very small scale and fragmented, and included small drapery and grocery
stores. Hundreds of small drapers were eliminated in the nineteenth century; over 30,000 small
grocery trade businesses were unable to compete against the modern supermarkets; and tens of
thousands of small specialty retailers have been unable to compete against the mega-size super-
stores. Very few of these stories have been documented. We know little about how some may
have simply accepted their lot while others may have resisted and perhaps introduced changes
and innovations in their own way.
Although there are relatively few academic studies about individual retailers, Australian
menswear retailer, Gowings, is an exception. For example, Miller and Merrilees (2001) tell the
story of the iconic Sydney menswear store Gowings. The research complemented a celebratory
history of the firm (Gowing, 1993). Research on the retail strategy that Gowings used from
the firm’s inception in the 1860s until the late 1990s, shows the range of innovations deployed
mainly in Sydney’s Central Business District (CBD) location over four generations (Miller &
Merrilees, 2001).
Gowings was founded in 1868 and quickly gained a reputation as a relevant, somewhat
quirky and down to earth retailer. Innovation was a major part of their evolution and a major

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factor in their longevity. The role of marketing and organisational capabilities including innova-
tion were sufficient in the Gowings story for Miller and Merrilees (2001) to develop a model
of retail longevity from the case material evidence (including advertising archives). Another
article (Crittenden & Wilson, 2002) has since replicated the Miller and Merrilees (2001) Great
Merchant Model of Retail Longevity.
The structure of retailing has changed dramatically. Traditional specialist stores remain, pro-
viding they are not too close to an existing superstore. Location convenience and personal
service remain as possible advantages. However, an ominous sign for the remaining traditional
stores is the leading superstores exhausting prime sites, and so considering an ever-wider terri-
tory for expansion. This strategy can be viable because of extensive car ownership and a will-
ingness to travel for destination shopping in Australia. Additionally, some superstores are adding
a smaller, junior version of the format which again increases the chances of encroaching into
places where the traditional stores have retreated to. Michael Hill, the New Zealand jewellery
chain, has made a significant impact in the Australian market and is a strong example of a small-
outlet size specialty retailer being modern and innovative.
The main real counters that traditional stores have to the superstore threat is for them to be
innovative and to offer more personalised customer serviced. Traditional stores in key cutting
and jewellery have responded by joining branded chains and modernising where possible. Inno-
vation is both a threat (from the superstores) and a counter-attack (when the traditional stores
innovate). Innovation has a role to play in most retail categories.
Australia and New Zealand have participated in retail trends globally, influenced by other
national models but also shaping others as well. The unique challenge to far-flung retailers in
the nineteenth and twentieth century was to manage the paradox between being somehow up
to date with trends, products and services in the major capitals such as London, Paris and New
York, and yet somehow respond to local needs, local opportunities and local constraints (Miller,
2005). The transference of fashion especially couture was often mediated by the department
stores, such as in the example of department stores in Toronto, where some Parisian fashion
could be ordered (Palmer, 2001). Several authors explore the impact of transnational influences
on the development of Australian and New Zealand department stores (Miller, 2005; Miller &
Merrilees, 2016) and find that while there were significant and identifiable global influences,
there were equally very recognisable local innovative responses, and thus glocalisation might
best describe developments (see also, Svennson, 2001). Retailing in Australia and New Zealand
has also made an impact globally. Scholars like Wellington Chan (1996) have demonstrated the
transference of knowledge from Sydney to Asia, for example, via the development of the Sin-
cere and Wing On department stores in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai. Chinese Austral-
ian merchants wanted to take modern business methods to China and were even inspired by
architecture of David Jones and Anthony Horderns (Chan, 1996; Godley & Hang, 2016; Miller,
2005). As an aside, some of those department store buildings from the first half of the twentieth
century can still be found on Nanying Road in Shanghai.

The impacts: an historical perspective

Disruptive innovation in marketing channels is best seen from a longitudinal view and his-
torical analysis is an ideal way of doing this. One rationale for the current chapter is to
highlight the role of innovation in retailing, that is, the marketing channel. All the inno-
vations discussed in our historical journey are tantamount to disruptive innovations. The
department store was much larger than its predecessor drapery stores. Not only was the size
of the store and the product range greater, the price was somewhat lower initially, and the

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 Dale Miller

scope of customer services was expanded including the provision of credit, delivery and
lay-by (lay-away). Thus, department stores were a disruptive change to the prevailing dra-
pery businesses. Similarly, supermarkets were disruptive to the grocery trade stores, and they
effectively eliminated them from business within a few decades. Superstores were disruptive
to the small traditional specialist stores, rendering many of them uncompetitive. In short, an
historical longitudinal discourse provides a powerful lens into a very modern phenomenon:
disruptive innovation.

Conclusion
The chapter is structured to focus on what the author identifies as the three giant retail catego-
ries that have dominated the past 200 years of Australian retailing. Department stores, super-
markets and superstores are the three retail categories representing the dominant format for two
key eras: first, the century-plus up to 1950 (dominated by department stores), and second, the
subsequent seven decades to the present (dominated by supermarkets and superstores). Taken at
face value, department stores and supermarkets seem unlikely candidates for superstar status.The
current somewhat negative perception of department stores (even whether they can survive)
should not distort their previous stellar status. Similarly, supermarkets might be dismissed by
many shoppers as boring and basic, but they remain a dominant economic force in Australian
and New Zealand retailing.
The capability of these three categories to achieve superior status is closely linked to their
innovation ability and to change over time. Innovation has been a theme linking the parts of
this chapter. All three retail categories have achieved high status because of superior innova-
tion. That is a salient lesson for contemporary retailers and other businesses. Moreover, they
achieved acceptance of their innovations by adopting glocalisation, proactively responding to
global trends and local needs.

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Sources
From the David Jones archive
Used with permission of David Jones Ltd and in consultation with the Archivist, Barbara
Horton.
BRG 1/32/1–6: Board Minutes.
BRG 1/69 50th Anniversary.
BRG 1/577 Historical Notes on David Jones & Co. and David Jones Ltd.
BRG Annual Reports and Chairman’s Addresses.
BRG R1/31/0–6 Rough Minutes of Board Meetings.
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September 1876 (Transcription); PRG 1/9 Original of PRG 1/9a.
PRG 2/80
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Robinson (unpublished).

Reports
Harwood, A. 1913 Commissioned Report.
Harwood, A. 1913 Commissioned Report – Responses to the Board.

Historical notes and articles

Horton, B. (c. 2000) Personal communications with C. B. L. Jones re influence of Saks 5th Avenue on
development of 1927 store design.
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427
 Dale Miller

Jones, C.L. (1948), David Jones idea of doing business: As outlined by “C. L.”; Reprint of Talk given in 1946.
Jones, C.L. (1956), ‘The history of David Jones Limited’, Bulletin of the Business Archives Council of Australia,
1 (1 May), pp. 1–10.

The catalogue collection

Most catalogues from their inception in 1899 are available. They emphasise both products and
services.

The McNeill collection

The McNeill Collection (McNC): the materials include published reference works (books, jour-
nals), McNeill’s original speeches and lectures prepared for training programme, photographs
and extensive materials from other department stores especially from outside Australia.
McNeill Collection: The Editors & In Collaboration with Ralph Starr Butler and John B. Swinney, 1918.
Marketing and Merchandising. Modern Business Series. New York: The Alexander Hamilton Institute.
Accessed in the David Jones Archive, 2006.

Newspaper clippings collection

Newspaper clippings have been collected over an extensive period. They include advertisements by David
Jones and press reports; Bartlett N. 1946. Charles Lloyd Jones: The Art of the Honest Draper. Daily Tel-
egraph (25 May): 16–17.

Oral history collection

Oral History Collection (OHC). This collection was generally developed by the Archivist with
former members of staff

Staff newspaper collection

Covers all the variously named internal staff newspapers including:
Between Ourselves 1916, Issues 1 and 2.
Between Ourselves from 1919, numbering starts at Volume 1, Issue 1.
The Dajonian Monthly
David Jones Store News

428
 25
HISTORY OF RETAILING IN
LATIN AMERICA
From the corner store to the supermarket

Martín Monsalve Zanatti

The big department stores of the nineteenth century transformed the urban structure, culture
of consumption and ways of doing business in the major Latin American capitals. Nowadays,
shopping malls have left the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods to reach a larger mass of
consumers, and for the first time supermarkets enjoy a high level of participation in the region’s
food distribution channels. In this chapter we will give a brief overview of the history of retail-
ing in Latin America, describing the transition from monumental city-center department stores
to the expansion of supermarkets throughout the urban space. We draw on national cases for
the analysis of each stage in this history, as they provide a broader explanation of the period.
Likewise, given the specificities of the subject, we place emphasis on a cultural approach, as well
as one involving commercial strategies.
The development of modern retailing is a phenomenon that emerged in Latin America dur-
ing the late nineteenth century as part of the first globalisation, but the system was not consoli-
dated until the middle of the last century. Moreover, it was not until the second half of the 1990s
that the sector underwent explosive growth. Two of the issues that we stress in this overview
are how the sector’s commercial strategies are configured based on tensions between the global
and the local, and how these strategies seek to address specific problems such as market size, or
competition with multinational companies using local resources.
We start by presenting a review of the literature on the culture of consumption in Latin
America, which will serve as an introduction to our overview of retail history. Then, we pro-
vide a general outline of the periodisation of retail in the region, before drawing on secondary
sources to sketch out the main characteristics of each of the stages in question.

Background: a review of the history of consumption in Latin America

Historical studies on consumption in Latin America are still in their early stage and have been
heavily influenced by economic, anthropological and, in recent times, cultural studies. Accord-
ing to Trentmann & Otero-Cleves, this is because studies on consumption in the region have
centred on three factors. The first is the prevalence of the study of export economies within
economic and social history approaches, which saw more importance being given to produc-
tion than to consumption. The second is based on the assumption that Latin America is an

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 Martín Monsalve Zanatti

economically backward region, and thus that it is lacking in consumers. Finally, the preconcep-
tion that the Latin American population tends to imitate foreign patterns of behaviour (tastes)
(Trentmann & Otero-Cleves, 2017: 20).
Despite these preconceptions, in recent years an interesting historiography has grown up
around consumption in Latin America, which can be grouped into three broad categories, or
stages. The first, formative category continues to work from the conceptual framework of Latin
America as an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactured products; the second
is based on national case studies and seeks to elaborate upon the path opened up by its prede-
cessors; and the third locates its analyses of consumption in gender debates, identity politics and
conceptions of social dignity. That said, a historiographical agenda for the history of consump-
tion has still to be established.
As proposed explicitly by Trentmann and Otero-Cleves (2017), initial studies on consump-
tion in Latin America were heavily influenced by the notion of the so-called Latin American
“exporter model”. Thus, analyses were preoccupied with the production of raw materials and
their impact on consumers in the European or North American markets. However vast its con-
tributions may have been, the pioneering study by Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985),
works from this standpoint, as do the more recent studies on raw materials or global com-
modities, as well as the excellent research on supply chains presented by Steven Topik, Carlos
Marichal & Zephyr L. Frank, in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the
Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (2006). Paul Gootenberg’s Andean Cocaine:The Making
of a Global Drug (2008) provides another example.
The analyses that truly open up the study of consumption in the region are those of Arnold
Bauer & Benjamin Orlove, The Allure of the Foreign: Giving Importance to Imports (1997), and A.
Bauer, Goods, Power and History: Latin American’s Material Culture (2001). Bauer charts a history
of consumption from the era of conquest through to the end of the twentith century. His study
provides an analysis of consumption and its techniques, as well as its relations with culture and
the impact of imported goods in different contexts (Morales, 2005: 178). That is, Bauer shifts
the focus away the exporter model to enquire into the impact that goods produced in Europe
and the United States have had on Latin American societies. Taking their lead from Bauer, the
most recent studies on national cases such as Manuel Llorca (2014) and Ana María Otero (2017)
have shown that Latin Americans are not passive consumers of foreign goods, and so European
traders should adapt to local needs and tastes (Trentmann & Otero-Cleves, 2017: 21–22).
In keeping with this pattern of national histories but from a perspective more closely linked
to economic history, several studies have analysed the formation of a society of local consump-
tion and its influence on industrialisation during the first globalisation (Rocchi, 1998). Such
works complement the analyses of interaction between final consumers and commercial inter-
mediaries in the creation of local and international markets (Lluch, 2015).
A third historiographical strand has focused on the development of a culture of consump-
tion and new consumers. A good example of this approach is Steven Bunker’s Creating Mexican
Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz (2014), in which the author analyses big stores and
the publicity associated with consumption during the Porfiriato. Bunker studies the emergence
of a society of consumption as part of the construction of the idea of modernity in Mexico.
The most important contribution of this strand, however, lies not in its analyses of the ideas of
modernity, but, as proposed by (Pérez, 2017; Trentmann & Otero-Cleves, 2017), in the study
of consumption as one of the mechanisms of gender and/or class identity, how consumption
contributes to the formation of a civic culture and political participation, and how it is linked
to notions of social dignity (Elena, 2011, Milanesio, 2013). Another example is the initial study

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of the relationship between middle-class identity and consumption in Maureen O’Dougherty’s

Consumption Intensified:The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil (2002).
The book by Natalia Milanesio, Workers Go Shopping in Argentina:The Rise of Popular Consumer
Culture (2013) is perhaps that which best exemplifies the aforementioned iterations, because,
on the one hand, it develops the idea of how the emergence of workers as new consumers in
Argentine society was fundamental to the legitimisation of President Juan Domingo Perón’s
regime. And on the other, the irruption of workers as new consumers forced publicists to change
their techniques and create a new culture of consumption. Moreover, Milanesio points out that
the importance of the domestic space in Peronist politics gave housewives from working-class
families a leading role (Pérez, 2017: 33).
This review of the literature on consumption sets the scene for our history of retail in the
region. However, if the historical analysis of Latin American consumption in general still lacks a
concrete agenda, the study of the history of retail in particular remains in its beginnings (Bunker,
2010). As such, in this chapter we present a general review of the history of retail in the region,
based on the existing literature for the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.We approach
the histories of these national cases for each of the periods in the development of retail in Latin
America, from the end of the 1900s through to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Periodisation of the history of retail in Latin America

Modern retail took root in Latin America in the late nineteenth century, in the period known
as the first globalisation. During this formative stage, the main actors were generally immigrants
from Europe who turned their old stores into supermarkets and/or department stores.This phe-
nomenon first occurred in the region’s most populous urban centres, such as Mexico City and
Buenos Aires, but quickly spread to other major Latin American cities (Reardon & Berdegué,
2002: 93).
The 1950s marked the start of the consolidation of supermarkets and department stores,
while the first shopping malls opened their doors in the 1960s.This was a period that coincided
with urban growth and industrialisation in the region, which saw workers become the “new
consumers” (Milanesio, 2013). This obligated the supermarkets to leave the city centres and
penetrate not only middle- and upper-class districts, but also working-class neighbourhoods.
However, this process did not occur at the same time in each of the countries in the region.
The period ended with the external debt crisis and the inflationary processes that hit the Latin
American economies in the 1980s.
The sector experienced significant growth following the liberalisation of the Latin Ameri-
can economies in the 1990s, which involved both a process of regional internationalisation
and the arrival of large international chains to countries in the region. During this period, first
supermarkets and then shopping malls expanded into neighbourhoods in the urban peripheries
inhabited by the lower-middle and working classes. Finally, it is important to note the growth
of self-service or convenience stores during the 2000s, including the likes of OXXO in Mexico,
Tambo in Peru and Big John and Ok Market in Chile.
It should be noted that marketing channels known generically as “traditional” or “informal”
have existed across all of these periods, and until very recently dominated the commercialisa-
tion of goods. These include bodegas, traditional stores engaged in the sale of miscellaneous retail
products; markets, places where retail and wholesale traders operate, are grouped into unions or
associations, and to a certain extent conserve the “traditional” channels of exchange of goods;
and street hawking.

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Figure 25.1 Supermercado, Chile
Source: Código: MC0069705/BN 1074891, Autor: Cardoso, Armindo, Titulo: Supermercado Almac, Año: 1973,
URL: http:www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-128267.html
 History of retailing in Latin America

Figure 25.2 Bodega E. Wong

Source: Photo courtesy of Eric Wong

The first department stores and supermarkets, 1890–1950

There is a long tradition of exchange and commerce in Latin America, which in one way or
another has influenced the development of retailing in the region (Bunker, 2010). Mexico
and Peru, historical centres of indigenous civilisation in the region, had different traditions of
exchange that predated the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors. Markets or tanguis were spaces
of commercial transactions in Mesoamerica, while forms of exchange or bartering measured in
the provision of work predominated in the Andes. Following the establishment of the dominion
of the Spanish Crown, trade expanded throughout the region.
In the colonial cities, commerce took place through street hawking, markets, pulperías and
cajones. The pulperías were stores usually located on street corners where a wide variety of prod-
ucts were sold. These are the forebears of what came to be known in the twentieth century as
bodegas. In the post-independence era through to the mid-twentieth century, these establish-
ments were often run by European or Asian immigrants: in the Peruvian case, the Italians and
Chinese.
Meanwhile, the cajones were stores based on the ground floor of buildings, generally found in
the major plazas of the cities. They sold threads, buttons, padlocks, footwear, textiles and so on.
In the years immediately following the independence of the Latin American countries, cajones

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 Martín Monsalve Zanatti

Figure 25.3 Augusto Fernando Oechle.

Source: Peruvian National Library

tended to specialise in the sale of a single product, or goods that were in some way related. In
the case of the rural sector, these stores acted as trading houses that supplied capital goods to
farmers and ranchers, connecting them to the international market (Fernández & Lluch, n.d.).
For various reasons, among them the scarcity of low-denomination currency, most sales during
the colonial and post-independence periods in the region were by credit; as Bunker notes for
the Mexican case, this practice would prove to be highly influential on modern retailing in the
region (2014).
In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a new wave of European immigration reached
Latin America. Many of these immigrants acquired cajones in the centres of major cities, in
some cases specialising in the sale of certain products, such as clothing. Little by little the cajones
evolved into stores that displayed their products in glass cabinets or behind the counter. This
made the merchandise more visible, but it meant that consumers did not have direct access to it.
Prices were not fixed and so were subject to constant haggling (Bunker, 2010: 43). These stores
were to play a fundamental role in the development of retailing in Latin America during the
first globalisation.
In the case of Mexico, it was the stores run by a group of immigrants from the com-
mune of Barcelonnette in France that were instrumental to the creation of department stores
in the country. The Barcelonnette entrepreneurs diversified their investments across the fields

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 History of retailing in Latin America

Figure 25.4 Almacenes, Peru.

Source: Peruvian National Library

of clothes manufacturing, banking, and beer, cigarette and paper production in several Mexican
cities. But their most significant investments for the history of retailing lay in converting the old
colonial cajones into retailers resembling the Parisian fashion stores, which later became the first
department stores in Latin America (Bunker, 2010, 2014; Galindo, 2013;Valerio, 2016).
One such store was “Fábrica de Francia”, opened in the 1860s by Alexander Raynaud and
V. Gassier from Barcelonnette.Years later, the two partners sold the store to the Parisians Joseph
Tron and Joseph Leautaud, who in 1891 turned it into “El Palacio de Hierro”: Mexico’s first
department store. Notably, they soon faced competition from similar businesses such as “El
Puerto de Veracruz” (opened in 1897) and “El Puerto de Liverpool” (1898), followed by several
others (Bunker, 2014).
In the case of Argentina, the experience was similar to Mexico’s. Thus, for example, in 1883,
Lorenzo Chaves from Chile and the Englishman Alfredo Gath founded a store selling menswear
made from English fabrics. They branched into women’s clothing soon after, turning “Gath y
Chaves” into a department store in 1901. In the Peruvian case, the main player was a German
immigrant, Augusto Fernando Oechle, who in the late 1900s opened a store selling threads, lace,
and buttons imported from Europe, to which he later added textiles, perfumes, decorative items
and toys. The growth of his business prompted Oechle to open Peru’s first department store in
1917.
All of these businesses, with the exception of Oechle, expanded considerably, spawned
branches and competed with similar stores. Yet these companies could not rely solely on the
sale of European imports to the upper classes from those countries as a means of expanding and

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 Martín Monsalve Zanatti

competing. They needed a strategy to reach a broader mass of consumers and be able to sell at
scale.
One pattern that many of the Mexican and Argentine department stores followed was to
initiate a process of backward vertical integration and invest in clothes production for sale in
their stores. Consumption of clothes had increased markedly in both countries at the start of
the 1900s, sparking the development of a garment industry (Rocchi, 1998: 540). In the case of
Mexico, department stores such as El Palacio de Hierro also benefited from low labour costs in
the manufacturing sector. The stores based much of their clothes-making strategy on producing
copies of French and other European products (Bunker, 2010: 47).
Department stores in Mexico, and in Latin America in general, changed the consumption
experience of an entire sector of society. Indeed, not only were store buildings enormous, but
they were also spaces in which consumers could enjoy the innovations of modernity, such as
electrical lighting, elevators, etc., free of charge. They were also able to view products in glass
display cases or behind the counter under no obligation to buy. Unlike their counterparts in
Europe and the United States, consumers in Latin America had no direct contact with the
products on sale (Bunker, 2010: 51–53).
Bunker (2010, 2014) notes that the transition to fixed prices denoted by labels was one of the
hardest changes for Mexican consumers, more accustomed to haggling, to accept. However,
embracing and promoting the sale of credit, as well as integrating into the country’s religious
and political calendar, were two characteristics that set Mexican department stores apart from
the French models on which they were based. The publicity strategies the stores designed were
aimed at reinforcing the idea of a negotiated modernity, whereby they sold a modern lifestyle
adapted to the particularities of the cultural world of contemporary urban consumers.
Just like the department stores, supermarkets in Latin America can also trace their roots to
the old colonial cajones converted into stores during the nineteenth century. Likewise, European
immigrants played an important role (Moreno, 2012). The best analysis of the rise of super-
markets so far available is that by D. Aristizábal García (2017), on the Colombian case. Of the
European traders who came to Colombia in the early 1900s, the Catalan José Carulla stands out.
To begin with, the bulk of Carulla’s business activities were centred on exporting coffee, rubber
and tobacco to Europe, and the sale of imported products to the Bogotá elite. As the years went
by, the latter field came to dominate through his store, “Carulla y Compañía”. Between 1930
and 1940, Carulla established a chain of stores known as “Escudo Catalán”, which followed the
pattern of the region’s early stores in that they were places of encounter and conversation for
consumers as much as buying and selling. For Carulla, gaining customer loyalty owed more to
the warmth of the service than it did to price levels (Aristizábal García, 2017: 144).World War II
changed the outlook for the Carulla family’s businesses by making it impossible to import Euro-
pean products, while new commercial techniques were introduced to the city of Bogotá. At the
start of the 1940s, the Steurs, a family of Czech origins who had fled the war in Europe, opened
a store in Bogotá called “Tienda Internacional Americana” in which they applied all of the
advances they had learned from American retailers – such as shelving, showcases and counters.
Thus, Carulla decided around the same time to adopt the new ways of promoting merchandise,
and changed his business focus to supplying Bogotá’s internal market with Colombian products.
In the early 1950s, his son, José Carulla Soler, went on a trip to the United States and Mexico to
learn about supermarkets and the self-service system.Years later, Carulla Soler would open the
family group’s first supermarket in the city of Bogotá. The strategy was accompanied by a series
of measures to “educate consumers” in the use of the new service. Leaflets were produced with
instructions on how to make the best use of shopping carts, for example. The Carullas trans-
formed their business in short order, establishing other supermarkets in Colombia and abroad

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within the decade. In addition, Colombia attracted US department stores such as Sears Roe-
buck, completely changing the consumption habits of the Andean country’s upper and middle
classes (Aristizábal García, 2017: 147–148).
In sum, the European immigrants who arrived in Latin America from the late 1900s to the
early 2000s were fundamental to the formative stage of retailing in the region, because they
acted as intermediaries between the new cultures of consumption in Europe and the United
States, and the commercial traditions of the Latin American countries. Both department stores
and supermarkets adapted to a situation in which they had to compete with traditional market-
ing channels such as bodegas and markets, where price negotiation was central. Department
stores, for their part, embarked upon backward vertical integration processes to lower costs and
enable competitive pricing. However, at a time of globalisation, department stores and super-
markets became a meeting point in which global notions of modernity interacted with local
traditions, as proposed by Bunker (2014) and Aristizábal García (2017).

The consolidation of retailing in Latin America, 1950–1990

The postwar years in Latin America marked a period of state-led economic development upon
which industrialisation processes were founded; the urban population had outgrown the rural
by the end of the period, the middle classes consolidated themselves in countries such as Argen-
tina, Chile, Mexico and Brazil, women acquired more economic independence and political
rights, and workers became the great new sector of consumption following their incorporation
into the region’s formal economy (Bulmer Thomas, 1994; Elena, 2011; Milanesio, 2013). In this
context, marketing channels based on department stores and supermarkets took root, and a new
actor emerged in the form of the shopping mall. However, traditional channels such as bodegas,
markets, and street hawking remained the primary mechanisms through which most of the
population obtained their consumer goods.
In this section we will continue with the case of Colombian supermarkets before moving on
to the particular experience of Peru. The aim of selecting these cases is to analyse the learning
experiences and the dissemination of knowledge around the retail business, and how even dur-
ing this period of consolidation the negotiation between traditional and modern styles endured.
As we saw in the previous section, the 1950s marked the definitive entry of supermarkets
into Colombian retailing. However, this process of consolidation involved a steep learning
curve for both the owners of the establishments and the consumers. One of the main problems
was that many potential customers, despite the printed material and the educational notices,
preferred to stick with the traditional markets and bodegas. The Carulla-run supermarkets
had difficulties in securing customer loyalty, but they were not alone. Sears had to close their
Medellín branch because once the novelty of experiencing “modernity” had passed, locals
opted to return to their direct and personal dealings with the traditional stores. The firm’s
branches were bought by the Toro family, owners of what went on to become the Éxito super-
markets (Aristizábal García, 2017: 149).
The supermarket system was consolidated in Colombia during the 1960s and 1970s and
several new local chains emerged, leading to fierce competition. According to Aristizábal García
(2017: 150–151) this compelled owners to constantly improve their knowledge through trips
abroad and participation in talks, such as those given by Bernardo of the National Cash Register
company in the United States. Thereafter, the owners shared what they had learned with their
employees.The Carullas were among those who embraced the new learning mechanisms, estab-
lishing more formal links with the National Supermarket Association in the United States. This
gave them an advantage over their competitors in terms of acquiring knowledge and marketing.

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 Martín Monsalve Zanatti

Towards the end of the 1970s, the supermarket owners looked for ways of making the shop-
ping experience more pleasant for consumers with a view to boosting their sales. Thus, they
experimented with combining the practices of the old stores with those of the US supermarkets.
The Éxito supermarket owned by the Toro family began to combine the sale of food staples
with garments and household appliances. In the 1980s, the Colombian supermarket sector con-
cerned itself primarily with expanding into working-class areas by promising access to moder-
nity at affordable prices. Finally, it is important to note the interest in adapting supermarket
architecture to local culture (Aristizábal García, 2017: 152–154).
We have followed the proposal of Colombian historian Aristizábal García closely because her
analysis demonstrates how the evolution of the self-service model was a product of the experi-
ences of owners, who acted as bridges between the North American culture of consumption
and the desires and aspirations of their customers. Just as Bunker argues for the case of Mexican
department stores, Colombian supermarkets were symbols of modernity that negotiated with
local consumers to achieve acceptance by the population and thus assure profitability.
Returning to Oechle and the Peruvian case, at the start of the twentieth century the depart-
ment store continued its expansion among the upper and upper-middle classes in the city of
Lima. Unlike his Mexican counterparts, Oechle had no interest in incorporating the working
classes into the “world of the modern consumer”. The economic growth undergone by the
county between 1950 and 1963 (Sheahan, 2001: 29), and the consequent consolidation of a
professional middle class in Lima, seemed to prove him right. Perhaps with this pattern in mind,
in 1953 the brothers Aldo and Orlando Olcese opened Peru’s first supermarket, itself called
“Súper Market”, in Miraflores – a district where the upper and middle classes converged. Aldo
Olcese had studies Business Administration at Texas University in the United States, where he
“conceived of the idea . . . based on the North American models” (Sheahan, 2001: 34). The
company sustained a solid rate of growth in the subsequent decades, with ten branches in Lima
by the time it was expropriated by the dictatorship of General Juan Velasco in 1972. In parallel,
other supermarket chains were established, such as Monterrey (1952) and Scala (1958). Probably
attracted by the growth of retailing in Peru, Sears, Roebuck opened its first Lima store in 1955.
Later, the supermarkets Gálax, Todos and Tía followed, always located in middle- or upper-class
districts of the city of Lima (Suarez, 2011: 156). These companies led the market until their
absorption by Grupo Wong in 1994.
The history of the E. Wong supermarket in Peru, founded on the notion of combining
the self-service model with the traditions of the neighbourhood bodega, helps to deepen the
study of how the culture of retailing was gradually introduced in Latin American countries and
developed into the boom of the 1990s. However, the case is atypical of the Peruvian and Latin
American experience insofar as the E. Wong group – which went on to lead the retail sector
in Peru until its sale in 2007 to the Chilean transnational Cencosud – was founded by Chinese
immigrants.
The first generation of the family, headed by the founder Erasmo Wong, opened a bodega in
Avenida Dos de Mayo in the district of San Isidro in 1942, under the name of Wong. Located
as he was in an upper-class district and in a business in which prices did not vary significantly,
Erasmo Wong reasoned that his advantage over the competitors should lie in the warmth of the
service he provided to his customers. This idea governed the approach of the second generation
when they opted to convert the old bodega into a supermarket, which was followed by a second
branch in the district of Miraflores in 1983, at a time when inflation and the economic crisis
were starting to hit established competitors (Uber Grosse, 2006).
The second generation rapidly understood that, given the economic environment, they
would not be able to compete on prices with the established supermarkets. Therefore, they

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opted to compete on the level of product quality and personalised attention. To achieve both
objectives, they sought to lend their supermarkets the feel of an upmarket bodega. Thus, for
example, they designed their supermarkets without the generic rectangular aisles, and included
special compartments for liquor and delicacies. Moreover, despite the self-service model, super-
market staff were urged to offer customers special attention. This compelled the company to
provide its employees with ongoing training, which set it apart from the competitors. To an
even greater extent than in the Mexican and Colombian cases, from the mid- to late-twentieth
century, tradition and modernity came together to create a consumer experience that distin-
guished Wong from its competitors, who were more preoccupied with emulating “the Ameri-
can way of life”.
In 1994, E. Wong acquired the Gálax and Todos stores, displacing them from the market.
This gave the company an enormous advantage over the rest of the field. But to safeguard the
company’s identity, it needed to assure the same quality of service in a greater number of stores,
and to this end it set up the Training Center for E. Wong Workers in 1996 (Calado, Castro, &
Lossio, 2004).
Wong’s biggest challenge in the 1990s lay in expanding the supermarket model to the
peripheries of Lima, which were still largely supplied through traditional channels. To do so,
it needed to lower prices, even if this meant a deterioration in service quality. To this end the
company created the Hipermercados Metro brand as a platform for selling staples at wholesale
prices, opening the first Metro supermarket in the working-class district of Chorrillos in 1992.
Later, more Metro supermarkets followed in working-class downtown neighbourhoods. But
the biggest milestone was the entry of Hipermercados Metro into the district of Independencia
in the north of Lima, as this marked the first time that a very low-income population – but
whose numbers equated to high aggregate demand – was included in the supermarket circuit.
The business was a success, and the supermarket contributed to the north of Lima’s ongoing
commercial development (Calado, Castro, & Lossio, 2004: 164). Moreover, the Wong group
was responsible for the expansion of supermarkets to all social sectors of the Peruvian popula-
tion, and not just in the city of Lima. This paved the way for the expansion of other Latin
American supermarket chains into Peru, which, somewhat ironically, ended up pushing the
Wong Group out of the supermarket business in 2007 – although the Wong and Metro brands
were retained by their new owners, Cencosud.

The expansion of supermarkets in Latin America, 1990–2000

This stage in the history of retailing is characterised by the departure of supermarkets, conveni-
ence stores, department stores, shopping malls, pharmacies and home improvement stores from
the middle- and upper-class neighbourhoods of Latin American cities. Shopping malls, for
example, have become one of the major urban landmarks, and a space of interaction for city
populations (Sassano, 2015).
Particularly striking is the progress made by supermarkets and convenience stores in seizing
large market shares from more traditional distribution channels such as market and bodegas.
This process can be explained by a combination of changes that took place in Latin American
societies between 1980 and 2000. Of particular note was the rise in the urban population, the
increasing entry of women to the workforce, the liberalisation of the food supply starting from
the 1990s and the growth of average per capita income at the beginning of the twenty-first
century (Reardon & Berdegué, 2002: 95).
The expansion of the sector has been accompanied by intense competition between domestic
companies, leading to a series of mergers and acquisitions. Moreover, the growth in the Latin

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American economy attracted foreign direct investment to the retail sector, especially in the case of
the largest economies in the region. Thus, major international chains such as Walmart, Carrefour
and Royal Ahold took advantage of the market concentration process initiated by local chains, and
ended up controlling the sector in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico (Reardon & Berdegué, 2002: 98).
Chilean retail companies are the exception to this process in that they managed not only to
compete successfully with the big transnational chains, but embarked upon their own regional
internationalisation process, establishing operations in the likes of Argentina and Peru. In this
section we focus on the Chilean case to understand how local companies responded to the chal-
lenge posed by a new process of globalisation.
The development of the retail sector in Chile was one of the most extensive in the region,
despite the comparatively small size of the market. This involved the emergence of a large
number of companies that had to compete fiercely with one another and develop competitive
advantages to stay afloat in the domestic market. Chilean retail companies then leveraged these
capacities to expand into other regional markets.
Chile was one of the first countries in Latin America to implement market reforms that
included openness to international markets, state deregulation, and privatisations. As a result,
Chilean companies underwent a restructuring process almost 20 years before their regional
counterparts. Thus, at a time when most Latin American companies were still adapting to the
liberal reforms of the 1990s, Chilean firms were already internationalising by expanding into
neighbouring countries, especially Argentina and Peru. These first attempts were not all that
successful, and in some cases the companies in question were forced to sell their investments to
US or European competitors.
As we have noted, the competition from foreign retail firms was very strong.Walmart entered
the Mexican market in 1991 and 4 years later expanded into Argentina and Brazil. Carrefour
also consolidated its market position in these two countries. Royal Ahold, for its part, partnered
with Grupo Velox of Argentina, which gave it directorial control of the Disco and Santa Isabel
supermarkets, allowing it to access the markets of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Peru (Calderón
Hoffmann, 2006: 158).
But the Chilean retailers successfully saw off the challenge posed by the expansion of these
international operators. In 1999, for example, the US company J.C. Penney sold its assets in
Chile to Almacenes París; while in 2001 Home Depot sold its operations in the country to local
rival Falabella; and in 2003 Carrefour offloaded its branches to D&S and Royal Ahold trans-
ferred its operations to Cencosud. For Calderón Hoffman, there are two main reasons for the
success of Chilean retail companies in this period.The first is the financial business lines of these
firms, and the second is the adoption of an integrated retail model (Calderón Hoffmann, 2006).
The development of financial retail by issuing credit cards to customers was one of the main
innovations of the Chilean retailers, serving as a means of financing their operations and gaining
customer loyalty. The success of these activities spurred companies to open their own financial
institutions, such as Banco Falabella (1998), Banco Ripley (2003) and Banco Paris (2004), which
allowed them to expand their business further. In turn, the construction of an integrated retail
mechanism was not as direct as the first process identified by Hoffman and was very closely
linked to the firms’ experiences of internationalisation.
Cencosud’s internationalisation process began in the 1980s when it started operations in
Argentina, leading to the creation in that country of the Jumbo chain of hypermarkets. But
more important was its construction of the Unicenter shopping mall in the 1990s. In 1993,
Cencosud introduced its line of home improvement stores, Easy, in Argentina and Chile simul-
taneously. For the rest of the decade, Cencosud concentrated its growth on the real estate sector
in Argentina, which would later allow the company to build and run the biggest shopping malls

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in that country. Moreover, in 2002 Cencosud took over Home Depot’s four Argentine branches,
and the firm took leadership of the country’s home improvement sector as a result. Meanwhile,
Falabella expanded more cautiously into the Argentine market by establishing branches of its
department stores in Mendoza, San Juan and Córdova. Its arrival in Buenos Aires came with the
opening of a branch in Unicenter. But Falabella’s most successful internationalisation experi-
ence was its incursion into the Peruvian market in 1995, the outcome of which prompted its
domestic rival, Ripley, to open stores in Peru 2 years later (Calderón Hoffmann, 2006: 161–162).
The development of the Chilean retailers was stalled by the difficulties experienced by the
Argentine and Peruvian economies around 2000. According to Calderón Hoffman, this forced
the Chilean retail companies to diversify – as opposed to specialising – into various sectors, which
allowed them to develop synergies to strengthen their businesses and reinvest abroad once the situ-
ation improved.Thus, they gradually developed a retail circuit around six fundamental lines of busi-
ness: department stores, supermarkets, home improvement stores, banking, credit card administration
and real estate operations, generally manifested in the construction of shopping malls (2006: 169).
As we have seen, each of the stages in the history of retailing in Latin America were charac-
terised by episodes in which companies or consumers reacted to cultural and economic stimuli
from outside the region. In this section, unlike in the others, the emphasis has not been on the
negotiation of ideas of modernity as a starting point, but on how Latin American companies
developed successful strategies to compete internationally.

Conclusion
Throughout this brief history of retail in Latin America, we have seen how department stores,
supermarkets and shopping malls became spaces in which ideas of modernity were negotiated
with local traditions in a globalised world. The European immigrants who gave rise to modern
retailing in Latin America, or the descendants of Chinese immigrants who revolutionised Peru’s
supermarkets, acted as intermediaries between these tensions.
During the stages of emergence and consolidation of retailing in Latin America, the process
of acquiring techniques and devising commercial strategies owed much to the intuition of the
business owners and managers. Using family contacts or friendships abroad, attending confer-
ences, going on field trips, joining international associations: trial and error were the most com-
mon methods of learning about the business. Moreover, one of the main challenges, above all
during the early decades, lay in getting customers used to the self-service system.
Finding mechanisms to expand the reach of “modern” retailing among the population con-
stitutes a constant tension. Vertical integration at the start of the last century was one of the
mechanisms used to lower the cost of products, and in the first years of this century, store credit
cards have been a common method employed. But it was the population and economic changes
in Latin American countries that enabled the expansion of supermarkets and department stores
into the working-class sectors towards the end of the 1990s.
Finally, a recent phenomenon is the concentration of the retail sector and the preponderance
of transnational operators in the region, the counterpoint of which has been the regional expan-
sion of Chilean retailers through the integration of different branches of the business.

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 26
CARAVANSERAI TO
CARREFOUR
The retail history of the
Middle East, 600–present

Omar Foda

The burning of the Arcadia Mall and the looting of Carrefour in Cairo sit as peripheral events
in the January 2011 movement in Egypt (Amar 2011; Press 2011; Chmaytelli 2015). The move-
ment is remembered for the mass mobilisation of Egyptians in the country’s squares, the iconic
chants and signs and the steadfastness of the people in the face of tanks and tear gas. If any fire
is associated with the movement it is the burning of the Napoleonic Institut d’Egypte (Press
2011). Nevertheless, the burning and looting of these venues in 2011 evokes the last time Cairo
burned in 1952. In that year, as Nancy Reynolds details in A City Consumed: Urban Commerce,
the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt, the fire-starters and looters targeted many
European-style department stores and retail venues. The targeting was symbolic of the greater
politicisation of retail during the decolonisation of Egypt. One could make the same proclama-
tion about the targeting of Arcadia Mall and Carrefour. It signalled that retail and its venues were
not collateral damage to the political happenings in Egypt, but were politicised as much as the
squares, mosques and government buildings.
The politicisation of the retail sector in the Middle East, however, has not been limited to
Egypt or the colonial/post-colonial period. From the very foundations of Islam until the present
day, buying and selling, and the venues where these transactions took place, have been insepa-
rable from the politics that surrounded them. This connection manifested itself in government
regulation of retail spaces, countrywide boycott of products and active scenes of violence in
retail venues. As I argue, there was never a time where retail was not a concern of those ruling
and those hoping to rule.This connection was only amplified by the fact that mass consumption,
and its attendant ideologies, erupted in a colonial context in the Middle East (Cohen 2004).
This political reality means that by analysing the typology of retail markets in the Middle
East, we not only see who was selling what, and to whom, but grasp the historical interaction
of state and society. Since retail markets generally abide by the rule of “sell what people want to
buy”, they offer a more honest look at the reality on the ground in the Middle East during the
pre-modern, early modern, colonial and post-colonial eras.
Nevertheless, there are a few caveats with this study, which through a four-part analysis
aims to map retail markets in the Middle East from 600 to the present. First, when I refer
to the Middle East, I am referring to the area south of the Danube and north of Aden and
between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indus river. Second, the topic of coverage is so large that

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I can only discuss general trends and concepts. It goes without saying that exceptions exist
for most everything discussed here. Third, the sources for this history are still being discov-
ered. Much remains obscure, and perhaps will be forever so. This is especially the case with
rural retailers, whose markets have generally remained outside the purview of study. Finally,
the definition of retail I use is broad and applies to any venue that traded or sold goods to
individual consumers.

Retail in the Islamic World, 600–1750

For the uninitiated, it may come as a surprise that the Quran, the foundational Islamic text, deals
with such a mundane matter as trade, but this was standard practice for a religion that aimed to
guide its followers in both worship and day-to-day activities. The Quran engages with the con-
cept of trade on two levels. First, it frequently employs the vocabulary of the market in its teach-
ings (O’Meara n.d.). For example, ‘We shall set up scales of justice for the day of judgement’
(Q 21:47) (O’Meara n.d.). Second, it lays out some of the basics of a religiously valid transaction.
The outlines of sale laid out in the Quran were supplemented by the hadith, the collection
of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The hadith contains
pertinent sayings on all variety of business-related matters, including: sales and trade; hiring;
transference of a debt; business by proxy; loans; freezing of property; bankruptcy; and mortgag-
ing (Bukhārī 1987).
From these two bases, an entire ruling structure emerged that blurred religious and secular
authority, as did the legal system, Islamic Law (shari’a), that supported it (Constable 1994, p. 113).
As a result, Muslim rulers from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, in one way or other,
were charged with the maintenance and protection of the suq (market, bazaar). The nature of
their intervention could take varied forms. Leaders could step in to protect local food supplies,
keep an eye on foreigners, prevent the export of certain goods or just to raise revenue (Consta-
ble 1994, p. 112).The involvement of the government in the market was best embodied in the
position of the muhtasib, the market inspector, who was to make the relationship between retailer
and buyer a fair and honest one.
The position of muhtasib was a feature of all Muslim empires from the eighth until the
nineteenth century. Somewhere between a judge and chief of police, he would monitor prices
and reprimand those who overcharged the rate set by the market. His methods of enforce-
ment entailed beatings, parading offenders through the streets, confiscating faulty goods and
even banishing repeat offenders from the markets. He was a government official, chosen for his
outstanding moral probity and knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), although, unlike a
qadi ( judge), mastery was not required. He worked with the judges and police and would often
have deputies to cover markets that were too large for one individual. However, his jurisdiction
and interests were limited to the urban markets and even there, he did not have the power to
determine prices. (Cahen et al. n.d.).
Under the Ottomans and the Persians, he took on additional functions like the enforcement
of fixed prices (Turk. narh, Per. tas’ir ajnas list of fixed prices), which came either from a direct
government order or through agreement with artisans (Floor 1987). While the muhtasib and
the narh regulated prices, it was the institution of the guild that was the strongest regulator of
artisans and retailers in the period from 1500 to 1750 (Faroqhi 2009, p. 31). Guilds appeared
sometime during the fourteenth century in Persia and in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century
in the Ottoman Empire and were involved in the production, marketing and taxing of crafts in
urban areas (Rafeq 2008, p. 109). Guilds were generally organised hierarchically, with the head-
man (Tr. kethüda/kahya, Ar. sheikh, Per. kadkoda) at the top. Below the headman was the master

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 Omar Foda

(al-ustadh in Persian, shortened into usta, or al-mu‘allim in Arabic), the journeyman (al-sani‘ ) and
the apprentice (al-ajir or al-mubtadi‘ ) (Rafeq 2008, p. 108).
In Ottoman domains in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guilds, in response to the
greater cost of opening shops and less demand for their products, tried to limit the number of
shops opened through the gedik system. A gedik, which meant “gap” or “slot”, was a heritable
‘workshop along with its contents, such as tools, instruments, raw materials and perhaps finished
goods and the right to do business in this shop’ (Faroqhi 2009, p. 119). It typically passed from
father to son, or the top journeyman if the master craftsman had no son. It was a court-granted
right and could not be bought or sold (Faroqhi 2009, p. 119). A similar institution appeared,
called the haqq-e bonica, in Persia in the Qajar period for similar reasons, but was not as wide-
spread as the gedik (Floor 1987).

Types of spaces
The muhtasib, the guilds, and the gedik were primarily urban institutions, but retail markets in
the period from 600 to 1750 in the Islamic world went beyond the cities. Retail markets were
generally organised in a solar central-place system (Clancy-Smith, 1994, p. 28; Barbara K. Larson
1985, p. 498). To understand what that means in the Middle Eastern context, it useful to map a
typology from the rural exterior to the urban centre.
The terms suq, çarşı and bazaar roughly correspond to the English word “market”. They, like
the English term, could cover a vast array of places where commercial business happened, and, in
some instances, even covered a single shop. Although there was a significant amount of overlap,
the terms corresponded to the ruling language. Thus in Arabic speaking domains, suq predomi-
nated, in Ottoman domains, çarşı, and in Persianate domains, bazaar.
The simplest type of market, and the one located in the smallest rural population centres
was the periodic market. Staged on private property, in exchange for a fee, it would meet on a
designated day of the week and would be organised by product. Friday markets staged near the
village mosque were quite popular because of their ability to draw people together, but these
types of markets were not exclusive to that day nor to that locale. In fact, nearby markets would
often co-ordinate their schedules so that a particular area could have a market every day of the
week (Mohieddin 1998, pp. 302–303). They mainly provided the rural peasantry an opportu-
nity to exchange locally produced agricultural products and household essentials (Larson 1985,
p. 501). Besides peasants selling to other peasants, there were also probably Bedouins, professional
village traders and local merchants.
As we move to a more densely populated area like a village or a town, the market maintained
similar features (periodic, on private property, organised by product and dominated by the peas-
ant), but everything was on a larger scale. In addition, the market featured products produced
by local artisans (and guilds, after they appeared) and imported goods. These markets were also
where agricultural goods would start moving up the chain towards urban centres. Merchants
would move goods from these markets towards the provincial town, which sat at the centre of
these small markets in a solar pattern (Larson 1985, p. 501).
As we move from the town, but before we reach the city, it was the khan that dominated.This
was a one to two-story enclosed structure with fixed walls, a monumental gate, and an open
courtyard with a water source. It was variably called a khan, funduq, samsara, wakala, hawsh and
the most familiar caravanserai, and was an essential feature of commerce in the Islamic world
between 600 and 1750 (Bianquis et al. n.d.). The khans dotted the trade routes of the Islamic
world in the intermediary spaces between centres of populations. They served as the junction
point between rural and foreign production and urban consumption (Elisséeff n.d.). In this

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capacity, their most critical role was as a safe haven and way station for caravans and other over-
land traders. Their solid walls, limited entrances, and access to water meant that they could be
closed off from the surrounding world, keeping the goods, horses and merchants safe in isolated
areas.
Although they were vital to the flow of goods through the paths of trade in the Islamic
world, khans were also a feature of its urban spaces. In the city, the khan was, as opposed to
a way point, the endpoint or a depot (Elisséeff n.d.). There, a large amount of merchandise
could be sold either semi-wholesale or retail and distributed to the markets throughout the
city. Depending on the city, it could be situated at the gates or inside of them, but there was
always a connection to the world outside. The features that made it an ideal safe haven on
trade routes made it an excellent segregation point for the rulers of the city. They were a
place where rulers could tax or tariff goods, isolate undesirables or house foreign merchants
and their goods (Elisséeff n.d.).They were also a place where muhtasib could verify the quality
of the goods to be sold. The use of the market as an administrative site in the city paralleled
the rural markets, which were also places to collect taxes and perform other administrative
duties (Mohieddin 1998, p. 308). Beyond the khan, the urban retail scene in the Islamic world
from 600 to 1750 was characterised by two common institutions: permanent booths and
covered markets.
These urban markets, would be under the watch of the muhtasib and had their own guilds.
However, this would change as the Ottoman Empire and Persia were fully integrated into the
European world market in the eighteenth century. This integration would mark the rise of the
merchants as the true masters of the market. This is not to say that they did not have significant
power, especially with regards to prices and goods sold, prior to this point (Hanna 1998). But
these merchants existed within the confines of the governmental systems of the Islamic world,
confines they would break, with the help of European powers, after 1750.

Retail Colonialism, 1750–1950

The solar organisation of the retail markets in the Middle East changed after 1750, when they
were integrated into the European world economy (Kasaba 1988, pp. 11–35). The most sig-
nificant development of this integration was that control of the markets moved from the hands
of the government into the hands of the merchants. This transition, a defining feature of the
period from 1750 to 1950 and one that was happening organically in America at roughly the
same time, was the result of the free trade imperialism of the European powers, summarised
by the phrase, ‘trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary’ (Gal-
lagher and Robinson 1953, p. 13; Leach 1994; Howard 2015, pp. 1–51). Across the Middle East,
European merchants, and the governments that backed them, sought cheaper sources of raw
materials, new locales for investment and new markets for their goods. The keystone to these
actions was securing favourable trade agreements between the governments. The clearest and
most widespread example were the capitulations (imtiyazat) (Wansbrough et al. n.d.). These
were trade agreements the Ottoman and Persian governments, in their early years, made with
foreign merchants to ensure safe passage and trade. As their geopolitical position weakened in
relation to Europe, these concessions (reduced taxes and tariffs, special legal status, etc.) grew
to be more favourable for Europeans. They were then formalised in treaties, the Treaty of Balta
Liman (1838, Ottoman) and the Treaty of Turkomānčāy (1828, Qajars). Part of this process was
the expansion of the populations covered by this protection from just European merchants and
ambassadors to protégés – residents who had acquired, sometime through purchase, the rights
(berat) granted to Europeans (van den Boogert n.d.). Once these trade deals were signed, foreign

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merchants, those with foreign status, and even well-connected local merchants, became the real
drivers of the markets in the Middle East.
The primacy of merchants significantly altered the reality of retail markets in the Middle
East. Most importantly, it changed the rural-urban market structure. Where previously it con-
sisted of small rural markets circled around entrepôts, which then circled major cities, it became
dendritic.This meant that rural markets became bulking centres for raw material exports, which
were then sent to one of the few major cities of the territory regardless of distance (Tunis,
Algiers, Cairo, Oran, Istanbul, etc.). As for the small periodic markets, they became more inter-
connected with each other, but decoupled from these larger markets.They ultimately came only
to serve the subsistence needs of the peasantry (Larson 1985, p. 516). This change in market
connectivity was intertwined in the physical restructuring of the territories, a process funded by
reforming Middle Eastern rulers and European powers, but directed by merchants.The transfor-
mation took the form of building infrastructure to better connect internal bulking centres to the
major cities and the external markets and of reshaping, rebuilding or reorienting the major cities.
Infrastructure building, in this period, mainly concerned constructing roads, railroads, bridges
and ports. For reforming rulers, especially the Ottomans, this infrastructure work was meant
to “reformulate mechanisms of governance” (Çelik 2008, p. 69). They hoped to have better
control of their provinces through a more mobile military, and better transport of goods inside
and outside of the empire. Imperial powers, on the other hand, saw this infrastructure building
as a method of enrichment, conquest, and colonisation (Çelik 2008, p. 69). As for the urban
restructuring of this period, the European powers and reforming rulers were guided by Haus-
manian ideals of cleanliness and sanitation and the hope of better movement through the city,
especially for new technologies like the tram. They viewed the market areas as prime targets of
“modernization”. They hoped to replace the “traditional” suq, as they called it, with its narrow
passageways and labyrinthine design, with wide boulevards and squares dotted with arcades
(Çelik 2008, p. 72).
The difference in aims, plus technologic superiority, meant that European powers were more
effective in their infrastructure projects. They were also playing with a stacked deck, as much
of the reformers’ infrastructure building was either financed by foreign powers, or carried out
by companies that had little allegiance to the state. In fact, this “modernisation” work of Mid-
dle Eastern reformers often set the territory on the path of colonisation or total loss of fiscal
autonomy, as it was underwritten by European powers and their merchants (Pamuk 1987). We
see this pattern in the colonisation of Tunisia (France, 1881), Egypt (Britain, 1882) and Morocco
(1884, Spain; and 1904, France).
When these territories came under European control, the odds were stacked even further in
the favour of merchants. Thus we see the outflanking of the urban guilds, who they deemed an
impediment to their work (Faroqhi 2009, p. 119). We also see a change in agricultural business,
leading to the privatisation of land, the growth of large absentee landholders and merchants
making profits as middlemen and landholders themselves (Shields 2008, pp. 48–54). Interestingly,
the prominence of merchants also worked against the concept of the dual city, i.e. a city with
a “modern” European centre cordoned off from a “backwards” native periphery, that framed
much colonial architecture.The most severe example of the desire for a dual colonial structure is
French colonialism in North Africa. In fact, this dual city was a distinctive feature of the French
colonial experience in the Middle East (Reynolds 2012, pp. 18–19).
Nevertheless, the urban retail markets themselves contravened this duality and were char-
acterised by the bleeding of the two together. Albert Camus noted, dismissively, that the shops
of Oran combined ‘all the bad taste of Europe and the Orient’ (Horne 2006, pp. 47–48). With
respect to the goods in the market, “foreign” goods would not be limited to the “foreign” sectors

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of town and would make their way in to the “traditional” markets of the city (Çelik 1986,
p. 160).Thus you would find socks, shoes, buttons and tarbushes in the markets of the “medieval”
city. Likewise, upscale and “European” shoppers, who were supposed to be segregated in their
sections, would frequent the suq based on better prices and the presence of certain “authentic”
and “traditional” goods.
However, it was not a one-way process.The foreign retail markets could also not keep out the
elements of the native markets. Native-style markets would appear adjacent to European-style
markets and serve a complementary role (Srougo 2011). In addition, flea markets and informal
markets, supplied by smuggling or counterfeits, offered the latest styles, lower prices and the
ability to create a modern look on a budget (Reynolds 2012, pp. 41–46). Even the assumed
enclave of the Western residents and their imitators, the department store, was not exempt.With
its location in the heart of the city, its doors were open to more than foreigners and the elite, but
all residents. Residents who, if they had the money, could shop at these department stores for
special occasions like weddings and the ’ids (Reynolds 2012, p. 71–72).
This mixing was also seen in the ownership of retail venues. While there were a few venues
that were easily identifiable as either foreign or native, that is, exclusively owned and run by
colonists or long-tenured Muslims, many more reflected a mixed transnational reality. It was
particularly the migrants and non-Muslim populations that played with this boundary. The
stereotype of this group was the retail merchant who used his foreign status (what at first was a
berat, and came to be called protégé status) to amass a large fortune, and who participated in the
colonisation of the country (Schreier 2012). Nevertheless, some of these merchants, especially
the non-Muslim populations, felt strong attachment to their territories and were fully enmeshed
in them (Miller 2011).
This period, termed the first globalisation, also brought a large working and lower-class
foreign-born population to the Middle East (Kozma et al. 2015).This group joined the working
and lower-class population of non-Muslims, who were more concerned with making a living
than grand projects of colonisation. The retail venues they established or worked in reflected a
hybrid identity.These were ventures that may have sold Western-style goods and may have been
located in Western cordons of the city, but were ventures that had no real connection to foreign
powers and carried markers (names, staff and products) that separated them from these pow-
ers. For example, the Circurel Department store in Cairo was founded by Sephardic Jews from
Izmir, who, by 1947, considered themselves Egyptian citizens (Reynolds 2012, p. 58).
But beyond the passive resistance of cultural mixing and boundary crossing, retail markets
also became venues of active resistance. There were hints of this change prior to World War I.
Examples include the 1891 nationwide tobacco protest in Iran in the face of the government’s
concessions to the British and the 1908 boycott of Austrian goods in the Ottoman Empire to
protest the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Keddie 2006, pp. 61–63; Reynolds 2012, p. 84).
This trend grew as colonialism engulfed the region after the end of World War I. The end of the
war brought the divvying up the Ottoman Empire and marked the appearance of the Wilso-
nian rhetoric of the self-determination of nations. This trend spurred on burgeoning nationalist
movements across the Middle East and the world. A distinguishing feature of these anti-colonial
movements was boycotts (Breen 2004, p. 20; Reynolds 2012, p. 82).They were, in fact, one of the
only ways that colonial subjects could fight the power of colonial states. Boycotts could take the
form of abstaining from foreign goods or buying local (Shoham 2013). These anti-consumerist
actions popularised the idea that all products had a nationality and that this nationality should
play a role in their purchase (Reynolds 2012, p. 83). Retail and retail choices were not value
neutral, but could be part of a larger struggle to guarantee the future or identity of a country
(Shoham 2013).

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As a result, there appeared a new entrant into the retail typology of the colonial Middle East:
the national retailer.This retailer and his success, in opposition to the foreign retailer, would help
build the country and strike at foreign powers. These retailers also reflected a new assertion of
national identity, as their consumers were not broad categories, but citizens of a country (Peter
2004). This push for nationalist retailers not only led to the establishment of new “national”
venues, but led others to rebrand with a “national” name or some just to stock and promote
national products as a way to capitalise on this new feeling. The result of these movements in
the period from the 1920s until the 1950s was that wealthy locals (especially Muslims) entered
into partnerships with foreign entrepreneurs or protégés to claim some of the profits of the
retail market while attaching a national name to their product (Vitalis 1995). Likewise, many
protégés shifted the identity of their establishments or the products that they sold towards the
national. This especially comes through in their advertisements, which grew tremendously in
this period (Shechter 2005). Thus we see advertisements for Egyptian socks, Syrian textiles and
Jewish bananas (Reynolds 2011; Shoham 2013).
However, these actions did not represent a radical disjuncture with the preceding period.Yes,
there was more space for local industry, “national” brands, and local entrepreneurs, but its effects
were mainly limited to the upper classes. Thus it was men like Ahmed Farghaly Pasha, a scion
of an Egyptian cotton family, or Fu’ad Saba, a Palestinian businessman who benefited tremen-
dously (Seikaly 2016, pp. 28–29). There were also gains for the urban middle classes as native
workers were given positions over the foreign (Shechter 2006, pp. 104–110). How much change
this actually produced in the workforce is up for debate as the very definitions of “native” and
“foreign” were being defined and redefined in this period (Foda 2014). Regardless, large swaths
of the populations, especially the majority of the rural population were excluded from this uplift.
By the end of the colonial period, we are left with a retail market that reflected the economic
reality of the colonial Middle East. In many urban areas there was a well-developed hybrid retail
sector where consumers could produce a distinctively “native” style that was a mélange of the
best of the boutiques and the suq. These consumers were likewise drawn from a developing
middle class and well-established upper class. Nevertheless, there remained a large number of
urban and rural poor.
Both middle and upper-class individuals recognised the economic inequity that colonialism
had brought to the Middle East, and they both had solutions. The men of capital believed that
the nation would be saved by the growth of an economy that they would lead, a free market
economy guided by capital accumulation and consumer moderation (Seikaly 2016, p. 46). The
middle class, who would come to control the governments of decolonisation, would see it
another way. Governments would develop the economy, and the nation itself, by excising colo-
nialists, predatory merchants and businessmen, and smashing the control of large landholders.

The retail of developmentalism, 1950–1990

The boycotts of the late colonial era transformed consumption, and thus retail, into a battlefield.
It is no surprise then that in the decolonising Middle East, retail, among other things, would be
a target of efforts to slough off the colonial yoke. One of the first and most violent examples is
detailed by Nancy Reynolds in A City Consumed. As she describes it, some of the most promi-
nent targets for the looting and fire-starting of the 1952 Cairo fire were retail shops (Reynolds
2011, pp. 186–187).
This ire represented the full enunciation of the ideologies that underlay the previous era’s
boycotts, that retailers, especially those carrying “foreign” names and “foreign” products were
embodiments of the exploitation of the colonial powers. This feeling was especially powerful in

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the urban middle class, who would carry through much of the fight against colonisation in the
Middle East and would take control of the seats of the power in many post-colonial govern-
ments (Eppel 2004, p. 152).
The policies of post-colonial governments charted a course of developmentalism. As Joel
Beinin describes it, this was a World Bank and IMF-supported ‘economic strategy based on
import-substitution industrialization: replacing imported consumer goods with domestically
manufactured products targeted to local markets and protecting uncompetitive “infant indus-
tries” with high tariff barriers’ (Beinin 2016, p. 41).This strategy could also include ‘government
redistribution of large landholdings to increase the purchasing power of poor’ and middling
farmers, and state-led economic development through investment in key economic sectors,
public utilities and industry (Beinin 2016, p. 41).
Developmentalism’s most prominent example was Arab Socialism and its figurehead Gamal
Abdel Nasser. Socialism, especially of the Arab kind, was very appealing to a region that looked
to chart a third course in an increasingly bi-polar world. This appeal was only increased by
Nasser’s strong stance in the Suez crisis (Vandewalle 2006, p. 80). It is then not surprising that
we saw some variety of this ideology in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq and Syria
(Issawi 1982, p. 180). However, developmentalism was not only limited to those countries
that committed to Arab socialism. Many of its policies were features of the economic initia-
tives of Israel, Turkey, Iran, Jordan and the Gulf countries in the 1950s, 60s and 70s (Issawi
1982, p. 180). Iran deserves special notice, because its developmentalism, under Khomeini,
was covered with an Islamic reformism and anti-western, anti-consumerist ideology (Webb
et al. 2005)
In the eyes of post-colonial governments, retailers, especially those with the foreign taint, did
little but extract precious resources from the native population in exchange for non-essential
and “foreign” goods. It is then no surprise that these retailers were swept up in the government
nationalisations that were a feature of this era (Addi 2006). Nevertheless, these post-colonial
governments recognised that their plans of import substitution would only work with concomi-
tant growth in the consumption of the goods that they were producing. From this realisation
emerged a new retail entity in the Middle East, the government retailer.
In its most ideal form, this would be a retailer, which was part of a large government organi-
sation or collective, that sold the consumer goods of another government industry. For example,
in Egypt, the nationalised department store Sidnawi could sell Ideal brand washers, refrigerators,
etc., whose producer was part of a larger economic organisation for consumer goods, which
was under the control of the Egyptian government (Abaza 2006a, pp. 92–93). If there was not
a large store to sell these goods, then the government would create one, like the Souk el-Fellah
(Peasant’s Market) in Algeria (Troin 1990, p. 90). This type of retailer was the full realisation of
the “national” retailer from the colonial era.
There was also another government-controlled retailer, the state co-operative. They would
draw their products from government-planned agriculture and industry. These, often in com-
bination with rationing, were meant to make sure that the population, one that was primar-
ily agrarian and poor, received the “essentials”. What these essentials were varied, but would
typically include foodstuffs and things like petrol, soap, sugar, etc. (Amuzegar 1993, p. 79; Abaza
2006a, pp. 153–154). Another aspect of this social net, which affected not only government
co-operatives but small retailers more generally, was subsidies. These subsidies which set the
prices of certain commodities were meant to ensure that all people received their “daily bread”
(Amuzegar 1993, p. 79). Nevertheless, the small retailers who existed before developmentalism,
persisted afterwards as they carried the badge of “authenticity” and were not big enough to draw
the eye of the government. This meant that the small urban shops, peddlers, and rural periodic

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markets that existed before remained relatively unchanged. Nevertheless, government products
replaced the foreign products that may have been present, and any staples sold were subsidised.
A problem with these government retailers, and one of the problems with import substitu-
tion, was that the success of a company was viewed through how much it produced, not how
effectively it was able to meet the demands of a population (Shechter 2008, p. 576). Simultane-
ously, demand for products was growing globally as the US led the world into an era of mass
consumption in the 1950s (Schayegh 2012).
It was the informal market that filled in for this demand. For example, in Egypt we have
the appearance of a social institution called the tujjar al-shunta (bag merchants). These were
primarily woman peddlers who sold smuggled fabrics, clothes, perfumes, crèmes, pullovers and
underwear at affordable prices (Abaza 2006a, p. 123). However, it was not only in Egypt, as there
were examples of strong informal markets in Algeria, Jordan, Turkey and several other countries
(Doan 1992; Varcin 2000). Informal retail was part of the informal structures that appeared
throughout the Middle East in response to another aspect of developmentalism in the region,
the ruling party’s domination of the state ( Joffé 2002).
Informal markets and subsidies would continue, and be bolstered, as the region made a tran-
sition away from developmentalism. The first step away from this was the 1967 Arab defeat,
which discredited Pan-Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. This defeat, however, was a mas-
sive boon for the Israeli economy, as they opened up new markets and cheap labour by occupy-
ing Gaza and the West Bank (Owen 1998, p. 181). They also saw a massive increase in defence
spending and American aid, which both helped fuel the economy.
Nevertheless, Israel suffered, like European countries and America, in the 1973–5 recession
and the subsequent period of stagflation (Beinin 2016, p. 60). This set of events would push the
World Bank and the IMF, which were guided by America and Western Europe, away from
developmentalism as a supportable strategy. They declared it a failure and moved towards the
idea that reorienting towards foreign markets with a focus on exports would save the countries
of the global south.
The countries in the Middle East and North Africa made some initial moves to the new
world consensus, but they did not carry out any of the truly drastic measures of “structural read-
justment” (massively reducing government budgets, privatising public institutions and remov-
ing trade exemptions and tariffs) as they were buttressed by the oil boom of the 1970s. The
boom supported both the oil-rich countries (The Gulf Countries, Iraq, Algeria, etc.) and the
oil-poor, who relied heavily on the remittances of workers in these oil-rich countries (Beinin
2016, pp. 58–60). The hallmarks of developmentalism would continue until, and sometimes
after, the oil bust of the 1980s, which would force many of the countries of the region to turn
to the world financial institutions (The World Bank and IMF) and accede to the “Washington
Consensus” and its requisite Economic Reform and Structural Adjustment Program (ERSAP)
(Beinin 2016, pp. 94–95).
It is at this point that the retail markets in the Middle East and North Africa started to move
away from government retail towards neoliberal retail. This transition to neoliberalism meant
a reintegration of retail markets into a global free-trade economy (Springer et al. 2016). It also
entailed governments ceding control of the markets, over which they had just had gained con-
trol, back to merchants.

Neoliberal retail, 1990–present

The end of developmentalism and acceptance of the Washington Consensus was meant to “free”
the markets of the Middle East and North Africa. It did, in the sense that it opened up the

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Middle East to foreign direct investment, eased the process for the establishment of private
businesses and lowered the trade barriers of the countries in the Middle East. But what did this
mean for retail markets?
The changes are best encapsulated in three additions to the typology of the retail market.
These were the retail chain, the hypermarket and the shopping centre, which were not present
in the Middle East prior to the 1980s and 90s (Vignal 2007, p. 69). Retail chains were outposts
of a typically foreign brand, i.e., McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Cinnabon. The hypermarket, on the
other hand, was a large store that housed everything under one roof, a one-stop shop. Walmart
was probably the most famous example of a hypermarket, but it was Carrefour, in conjunction
with Majid al-Futaim (a Dubai-based holding company), that was probably the most famous in
the region (Elsheshtawy 2006, p. 242).
The shopping centre was a structure that housed large stores, even department stores, selling
a wide variety of goods and services. The shopping centre typically contained retail chains and
hypermarkets. Each of these venues differentiated themselves from the “traditional” markets
with their claims of cleanliness (tiled floors, glass windows), organisation (well-marked signage
and directions), safety (video cameras and security) and ease of movement (wide thoroughfares,
the presence of escalators and elevators) (al-Otaibi 1990; Markowitz and Uriely 2004, p. 28;
Abaza 2006a, p. 274). In addition, these venues often would come as part of larger government
projects of “beautification” (Singerman 2007).
Despite the fact that most of these venues were either western brands or Western-style ven-
ues, they typically functioned through license agreements and direct investment relationships
between local and regional entrepreneurs and foreign investors (Vignal 2007, p. 69). In this
respect, we see similarities with the pre-developmentalism era, especially when we consider
that the group of local and regional entrepreneurs was comprised of the economic elite, gov-
ernmental cronies and wealthy Gulf merchants. The other similarity is that these stores were
aimed at urban and suburban middle and upper-class shoppers. These goals fit with the general
economic trends of the post-developmental Middle East. Governments “freed” the markets, but
at the expense of economic equality and the social support programs of the developmentalism
era (Shechter 2009).
The results of this reality were starkly portrayed in the suburbs. Here shopping centres, filled
with chains and hypermarkets, sat near exclusive suburban gated developments. They were only
accessible through cars and thus presented one of the most exclusive retail locations in the Mid-
dle East (Abaza 2006b, p. 205). These venues were in sharp contrast to the periodic markets that
existed on the peripheries of the city (Singerman 2007).
Bearing a striking similarity to the periodic markets that had been a feature of rural retail
since pre-modern times, these markets served the low-income populations living in the infor-
mal housing on the edges of the city.Their resemblance to the rural market was not coincidental,
but represented a distinct feature of urbanisation in the post-1980 Middle East. The majority
entering the city and remaining in its periphery were rural people looking for greater opportu-
nities in the face of the suffering agricultural sectors of the economy.
However, it would be incorrect to conclude that the introduction of these retail institutions
created a new dual society. In a manner similar to what we saw prior to the 1950s, the retail
market on the ground was both a site of cultural hybridisation and active resistance (Marr 2012,
pp. 358–359). First, these shopping centres and hypermarkets did not replace the retail markets
that existed before (Abdelghani 2013, p. 246). Rather, consumers incorporated them into their
other retail habits. Each historical locus of retail, the suq, the colonial market, the subsidised
government retailer, carried associations and identities that a consumer performed when he or
she entered (Vicdan 2015).

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Second, as these new shopping centres became part of the urban and suburban fabric, peri-
odic markets grew up around them (Abaza 2006a, p. 258).Their product offerings were comple-
mentary or competitive with those offered in the mall – cellphones, entertainment devices and
other electronics alongside clothes and other dry goods – but much more affordable (Ilahiane
and Sherry 2008). The organisation of these informal markets resembled the rural retail mar-
kets, and contravened the government’s “modernization” projects for their cities (Abaza 2006a,
p. 258). They were part of the growth in the informal sector that neoliberalism brought to the
Middle East (Doan 1992).
The ruralisation of the urban retail market was matched by the urbanisation of the rural
markets (Troin 1990, p. 88). The periodic market remained the primary way that the rural
populace acquired its consumer goods. However, these periodic markets grew to carry not only
agricultural livestock and produce, but cheap imported dry goods (clothes, toys, appliances, etc.),
arriving from urban centres (Troin 1990, p. 88). These markets also remained important points
of local political organisation and social regulation (Mohieddin 1998, p. 309). In addition to the
presence of imported goods in these rural markets, another significant change was that there
were more permanent shops in rural towns and the in-between spaces between cities. These
shops typically sold imported goods, but of a higher quality than those in the periodic markets
(Mohieddin 1998, p. 308)
But it was not only on the outsides of the markets and cities, where the local population
asserted themselves in the face of new retail realities. Since many of these shopping centres and
supermarkets were urban they witnessed what Jillian Schwedler and Rodney Collins term trans-
versals (Schwedler 2010). These shopping centres, as well as the periodic markets that formed
around them, had porous boundaries between “foreign” and “native”, which Middle Eastern
residents of all social levels traversed. Their placement in the city centre meant that to keep the
“wrong” people out was difficult, if not impossible.
Beyond population demographics, there was also the growing presence of Islam within these
new shopping venues. As the region abandoned developmentalism for the neoliberal market
orientation, it also suffered an identity crisis. The middle-class modernity that had been the
dominant discourse since the late nineteenth century and saw its apotheosis in Arab social-
ism, was no longer workable in a post-developmental Middle East (Shechter 2008, p. 578).
The policies that undergirded the middle class were slashed or under attack and its ideologues
were impoverished, imprisoned or exiled. Although the governments pushed Middle Eastern
countries towards a market orientation, this move was not typically met with the same ideologi-
cal support that developmentalism was. Most governments after 1970 were ideologically very
flexible and more concerned with their continued rule of the country, and profits from it, than
articulating strong positions.
Into this void entered another take on modernity that had been simmering since the 1920s,
but had been pushed aside by Arab nationalism and socialism – Islamic reformism (Starrett
1998). This Islamic modernity pushed Islamisation as the solution to the troubling realities of
the Middle East after the 1980s: income disparities, the disassembling of the social safety net and
repressive governments (Göle 2000). This Islamic modernity was not generally anti-capitalist,
socialist or isolationist (Shechter 2011). Rather it meant to show how Islam could solve the ills
of the new global market economy while also allowing countries to enjoy its benefits. It did not
argue with the ends of market orientation, merely the means.
This ideology was helped in many ways by the success of Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. The
Saudi ruling regime, which was heavily imbricated with the Wahhabi sect of Islam, one of the
earliest and most severe reformist movements, did much to present a workable model of an
Islamic capitalist economy. This ability to provide a template was especially clear in their early

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treatment of retail venues. Shopping centres, hypermarkets and other retail venues were at the
vanguard of Saudi Arabian commercial evolution and urbanisation. However, they only entered
under the terms of the government, who controlled the purse strings. This meant that they
would be internationally structured and follow the latest trends in retail architecture, but also
bear local – traditional names, match the local daily pace – shops closed for an afternoon break
as well as prayer breaks – and facilitate state regulation of halal and price (Shechter 2011, p. 379).
Although they would soon come to be one of the few public spaces Saudi women could inhabit,
they were also the homes to the semi-official morality police and other community gatekeepers
that kept them as places of enforcement of strict religious observance (Shechter 2011, p. 379).
Saudi Arabia provided a ready model for those who looked to reconcile the new global world
and their desire for an Islamic life. It was a model that many would witness firsthand as Saudi
Arabia served as the locus of internal Middle Eastern migrants profiting from the oil boom and
sending home remittances. This group, and their Saudi-influenced ideologies, would come to
replace the old middle class as the emergent middle section in Middle Eastern societies and
would further bolster this Islamic modernity (Shechter 2009, pp. 34–35). But it was not only
returning migrant workers who aided this movement, but the wealth of Saudi Arabia and the
rest of the Gulf Countries. Their investment in other Middle Eastern countries, often times
in the form of retail venues, was coupled with support of those local movements that would
embrace their particular brand of Islamic reformism.
The result of this social movement is that Islam and retail became readily connected in the
Middle East. Islamic retail took two forms in the markets in the Middle East. The first was the
commodification of religious products. By that, I mean those products with ‘direct association
with acts of worship, as with prayer beads, or, more commonly, their bearing of sacred images
or writing, often only the single word “Allah” or “Muhammad”’ (Gregory Starrett 1995,
p. 53). This group could include ‘bumper stickers, keychains, posters, board games, jigsaw puz-
zles, colouring books, fans, clocks, framed Qur’anic verses, banners, greeting cards, decorative
items in ceramic, brass, wood, cloth, and paper’ (Gregory Starrett 1995, p. 53).
The second form is that of Islamized products, services and venues. In this mould, we see
things like Islamic socks, Islamic ties, hijabi dolls, Islamic business associations, Islamic malls and
Islamic banks (Abaza 2006a, pp. 198–204; Meneley 2007; Shirazi 2016, p. 23). Despite their
names, all of these retail features are a messy mix of Islamic and neoliberal capitalist features and
cannot be easily classified as products of either (Gökarıksel and Secor 2016). They are crea-
tions of the post-developmental Middle East and are thoroughly enmeshed in the retail venues
discussed above. In these new shopping centres and hypermarkets, you can find stores selling
Islamic goods, funded by Islamic banks and bearing Islamic names.You can even find shopping
centres and hypermarkets that are “Islamic”.
Finally, while governments may have abandoned developmentalism, the idea that consump-
tion and the markets where it takes place are political battlegrounds did not disappear. The first
and most famous example of this is the Bread Intifada in Egypt in 1977. When the Egyptian
government tried to cut subsidies on sugar, tea, flour, rice and cooking oil, riots broke out in
urban centres around the country. Clashes between security forces and demonstrators killed
seventy-three, injured 800 and lead to arrest of 1,270 (Beinin 2016, pp. 96–97). It was not
only Egypt, but Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan and Morocco that saw the manifestations of this return
(Owen 1998, p. 191; Holden 2009, p. 215; Perkins 2013, p. 173). But it was not only riots over
commodities that showed that the market was a battlefield. One particularly potent example
was the bombing of the Dizengoff mall in Tel-Aviv on Purim in 1996. Malls, like cafes and
discos, were potent targets for attack because they embodied the material privilege of the win-
ners in the market (Carmeli and Applbaum 2004, p. 13).

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The turn to neoliberalism was not solely an outside imposition, but an attempt to meet
the demands of the population that no longer desired austerity, but demanded consumption.
However, this came at the cost of the steps towards economic equality that developmentalist
governments had taken.The clearest signal of this was the informal markets that grew in tandem
with shopping centres and the Islamic ventures that featured in these places. The uniting factor
between these two seemingly opposed retail features was that they both agreed that the system
was broken and needed a different path. Soon mass movements, which concurred that the sys-
tem was broken, would appear across the Middle East. Many of these movements would carry
slogans and ideas that showed the continued political nature of retail in the Middle East. It is no
surprise that one of the most well-known Egyptian slogans began with a demand for “Bread!”

Conclusion
The Arab Uprisings of 2011/2 were historic events, but did little to arrest the retail trends of
the previous decades. In the years since, shopping centres and hypermarkets have been built,
informal markets persist, and Islamic neoliberal institutions have grown. Nevertheless, they did
mark a significant milestone in the social power of Internet technologies. Although they did
not cause the movement, Internet technologies did have a well-observed impact (Kraidy 2016).
The disbursement of these technologies has only grown since the uprisings, and this offers some
interesting retail futures.
Most notably, online retail offers two powerful pathways. First, it empowers the informal
retailers. As evidenced by a site like Etsy, one only needs an Internet connection and a camera
to sell products directly to consumers. Online retail offers the ability to subvert the powered
interests that necessitate the informal market (Ilahiane 2013). Second, the Internet provides con-
nectivity to a global community. It not only offers larger world markets, but the ability to find
like-minded individuals. In the case of retailers who prioritise the Islamic, the Internet offers
the ability to tap into those within the Middle East and the world who are looking to assert
their Islamic identity through their participation in the neoliberal world market (Abaza 2006a;
Meneley 2007, pp. 198–204; Ilahiane 2013; Shirazi 2016, p. 23).
As I have shown, retail in the Middle East occurred on the ground in ways that defy or
counter assumptions. There were “traditional” markets that showed significant dynamism, dual
retail colonial scenes that in fact were a synthesis of foreign and native and Islamic retailers who
were a mélange of Islamic and neoliberal ideas. Likewise, the arrival of one form of retail did not
annihilate the previous model. Thus, while a fully developed online retail system in the Middle
East may solve some problems, it will not be detached from the realities in place. But, regardless
of the actual outcome, like the suq, the department store and shopping centre, this retail venue
will be deeply imbricated in the politics of the day.

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 27
MODERN RETAILING HISTORY
IN JAPAN: FROM THE MEIJI
RESTORATION OF 1868 TO
THE BEGINNING OF THE
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Harada Masami

Introduction
After the Ansei Five-Power Treaties of 1858, Japan opened its country to the world and under-
went a planned programme of economic and especially industrial development, orchestrated
by the government of the Meiji Restoration. It was the first Asian country to be recognised
by Europe and America as a modern, industrialised nation. However, the Meiji Government’s
policy for development did not specify how to modernise in the area of retailing. This chapter
examines a range of modern retail formats which rose to prominence in the century or so after
1868: department stores, retail markets, supermarkets and convenience stores. After World War I,
department stores and retail markets began to establish themselves in Japan as income levels rose
and mass market began to grow. This growth was temporarily interrupted during World War II,
but Japan once again achieved high economic growth in the postwar era. This was reflected in
the growing number of supermarkets, which have been described as a “distribution revolution”
in Japan. After the end of rapid economic growth in the 1980s, convenience stores became
established as a new type of retailing business. Since the 1990s, it is these convenience stores that
have become a leading retailing business style in Japan.
Japanese department stores, retail markets, supermarkets and convenience stores were all
modelled after European and American retail models. After the Meiji Restoration, a few enter-
prising retailers actively sought to build a modern retailing sector, but many small and traditional
retailing establishments, which existed in Japan long before the Meiji Restoration period, have
survived despite programmes of industrialisation and modernisation. While some of these small
retailing businesses attempted to keep up with change, many resisted modernisation and started
a movement against the establishment of department stores. Their success can be seen in the
Department Store Act of 1937, enacted to control the business activities of department stores.
This developed into the Large Scale Store Act of 1973, which controlled the activities of depart-
ment stores and supermarkets. The act as well as the Department Store Act of 1937 sought to
mediate between the interests of traditional and modern retailers, although the former steadily

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declined in number, especially after the mid 1980s, due to the spread of supermarkets.The regu-
latory act was abolished in 2000.

The emergence of modern retailing

There are two major historical lineages of Japanese department stores in large cities. The first is
the case whereby dry goods stores developed into department stores; the second pertains to the
establishment of department stores by railway companies at their terminuses. With respect to
the former, in many cases they had established their businesses in large castle towns such as Edo,
Kyoto and Osaka in the pre-modern Edo era and evolved into department stores in the modern
period. Mitsukoshi was the first, and typical, store that decided to convert from selling dry goods
to the broader-based department store format.
Mitsui Echigoya, the name of Mitsukoshi in the Edo era, became a large dry goods store by
introducing cash payments at the end of the seventeenth century. It also became a purveyor
of dry goods to the Tokugawa Shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration, Echigoya changed
its name to Mitsui Dry-Goods Store (Mitsui Gofuku-ten) in 1893. Two years later, Mitsui
introduced a merchandise display on the second floor of the main store in Tokyo, replacing
the traditional selling method of za-uri. By 1900, za-uri was completely abolished on all floors
of the Tokyo store. Takahashi Yoshio, the director of Mitsui and the person in charge of the
conversion, explained za-uri in his book published in 1936 as follows.
When a visitor finds his favourite clerk and tells him his order, the clerk shout in a loud voice
‘errand boy, bring me the commodity’. In response to the clerk’s voice the boy bring back the
commodity on a square plate board from the warehouse to the sales floor, and the clerk receives
it and shows it to his customer. This is the ordinary procedure for selling in a draper’s shop. The
reason why the deep blue curtain makes the inner shop dimly lit is for improving the appearance
of commodities. It is said to be a secret skill of the clerk that he reduces opportunities to show
commodities to and satisfy his customer (Takahashi, 1936; 253).
The switch from the traditional selling method of za-uri to a system of open display enabled
customers to freely peruse the commodities (Sueta, 2010; 48). Its direct model of influence was
the Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia, USA, and its origin might be found in the
merchandise display of le Bon Marché in France, although there is undoubtedly a longer his-
tory of such practices (see Chapters 10 and 11). Mitsui Dry-Goods Store changed its name to
Mitsukoshi Dry-Goods Store and became a stock company in 1904. In the following year, the
store publicised “a department store declaration” in major newspapers. The declaration stated
that Mitsui Dry-Goods Store would expand its scope of commodities in addition to dry goods
and had sent a clerk to America to study a department store there.
Although the declaration made it clear that the business would become a department store, it
was only the first step in the transition (Mitsukoshi, 1990; 42–43). After its announcement, Mit-
sukoshi increased the number of commodities it stocked, beginning to sell imported cosmetics,
hats and caps made in Europe and America and accessories for infants in 1905; it established a
Western clothing department, beginning to sell children’s accessories in 1906. It also began to
sell bags, footwear, umbrellas and hair care items (combs and ornamental hairpins) in 1907 and
jewellery, tobacco and stationery in 1908. A year later, Mitsukoshi also established a restaurant
and art gallery. This increasing range of goods and services led to the construction of a new
wooden three-story building with 1,858m2 of floor space in 1907. However, the building gradu-
ally became too crowded and Mitsukoshi built an alternative in 1914, which was constructed
with reinforced concrete with one floor underground, five floors above ground and a total floor

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space of 13,210m2. At the same time, Mitsukoshi added some provisioning departments stock-
ing tea, dried bonito and flowers. Many scholars suggest that this outlet constituted the first
true department store in Japan (Sueta, 2010; 55). However, there is no consensus on the precise
timing of the transition from dry goods to department store retailing, partly because other dry
goods stores quickly followed Mitsukoshi’s example. By the mid-1910s, Shirokiya, Matsuzakaya,
Daimaru, Takashimaya and Sogo had all introduced modern merchandise displays, increased the
range of commodities for sale and became stock companies.
The second historical lineage for Japanese department stores occurred when railway com-
panies established department stores at their terminuses. The first of these “terminal department
stores”, Hankyu Department Store, was established at the Osaka Umeda terminal station of
the Hankyu Electric Railway Company in 1929. It consisted of a station concourse on the
ground floor, a market selling fish and fruit and vegetables on the underground floor and five
floors selling daily necessities and miscellaneous goods from the second floor to the sixth floor.
It informed its customers in its newspaper advertisement that ‘the department store would sell
better commodities at lower prices than any other department store’. Subsequently, Hankyu
completed enlargement of the building, then rapidly expanded its range of commodities. In
1931, it came to sell high-grade dry goods and kimonos. Moreover, in 1933, it established an
out-of-store sales department, extending business to more customers. The total sales floor area
of the store reached 56,200m2 in 1936, becoming the largest department store in Osaka. By
this time, it also seems to have established a departmental management system – a remarkable
achievement for a store which was created from nothing.

Figure 27.1 New building of Mitsukoshi’s main store, constructed in 1914

(Courtesy of Isetan Mitsukoshi Ltd)

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 Modern retailing history in Japan

The success of the Hankyu Department Store made it a pioneering example of terminal
department stores in Japan. In Osaka,Takashimaya followed suit, although it had a longer history
of retailing, having started a second-hand clothes dealership in 1831. In 1930,Takashimaya drew
up plans for new store buildings in both Osaka and Tokyo to sell a large number of commodities
to the masses. Nankai Store, which Takashimaya opened in Osaka in 1932 at the terminus of the
Nankai Electric Railway, was the largest department store in the Kansai area. Building on this
success, Takashimaya opened an eight-story outlet in Nihonbashi, Tokyo in 1933. In some ways,
it was a pioneer, being the first dry goods store to build a terminal department store, but Takashi-
maya lagged behind Mitsukoshi and others in adopting the department store mode of selling.
After Takashimaya, other terminal department stores were opened: the Daitetsu Department
Store and Daiki Department Store in Osaka, and the Toyoko Department Store and Keihin
Department Store in Tokyo. These tended to be located at suburban railway terminuses, serving
residents living along the railway (Sueta, 2010; 106). Keihan Department Store was one of the
most interesting because it started as Keihan Market before evolving into a department store.
The department store, which was established through equal investments from the Keihan Elec-
tric Railway Company and Shirokiya, sold mainly food and miscellaneous goods, and as such
its sales area and sales volumes were not large. After the Department Store Act of 1937, this par-
ticular store, by reducing its sales area, escaped regulation – a reminder that expansion was not
always the best option for a store (Taniuchi, 2014; 164, 170–171, 175). Japan’s terminal depart-
ment stores are sometimes said to be unique in the world. They were the product of railway
companies identifying and pursuing business diversification opportunities (Ogawa, 2004; 210).
Japanese terminal stations, in many cases, had connections with other railway stations (Terasaka,
2005; 28–29), undoubtedly an advantage for the terminal department stores vis-à-vis acquiring
customers.
In 1928, when the popularisation of department stores was gathering speed, a magazine
Shotenkai (the world of commerce) published the results of a questionnaire comparing depart-
ment stores with traditional retail stores. The analysis was distributed across two articles. The
first addressed the questions ‘What makes you want to shop at a department store?’ and ‘What
department store features appeal to you?’; the second considered ‘What makes it difficult for you
to shop at traditional retail stores?’. The respondents consisted of twenty-six people: a novel-
ist, three professors, a lecturer, a beauty salon executive, an artist and nineteen untitled persons,
many of whom seem to have belonged to the middle class. At the same time, judging from their
addresses, titles and the contents of their answers, they seem to have lived in Tokyo. Among the
answers, the following was typical of responses to the question concerning the attraction of
department stores:

1 Free browsing; salespeople do not compel customers to buy things.

2 Since department stores display a very wide range of commodities, it is convenient for
customers to buy other things beyond the target goods.
3 Free from deceit because fixed prices are displayed.

Overall, the answer showed that customers appreciated the new selling practices of depart-
ment stores: merchandise displays, selling a variety of commodities and selling at fixed prices.
By contrast, traditional retail stores lacked such benefits and were seen in a negative light when
compared to department stores.
By the 1930s, Japanese department stores were supplying many of the commodities demanded
by the general public, their main lines having changed from luxuries to utility goods.They made
purchases of high cost durable goods easier by introducing monthly instalments, thus expanding

463
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their ability to attract customers from the ordinary population as well as the upper classes (Ooka,
2014; 226). This was important because the middle class was growing rapidly at this time, from
1.07 million in 1920, accounting for 4% of the total labour force, to 3.62 million in 1940, or
12% of the workforce (Hirano, 2005; 169).This increase in the size of the middle class promoted
the expansion of department stores so that, by the end of 1937, there were fifty-three depart-
ment stores in the six large cities and 110 in Japan overall (Sueta, 2010; 303–304).
This growth had deleterious consequences for traditional retailers, especially when the Showa
Depression brought a prolonged slump to retailing in general. In response, department stores
engaged travelling salesmen, established of branches in new places and extended store space.
They also strengthened sales and the acquisition of new customers by holding bargain sales,
promoting loss leaders and extending free delivery services. As a result, department store sales
reached 32.3% of total retail sales in Tokyo in 1931–32, 15.6% in Nagoya in 1932 and 13.8% in
Osaka in 1936 (Suzuki, 1980; 117–119). Such increasing market penetration drove traditional
retailers into activities against department stores; they demanded that the Government should
enact legislation to regulate the business of these burgeoning leviathans.
As a result, the Department Store Act was introduced in 1937. According to the act and
the rules related to it, the department store was defined as a store where the sales floor area
was more than 3,000m2 in the six large cities (more than 1,500m2 in other cities) and sold a
variety of goods relating to food, clothing and housing. The act required department stores to
obtain permission from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry regarding the opening of the
store, establishment of branch stores, enlargement of sales floor area and so forth. The ministry
was authorised to inspect department stores as necessary and to take action where required,
including the suspension of business, dismissal of officers and rescindment of department stores’
licenses. It is certain that the act, by regulating the activities of department stores, protected the
activities of small and medium retailers; but it is also certain that, by regulating the opening of
new department stores, it restrained competition among the existing department stores. The act
was abolished in 1947 owing to the establishment of a broader Antimonopoly Act of 1947, but
its key characteristics were enshrined in the 1956 variant of this act and in the Large Scale Retail
Store Act of 1973, discussed below.
During the Edo era, retail markets ceased to exist and only wholesale markets operated in
many castle towns (Toyoda, 1983; 388). The inhabitants of these towns bought daily neces-
saries from a small number of retail shops and a much greater number of pedlars. In the early
twentieth century, drawing on the experiences of European cities, arguments for the establish-
ment of municipal markets emerged in Japan. A rise in food prices after the Russo-Japanese
War (1904–1905) fuelled such arguments and prompted a series of national inquiries into retail
and wholesale organisations. Scholars such as Isoo Abe, a professor at Tokyo Technical College,
Kaichi Toda, a professor at Kyoto Imperial University, and Susumu Kawatsu, a professor at Tokyo
Imperial University, all insisted on the necessity of establishing municipal retail markets. The
National Government’s council reported that it was urgently necessary to establish municipal
retail markets to improve the living standard of “the working poor”. However, it took a several
years for municipal corporations to establish their retail markets (Harada, 2016; 486–487).
World War I brought Japanese society both an economic boom and escalating prices.
Although the former brought wealth to some people, many people suffered because of the lat-
ter. Newspapers and magazines reported the hard lives of yofuku saimin (poor people wearing
suits), reflecting the difficulties faced by salaried men because their wages could not keep up
with the rising prices. Prompted by such concerns, Osaka City Corporation established four
municipal retail markets in April 1918 – the first municipal retail markets in Japan. After four
months, the outbreak of the rice riots contributed to the spread of municipal retail markets

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through Japan. Many municipal corporations started to sell rice at low prices from their outlets
and then established municipal markets. In Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto and Kobe, municipal retail
markets were established immediately after the outbreak of the riots, although it took another
year before Tokyo City followed suit. In each market, rice quickly becoming one of the most
important commodities, constituting, for example, 51.3% of all commodities sold in the munici-
pal retail market in Tokyo City in 1919, 46.4% in Osaka and 70.2% in Nagoya (Daitoshi, 1931;
62, 88, 102). Thereafter the percentage gradually diminished, but municipal markets continued
to grow rapidly in number, reaching 409 in 1923 – just five years after the first was established.
A certain amount of volatility ensued between 1925 and 1930, turning into a gradual fall to 304
markets in operation by 1931 and 257 in 1938.They remained primarily food markets. Fruit and
vegetables, fish, meat and eggs as well as rice and other grains, accounted from between 74.2%
to 93.2% of the total sales of the six large cities’ municipal markets in 1932.
Osaka City’s municipal retail markets were the most successful examples across the six large
cities. It was, for example, the only municipal retail markets to remain in the black (Osaka, 1989;
36). It is important to remember that only Osaka City had established municipal retail markets
before the outbreak of riots – as part of urban planning rather than a response to food crisis.This
planning was introduced by Hajime Seki, a deputy mayor of Osaka City and a former professor
at Tokyo Commercial High School who had experience of studying in European universities
and was a specialist in Japanese urban policy. He was asked to take office as the deputy of Osaka
City and later became the mayor of the City.The prosperity and success of Osaka City’s munici-
pal retail markets can in part be attributed to his knowledge and foresight. In contrast, Tokyo
City’s municipal retail markets were rather less successful. Before their establishment in Tokyo,
existing retailers had united against the planning of municipal retail markets, delaying their estab-
lishment in the city. In the Tokyo City Assembly, it was even insisted that the municipal retail
markets should not sell expensive goods such as high-quality fish, excellent rice cakes and so on,
but should only sell low price goods such as low quality rice (Harada, 1991; 122).The result was
that retail traders in Tokyo City’s municipal retail markets were obliged to sell inferior goods, so
they were said to resemble poor bargain markets. According to Nakamura, it is no exaggeration
to say that Tokyo City’s municipal retail markets became the retail organisation which repro-
duced the simple and poor eating habits of urban lower classes (Nakamura, 1989; 191).
Despite such problems, it should be emphasised that municipal retail markets played an
important role. Fixed and marked prices, cash payments and personal collection were the oper-
ating principles of municipal retail markets – principles which are regarded as representing the
modern characteristics of retail trade. Municipal retail markets, therefore, played an important
role in the modernisation of the retail trade in Japan, because traditional retailers trade contin-
ued to sell commodities on credit and without price tags. In this sense, municipal retail markets
developed a modern social relationship in which the retailer could sell commodities to anyone
with the money to pay. However, it also needs to be pointed out that these modern characteris-
tics of municipal retail markets had some limitations. One is that the majority of the daily neces-
sities demanded by urban residents were supplied by small retail stores and private markets, not
municipal retail markets. The sales volumes of municipal retail markets were therefore marginal
relative to total retail sales across the city. For example, municipal retail markets accounted for
only 0.4% of the total goods sold in Tokyo City in 1932 and 2.9% in Osaka City in the 1930s
(Ishihara, 1989; 131). Therefore, the role of municipal retail markets was limited to checking
and restraining general retail prices in private retail stores and private markets – important, but
hardly revolutionary.
Even this limited role encountered a very difficult situation later on. A 1916 notice from
the Vice-Minister of Agriculture and Commerce prohibited trade associations from any price

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agreement. In Tokyo, the Director of Bureau of Industry of Tokyo prefecture warned trade asso-
ciations against establishing price agreements in 1921 and investigated retail trade associations
on that basis. In response, the Federation of Tokyo Business Association, a network of retailers in
Tokyo, determined to abolish price agreements in 1922. However, the global downturn of 1929
resulted in falling profits and business failures for many retailers; the Ministry of Commerce
and Industry succumbed and in 1933 permitted price agreements within trade associations
(Hirota, 2007; 242). The Government’s acquiescence to price agreements resulted in the impo-
sition of serious limitations on municipal retail markets over controlling general retail prices.
The mayors of six large cities made futile efforts to petition the Ministries of Commerce and
Industry, Health and Welfare,War and the Navy in 1938, requesting that municipal retail markets
should be free from the restrictions imposed by trade associations’ price agreements (Inoue and
Tsuchiya, 1939; 366–368). The Government, however, chose to prioritise the interests of retail-
ers rather than those of consumers, although following the end of World War II, trade association
price agreements were again prohibited (Fujita, 1995; 269–270).
After World War II, municipal retail markets managed to maintain their social role until the
end of the economic growth period, declining thereafter as price inflation eased. In sum, the
municipal retail market as a retail type maintained its social and economic role only for fifty or
sixty years in Japanese society. One of the reasons is that, whereas Europe’s municipal retail mar-
kets were incorporated into their long histories of cities from the Middle Ages, Japan’s municipal
retail markets were not associated with such long history and thus were not institutionalised or
embedded in the social fabric of the country to the same extent as their European counterparts.

Retailing in a mass consumption society

The first supermarket in Japan was Kinokuniya, established in 1953 in Aoyama,Tokyo, and based
on a self-service format, rather than a face-to-face selling style. Kinokuniya’s customers were
mainly American soldiers in the Occupation Forces and their families. In 1956, Maruwa Food
Center established in Kokura city was the first self-service style supermarket mainly for Japanese
customers. It was on the recommendation of NCR Japan, an American overseas-company, that
both supermarkets employed a self-service format. They were successful and profitable, suggest-
ing that the self-service style improved labour productivity and contributed to increasing sales.
Such an economic effect was not achieved in the Japanese retail trade more generally until the
period of high economic growth after World War II (Yamaguchi, 2005; 157).
Table 27.1 shows the development of supermarkets in the period of high economic growth.
The number of supermarkets grew more than threefold, store space nearly six-fold and sales nearly
eleven-fold.The growth rate of turnover was even higher than the average economic growth rate.
In this period, then, the number of supermarkets increased rapidly, the size of supermarkets became
larger and supermarket sales increased more rapidly than the above two growth rates. Table 27.2
shows the percentage of consumers’ expenditure by type of outlet in the same period. Traditional
retail stores accounted for 48.0% of the total expenditure in 1964, decreasing to 37.4% in 1974,
while supermarkets accounted for only 5.1% in 1964, increasing to 11.4% in 1974. Department
stores’ share of the market according to this metric decreased slightly over this 10-year period.
With food expenditure, however, the market share enjoyed by traditional retail stores fell much
more dramatically, from 78.4% to 56.4%, supermarkets growing from 9.2% to 23.6%. It is quite
clear, then, that consumers rapidly changed where they shopped, especially for food.
Supermarkets were classified into one of four categories: food supermarket, clothing super-
market, general merchandising stores (GMSs) and others. Table 27.3 shows the percentage of
sales by kind of supermarket in the period 1968–74. In 1968, food supermarkets and clothing

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Table 27.1 Number of supermarkets in Japan, 1964–74

Year Number of supermarkets

1964 3,620
1966 4,790
1968 7,062
1970 9,403
1972 10,635
1974 12,034

Source: Tsushosangyoshodaijinkanbo tokeichosabu

(Research and Statistics Department of the Minister’s
Secretariat of the Ministry of International Trade and
Industry), Serufusabisuten ni kansuru tokeihyo (Statistics
of self-service stores), Tsushosangyoshodaijinkanbo
tokeichosabu, Tokyo, each year.

Table 27.2 Expenditure by Japanese consumers by type of outlet, 1964–74 (%)

Retail stores Supermarkets Department stores

Year 1964 1969 1974 1964 1969 1974 1964 1969 1974

Total expenditure 48.0 43.8 37.4 5.1 7.7 11.4 5.9 5.4 5.5
Food 78.4 72.3 56.4 9.2 15.2 23.6 2.6 2.7 2.3
Household goods 34.6 38.0 34.6 1.7 3.5 5.9 6.7 6.0 6.0
Clothes 49.8 50.4 45.1 6.9 10.7 14.8 32.1 31.3 31.6

Source: Sorifu tokeikyoku (Bureau of Statistics of the Prime Minister’s Office), Zenkoku shohi jittai chosa
hokoku (1974 National survey of family income and expenditures), Vol. 11, 1977, Sorifu tokeikyoku, Tokyo,
pp. 272, 275,276.

Table 27.3 Sale of different categories of goods by type of supermarket (%)

Year 1968 1970 1972 1974

Food supermarket 60.7 57.5 54.6 44.9

Clothing supermarket 20.8 16.9 16.5 9.8
GMS 11.6 21.9 24.5 42.4
Others 6.9 3.7 4.4 2.9
Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Source: Serufusabisuten ni kansuru tokeihyo (Statistics of self-service stores), Tokyo, each year.

supermarket accounted for 81.5% of the total sales. However, afterwards GMSs, such as Daiei,
Seiyu-Store, Jusco, Nichii and UNY, grew rapidly; their market share reached 42.4% by 1974.
Japan’s GMSs were different from those in America, as they dealt in perishable food as well as
a wide variety of other goods. One reason for this is that Japan’s GMSs had to accommodate a
variety of goods because of poor growth in the mass consumption market (Tatsuki, 1995; 196).
Another is that, because the profitability of perishable food in GMSs was low, these stores also
had to sell a variety of goods, including clothing, in order to secure an adequate gross margin

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 Harada Masami

ratio (Yahagi, 1998; 128). Whatever the precise cause, GMSs grew particularly strongly. Accord-
ing to a survey of large-scale stores by Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha, in 1967, two supermarket
companies reached the top ten retail companies by sales, four in 1969 and five in 1971. Daiei
attained the top position in 1972.
Daiei is a typical Japanese GMS. Its founder, Isao Nakauchi, established his first supermarket
store, Shufu no Mise Daiei (Daiei store for housewives) in 1957, dealing in pharmaceuticals,
cosmetics, canned and bottled foods. Sandwiched by famous drugstores on both sides, Daiei
soon suffered decreasing sales. To prevail against such difficulties, it pursued a broader diversity
of goods. Clothing, meat, household articles, footwear and pesticides came into stock in 1959;
fresh fish, fruit and vegetables, meats and household electric appliances such as televisions, transis-
tor radios, refrigerators, electric rice cookers, washing machines, fluorescent lamps and electric
lamps followed in 1960; and furniture, stationery and toys were added by 1961. The widening
assortment necessarily required a massive and stable supply of goods. Nakauchi recognised that a
management system for a chain store was necessary to improve his supermarkets when he visited
supermarkets in Hawaii in 1962 (Mukoyama, 2009; 78–79). Daiei planned to introduce such a
management system in 1962, establishing a chain store headquarters and a distribution centre in
Kobe in 1963. In the same year, it opened five stores, one of which was a large store in a six-story
building in Kobe with 5,672m2 floor space. This was the first self-service discount department
store (SSDDS) in Japan. Other supermarkets such as Seibu Store (later Seiyu) and Ito-Yokado also
established SSDDS, laying down the management system in earnest (Mukoyama, 2009; 129–130).
In the early stage of their development, supermarkets introduced self-service systems and
could manage only a single store. However, chain-store management systems became widespread

Figure 27.2 The first store of Daiei, Shufu no Mise Daiei, established in 1957
(Courtesy of Daiei, Inc)

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 Modern retailing history in Japan

in Japan in the later 1960s, shifting supermarkets towards bulk purchases, reducing management
costs and enabling them to sell goods at low and thus highly competitive prices, not least because
of labour productivity improvements (Takaoka, 1999; 12). Both the Pegasus Club established in
1962 and the Japan Chain Stores Association established in 1967 contributed to this diffusion.
Their activities helped supermarkets to secure and benefit from economies of scale, make the
best use of sales floor space, learn methods for managing merchandise, simplify operations, and
rationalise facilities (Yamaguchi, 2005; 174). The Government, meanwhile, avoided regulating
the growth of supermarkets in the period of high economic growth – another reason why they
became widespread in Japan in this period. Although the Distribution Section of the Industrial
Structure Council began to consider a “distribution policy” in late 1962, it determined not to
regulate the growth of supermarkets by any law (Tateno, 1992; 121). Accordingly, it was not until
1973, the end of the period high economic growth, that the Government began to introduce
regulations governing the growth of supermarkets.
The growth of supermarkets in the period of high economic growth brought an impor-
tant change to Japanese society. Although only the department store was synonymous with the
modern retail industry before the end of World War II, the supermarket appeared as a second
example of this modernity in the period of high economic growth. The bi-polar structure of
a few department stores and many more mom-and-pop retail stores that had existed until the
end of World War II disappeared with the spread of supermarkets. That change brought a wider
variety of retail suppliers to Japanese consumers (Yamaguchi, 2005; 179).
The Department Store Act of 1956 and the Law on Special Measures for Adjustment for
Retail Businesses of 1959 were expected to restrict the growth of supermarkets. However, neither
central government nor local governments applied these Acts to the case. In 1962, when medium
and small retailers lobbied for restricting the growth of supermarkets, the Distribution Section
of the Industrial Structure Council began to consider the role of distribution policy. After two
years of discussion, the Council reached a conclusion that no legal restriction to the growth of
supermarkets should be introduced because they considered that the government should not
prevent supermarkets from promoting the distribution revolution (Ishihara, 2011; 31). A White
Paper on Small and Medium Enterprises in Japan, published in 1964 by the Small and Medium
Enterprise Agency, also appreciated that supermarkets improved the prevailing low labour pro-
ductivity of retail businesses (Odaka, 2013; 380). From the late 1960s onwards, many supermar-
kets became increasingly large and were categorised as GMSs. Since these were similar in size
and range of stock to department stores, they were called imitative department stores, yet they
remained unregulated. Indeed, it is said that The Ministry of International Trade and Commerce
even taught supermarkets how they could avoid the regulatory clutches of the Department Store
Act (Ishihara, 2011; 30).
Small and medium retailers reacted against the growing and flourishing GMSs. In addition,
department stores were also disconcerted by the growing GMSs which posed a threat to them,
especially in smaller cities. Department stores made a request to the Government that GMSs
and department stores should both be regulated by the same Act. Partly as a response to this,
the Large Scale Retail Store Act of 1973 replaced the Department Store Act. It required that all
large-scale stores, with a sales floor area over 1,500m2 (3,000m2 in government ordinance cities),
should notify the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the location, sales floor area, business hours
and business days of the store. The act also provided for the establishment of regional Large
Scale Retail Stores Councils and Commercial Activities Adjustment Boards, the latter compris-
ing representatives of local retailers, consumers and academics. Although the act was officially a
notification system, it effectively operated as a licence system and it took a long time, often more
than ten years, for Boards to provide consent for a new large-scale store.

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Although there were 1,700 large-scale stores in Japan in 1973, when the act was enacted, the
number of large-scale stores’ notifications increased rapidly over the next five years. There were
a total 1,991 notifications between 1974 to 1979, which would effectively have doubled the
number of existing large-scale stores. Moreover, from the institution of the act onwards, many
stores opened with sales floor areas of less than 1,500m2 because there were no legal restrictions
on stores of this size. These slightly smaller stores were a great threat to local small and medium
stores, where the average sales floor area was only from 30–50m2 at the time of the 1974 Census
of Commerce by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. To restrain such stores from
opening, Toyonaka City in Osaka prefecture formed local regulations in 1976 and Kumamoto
City enacted similar regulations with penalty provisions in the same year. Henceforth, many
municipalities followed suit, and the number of such local regulations and guidelines reached
seventy in September 1977 and 209 in September 1978 (Ishihara, 2011; 56; Tsushosangyosho
1985; 5). Furthermore, many local commercial organisations declared that any large-scale store
project under development should be frozen (Ishihara, 2011; 84).
The result of this local action was that the act was amended in 1979. The most important
amendment was that the sales floor area of large-scale stores was set at less than half of the previ-
ous standard. In other words, the amended act required that all large-scale stores, in cases where
sales floor area exceeded 500m2 (1,500m2 in government ordinance cities), should notify the
Ministry.With such strengthening of national regulation, local regulations by municipalities were
supposed to be abolished, but in reality they survived because the amended act was regarded as
the fruits of the traditional retailers’ movement against large-scale stores. Affected by the second
oil crisis and the impending implementation of the amended act, the number of notifications
increased enormously. As a result, the problem of large-scale stores became extremely serious in
the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Kyoto City announced in March 1981 that it would prohibit
new large-scale store developments and many others followed: some twenty-eight prefectures
and sixty-three commercial organisations in all. Some jurists who extolled the rights of small
and medium retailers’ even appeared.The Ministry determined to intervene further by strength-
ening its regulations, issuing a notice in January 1982 to restrain the opening of new large-scale
stores. The political backdrop to this was that both the ruling party and the opposition claimed
champion of the regulation of large-scale stores. The period from the late 1970s to the early
1980s is called ‘the frozen era on opening large-scale stores’ (Ishihara, 2011; 72–84).
While large-scale supermarkets, especially GMSs, grew rapidly in the period of high eco-
nomic growth, food supermarkets dealing in perishable food could not grow in the same period.
Most people bought perishable food in small amounts every day. Only specialists such as fish-
mongers, greengrocers and butchers had the requisite skills to process and maintain the quality
of perishable food. Since most supermarkets, including GMSs, did not have such skills, super-
markets had to have those specialists enter as tenants or employ them directly.This caused super-
markets problems from a management perspective.
It was Kansai Supermarket that first innovated to mitigate such difficulties. Established in
1959 as a food supermarket in Itami, Hyogo, Kansai Supermarket had to accommodate a fish-
monger and a butcher as tenants in the early stage. The tenants, especially the fishmonger,
caused serious problems: management of fresh stock was poor; fish were not arranged on the
sales counter by the opening time, and stock often sold out before closing time meaning that
the fish department shut before the rest of the store. Those troubles, which suggest that the
supermarket could not effectively control the business of the tenants, continued for several years
and it was not until 1967 that Kansai Supermarket determined to directly manage the perish-
able food departments. While sending staff to America for training, the supermarket also began
to independently seek a new sales system for perishable food. Its specific goal was to discover

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 Modern retailing history in Japan

how the supermarket could scientifically manage the freshness of perishable food and sell it via
self-service. To achieve its goal, it developed a new refrigerated display case suitable for Japan’s
humid climate; a set of new trays and film which covered the perishable food; a new manual by
which anyone without bespoke skills could process perishable food, and a new cart by which
the processed food could be efficiently carried to the sales floor. This series of largely technical
innovations enabled the supermarket to manage the freshness of perishable food and to raise
labour productivity in this area. Going further, Kansai Supermarket also determined to process
perishable food in its backyard, which enabled it to always supply its customers with suitably
fresh food. As a result, the supermarket could control intra-day fluctuations of perishable food,
secure equality of access to food for all customers and reduce the loss of sales opportunities. It
took the supermarket about ten years to achieve these innovations (Ishihara, 1998; 152–154).
Significantly, Kansai Supermarket published its innovations via the All Japan Supermarket
Association (AJS) with the result that they were adopted all over Japan, often to the detriment of
traditional retail stores. According to the Census of Commerce by the Ministry of International
Trade and Industry, the number of traditional retail stores of perishable food started to decline
1979, reversing the trend of previous years (Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc., 1980; 8). It was not
until 1985 that the number of traditional retail stores as a whole started to decline – a point at
which it might be said that the distribution revolution had been accomplished in Japan.
The Marusho store established in Kobe in 1968 and My Shop in Toyonaka in 1969 were the
first convenience stores in Japan. Both were independent stores. After 1973, companies in the
large-scale supermarket business such as Seiyu, Ito-Yokado and Daiei, started to infiltrate this
domain through establishing businesses such as Family Mart, 7-Eleven Japan and Daiei Lawson.
Such entries caused rapid growth of the convenience store sector (Kim, 2001; 5). Table 27.4
shows that both the number and sales of convenience stores increased rapidly, although the
growth of both slowed after the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991.
Japanese convenience store businesses considered various stores America as models, but
important differences emerged between the stores in these two countries. One key difference
was that Japanese supermarket companies played an important role in developing convenience
store businesses, whereas American supermarkets did not. The reason was that the Large Scale
Store Act of 1973, especially the amended act of 1979, restrained further expansion in the num-
ber of supermarkets. As a result, large-scale supermarket companies began to direct their funds
to convenience store businesses (Kawabe, 2003; 139). According to a survey of Japanese retailing
by Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, it was in 1982 that convenience stores, including 7-Eleven Japan,
San Chain and Daiei Lawson, first featured in the top 200 by sales (Kawabe, 2003; 139).Thereaf-
ter, these companies not only increased the number of their stores but also gradually raised their
rankings. Major convenience store companies first strengthened their franchise systems and then

Table 27.4 The development of convenience stores in Japan

Year Number of stores Sales (million yen)

1982 23,235 2,177,609

1985 29,236 3,382,902
1988 34,550 5,012,549
1991 41,847 6,984,859
1994 48,405 8,335,279

Source: Tsushosangyoshodaijinkanbo tokeichosabu (Research and Statistics Department of the Minister's

Secretariat of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), Shogyo tokeihyo (Census of Commerce),
Okurasho insatsukyoku, each year.

471
 Harada Masami

expanded the number of stores and their sales; in comparison, companies employing voluntary
chain systems grew more slowly (Kawabe, 2003; 139–140). In 1986, the top ten companies
accounted for 75% of the total number of convenience stores in Japan and 80% of the total sales
in this sector (Kim, 2001; 80).
In the early stage, adopting a franchise system (the dominant strategy for opening conveni-
ence stores), introducing point of sale (POS) systems, and constructing physical distribution sys-
tems were regarded as important factors.With such strategies and systems, Japanese convenience
stores successfully grew. 7-Eleven Japan, which began convenience store business under the
license agreements with the Southland Corporation in America in 1973 (Seven-Eleven Japan,
1991; 14), was the most successful example in the country. Normal practice was for the conveni-
ence store head office to open a large number of stores in a specific area, a strategy that reduced
distribution costs. Thus, as soon as 7-Eleven Japan opened the first store at Toyosu, Tokyo, it
determined to open many stores around the first store. At the same time, it adopted a franchise
system – common in Japanese convenience stores, but largely absent in America. The reason
why a franchise system was selected by 7-Eleven Japan and became widespread in Japan was its
favourable cost profile compared to the direct-management alternative. Accordingly, traditional
retail shopkeepers who had their own shops and land became targets as franchisees of con-
venience stores. This was considered to be a good opportunity by many traditional shopkeepers
because they had come to acknowledge the limits of their own business due to the quick growth
of supermarkets, especially large-scale retail stores. Many shopkeepers, including those presiding
over sake shops, which were the main target of 7-Eleven Japan, thus took up this opportunity.
7-Eleven Japan introduced joint delivery in 1976; this decreased the number of delivery opera-
tions and the overall cost of delivery to each store. The introduction of the POS system to every

Figure 27.3 The first store of 7-Eleven Japan, Toyosu store, established in 1974 (Courtesy of 7-Eleven
Japan Ltd)

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 Modern retailing history in Japan

store in 1982 not only enabled the company to decrease stock quantities, but it also enabled every
store to know which commodity was the best-selling. As a result, the company could achieve a
great impact on its performance, with the result that other convenience store companies also intro-
duced the similar systems in the following year (Kawabe, 2003; 158–159). It is said that the POS
system was the secret to the success of Japanese convenience stores. In America, the system was
introduced to reduce labour costs and to minimise human error, whereas in Japan it was developed
to a high level of functionality so that it could contribute to commodity management, an order-
ing system and a supporting system to every store. With such high level POS, the company could
create a business strategy for responding to the changing market environment (Sunaga, 2005; 259).

Retailing in the consumer recession

After the oil crisis in 1973, Japan’s economy transitioned away from secondary industries, espe-
cially manufacturing that had driven the country’s economic growth, to the tertiary sector.
As a result, Japan transformed from an industrial into consumer society, where people could
enjoy high consumption of commodities and services. The rise of bulk purchase, the expand-
ing demand for cooked and semi-cooked food due to increasing female employment, and the
widespread use of automobiles promoted consumers’ purchasing in large-scale stores in suburbs.
Through merging with or affiliating with different types of retail entities such as local depart-
ment stores and discount stores, GMSs changed their previous business types and became diver-
sified. The largest GMS, Daiei, for example, expanded beyond retail and into services, finance
and development to such an extent that it regarded itself as a comprehensive information enter-
prise. The bubble economy in the late 1980s encouraged GMSs to diversity very quickly, but
its subsequent collapse plunged many into difficulty or even bankruptcy (Sunaga, 2005; 209).
Real consumption expenditure declined after 1993, with the result that department store
sales figures decreased year by year, while sales from GMSs remained lacklustre. In addition,
bankruptcies of financial institutions, rising unemployment and a slump in incomes all served
to amplify consumers’ anxiety about the future and suppressed consumption. As a result, dis-
count stores specialising in particular commodities such as clothing, food and home electric
­appliances – sometimes called category killers – grew in number. These discount stores, procured
commodities at low prices from other Asian countries and sold them at low prices in Japan.
To fight against such activities, GMSs also had to construct networks by which they too could
acquire commodities at lower prices in the international market. However, this response by
GMSs unfortunately backfired through deteriorating sales productivity and capital income rate
(Sunaga, 2005; 239). Although some department stores opened new large-scale outlets, others
reduced the number of employees, closed some existing stores and even filed for civil rehabilita-
tion proceedings, which meant virtually going bankrupt. This was also true in the case of some
GMSs. Yaohan, a GMS which aggressively developed stores overseas, went bankrupt in 1996,
with Mycal also going under in 2001. It was Daiei that received the most attention due to its
business slump. Since the company diversified by taking out large bank loans on the security
of its real properties, the collapse of the bubble economy rapidly depressed the value of these
properties, causing great damage to Daiei. It started to reconstruct its business with significant
financial support from banks in 2002, but after two years had to seek support from a govern-
mental institution, namely the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan. Finally, in 2015,
Daiei became a wholly owned subsidiary company of AEON.
In contrast, convenience stores enjoyed relatively good business performance during this
period, with the overall number of convenience stores continuing to increase, from 39,614 in
1991 to 54,398 in 2000. 7-Eleven Japan, the largest convenience store company, secured the top

473
 Harada Masami

position in retail industry sales in 2000. In 2005, the company merged the Southland Corpo-
ration of America, which had been the model of 7-Eleven Japan, and developed convenience
store businesses in America, employing the franchise system. One reason for the uniquely strong
performance of convenience stores this is that they won the trust and support of consumers by
providing a variety of services such as collecting money for electricity bills, accepting home
delivery requests and selling tickets. Another reason was that most convenience store companies
adopted a method of gross profit share between the head office and the convenience stores
(franchisees) as royalty payments. The economic effect of this method was that both the head
office and the affiliated stores were motivated to pursue maximum gross profit (Ito, 2005; 212).
To this day, the convenience store industry maintains the top position in the retail industry.
The global trend to economic liberalisation and expansion in exports from Japan to America
affected Japanese distribution policy in the 1980s, especially the Large Scale Retail Store Act.
The Federation of Economic Organizations proposed a document to the Government in 1985,
suggesting that the act should be properly operated, indicating current failings in this respect.
The chairperson of the Large Scale Retail Stores Council made a remark to the same effect in
1987. Two years later, the Prime Minister’s investigative committee, called the Special Adminis-
trative Reform Promotion Council, also submitted a report asking the Government to improve
the operation of the act. Accordingly in the same year, the Ministry of International Trade and
Industry published ‘A vision of distribution in the 1990s’, in which they made it clear that
operationalisation of the act would be improved. However, those domestic improvement plans
could not foresee the subsequent pressures for abolishing the act.
It was the Structural Impediments Initiative (SII) convened by the Japanese and American
Governments that pushed the act to abolishment. SII was established in 1989 through the
American Government’s proposal to inspect the Japan-United States mutual socio-economic
systems to further open up Japanese markets. Although America demanded the abolition of the
act in the negotiations, Japan declared its intention to loosen its application. These negotiations
settled on a decision reflecting Japan’s intentions and the act was amended in 1991. The key
amendments were that the sales area of stores required for notification to the Minister was dou-
bled compared to the previous level and that the Commercial Activities Adjustment Board was
abolished so that only the Large Scale Retail Stores Council could discuss the notifications of
large-scale stores.The abolition of the act meant that public policy which had existed to restrain
retail industry activities for many years ceased to exist in Japan. The Joint Conference proposed
that a Large Scale Retail Stores Location Act should be enacted, a recommendation adopted in
1998. The Large Scale Retail Stores Location Act replaced the Large Scale Retail Stores Act in
2000.The purpose of the act was to preserve the living environment of areas surrounding large-
scale retail stores. Since large-scale retail stores were usually located in suburbs, many shoppers
come to the stores by car.The noise and pollution from cars was regarded as a threat to the living
environment of the surrounding area.

Conclusions
Department stores and retail markets established modern retail practices in Japan before the
end of World War II. Department stores descended from dry goods stores in the Meiji era and
established their business style in the early stage of mass market after World War I. They became
more popular after widening their clientele to include the middle class, rather than just catering
to the upper class, a shift that was both furthered and symbolised in the emergence of terminal
department stores. Municipal corporations played a key role in establishing retail markets which
employed a cash payment system and played a revolutionary role in Japanese retailing. Retail

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 Modern retailing history in Japan

markets and department stores had at least one feature in common: the provision of a variety
of goods under one roof. This made it easy for customers to buy whatever they needed in one
location, a convenience aptly named “one-stop-shopping” and one not open to traditional and
specialised retailers. Both department stores and municipal retail markets were part of a pro-
gramme of conscious modernisation and westernisation of the Japanese retail sector. However,
both developments caused unrest among traditional retailers.The Department Store Act of 1937
was the result; it mediated between the interests of traditional and modern retailers.
Supermarkets emerged as a major retail format in the postwar era and became a symbol of
the mass market in Japan. They contributed to the widespread use of cash payment and a rise in
the productivity of labour in retailing. The turnover of supermarkets surpassed that of depart-
ment stores in the early 1970s, growth that again caused unrest among existing retailers, resulting
in the Large Scale Store Act of 1973 and a plethora of local regulations. These restrained super-
markets from opening new stores, but gave way to a new retailing system: convenience stores. In
Japan, these were franchises, a system different from that which existed in America, and one that
enabled Japanese convenience stores to develop rapidly and to provide traditional retailers with
opportunities to become convenience stores. After the collapse of the bubble economy in 1991,
convenience stores maintained a high growth rate compared to other retail industries such as
department stores and supermarkets. In 2005, 7-Eleven Japan, the largest company of conveni-
ence stores, purchased the American company which had provided its original inspiration – a
remarkable symbol of the strength of this part of the Japanese retail sector.

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 28
WESTERN MODELS AND
EASTERN INFLUENCES
Japanese department stores in the early
twentieth century

Rika Fujioka

Introduction
The development of Japanese department stores was influenced by Western department stores,
which were established in the middle of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 11). Mitsukoshi,
for example, was Japan’s first leading department store and was strongly inspired by American
and British department stores. Its first professional managing director,Yoshio Takahashi, visited
Wanamaker in Philadelphia in 1888 and was keen to introduce Wanamaker’s modern organi-
sational structure, including its personnel management, into his own store. Indeed, in 1900
Mitsukoshi began to hire female employees, which was revolutionary in Japanese society at the
time (Takahashi, 1933).The second professional managing director, Osuke Hibi, learned a great
deal from Harrods in particular and studied the layout of the store, its interior and exterior
design, its merchandise and the customer service of its sales assistants. He met Harrods’ director,
Richard Burbidge, and they discussed the department store’s social mission as a modern retailer.
After this insightful experience, Hibi aimed to use his newfound knowledge to transform his
own Mitsukoshi store (Hibi, 1912). Following its great success, other Japanese stores soon fol-
lowed suit.
This development of Japanese department stores had a great impact not only on retailing but
also on the Japanese economy and on Japanese society. Department stores were the hub of many
industries and innovations; this was largely due to the expansion of their merchandise to include
brand new Western-style products, a strategy that was an important part of their transformation
from traditional dry goods stores. Only department stores could encourage Japanese manufac-
turers to learn the advanced skills of Western companies and could use their trading companies
to buy the necessary equipment from Western countries to create these new products; only they
had the power to influence the manufacturing and distribution system in Japan. Department
stores in Japan therefore acted as windows into the Western lifestyle, and Japanese consumers
were encouraged to adopt this new lifestyle and buy the accompanying products. In this way,
department stores led manufacturers and consumers in a process of Westernisation, and they
consequently dominated the retail market in Japan in the early twentieth century.
This development in turn impacted on retailers and consumers in other Asian countries such
as Korea and China. Japanese retailers began their international activities in the early twentieth

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century. Mitsukoshi started by launching a branch in Seoul in Korea in 1906 and many more
overseas stores followed.These stores were a catalyst for the modernisation of retailing in Asia, as
they included never-before-seen features such as point-of-sales displays, which changed the way
that local consumers shopped. Mitsukoshi expanded its network of overseas stores to include
Dalian, Beijing, and Shanghai (in China), Honolulu (US) and Singapore, before the outbreak
of World War II. These modern, Western-style stores became symbols of the Westernisation of
retailing. The original department stores therefore triggered a wave of Westernisation and mod-
ernisation that spread from the West to Japan, and then on to other Asian countries.
Despite the huge social and economic impact of this global phenomenon, many researches
on department stores have focused on the development of Western department stores from the
perspective of Western retailing and Western consumers: when innovative new methods were
introduced, how these stores developed, and how they impacted on consumer habits. Many
studies have also looked at the business history of leading department stores such as The Bon
Marché (Zola, 1928; Miller, 1981; Kashima, 1991), Wanamaker (Gibbons, 1971; Zulker, 1993),
Macy’s (Hower, 1943) and Harrods (Dale, 1981). Although there are studies of Japanese depart-
ment stores, these have also investigated how they developed and how they changed consumer
habits within the Japanese context. Few studies have given any attention to why Japanese retail-
ers decided to adopt the Western model of retailing and management in the first place, why they
led and encouraged the westernisation of Japanese society and how they caused such dramatic
changes in the retail industry and consumer habits across Asia. This chapter will therefore inves-
tigate how Japanese department stores not only caught up with Western department stores in
terms of their development, but also carved out a path beyond the limits of the existing Western
model, and by doing so charted the road ahead for the modernisation of Asian retailing in the
early twentieth century.

From dry goods store to department store

The predecessors of Japanese department stores were dry goods stores, which dealt mainly in
silk draperies in the Tokugawa era (1603–1868). Before their transformation into department
stores, dry goods stores were always exclusive spaces and customers could purchase goods only
under tightly regulated conditions. These practices are discussed in Chapter 29, but are usefully
summarised here. Paying customers were the only people permitted to enter the store and these
were mainly men.There were no window displays and no one would ever enter a store without
a clear intention of making a purchase. Customers could never see the items available for sale
inside the store; they would simply tell the sales assistants what they wanted to buy and some
suitable goods would be brought out from the storeroom. The assistants were very knowledge-
able and skilled at providing their customers with exactly what they were looking for. Mitsuko-
shi had used cash payment and a one-price policy since its business began in 1673 – innovations
that came much later in most Western shops – but it did not begin to develop as a department
store until around 1900.
Retail modernisation came about due to the difficult situation that Mitsukoshi found itself
in, which forced it to change its business strategy in order to survive. After the Meiji Restora-
tion, Mitsukoshi’s sales sharply decreased due to the demise of its greatest patrons, the samurai
class (Mitsukoshi, 2005). To recover its sales, in 1895 Mitsukoshi brought in a new director,
Yoshio Takahashi, who was a manager of Mitsui Bank (a leading partner organisation) and had
studied in the United States at Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1887.
He introduced some sales innovations common to American department stores, specifically fol-
lowing Wanamaker’s business model. He launched strategies such as point-of-sale displays and

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 Western models and Eastern influences

Western-style double-entry bookkeeping (Takahashi, 1933). Mitsukoshi therefore broke out of

the mould of the traditional retailer at the start of the twentieth century.
The prohibitive form of shopping that consumers experienced in the dry goods store was
transformed forever when Mitsukoshi’s anchor store, the Nihonbashi branch, was refurbished
in 1895 and completely converted into a sales area with display cases in 1900. Sample patterns
for new silk draperies were displayed in showcases and rotated regularly to attract all types
of customers and encourage them to enter the store. For the first time in Japan, people were
invited to enjoy browsing the store, completely at liberty to select products without being
disturbed by sales assistants. In 1904, Mitsukoshi took the decision to completely transform
itself into an American-style department store, and this was announced in newspapers in
1905. Mitsukoshi swiftly brought in the new retail format and embraced Western sales meth-
ods to become the first modern retailer in Japan. Soon afterwards, four other retail firms –
­Takashimaya, Matsuzakaya, Daimaru and Shirokiya – also set about adapting their stores into
Western-style department stores, after the managers of these dry goods stores travelled to
Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States to learn from these
Western retailers (see also Chapter 29). With this major initial overhaul, Japan began racing
towards a genuinely modern retail industry. Department stores were the pioneers of modern
retailing and only they succeeded in introducing Western sales techniques into their stores
before World War II.
The Japanese government encouraged new industries to enable Japan to catch up with West-
ern countries, and there was subsequently a large population shift from rural to urban areas to
meet the huge demand for more factory workers. Tokyo’s population tripled in fifty years from
671,000 in 1878 to 2.73 million in 1930, while the percentage of the Japanese population liv-
ing in Tokyo increased from 1.9% in 1878 to 4% in 1903. The population of Osaka, the leading
industrial city in Japan, increased even faster (Population Census, Statistics Japan). Within these
growing cities, several dry goods stores transformed into department stores by around 1920, and
then new department stores were also established. At the time, only traditional Japanese-style
wooden buildings existed and so this process began with the construction of Western-style fac-
tories for several emerging modern industries that were needed; this then fed into the gradual
industrialisation of Japan as a whole. Mitsukoshi was the first retailer to begin the process of
building Western-style multi-storied buildings, but Japanese construction companies and archi-
tects had no experience of constructing a Western-style building for Mitsukoshi’s new store.
Mitsukoshi therefore asked Tamisuke Yokogawa, an architect in the Mitsui group who was plan-
ning a visit to the United States between 1896 and 1897, to inspect American department store
buildings while he was there, so that he could bring back useful information about the skills they
would need to develop and the materials they would need to acquire in order to construct such
a building in Japan. Mitsukoshi went on to purchase the required materials, such as reinforced
steel (Hatsuda, 1992).
Mitsukoshi’s first modern, full-scale Western-style store was a six-story Renaissance-style
building established in 1914, which introduced the escalator for the first time in Japan, along
with lifts, air conditioning and heating – the latest facilities at the time. It had a stairwell in the
centre of the store, similar to that of the Bon Marché, a garden on the roof terrace and a gor-
geous lounge with lavishly designed interiors and Western furnishings modelled on Western
department stores (Mitsukoshi, 2005). This store and other similar department stores became
landmarks and symbols of the modern city in early twentieth-century Japan, which was charac-
terised by greater industrialisation, urbanisation and Westernisation. In this sense, to understand
the development of the Japanese retail industry is to also understand the Westernisation and
modernisation of Japan.

479
Figure 28.1 Central Hall at Mitsukoshi Nihombashi store in 1914
(Courtesy of Isetan Mitsukoshi Ltd)
 Western models and Eastern influences

From the West to Japan

The new-style stores needed more space for customers to view the products and Mitsukoshi
needed to provide a much wider range of merchandise to fill its sales floors. After Mitsukoshi
had converted its format into the new display style, its sales area in 1905 was 1,260 square
metres over two floors. In 1908 it expanded the building to 5,210 square metres over three
floors before building its much larger store in 1914 – an imposing edifice with a sales area of
13,210 square metres (Mitsukoshi, 2005). From its initial focus on silk draperies, Mitsukoshi
began diversifying its merchandise. Increasing the range of merchandise was crucial both in
the definition and expansion of western department stores (Nystrom, 1919; Pasdermadjian,
1954); to do this, Japanese stores had to add Western products to their merchandise, so this was
a doubly innovative process for them. Mitsukoshi first expanded its existing drapery lines and
then introduced new product lines, including cosmetics, household goods, umbrellas, accesso-
ries and stationery. In order to meet the consumer’s demand for Western products, Mitsukoshi
and other leading department stores also started importing goods such as clothing, bags, shoes,
cameras and blankets from Europe – replicating the product range found in many Western
department stores. Adoption of western goods sparked a strong interest in Western goods and
culture, but was not without its problems: with regard to clothing, the standard proportions of
Westerners and Japanese people were very different, so many imported socks, shirts, shoes and
jackets went unsold and became dead stock (Fujioka, 2006).
In order to expand their merchandise with new product lines, Japanese department
stores therefore needed to develop hybrid products. They essentially had to create their own

Figure 28.2 Western-style umbrella, shoes and hair accessories department at Mitsukoshi Nihombashi
store in 1914
(Courtesy of Isetan Mitsukoshi Ltd)

481
 Rika Fujioka

Western-style merchandise for Japanese consumers. This was a very challenging task and one
that Western department stores did not need to consider at all. To establish its own production
system, Mitsukoshi hired staff from London in 1906 to make clothing that would better fit
Japanese customers. Another department store, Takashimaya, sent managers to Europe to inspect
Western products and then developed hybrid products such as clothing, carpets and furniture.
The stores also introduced point-of-sale advertisements to help sell their products by suggesting
how they could be used to help Japanese consumers adapt their existing lifestyle into something
more Westernised.
The carpet is a good example of a Western product that was introduced in Japan during
this time. When the government decided to build its imperial palace in 1888 with a Western
style of design and decoration for public spaces and traditional Japanese style for the façade and
residential spaces, the government also decided to use mostly domestic products rather than
imported ones in order to encourage and support the development of its domestic industry
(Nakamura, 2000). Takashimaya became one of the suppliers of these Western-style products
and also received another order to supply Western-style carpets to the Diet Building in 1889.
However, it had never dealt with high-quality Western ornamentation and had little technical
knowledge about how to produce carpets, so this was a huge challenge for Takashimaya. The
company began by making a thorough study of Western interior design. Then, its associated
manufacturer, Suminoe, performed reverse engineering on the textiles in order to examine
how they were manufactured. Takashimaya eventually succeeded in training its Japanese work-
force to sufficiently high standards to be able to reproduce authentic Western carpets together
with Suminoe in 1890, but then needed to buy Western power looms through its trading com-
pany in 1901 so that it could maintain a consistent standard of quality for carpets (Takashimaya,
1941; Suminoe, 1975). Takashimaya also began promoting carpets to its upper-class customers.
Takashimaya introduced point-of-sale advertisements to increase the marketability of carpets,
which included information about carpets and suggestions of how they could be used to adopt
a more westernised lifestyle. In 1920 Takashimaya held an event that showed a mock-up room
with Western furniture and interior products at its store, and looked at how Japanese rooms
could be modified with Western products. With the actual products in front of them, customers
could easily visualise this new lifestyle and identify how these new products were used, and this
event successfully increased the sales of Takashimaya’s Western-style products. Furthermore, if
customers accepted one Western-style product, they would then quickly accept other products,
making it possible for Takashimaya to succeed in its goal of diversification (Fujioka, 2006).
The creation of new products was simply not possible without extensive cooperation
between manufacturers and retailers; neither one could do it alone. While department stores
depended on manufacturers for their merchandise, budding manufacturers relied completely
on retailers buying and selling huge quantities of products in order for them to succeed in their
new enterprise. During this time, some manufacturers began to introduce similar Western-style
production systems and to obtain detailed knowledge of Western products through govern-
mental support. However, if these products suffered poor sales, then they inevitably collapsed
under the new production system. Takashimaya endeavoured to secure the market for these
manufacturers and then transferred their knowledge into its own associated manufacturers. By
doing this, Takashimaya and other Japanese department stores were able to offer their custom-
ers a very wide range of Western merchandise. Takashimaya’s new Osaka branch benefited from
a more modern framework after achieving its goal of diversification and by 1931 the sales in
non-drapery departments – of goods such as accessories, bags, cosmetics, shoes and household
goods – had grown to 32% compared with the sales of silk draperies, which stood at 42.3%
(Fujioka, 2006).

482
 Western models and Eastern influences

While dry goods stores introduced retail innovations and diversified their merchandise, they
also needed to reform their management and organisational structure. Mitsukoshi, for example,
reformed its traditional business organisational structure and introduced a new form of person-
nel management. Mitsukoshi’s first professional managing director, Takahashi, recruited highly
educated graduates from universities and business schools and gave them leadership positions.
He clarified the specific tasks and roles of each unit and each staff member and established clear
rules of employment and a wage structure (Mitsukoshi, 2005). Before this restructure, Mitsu-
koshi and other retailers had used traditional, patriarchal personnel management, originating in
the Tokugawa era (Yui, 2012; Kikkawa, 2012). Under this system, a boy aged around 13 would
be employed as an apprentice and would then climb the career ladder until he became a senior
manager at around the age of 30. During this time, employees would generally be obliged to live
in an in-house dormitory at the store where they worked. The company treated all employees
like members of a family, providing them with food, clothing and education. Employees were
educated in good manners, social consideration, reading, writing and arithmetic, in addition
to the knowledge and skills needed for their jobs. Although their salary was quite low, the tra-
ditional Japanese perception was that companies were not just a means of earning money, but
a way of life. Employees lived and grew up together harmoniously as a company family in a
feudatory culture.
Takahashi, however, did not have any experience of living with his co-workers. He received
a large salary from the beginning for his professional work to reform Mitsukoshi. When he
arrived, he felt that the traditional apprenticeship system was too old to transform. He therefore
introduced a completely new personnel system, which was a very modern idea in Japan at the
time. The new system was met with resistance from some of the older employees, who were
subsequently dismissed. Soon afterwards in 1900, Mitsukoshi began to hire female employees
in addition to university graduates. A total of twenty-six female sales assistants were employed
by 1903 and their training was very strict. Recruiting female staff was revolutionary in Japanese
retailers at the time as women had not traditionally been part of the workforce in Japan. From
1910, employees’ dormitories were moved off-site, and they began commuting to the store each
day. For the first time, they could separate their home life from their work life (Mitsukoshi,
2005).This revolution of personnel management proved to be very successful at Mitsukoshi.The
new professional staff members then introduced further retail innovations at the department
store. Soon afterwards Mitsukoshi became a joint stock company and so was able to raise huge
amounts of investment capital with which Mitsukoshi constructed its new Western-style build-
ing that become a showcase for the latest Western technology. With this reform of organisation
and management, Mitsukoshi successfully transformed its business model from a traditional dry
goods store to a modern department store (Fujioka, 2014).
Another large store, Takashimaya, also had a conflict between old and young generations
among board members and so had to restructure the organisation.Takashimaya introduced some
new sales methods that had been used by Mitsukoshi before its transformation to a department
store. Indeed, this transition was by no means inevitable. While Mitsukoshi had suffered from
falling sales and had no other option but to restructure,Takashimaya’s business was doing well. It
was responsible for creating a boom in European admiration for Japanese products and culture
due to its presence at world expositions in Europe where the company displayed kimonos and
silk tapestries of Japanese art work. It was difficult, therefore, to make the decision to transform
into a department store (Takashimaya, 1968). In time, however, Takashimaya found itself com-
peting with Mitsukoshi’s increasingly successful new department stores in Osaka and it became
clear that Takashimaya would need to follow suit to remain competitive. In 1919, it transformed
into a modern-style department store, becoming a public company to gain the funds to build

483
 Rika Fujioka

a new eight-story Gothic-style anchor store in Osaka with a sales area of about 10,000 square
metres in 1922. Takashimaya furthermore changed its personnel system at its Kyoto branch in
1909, its Osaka branch in 1914, and its Tokyo branch in 1916: building off-site dormitories for
its employees to commute from. The department store then reformed its standard corporate
structure from a family-owned business to a modern organisation to develop even further.

The penetration of department stores across Japan

Japanese economic growth supported the development of department stores. In 1912, the gross
national product (GNP) was 4.77 billion yen, which increased to 15.45 billion yen in 1919.
With Japan’s industrial development, real wages and income increased; with the development
of the Japanese economy, sales in department stores grew dramatically. Also, as total personal
consumption expenditures (PCE) increased from 3.66 billion yen in 1912 to 11.3 billion yen
in 1919, consumers had more opportunity to enjoy shopping (Okawa et al., 1974). Consumer
demand grew hugely during this time and only department stores were able to respond quickly
enough to meet this increase. Mitsukoshi increased its sales and expanded its workforce (Mit-
sukoshi, 2005). When it announced its intention to transform into a department store in 1905,
its gross profit was 537,000 yen. This increased to 1.7 million yen in 1910, then 2.4 million yen
in 1915, then 9.6 million yen in 1920 and to 14 million yen in 1930. Mitsukoshi’s number of
employees also increased from 323 in 1905 to 1,407 in 1910, 5,101 in 1925 and 8,464 in 1935.
The main reason for this steady increase in sales and employees was the great success of its new
retail format, especially in its 1914 building established in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Mitsukoshi went
on to establish more new stores in other big cities across greater Tokyo and the country as a
whole, including Kobe in 1926, Kanazawa in 1930, Takamatsu in 1931, Sapporo in 1932 and
Sendai in 1933.
At the time, Mitsukoshi’s main customers were upper-class and upper-middle-class people
who lived in urban areas, because most products on sale were expensive and the stores were
located only in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. When the Great Kanto Earthquake struck
in 1923, however, the business model of Japanese department stores began to change. The
earthquake and subsequent large-scale fires inflicted catastrophic damage on department stores
in Tokyo: those of Mitsukoshi, Matsuzakaya and Takashimaya mostly burned down. They
began selling essentials such as soap, basic clothing, dishes, cans of food and rice at temporary
stores. Next, stores expanded their scope to cater for a wider and lower economic class of con-
sumers than before. The incomes of these new middle-class consumers also steadily increased, a
combination of factors that prompted the popularisation of department stores and the beginning
of mass consumption in Japan (Suzuki, 1980). It was an exciting experience for shoppers to visit
such a store and walk around buying new products that they had never seen before. As a result,
the department stores became important attractions for both visitors and residents.
Focusing on this wider target market, new department stores soon spread to many cities in
Japan. In addition to the department store format that evolved from dry goods stores, there were
various other routes to becoming a department store. For example, Jyuichiya, a store that sold
hair accessories, bags and shoes in Nagoya, transformed into the department store Maruei in
1922; Daiwa used to specialise in selling imported products in Kanazawa, becoming a depart-
ment store in 1923; and Tenmaya started out as a dealer in building materials in Okayama, but
established itself as a department store in 1925 (Hida, 1998). Some railway companies also cre-
ated a uniquely Japanese type of department store (see Chapter 29). The Hankyu department
store was firmly established in 1929 in Osaka. While other department stores were located
on main streets in city centres, it was located at a major train station terminal and its target

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customers were urban commuters travelling to and from work between the city centre and
suburban areas. The founder of Hankyu had shrewdly anticipated that locating stores at a train
terminal would eliminate the need for advertising of any kind, since the potential customers
were already there (Kobayashi, 1970). The store mainly sold food, toys, books, household goods,
cosmetics, stationery, shoes and silk draperies, all of which were slightly cheaper and more
practical than the more fashionable products sold at Mitsukoshi and Takashimaya. Keen to take
advantage of this newly discovered market, other department stores soon began to open at train
station terminals: Takashimaya launched a new store in Osaka in 1930, Toyoko opened its first
store in Shibuya,Tokyo, in 1934 and Iwataya established its store in Fukuoka in 1936. In this way,
the number of department store companies began to increase from the late 1920s.
Department store companies expanded the size of each store’s sales area and increased the
number of their stores, and more and more companies entered the market.With their expanded
target market, they spread throughout Japan, although they were almost always found in large
cities. In order to reach out to consumers in smaller cities, sales staff from leading department
stores travelled to these neighbouring centres to sell the store’s products. For example,Wakayama
was one of the twenty largest cities near Osaka, yet there were no department stores there; big
city stores therefore rented public or private venues to use as temporary sales spaces for a few
days, so that consumers in the city could browse their products and enjoy shopping.There was a
big demand from wealthy people in these cities and they looked forward to buying new prod-
ucts from these temporary stores. Any department store that had a temporary presence in these
areas each month therefore had a huge impact on local stores in terms of sales (Fujioka, 2014).
In addition, department stores started a mail order service so that everyone could order products,
even if they had no access to a nearby department store and were unable to visit a temporary
store. Mitsukoshi, for example, launched its mail order magazine in 1912 and expanded its busi-
ness (Mitsuzono, 2014). Then, customers of department stores spread across Japan, and the latest
fashions and Western products also reached wealthy people in smaller cities in Japan.
The dramatic growth of department stores, with their huge sales, completely overwhelmed
all other Japanese retailers and adversely affected smaller retailers in particular. While there were
only 36 department stores in Tokyo in 1932, which was only 0.027% of all retailers, the sales of
department stores amounted to almost 25% of total retail sales and 55% of total clothing sales.
The fifth largest city in Japan, Nagoya, had five department stores, which were 0.016% of all
retailers, yet they enjoyed 15.6% of total sales and 44.4% of total clothing sales in 1932 (Nakani-
shi, 1938). Japanese department stores therefore became very powerful and dominated the retail
market in Japan.

From Japan to other Asian countries

Before the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan was closed to foreign commerce except Korea,
China and the Netherlands, and Japanese people were banned from travelling to and from for-
eign countries. Even in the early Meiji era, there was little information on Western countries,
so Japanese politicians and bureaucrats needed to study Western systems in order to restructure
Japanese society and economy in the Meiji era. Department stores were exceptional retailers in
Japan and, as we have seen, were a driving force for the modernisation of Japanese business and
the Westernisation of the Japanese lifestyle, in part because they initially catered for the wealthy
ruling class. Leading modern companies such as the Mitsui trading company and Mitsui Bank
grew from the largest retailer, Mitsukoshi. There were also other department stores that had a
big effect on other industries: Shirokiya first started producing Western-style clothing when
its politician customers introduced a policy of wearing Western clothing at the Western-style

485
 Rika Fujioka

guest house for visiting overseas politicians, and Matsuzakaya established a modern-style bank
in Nagoya at almost exactly the same time as it transformed into a department store. Their cus-
tomers were also powerful and influenced others, such as imperial families, politicians (including
prime ministers), directors of big business, wealthy entrepreneurs, venerable Buddhist monks
and highly educated people. With this influential position in Japanese society, these stores could
effectively modernise retailing and catch up with Western department stores within a short
period of time. Their positioning was therefore very different from Western department stores,
and they were able to have a huge impact not only on Japanese consumption but also on the
entire economy of their country.
These powerful retailers also launched overseas branches in Korea, mainland China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, largely in order to meet the demand of existing Japanese
clients in the early twentieth century. The Japanese army and the South Manchuria Railway
Company, which was established by the Japanese government and private companies in 1906
and formed the major military base of occupied Manchuria, were looking for suppliers and
importers of goods such as food, military and civilian clothing, and camping gear – especially as
things moved onto a war footing. They sounded out several department stores for this logistic
support, some of which were able to meet this demand through their long history and strong
relationship with the government and other leading companies (Shirokiya, 1957; Daimaru,
1967; Takashimaya, 1982; Matsuzakaya, 2010). Japanese department stores that had originated
as dry goods stores were ideal partners in this case, since they had two established divisions that
were ideally suited to the task. These divisions did not exist in Western department stores or in
other Japanese department stores that had grown from railway companies. The first division was
the Gaisho department, which was literally a sales department for external customers; Gaisho
sales assistants would visit the homes of loyal customers or the offices of loyal companies to
take their orders, building a special one-to-one relationship. The other division was the Trading
department, which traded with other companies – purchasing materials and using associated
manufacturers from Western countries – to make its own products such as Western clothing
and furnishings; in other cases, it set up its own supply chains with associated and outsourcing
manufacturers to produce specified goods on demand for a client company.
At that time, the Japanese government was a loyal Gaisho client of Mitsukoshi, Takashimaya,
Matsuzakaya, Shirokiya and Daimaru. Due to the government’s national policy concerns, these
department stores expanded their market towards Asia during the difficult wartime conditions
in Japan, and the government loosely assigned a trading area to each of them (Shirokiya, 1957).
For example, as a loyal Gaisho client of Takashimaya, the South Manchuria Railway Company
asked the department store to supply bench seats for its trains (Fujioka, 2006). Takashimaya
was able to manufacture bench seats with Suminoe, its associated company that produced car-
pets (as described above). The Gaisho department in Japan received its orders from the South
Manchuria Railway Company and Takashimaya’s branch office in Manchuria was established
in 19331 to communicate with the railway company; the trading department then purchased
the materials and controlled the manufacturing at Suminoe’s Manchurian factory, established in
1939. The local branch in Dalian, which had a trading division and a store, also played a crucial
role as a hub to expedite the handling of orders. In this way, Takashimaya expanded its overseas
stores in the 1930s; it opened a store in Tianjin in 1937, in Nanjing and in Shanghai in 1938
and in Tsingtao in 1939, and a total of twenty-seven branches and stores in Korea and China
before World War II. Crucial here was its ability to make deals with military companies, which
further expanded its business in East Asia (Takashimaya, 1941).
There were a lot of uncertainties and risks in these markets and they required serious invest-
ment; but the department stores had no other option but to comply with the government’s

486
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requirements under these conditions if they wanted to keep their business from this particular
loyal client. Shirokiya established 38 local offices in China catering for the Japanese military
(Shirokiya, 1957). Matsuzakaya launched a branch in Tianjin in 1939 and had a total of twenty-
five local offices in China, Java and Sumatra (Indonesia) by 1942, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and
Singapore in 1943. These branches imported industrial products from Japan, produced furniture
on site, sourced military supplies and ran a restaurant for Japanese residents, in addition to man-
aging stores (Matsuzakaya, 2010). Daimaru established its local office in Tianjin in 1938, which
supplied food, oil and wool for the Japanese military. The Tianjin office then opened a full-scale
store in 1940 to cater for Japanese residents, with 1,300 square metres for its sales floor and res-
taurant. This was its largest overseas store and had over 150 employees in 1943: thirty Japanese
men and ten Japanese women were sent from Japanese stores to teach their sales techniques to
locals; a dozen highly educated Japanese-speaking Chinese men were sent to Daimaru’s anchor
store in Osaka to learn the Japanese way of retailing; and a hundred Chinese women worked as
sales assistants. Daimaru also had stores in Singapore and Malaysia and branch offices in Vietnam,
Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar for military supplies (Daimaru, 1967).
The outbreak of war between China and Japan and subsequently World War II brought
a worsening economic situation in Japan. There was little merchandise in department stores
because manufacturers only produced essential products in the newly controlled economy, many
of the stores’ staff had been conscripted into the military, and the stores’ exhibition spaces were
exploited for military use by the government. However, their overseas stores did well during
this time, contrasting strongly with decreasing domestic sales. The total sales from all Japanese
department stores began to decline, from 886 million yen in 1941 to 462 million yen in 1945,
but the decline was uneven ( Japan Department Stores Association, 2013). For example, sales in
Mitsukoshi’s Seoul branch amounted to 11 million yen in 1943 and its Dalian branch gener-
ated 6.8 million yen; this compared favourably with 2.9 million yen at the Sapporo branch in
Japan, despite the similar sales areas (approximately 7,500 square metres) in each store. In 1945
Mitsukoshi’s largest store in terms of sales remained its flagship store at Nihonbashi in Tokyo, but
the second largest store was its overseas store in Seoul, which had overtaken the Osaka branch,
established for as long as the Nihonbashi branch and formerly its other flagship store (Mitsu-
koshi, 2005). Takashimaya had a workforce overseas of 141 Japanese employees in 1938, which
grew to 417 in 1944 across all its overseas branches; in addition it hired local sales assistants. Sales
in its overseas branches amounted to 5 million yen in 1938 and increased to 15.8 million yen in
1941, remaining at this level for three years. Sales in the overseas branches accounted for 67.1%
of its total sales in the second half of 1944, and so these overseas branches became vital stores
during World War II (Takashimaya, 1982).
This expansion of Japanese department stores in East Asia influenced the local communities
not only politically but also culturally. As Fujioka (2013) has observed, the overseas branches of
Japanese department stores were ethnic enclaves; internationalisation was purely aimed at spa-
tial expansion, as the Japanese government intended. Their launch of overseas stores and their
engagement was simply a response to the requirements of their loyal customers behind the colo-
nial power; these stores opened mainly to cater for Japanese residents and tourists in these coun-
tries. However, it is hard to ignore the impact these stores had on the host countries, in terms
of the modernisation of retailing. In Seoul, for example, there were four Japanese department
stores, Mitsukoshi, Minakai, Chojiya and Hirata, and one Korean department store, Hwasin, in
the 1920s. While Mitsukoshi had only one store in Seoul, which was the biggest department
store by sales in Korea, Chojiya had three stores in Korea and three stores in Manchuria, and
Minakai had twelve stores across Korea and three stores in Manchuria. These stores’ main target
customers were Japanese residents, but Korean people also visited them. Mitsukoshi targeted the

487
 Rika Fujioka

Figure 28.3 New-built Seoul store in Korea in 1916

(Courtesy of Isetan Mitsukoshi Ltd)

wealthy, whereas Hwasin expanded its customer base to the middle class and even lower classes
after the mid-1930s. With an increasingly intense competition among stores, 60% of Chojiya
customers were Korean, while 90% of Minakai customers were Japanese (Hayashi, 2004).
Mitsukoshi’s store in Seoul was designed in a Renaissance-style, with the very same design
and structure as Mitsukoshi’s flagship store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo; its interior was also similar,
with a central hall, a stairwell, lifts, lounges, restaurants, a roof garden, an art gallery, a theatre, a
tea room and even a small Shintō shrine. It was impressive and highly distinctive Western archi-
tecture in Korea at that time. Mitsukoshi also had an outdoor rooftop café with a balcony, which
had by the 1930s become a popular meeting place for local Koreans, as it was seen as a new land-
mark of colonial Seoul and, perhaps ironically, a symbol of Westernisation (Kal, 2008). Minakai
opened a seven-storey Renaissance-style flagship store in Seoul in 1933 and introduced the first
escalator in Korea (Hayashi, 2004).Wealthy and highly educated Korean people prefered to shop
at the Japanese department stores, especially Mitsukoshi, rather than Korean department store,
Hwasin, and some of them disdained its offerings. They were called ‘modern girl’ and ‘modern
boy’ and Japanese department stores were in the heart of modern culture (Oh and Kahm, 2018).
In addition, their merchandise and Western-style sales practices were entirely new to Korean
customers. Japanese department stores sold mainly Japanese and Japanised Western products that
were imported from Japan (Hirano, 1999). With this Western-style retailing, wealthy Korean
customers enjoyed browsing new products from Japan and modern retailing therefore pen-
etrated into the Korean market through these Japanese department stores. Furthermore, Japanese
intermediaries collaborated with Korean manufacturers to reinvigorate traditional goods (Oh,
2016). Japanese tourists were looking for authentic Korean products as luxury souvenirs, and
Mitsukoshi’s “Chosŏn Product Showroom” was a well-known place to get reliable, high-quality

488
Figure 28.4 New-built Dalian store in China in 1937
(Courtesy of Isetan Mitsukoshi Ltd)
 Rika Fujioka

Korean Chosŏn products. The most popular items sold in this showroom were Koryŏ celadon
and lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The Koryŏ celadon products were not original
antiques, because these had virtually disappeared before the 1880s. However, the Japanese colo-
nial elite endorsed this as the best of Korean art, and affluent Japanese expatriates and tourists
(as well as those from other countries) were eager to purchase Koryŏ celadon products either
for their own collections or as gifts; as a direct result, the price of genuine Koryŏ celadon
inflated. When this happened, a Japanese entrepreneur began a business that produced modern
replicas as an affordable substitute for overpriced genuine ones. These replicas were produced
at local workshops run by skilled Japanese artisans, who had professional knowledge of ceramic
materials and techniques and, as Korean workers were employed to undertake this work, this in
turn developed the revival of Koryŏ celadon production in Korea. These items became some
of the best-selling Korean products at Mitsukoshi. Therefore, while Mitsukoshi developed as a
leading modern retailer in Korea, it also influenced both Korean consumer culture and Korean
manufacturing.
The modernisation of retailing in China was mainly brought about by overseas Chinese
entrepreneurs, who had gained their business experience in Australia and Hong Kong in the late
nineteenth century, before returning home in the early twentieth century. In Shanghai, there
were four leading department stores run by these Chinese directors: Sincere opened a store in
1917, Wing On in 1918, Sun Sun in 1926 and The Sun in 1936. They built traditional English-
style buildings and each store included a hotel, a tea room and a restaurant (Shima, 1995; Chan,
1998; Ching-hwang, 1998; Young, 1998, Shimanaga, 2007). Their target market consisted of
wealthy local customers and foreign expatriates living in China; they used modern sales methods
and their main merchandise consisted of imported products from the West and Japan, as well as
luxury domestic products. These stores were considered to be a symbol of Chinese modernity
(Shima, 1995; MacPherson, 1998). The first Chinese store to be named a “department store”,
following the Japanese usage, was in Shanghai in 1921. The term first appeared in a Chinese
dictionary in 1923, where it was defined as a business that is engaged in large-scale retailing
that is divided into individually managed departments, is highly profitable and has very good
facilities for customers; it also implied a modern organisation that included foreign goods in its
merchandise (MacPherson, 1998).
Chinese art had strong historical links with Japanese art and Japan had the role of being
China’s window on the West (Wong, 2006). The Mitsui Trading Company, for example, distrib-
uted advertisements promoting Western-style wedding fashion with Japanese captions that con-
structed an exotic image, encouraging customers to transform their lives (Zhao and Belk, 2008).
Japanese products, including cosmetics, fabrics and food, were widely accepted by Chinese cus-
tomers. In the 1930s, however, Chinese department stores became the target of criticism when
the Chinese government began promoting the purchase of Chinese products following the
1932 Shanghai Incident. An increasingly strong nationalist movement grew, which campaigned
fiercely against the sale of Japanese products (Lien, 2016). The women’s magazine Linglong, for
example, endorsed this government-led campaign; at the time, 90% of toys were imported,
mostly from Japan and readers were encouraged to buy Chinese toys for Christmas, the head-
lines reading: ‘Let’s buy a Chinese Christmas gift’.2 When Chinese department stores promoted
Christmas gifts, they circulated their promotional catalogue and leaflets, and offered luxury
imported products from Japan with lower prices. Japanese products were therefore very com-
mon as good quality and less expensive options than Chinese products at that time. Following
these nationalist campaigns, Chinese department stores subsequently changed their merchandise
to comprise mainly domestic products. For example,Wing On’s domestic products formed 25%
of its merchandise during the 1920s, but 65% in 1937 (Shima, 1995). Despite the movement

490
 Western models and Eastern influences

against Japanese products, Japanese department stores in China continued to develop in the
1930s. First, these department stores expanded their target market to include a much broader
range of Chinese customers, selling low-cost, high-quality products (Zhōngxíng, 1933). Second,
the number of Japanese stores increased along with the requirement of the Japanese govern-
ment to supply goods both to its military institutions and to consumers in China. The impact
of Japanese products and stores was therefore huge on both the retail industry and consumer
culture in China.
From a global perspective, the birth of department stores began in the West, with modern
retailing established in the late nineteenth century. Around fifty years of Western innovation gave
Japanese retailers a direction to follow for their own development. Japan then created its own
unique type of department store, which was a hybrid model between East and West. Japanese
department stores learned to adapt their merchandise in a Western style and thereby produced
their own original products to better fit with the existing Japanese lifestyle. Setting a good
example to follow, this new Japanese model then expanded throughout East Asia, bringing mod-
ern retailing to a global market in a different way from Western department stores. This move-
ment from Japan to East Asia continued in the period of economic development after World
War II. For example, the Singaporean Apollo Hotel invited the Japanese department store Isetan
to open a branch next to its new modern-style hotel in 1970. This joint venture was supported
by Singapore’s government in order to attract foreign investment and modern Japanese retailers
to the country. Isetan seized the opportunity to launch its first overseas store, which opened in
1972. At that time, customers in Singapore had never encountered Isetan’s modern fixed-price
policy and were daunted by it, so the store was not an immediate success; but as customers
gradually became accustomed to fixed prices the store began to increase its sales, and both Isetan
and the Apollo Hotel enjoyed widespread popularity (Isetan, 1990).
In addition, Taiwanese department stores began partnerships with Japanese department
stores from the late 1970s; Taiwan’s Evergreen department became affiliated with Japan’s Tokyu
department store in 1977 and Taiwan’s Pacific and Japan’s Sogo began a joint venture in 1987
(Chang and Sternquist, 1993).When Japanese department stores entered the Hong Kong market
to meet the demand of Japanese tourists, they had a big advantage because local department
stores had comparably little experience and little money to invest. The first Japanese depart-
ment store to open branches in Hong Kong was Daimaru in 1960, and during the 1970s Isetan
and Matsuzakaya also launched into this market. By the 1980s, there were fourteen Japanese
department stores in Hong Kong, with a market share over 30%. These stores attracted younger,
fashion-conscious shoppers and were symbols of high technology, modernity and efficiency
(McGoldrick and Ho, 1992).

Conclusion
The development of department stores had a great impact on the Japanese economy, Japanese
society and on the wider Asian market. First, Japanese department stores made a major contri-
bution to the Westernisation of Japanese society and the modernisation of Japanese companies,
as a direct result of their radical transformation from traditional Japanese dry goods stores. In
contrast, Western department stores simply underwent a process of modernising their exist-
ing retail format (Shaw, 1992). Japanese department stores were the hubs of modern industry
relating to the Western-style products they sold. Although they did not manufacture all of their
products themselves, they managed the development of new Western products with their asso-
ciated factories and trading companies to fit the Japanese lifestyle. They forged a supply chain
with manufacturers, who often gained advanced skills through working with department stores;

491
 Rika Fujioka

this partnership bridged the gap between supply and demand, and created new Western-style
products using Western machinery and materials that were imported by department stores.With
these new products, department stores not only boosted their sales but also encouraged new
industries to emerge. Therefore, department stores developed in tandem with the industrialisa-
tion of Japan.
The modernisation of Japanese retailers was a process of continuous innovation, including
new sales methods, new management and organisational structures and the Westernisation of
Japanese society through the promotion of Western products. This led to the creation of an
entirely new form of consumer culture in Japan, similar to that created by Western department
stores; the Bon Marché and the Louvre in Paris were described as cathedrals of modern com-
merce (Crossick and Jaumain, 1999) and dream worlds (Williams, 1982), and American depart-
ment stores embodied a new culture of consumer capitalism (Leach, 1994). With a modern
display of products and new sales methods in place, Japanese customers – in particular women
and children, who had not been able to enter dry goods stores – were able to enjoy shopping for
the first time, which quickly became a leisure activity. In these new ”cathedrals of consumption”
in Japan, the new products boosted consumer demand and created an entirely new shopping
experience. Mitsukoshi’s second professional managing director, Osuke Hibi, said that stores
should present their displays to be appealing to children and their families, because if children
enjoyed coming to the stores, then they would grow to become loyal customers in the near
future; this was part of his marketing strategy for further development (Hamada,1948).
The development of Japanese department stores also impacted on retailers in other Asian
countries. Japanese department stores expanded their new stores in Korea and China in the early
twentieth century. This expansion had more far-reaching consequences than simply increased
sales for Japanese department stores: the new Western-style buildings that had been built to house
the stores in Seoul and Shanghai visibly impacted on local consumers with their striking pres-
entation of Western culture. Wealthy locals, and eventually a broader range of customers, enjoyed
experiencing Western-style shopping for the first time at these stores, alongside the Japanese
community living abroad, which was originally the main target market.The extent of this impact
has yet to be fully assessed, due to the lack of statistical data. However, when local retailers in
South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan wanted to modernise their own stores after World War II,
it is apparent that they were keen to work with Japanese department stores so that they could
model their new stores on the Japanese format. Japanese department stores were therefore not
simple imitations of Western department stores and they developed along their own original path.
This chapter has shown the unique path of the modernisation of Asian retailing and the role of
Japanese department stores as an intermediate between West and East.

Notes
1 Takashimaya first established its local office in Dalian, Manchuria in 1924, then closed it in 1925. In 1929
it opened a liaison office for its staff to communicate with its clients (Takashimaya, 1941).
2 Anonymous, ‘Let’s buy a Chinese Christmas gift’, Linglong (Lin Loon Magazine) (1931). 1(41).

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 29
RETAILING IN INDIA
Strategic overview
Nitin Sanghavi

Retailing in India is about capturing the opportunities of a complex consumer

class – either you will swim or you will sink
—(  Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st Prime Minister of India, 1948)

Introduction
India has been a leading nation in International trade since the fourth century B.C., when the
Mauryan Emperors unified the subcontinent, building and maintaining roads and transporta-
tion hubs for most of the country, forming trade routes and minting coins for trade. During the
first to eleventh centuries A.C., India had nearly 33% of world GDP, making it world’s largest
economy (Menon, 2009). This also attracted various traders from Europe, including the Portu-
guese, Dutch, French and English, who sought to establish trade status in India, especially from
the sixteenth century onwards. Most notable were the English traders, who arrived during the
seventeenth century and established various trading missions, starting with the first one in Cal-
cutta (Kolkata) in eastern India and then on to norther and southern parts of India, and finally
all the way to up to Cochin (Kochin) – a major centre for spice manufacturing and trading.
From the late seventeenth century, the East India Company monopolised English trade with
India, waging economic and military warfare to drive out and/or reduce the presence of vari-
ous other traders and their trading missions, and generating huge flows of trade between India
and England. It also exerted political influence over several Kings and Princes throughout India
in order to maintain and enhance this trade. This led to massive unrest in several regions of the
country, eventually resulting in the British Government taking over The East India Company
in 1858 and ruling until 1947. However, during this period, Indian economic performance was
mediocre at best: its share of world GDP plummeted from 24.4% in 1700 to 3.6% in 1947 and
it has been estimated that the yearly agricultural wage was higher in 1810 than in 1946 in real
terms (Nehru, 1948). Although economic performance picked up in the latter part of the nine-
teenth century, India was still desperately poor in 1946. After India won independence in 1947,
it embarked on gradual reforms to rebuild its economy and infrastructure.
Retailing in India has a huge impact on its economy, accounting for over 10% of GDP and
around 8% of all employment. According to the latest research (India Retail Report, BCG,

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2015), the Indian retail market at present is estimated to be over US$600 billion and one of
the top five retail markets in the world by economic value. It is also one of the fastest growing
markets in the world with a market size of 1.2 billion people. The Indian retail sector is likely
to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% to reach US$1 trillion by 2020–1.
Modern retailing is expected to grow three times from its present share of 11% at US$66 billion
to 21% of the overall retail market reaching US$210 billion by 2020–1, with traditional retailing
also growing at 10% per annum. India is also expected to become the world’s fastest growing
e-commerce market, driven by a rapid increase in the number of Internet users and smart phone
owners as well as the arrival of major foreign e-tailors. Indian e-commerce sales are expected to
reach US$5 billion by 2020. India’s direct selling industry is also expected reach US$3.6 billion
by 2020. All these developments are and will continue to make Indian retailing dynamic, excit-
ing and challenging for domestic as well as foreign players.
This chapter aims to set this recent and future growth into a longer historical context, begin-
ning with the early history of Indian retailing, then charting the emergence of modern retail in
India and discussing the various factors shaping current and future developments.

The history of Indian retailing

Early years
The origin of retailing in India is as old as the trade itself. Barter was the oldest form of trade.
The Indian retailing of lifestyle goods dates back to prehistoric period (Nehru, 1948). Evidence
of ornaments, apparel, foot ware, handicrafts, paintings and sculptures were found in the excava-
tions at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. In the ancient period, the diversity in clothing and food
habits was largely dependent upon the climate, physical features and traditions in respective
regions; variables which continue to shape consumption even today. For centuries, most mer-
chandise was sold in the marketplace or by travelling merchants and sales persons. Medieval
markets relied on local farmers for supplies of perishable food as the journey time would be too
long to bring these goods from greater distances. Customers also travelled regularly to particular
places for specialty items traded at market places comprising haats, melas and mandis.
Haats are locations which witness a public gathering of buyers and sellers of perishable and
household items at fixed times and fixed locations. These periodic markets remain a major part
of the rural market system in India, with an estimated 42,000 haats spread across India. Melas
are fairs (sometimes selling commodities and sometimes associated with religious festivals) and
almost all states in India have melas for which they are known e.g. Madhya Pradesh for Kumbh
Mela. It is estimated that more than 2,500 melas are held commonly in the country lasting
between three to seven days, each one having over 600 stalls selling a variety of products. Mandis
are permanent markets set up and regulated by state government for the sale of mainly agricul-
tural produce sourced directly from farmers and other food consumables. There are currently
around 7,500 mandis spread across India that play a key role in both supplying local communi-
ties and providing better prices to farmers. In earlier times, most trade at these locations was
through barter, but this gradually moved to exchange of gold and silver coins and then to local
currency. The most popular village locations saw their trade increase and exchange became
more permanent, allowing them to grow into Mandis or Haats.
It is important to understand Indian geo-demographic as well as consumer segmentation
aspects and their impact on the growth and diversity of the retail landscape over the centuries.
From earlier times, Indian society was segmented into main and sub religions, casts and sub casts;
clothing, food habits and purchasing decisions were largely governed by the prevailing customs

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and traditions shaped by these structures. Culture was thus the major influence on the purchase
decision (Nehru, 1948). Occupation was the basis of casts and sub casts, and birth was the base
for religion and sub religion. Society was segmented into four classes: Kshatriyas (fighter, war-
rior), Brahmin (teacher, preacher, religious leader), Vaisyas (traders, merchants) and Shudras (serv-
ants, peasants, artisans, landless labourers). Retail activities were mainly carried out by Vaisyas,
who then opened small shops to stock them with products customers needed and wanted with
the vision of providing convenience at the doorstep of the consumers. Much later, in the nine-
teenth century, the shops became “mom-and-pop” or kirana stores and formed the hub of their
local community. These form the basis of the traditional retail sector today. With a small area
averaging at around 300 sq. ft., stocking food, packaged grocery and household goods, custom-
ised to the needs of the target customers in their catchment area, they are usually operated by
the owner and family members and in many cases have been owned by successive generations.
One of the key features of the evolution of retailing in India is how it has been underpinned
by huge variations across regions and communities, discussed more fully below. These variations
in culture, traditions and customs have been reflected over the centuries in the different retail
propositions found across the country. Indeed, significant differences in the taste, preferences and
buying habits between consumers and the corresponding retail propositions between the North
and the South of India exist even today. The South of India is more traditional and conservative,
so there is a large number of shops selling sarees, jewellery and ethnic ware. The North, with its
rich heritage of artisans, dating back to Mughal Empire times, has large numbers of retail shops
decorative art, home furnishings, furniture and carvings.The colder regions of North India have
also developed domestic crafts such as carpet weaving and embroidery work, some of which
have grown into very large industries.
Over the last 150 years, Indian retailing has grown significantly, mainly at a local and regional
level catering to significant local/regional differences and preferences. This growth was largely
driven by trading families which had been going over several generations. Many of them had
either a product and/or category specialisation; coupled with a good location, this allowed them
to create their own unique selling proposition (USP), image and positioning with personal cus-
tomer service. The key areas of differentiation were based on range, choice, colour and design,
price, quality and service or some combination of these. Some of the notable examples of these
trading families are the Nallis and Kumarans of Chennai, specialising in sarees and ethnic ware;
Sighania with Raymond, the textile brand, and Wadia with Bombay Dying for textile furnishing.
Other important retailers in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India included the
Canteen stores, mainly supplying the army and certain classes of government employees and
their families with a limited range of food and household items, and the Post Office, which
transported huge quantities of the consumer goods across India between 1890 and 1920. Dur-
ing the British Raj in India, several famous specialist British and later European retailers estab-
lished their stores in larger cities in India. Retailers such as Spencers, the Army and Navy Stores,
Trufitt & Hill and Lawrence and Mayo catered mainly to the expatriate community, rulers and
wealthy Indians. Some of them have survived and even prospered into the twenty-first century,
maintaining their appeal to an elite customer base.
During early 1940s, immediately before independence from Britain, the Public Distribution
System (PDS) was established by the government and was run by local government bodies and
their appointed agents in several cities and towns.These sold a very limited range of product cat-
egories, comprising mainly food, grains, sugar and other essential commodities such as fuel. The
idea was to achieve “fair” distribution of these essential items to the masses across India and at
“fair” price – a price which was highly subsidised and heavily regulated by the government.The
intention was to deal with frequent droughts and shortages, and the scheme was subsequently

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extended to other cities and towns in the late 1940s. By the year 1946, nearly 780 cities/towns
were covered by this system, making it one of the largest retail chains in India. Even after inde-
pendence, this continued for several decades, only gradually shrinking with the emergence of
modern retail stores. Even today, there are still a few hundred of these stores remaining, though
most face an uncertain future.
Taking a different approach to supporting local economies, the Khadi and Village Industries
Company (KVIC) was set up post-independence to promote hand spun and hand woven cotton
textiles (known as Khadi) and thus support hundreds of thousands of farmers/ workers in vil-
lages across India. Today, there are more than 7,000 KVIC stores spread all over the country.The
co-operative movement was also championed, post-independence, by the government, resulting
in the establishment of several stores, known either as Sahakari Bhandar or Apna Bazar, selling a
range of food, household and other essential home/family related items. To date, there are over
200 of these stores in existence across India, many of them averaging in size between 1,000 and
5,000 square feet.

Emergence of organised (modern) retail in India

The emergence of the first wave of modern retailing in India can be traced back to when a
shopping centre came into existence in the year 1861 in Bombay (Mumbai). Known as The
Crawford Market, after the then Municipal Commissioner of Bombay Sir Crawford, it took
nearly 7 years to build having a unique design which blended Indian and British architectural
elements. In 1874,The Hogg Market (popularly known as New Market) was established in Cal-
cutta (Kolkata).The shopping centre was designed by an East India Railways Company architect
R R Banga and was named after the then Municipal Commissioner of Calcutta Sir Stuart Hogg.
These markets mainly catered to the expatriate community as well as rich and discerning Indi-
ans, stocking specialty items such as imported food items, fruits and vegetables, specialty teas and
spices and household items. Even today, the Crawford Market and the New Market continue to
be premier shopping areas in Mumbai and Kolkata respectively, frequented by upper and middle
class Indian consumers. In early 1900, a similar development was also initiated in Delhi, called
Connaught Circle, which again remains an important shopping area, selling imported clothing
and household items as well as specialty ethnic ware. These developments were similar to devel-
opments in various “colonial cities” around the globe, e.g. Singapore and Santiago, mimicking
largely prevalent European styles with a touch of local architecture.
During 1920s, in Madras (Chennai), a lake known as “Long Tank” was drained to create the
first “planned” shopping/residential town. It was named Thiagaraya Nagar, popularly known as
T-Nagar (city). Many specialty retailers such as Nalli, Kumaran Silk and GRT Jewellers opened
their stores in T-Nagar between the late 1920s and the 1940s, selling upmarket sarees, jewellery,
occasion ware and accessories to the rich and famous including a small number of expatriates.
Today, T-Nagar, a stretch of around 2 kilometres, popularly known as “The Golden Mile”, has
become India’s largest high street by revenue, home to more than fifty large regional and Indian
brands. It attracts more than 50,000 shoppers and 75,000 vehicles on a daily basis, swelling to
500,000 shoppers and 150,000 vehicles each weekend. During festivals such as Diwali and Pon-
gal, it draws as many as two million shoppers in a single day.
The second wave of organised retailing can be traced back to the year 1931, when the
Bata Shoe Company opened chain stores (mixture of company owned and franchised outlets)
in various cities and towns across India. This was quickly followed by DCM and Raymonds,
which sold clothing and textiles from their shops across India. The 1940s and 1950s also saw

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the establishment of a few department stores in metropolitan cities, including “Akbarally” in

Mumbai, and Nilgiris and Spencer in Chennai. These were often created by local entrepreneurs
based on the inspiration of their visits to European cities (see also Chapter 28). During the late
1970s and 1980s, multi-product, multi-brand retailing also emerged in the largest cities, with
key retailers including The Heritage Emporium in Delhi, Benzer and Amarsons in Mumbai and
Pantaloons in Chennai.They enjoyed similar success to the department stores and many of them
are still in business today.
Useful parallels can be drawn here between the emergence of “modern” retailing in India
and the West. The High Street came into existence in Europe between the twelfth and four-
teenth centuries, comprising of specialty and variety stores; the department store concept was
launched in Europe and the US around 1880 and quickly spread to provincial towns, and chain
stores established national coverage within a few short years. In contrast with what can often
seem like revolutionary changes, the emergence and spread of modern retailing in twentieth-
century India was regionally diverse, with a clear focus on longevity and slow but sustainable
growth.

The wind of change

In 1991, the government headed by then Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao and the finance
minister Dr Manmohan Singh, liberalised the country with sweeping changes that formed a
catalyst for the emergence of “New India”. Most restrictions and archaic laws were done away
with. Many entrepreneurs and businesses saw this as a huge opportunity to invest in existing and
new businesses/sectors. The Indian IT sector, telecom sector and service sector started growing
rapidly. Indian professionals also saw a huge opportunity in various sectors for career develop-
ment and career enhancement. Increasing urbanisation also resulted in large job growth in met-
ropolitan centres and large cities. All this created a significant opportunity for Indian retailing
to grow and modernise since this liberalisation and rapid economic growth has fundamentally
changed the country’s consumers at all levels. The average household income is rapidly grow-
ing and large middle and professional, educated classes have emerged with increased spending
power, sophisticated tastes and shopping habits.
In response to this increase in demand, the supply side also started to witness significant
growth in retail real estate development in all metropolitan centres and several large urban cen-
tres. A number of private and multi-brand outlets also opened in 1990s and in the first decades
of the millennium. Notable among these was Shoppers Stop – a department store founded
in Mumbai in 1991 by the property company K. Raheja Corporation (see Figure 29.1). This
was the first modern department store in India with the selling area of around 30,000 square
feet, stocking clothing, textile, foot ware and accessories. Today, Shoppers Stop has become the
largest department store chain in India with over eighty stores across India, with a combined
retail floor space of nearly 4 million square feet. The company also owns a national chain of
hypermarkets called Hypercity. Big Bazar – a multi category retailer, part of the Future group,
opened its first store in Mumbai in 2003 selling food and non-food items to lower and middle
class citizens. Today, it has become one of the largest retail chains in India with multiple formats
selling food and non-food items in nearly 800 stores located not just in the metropolitan centres
and big cities, but also in towns across the country. One of the largest businesses conglomer-
ates in India, TATA Sons also entered retailing in 1999 with the creation of the Trent retail
group and launched the store brand called Westside. Subsequently, Trent also brought Zara,
Tesco and Starbucks into India through a variety of partnership arrangements. At the same

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Figure 29.1 Shoppers Stop, Andheri, Mumbai 1991 and 2017

time Landmark – the multibillion-dollar retail group from Dubai – also entered India with its
Lifestyle brand.
In the last 10 years, many of India’s biggest business conglomerates have entered retail-
ing either as branded/multi branded/supermarkets/hypermarkets or combination of these and
spread their operations across India. These include Reliance, one of the largest companies
in India with a focus on petroleum refining and distribution as well as telecoms, and Birlas,
another very large conglomerate with wide-ranging business interests in textiles and con-
struction. Such organisations have clearly recognised retailing as an important growth area, as
have overseas retailers: the first millennium decade saw arrival of several foreign brands such
as LVMH, Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Jack-n-Jones, Diesel and other specialty stores such as Body
shop and MAC cosmetics. Shopping malls also started mushrooming all over India during this
period. The first, Inorbit Mall, was opened in Mumbai in 2005 with around 250,000 square
feet of selling space. Consciously copying western patterns, this was quickly followed by many
others, built in a similar style but varying hugely in size, from 30,000 and 300,000 square feet,
depending on their location and competitive intensity. By 2008, India had 225 operational
malls; 5 years later this had mushroomed to over 600 malls in metropolitan centres and in Tier
1–1 and 2 cities with a total area of over 200 million square feet (RAI, 2013). With the pos-
sible exception of China, no other country has seen this type of huge growth and interest in
retailing nationally and internationally within the last two decades. Indeed India ranked as one
of the most attractive markets to invest in between 2008 and 2011, according to A.T. Kearny
Global Retailing Index.

Indian retailing today

Today, India is the world’s largest democracy, with a population of more than 1.2 billion and
the tenth largest economy in the world, amounting to GDP of US$2 trillion. With an aver-
age growth rate of 6–7% per annum in the last 5 years, it is likely to become the third largest
economy in the world by 2030 (World Economy – 2012). Indeed, in terms of Purchasing
Power Parity (PPP), it has already reached this milestone (World Economic Outlook, 2012).
The median age of the population is 25 years, making India one of the youngest countries in
the world (RAI, 2013). These young and increasingly educated consumers, with their numbers

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increasing year on year as more of them join the workforce, like to spend money on shopping
and services. Coupled with the easy availability of credit, this has allowed retail spending to
grow 8–9% year-on-year in the first decade of this century. Moreover, according to forecasts,
Indian consumers are likely to grow four times from their present numbers by 2025 (Gadkari,
2009) with average consumption set to increase threefold between 2010 and 2020, the highest
growth being in clothing, fashion, footwear, housing and consumer durables. The key drivers of
this growth are income growth (which showed a threefold increase between 2010 and 2020),
urbanisation (40% of population living in urban areas by 2020), nuclearisation of households
(180 million nuclear households growing at 4% CAGR compared to 2% growth in total popu-
lation) and a growing workforce (137 million people will be added to the workforce by 2020
bringing the total to 752 million).
With all these attributes, India has emerged as a very attractive market for retail invest-
ment. However, political decisions such as recent overnight demonetisation of large cur-
rency notes can create significant adverse short-term impacts on retailing. In addition, the
level of bureaucracy at central and state government can also make India a complex and a
tough country in which to do retail business. Despite recent improvements, India still ranks
130th in the world in terms of ease of doing business (Ease of Doing Business Ranking,
World Bank, 2017).
India has the largest number of retail outlets in the world, with more than 12 million outlets
compared to around 3.8 million in USA and 300,000 in the UK. Retail is one of the most
important sectors of the Indian economy, contributing to 35% of GDP and employing 40 mil-
lion people directly or indirectly (Rao, 2006). However, neither retail employment nor retail
businesses are evenly distributed. Economists categorise Indian cities into four tiers, as Tier 1,
Tier 1–1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities/towns, based on factors such as infrastructure, skill availability,
concentration of population and quality of life (Deloitte, 2013).Whilst these are objective meas-
ures, they are the product of centuries of urban development and often reflect the hierarchies
established by earlier rulers, including the British Raj, despite refinements put in place following
independence.
The Tier 1 cities, sometime called Metro cities, are major metropolitan areas with superior
infrastructure, skill availability, concentration of population and the quality of life. Gener-
ally, these cities have the biggest modern and luxury retail markets – a position which they
have enjoyed since the nineteenth century or earlier. These cities, which include Mumbai,
Chennai, New Delhi and Kolkata, have the largest segment of upper middle, upper and rich
consumers; they account for around 60% of the total retail real estate space and global con-
sumers. However, as these cities have become saturated with modern retail formats, retailers
have started to move to Tier 1–1 cities, which share many of the same characteristics but are
smaller and a little behind in the above four parameters. Cities like Hyderabad, Pune, Ban-
galore, Navi Mumbai, Ahmadabad and Gurgaon have therefore become increasingly impor-
tant for retailers in terms of driving the growth of their business. Tier 2 and 3 cities are also
becoming more important: their collective numbers are significant, they are growing at a
faster pace, and their increasingly affluent populations are spending more on goods and ser-
vices. Places such as Ludhiana, Coimbatore, Nasik and Rajkot are set to become important
for the growth of retail businesses over the next 5 years. Below this, there are estimated to be
around 400,000 villages across India, many of them with populations of less than 800 inhabit-
ants. Many of the people living in these villages are poor, with very limited spending power.
Most of their spending goes on basic essentials such as food and fuel. Yet it is important to
remember that, despite significant growth in modern (organised) sector in the last 10 years,

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Indian retailing is still dominated by traditional (unorganised) retail. As indicated earlier, there
are over 12 million retail outlets operating across India, most of which are Kirana (mom-and-
pop) stores and small stores in market towns and villages, with only 4% of them being larger
than 500 sq. ft. (RAI, 2012).
As the modern retail sector slowly starts to mature, different players are adopting different
strategies in the battle for a share of the consumer’s mind and wallet, focusing on key sectors and
target customers. Many of these strategies are underpinned by the history of the company, their
origins and their owners’ vision, underlining the importance of the past for the present. Some
players like The Future Group sought the lower and middle-income groups from the begin-
ning. Founded in South India in the late 1990s by the entrepreneur, Kishore Biyani, The Future
Group became the largest retailer by value. Biyani first opened a retail store named Pantaloon
selling men’s clothing at very competitive prices and has continued to focus predominantly on
middle and lower income groups with clear value driven propositions, selling fashion, house-
wares and food through different formats. On the other hand, from its origins, Shoppers Stop
Group has targeted rich, upper middle and middle segments with a focus on differentiation,
service, choice and ambience. Other players such as Trent are focusing more on fashion and
affordability. The Lifestyle Group has chosen a “middle of the road” positioning with something
for everyone; the Aditya Birla group is developing and leveraging specialty retailing brand/for-
mats; and the Reliance Group continues to target high future growth and market share potential
sectors such as food and groceries, apparel, electronics, footwear and jewellery. There are echoes
here of the market differentiation of British department stores in the early twentieth century.
However, markets and consumers continue to fragment at a faster pace than previously, due to
the arrival of several domestic as well as foreign players with varied and, in many cases, superior
propositions targeted at many of the customers of the established retailers. This has resulted in
a much higher level of competitive intensity during the last 3 years. In response, many of these
established retailers are beginning to refine their positioning as well as exploring unmet wants
and desires of their “core” customers in adjoining spaces for future growth and survivals.
Going forward, it is very evident that traditional retailing in India is here to stay, at least for
now. It will start to lose market share to modern retail in many sub-sectors, but this will be a
slow process, especially in food and grocery. In the foreseeable future, both modern and tradi-
tional retail sectors will continue to grow, albeit at different speeds.

Digital revolution – e-commerce

The Indian e-commerce sector commenced around 2010 and is still in its developmental stages,
especially when compared with China and the US. E-commerce, at present, accounts for only
4% of the organised retail sector in India compared to 7% in USA and 30% in China. However,
the e-commerce market in India is expected to quadruple to US$60–70 billion over the next
5 years, representing CAGR of 50% in goods and 23% in services (Retail Report, BCG, 2016).
Current Indian and foreign off-line/online players are making substantial investments in mar-
keting, customer acquisition and infrastructure development/enhancement to retain or build
customer numbers and market share. E-commerce and M-Commerce propositions and chan-
nels are becoming increasingly attractive to customers because of the superior value, broader
choice and selection, and the greater convenience offered by the operators. In this sense, they
appeal to the same values and priorities that have long driven consumer choice. In India, the
leading categories in e-commerce, measured by transaction share, are devices (35% – mobile,
tablet, accessories); fashion (28% – fashion, footwear and accessories); electronics (18% – com-
puters, cameras, electronics and appliances) and books (7%). The online grocery market in India

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is still undeveloped and has a market share of less than 0.1%, but this is likely to grow as big
players such as Amazon (India), Reliance Retail and Future Group have all recently announced
ambitious plans to invest and grow their market share faster. This responds both to the posi-
tion of rival businesses and the huge growth in Internet use expected in India – to 600 million
by 2020. This is driven by: increased ownership of smart phones, reaching between 600 and
700 million by 2020; the lower cost of connectivity; and the expanded coverage in Tier 2 and
3 cities and rural areas as a result of significant investment by the key operators (BCG, 2016).

Structure of the Indian retail sector

Indian consumers – a complex and constantly changing picture

Sometimes, we, a nation of over one billion people, think like a nation of one mil-
lion people.
—(A.P. J. Abdul Kalam, former President of India)

It is important to highlight that every one of India’s twenty-eight states is different in terms of
climate, language or dialect (there are estimated to be over 2,000 dialects in India) as well as in
term of clothing, fashion, style, colour choices, jewellery ornaments, food and eating habits – all
developed over several centuries. However, over the last 10 years, with the onset of ‘National
localisation’, some common themes have emerged which are starting to reduce these regional
distinctions all over India in terms of food and fashion. For example, North Indian foods are
becoming popular in South and vice-a-versa; Southern sarees with their unique designs and
strong colour themes are gaining high acceptance across India, and Northern male styles and
designs of Kurta (Top) and Salwar (Bottom) have become very popular across western, east-
ern and middle India. These changes have affected all consumer classes, with varying degree
of sophistication in terms of either quality of the material and/or designs. In addition, the
Indian film industry has also acted as a catalyst to bring about these common themes, as Bol-
lywood movies are increasingly becoming popular all over India and more and more consumers
throughout India are following the fashion trends set by these movies. All these make India an
incredible and extraordinarily diverse country in term of culture.
Retailers have also had to consider India’s weather related and seasonal variation, e.g. severe
winters in parts of North India versus an almost tropical climate in South India, and very hot
summers in north and west of India versus heavy summer rain fall in the east and south of
India. These variations are not new and it has long been important for retailers to buy and
stock appropriate merchandise in their stores, aligning them appropriately with these climatic
and seasonal variations. There is a famous example of Zara, the international fashion brand,
launching autumn/winter ranges in their Delhi and Mumbai stores simultaneously in 2015.The
merchandise sold well in Delhi with its severe winter weather, while it hardly moved in Mum-
bai’s subtropical climate. Domestic as well as foreign retailers in India need to be very mind-
ful of major as well as subtle but significant differences in the shopping attitudes and buying
behaviour patterns of Indian consumers in their chosen locations to ensure that the store layout,
colour scheme and décor are also suitable to attract or retain their target customers. They also
need to be sensitive to cultural perspectives, including the style, length and colour of clothing,
pink being less popular in Southern India than in middle India. Brand names can have different
meanings in Northern and Southern India, e.g. Hariyali means “pleasant greenness” in several
Northern Indian languages but is a personal name in some Southern languages. They also need

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to take into account family and household structural differences between various casts, religions
and types of settlement in urban and rural areas. It remains important for retailers to understand
areas of convergences and divergence here to ensure that the right product is offered in the right
place, in the right way at the right time.
With economic and demographic growth, as well as a cascading of income to the “bottom
of the pyramid” and, more particularly, a growing middle class with a rising household income,
the Indian consumer market represents a huge opportunity over the next decade and beyond.
There will be an opportunity (and challenges) in every segment of the market from the bottom
to the apex of the pyramid.With the increasing penetration of new media, Bollywood films and
television series, huge aspirations are building up in consumers for better living conditions and
quality of life, leading to increased quantity and quality of consumptions of goods and services.
The number of households in the middle will expand, resulting in a threefold increase in the
average household income by 2020 from its 2010 level (E&Y retail report 2013). This increase
will be seen not just in urban but also in semi-rural areas. This is evident from recent report by
E-commerce companies such as Amazon (India) and Flip kart etc. that nearly 45% of their sales
growth comes from Tier 2 and 3 cities and towns. These consumers are shopping the same way
for similar brands online as the metro and Tier 1–1 cities consumers. However, one consumer
behaviour that is cutting across all classes, from luxury to malls, is the search for “value” by look-
ing for lower prices and an overall better value for money. Indian consumers have always been
value conscious, but – as in other emerging markets such as China, Brazil and South Africa –
consumers are becoming more conscious of this priority, not least because of slowing economic
growth and slower job and income growth. This trend is evident in most of the product cat-
egories. Indian consumers are increasingly using smart “mixing and matching” of brands and
retailers to create a “superior value proposition” for themselves.
Over the last several centuries, as was the case in the West, women in India traditionally
took the role of a home maker, looking after and taking care of the family and the elders who
were part of the family. There were women entrepreneurs such as Mrs Scandia, who, after the
death of her husband in early 1950, took over the reins of the vast business empire and made
a great success of it, but this was exceptional. This situation changed significantly in the West
during the early twentieth century. In India, over the last 30 years, more and more women have
been emerging from their traditional roles and are taking on the dual role of working as well as
home-making – a transition which is much more evident in large urban centres than rural areas.
The emergence of educated, working women has also fuelled the growth of convenience goods
and services. This trend is likely to continue, having a significant impact on types of products,
packages, delivery and services consumed by these women and their families. Examples here are
the growth of home related services in areas such as meal deliveries, cleaning, personal shoppers,
personal life-organisers and wedding planners. At the same time, children are having a grow-
ing influence in household and personal decisions as the traditional power-distance between
various generations is diminishing. Children (and especially teens and tweens) are increasingly
demanding and having their say in shopping, eating out, choice of brands and retailers, holidays,
electronics and automobile purchases.
It should be remembered, however, that in India there are multi-tiered consuming classes
segmented by socio/economic cultural, religious and location aspects. These traditional divi-
sions in Indian society and consumer practice are being blended with these recent trends noted
above to create a complex consumer market. Many of the successful retailers, such as Shoppers
Stop, Pantaloon and Westside, have understood these subtle but significant differences and have
adjusted their propositions relating to styles, colours, fashionability, etc., and have communicated
effectively with customers in the right language using the right phrases. In summary, India has

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a complex retail market in many different ways. Its multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic
consumers, with significant geo-demographic differences, make it a unique, interesting and
challenging emerging market for all retailers.

Retail channel structure

It is also important to look at the channel structure of Indian retailing. Like Western countries
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the traditional channel structure comprising of
manufacturer, distributor/wholesaler and retailer has been the norm in India. However, in com-
mon with all emerging economies, this structure is also changing and evolving in India with
the blending of modern and traditional retailing. At present, the retail and wholesale channel
structure is divided into six key areas (E & Y, 2012): traditional retail, modern retail, online retail,
direct retail, cash and carry and wholesaler.There is also a growing franchise sector, but at present
it is too small to be classed as a separate sector and is merged into modern retailing.
As discussed earlier, traditional retail is made up of the Kirana (mom-and-pop) stores and
small stores. Modern retail has emerged as the most important channel in Metro, Tier 1–1 and
Tier 2 cities, the top ten cities contributing around 70% of the organised market. These and
other cities from Tier 1–1 and 2 represent significant growth opportunities for both domestic
and international retailers now and in the future. Online retail is also a new channel, growing
significantly and is typically available in the top seventy-five cities in India. This is now wid-
ening to include smaller cities and towns as Internet and smart phones penetration increases.
As noted earlier, Indian online retail sales are expected to reach around US$6 billion by 2020
(Retail Report, BCG, 2016), but the development of online retailing requires capital, time and
infrastructure investment. Here, major foreign players such as Amazon and Alibaba have entered
India and are making substantial investments in infrastructure development and marketing areas
with the aim of grabbing greater market share from traditional and modern retailers going
forward. Direct retail is an alternative retail channel which uses agents who contact customers
directly, either in their homes or via social gatherings such as Kitty Parties to bring customers to
their homes to display various items with the intention of making sales. This channel is becom-
ing popular especially in semi-urban and rural areas of India, where the social bonds are much
higher than in Metros, where many women are working. It is estimated that this channel has a
total distribution base (agents) of around four million people, with total customer numbers at
approximately 20 million, focusing mainly on health, well-being, beauty and household catego-
ries across India. Another emerging channel is cash and carry, located mainly in the Metros and
certain Tier 1–1 cities. This is not strictly retailing as cash and carry outlets are only allowed to
serve only trade customers at present, but Walmart of the United States and Metro of Germany
are currently using this channel to establish their foothold in the Indian market. It is anticipated
that the government may relax rules in the next few years to allow these retailers to sell direct to
customers who via membership, as it is the current practice in Europe and the US. Distributors
and wholesalers, such as Gokuldas and DCM Shriram, established themselves between the 1930s
and the 1950s as the consumer markets started to develop and now dominate the channel struc-
ture with an intricate network of main, regional and local distributors and wholesalers. They
played a vital role in creating the essential infrastructure, connecting manufacturers and consum-
ers and in the continuity of supplies to small “traditional” retailers throughout India. Even today,
these distributors and wholesalers dominate many sub-sectors such as FMCG products and
small electrical appliances at regional and local levels. However, their dominance is diminishing
with the growth of modern retailers, many of whom are bypassing them and going direct to the
manufacturers; but their decline will be a slow and geographically uneven process.

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There are four major categories in the Indian retail sector. Food and grocery, including fresh
and packaged products, is the largest category which accounted for over 80% of the retail
market between the 1940s and the 1960s. However, today it accounts for around 60% of the
retail market, is dominated by the traditional sector and is very fragmented. The modern sector,
especially supermarkets, food stores and hypermarkets are expanding their footprint and gain-
ing greater market share in this category; but most of these are located in Metros and Tier 1–1
cities and account for less than 5% of this category. Although this is likely to increase to around
10% by 2020, the traditional sector will still dominate this category for some years to come.
Apparel and accessories, including clothes, apparel, textile, footwear and jewellery is the second
largest category. Dominated by the wholesalers and independent traditional retailers over the
last 70 years, this category has witnessed significant changes within the last 10 years in terms of
moving from unorganised to organised sector with modern trade share ranging from 40% for
footwear, through 35% for clothing and apparel to 11% for jewellery. Consumer durables is the
third largest category and include electronics, mobile and telecom, home interior and household
items. This category was also dominated by wholesalers, distributors and independent retailers
over the last 40 years. It too has witnessed significant changes and also growth over the last
5 years, especially in electronics and electrical products, where modern retailing accounts for
20% of sales. The category is still dominated by independent stores, especially for mobile and
telecom segments, but several regional and national chains are slowly increasing their market
share. Health and beauty aids is the fourth largest category and includes beauty and personal care,
eyewear and pharmacy. This category, dominated by distributors, wholesalers and retailers over
the last 50 years, has witnessed the most dramatic changes in the channel structures and has
also achieved substantial growth within the last 5 years with a five-fold increase in sales (RAI
2016). Although still dominated by independent operators, this category has witnessed the rise
of several regional and national chains, many with highly ambitious growth plans for the next
5 years. The other categories are leisure, alcohol, beverages, tobacco and food services, and are
still mainly dominated by independent retailers.

Explaining change: the impact of PESTEL factors

A combination of political, economical, social/cultural, technological, environmental and legal
(PESTEL) factors have impacted retailers in developed as well as developing countries and con-
tinues to do so in terms of retail strategy in terms of opening of the stores; expansion plans, and
resource, customer and distribution decisions. In India, government policies and area priority
for economical and societal development during both the pre- and post-independence periods
have led to many challenges and uncertainties facing domestic as well as foreign retailers at
central, state and local levels, with myriad rules and regulations to deal with. One of the most
notable of these policies was The Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act (APMC),
which was brought in during the 1940s and 1950s to safeguard the interests of poor farmers
and prevent their exploitation by providing them with fair prices for their goods. However,
today the 75-year-old laws are seen by many as stifling the growth of an effective and efficient
supply chain from farm to fork, depriving all stakeholders (farmers, manufacturers, retailers and
consumers) of cheaper prices, improved quality and continuity of supply of agricultural prod-
ucts, including pulses, grains and fresh produce. At present, a farmer can sell vegetables, fruits,
grains, cereals, milk and so on only in specified mandis. They cannot sell directly to a retailer or
in far off cities or in another state; nor can they export to foreign countries. Recently, central
government has relaxed some of these rules, allowing farmers direct access to the city markets

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and modern retailers. So far, however, this has proved very inefficient in practice, as state govern-
ments are allowed their own interpretation and policing of these revised rules.
During the last decade, environmental regulations have become the biggest cause of delays
in the approval of developing malls and retail sites. The regulators at both the central and the
state level have been neither able to build capacity nor develop the capability to clear quickly
enough several retail project proposals which are either in the pipeline or being put together.
Even when approved, the implementation of most of the regulations is patchy and they are
not well monitored or policed. There are no restrictions on domestic retail companies in their
choice of location for opening any type of retail outlet in any part of the country, as long as
the retailer has obtained all necessary permissions and licenses. In contrast, the current Foreign
Direct Investment (FDI) rules prevent foreign retailers from entering towns with a population
of less than one million.There are also restrictions in opening stores in locations where the state
government does not support FDI in retail. This has led to significant challenges for several for-
eign retailers with their plans to create a pan-India presence. However, the central government
recently changed the law to allow foreign retailers to hold a majority stake in single brand retail,
thus freeing up the market a little. During the 2017 Spring Budget Session, the government
also indicated its willingness to allow majority shareholding by a foreign retailer in multibrand
retail in the near future, though with several restrictions. It is important to note that, at present,
there is no specific policy that governs the relationship between retailer and supplier and no
forum to address any grievances.Therefore, most of these disputes are settled out-of-court rather
than going through civil courts, which can take up to 10 years for the judgement.
Retailers all over the world need to get four key areas right for survival and success. They
were relevant to retailers one hundred years ago, are relevant today and will remain so for the
next thirty years at least. They are popularly referred to as 4Ps of retailing: Proposition, People,
Property (Location) and Processes. Examining these 4Ps in the context of Indian retailing, the
past and the present, highlights the following issues. Proposition includes the merchandise, mer-
chandising, price, service, brand image and positioning. Early Indian entrepreneurs during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Mr Nalli, Mr Kumaran and Mr Wadia knew the
importance of this and were able to develop their special blend of these factors to create their
own USP and successful retail business. They also understood that, as consumer’s needs, wants
and desires change, they also need to change accordingly. With the right adaptations at the right
time over the years, many of these businesses are thriving today.
People includes all employees: frontline, back-office and management, and all other related
key stakeholders such as suppliers and local communities. Again, Indian retail pioneers knew
the importance of getting this right; they understood clearly that without people with the right
and relevant skills, knowledge, capabilities and competencies at all levels in the retail business,
it would not survive and prosper. Many of them developed innovative methods of employee
training to ensure that they all created customer empathy and loyalty. They also knew how to
initiate, manage and lead when and where it was required. As a result of this, many of these
retailers have developed long-lasting and successful businesses. As the impact of technology on
retailing intensifies, the people aspect will become even more important for both modern and
traditional retailers.
Property. All over the world, retailers know the importance of having the right store in the
right place of the right size at the right price. Within the Indian context, during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, successful retail entrepreneurs understood the critical importance of
this aspect and used their intuition in most cases, as today’s sophisticated retail location technol-
ogy was not available, to get this right. Inevitably, mistakes were made. For example, Mr Nalli
built a large store in a in a Southern city which had to be shut few years later because it was too

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far removed from the main retail locus. Relocated just 500m away and on the “right” street, it
proved a great success. But the right location comes at a price. The absence of a suitable retail
zone policy and with a lack of appropriate infrastructure development since independence by
successive central/state governments across cities and towns, has led to very high land prices for
the “prime” retail locations and overcrowded high streets not just in Metros, but also in Tier 1–1
and 2 cities and towns.
Processes. One of the key factors for success in retailing is to have appropriate and timely pro-
cesses and systems in the right places. During first decade of the millennium, this was a major
issue for many Indian retailers such as Big Bazar of Future group and More superstores of the
Birla retail group, which led to a lot of duplication, the overrun of costs, stock mismanagement
and eventually to customer dissatisfaction, as happened with some Western retailers. However,
huge advances were made on this front in the west within the last 40 years or so with the help
of technology, especially within the last decade. As the modern retailing sector is still evolving
in India, many retailers lack the proper and appropriate process map within their organisation.
Retailers such as Shoppers Stop, Trent and Lifestyle group are working on these issues by using
global benchmarks as standards. In some ways this is helpful because they are starting with
“what good looks like” but the reality is that some of these processes and benchmarks need to
be adapted to emerging market and country specific scenarios, with their special and unique
features. Currently there is a lot of development work going on within the modern retail sec-
tor in terms of establishing relevant process maps and accompanying KPI’s as well as setting up
measurement criteria for these KPI’s with the right feedback loops. It is anticipated that this will
make Indian retailing more robust and efficient in the medium to long term.

Conclusion
India has been a leading nation in international trade since the fourth century B.C. As a result,
retailing in India has a very long and colourful history going back over 2,000 years. During this
period it has gone through many changes, mainly as a result of external changes such as PESTEL
factors, as well as internal aspects such as resource, distribution, consumer, channel, competitive,
people and capability, along with the rise of modern (organised) retailing.The Indian retail mar-
ket at present is estimated to be over US$600 billion and one of the top five retail markets in
the world by economic value. The Indian retail sector is likely to grow at CAGR of over 20%
to reach US$1 trillion by 2020–1. Modern retailing is anticipated to grow three times from its
present share of 11% at US$66 billion to 21% of the overall retail market, reaching US$210 bil-
lion by 2020–1 with traditional retailing also growing at 10% per annum. It is anticipated that in
the foreseeable future, both traditional and modern retailing, will co-exist as has been the case in
several Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea. Retailing in India is exciting
yet challenging. This is a country where the customer habits change every 100 kilometres and,
with citizens speaking more than 2000 dialects, it is not easy to build a successful retail business
across the whole of India.The potential on the other hand is huge, with rapidly growing middle
class consuming population. Just remember this: retailing in India is like driving a car in India –
you need loads of patience, excellent judgement and lots of luck.

References
BCG, India Retail Report, 2015.
BCG, India Retail Report, 2016.
Deloitte, India Retail Report, 2013.

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Earnst and Young, Economic Survey, 2012.

Earnst and Young, Road to India’s Consumer Markets, 2013.
Gadkari, Saurabh, Indian Retail Industry, 2009.
Menon, Prakash, Indian Retailing – the Future, 2009.
Nehru, J., Personal Essays, American Retail Stores, 1948.
RAI (Retail Assoication of India), Trade Briefing Reports, 2013.
RAI (Retail Assoication of India), Trade Briefing Reports, 2016.
Rao, N.C., Organised Retailing in India, 2006.
Retailers Association of India (RAI), Trade Briefing Reports, 2012.
World Bank, World Economic Outlook, 2012.
World Bank, Ease of Doing Business Ranking, 2017.

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 INDEX

A&P (Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) Asia 21, 168, 170, 182, 224, 362, 273, 423, 433
223, 239, 254, 273 – 274, 281, 296, 365 Auctioneer 88, 90, 92 – 93
advertising: budgets 42, 264, 321; campaigns auctions 84, 88 – 90; Christie’s Great Rooms, Pall
234, 238 – 239, 364; co-operative goods 307, Mall 90, 92; Duty Act, 1777 86, 88
313; in-store display 158, 238, 263; manager Australia 167, 221, 264, 270 – 271, 293, 296, 302,
141, 269, 274; social media 377; trade cards/ 305, 311, 312 – 314, 333, 413 – 424, 490
newspapers/catalogues 27, 86 – 88, 92 – 93, 95, automobile, influence on retail development
138, 147, 320, 348, 397, 420 57 – 59, 159 – 161, 192, 197, 203, 205, 207, 209,
Africa 85, 90, 134, 168 – 169, 218, 256, 264, 350, 290, 331 – 332, 366 – 367, 473
378, 415, 448, 452, 504
African Americans: consumers 149, 206; bar code 219, 370
developer 207 Barossa Valley (South Australia) 311 – 313
agriculture 15, 109, 114, 328, 402, 451 bazaars 42, 94, 124, 138, 281, 275, 389, 398,
Ahold Delhaize 166, 390, 440 445 – 446
Albertsons 157, 257 Belgium 32 – 33, 40 – 44, 85, 105, 109, 166, 270,
Aldi 166, 174, 421 272, 302, 345, 380, 385 – 388, 390, 479
Alladin (mail-order homes) 325 – 326 big-box stores 2, 6, 9, 150, 209, 216 – 224, 255,
Allied Stores 60, 149, 290, 292 368 – 372, 389; see also individual store names
Almacenes: Paris 440; Peru 435 BJ’s Wholesale 295 – 296
Amazon: Black Friday 72; competition 2, 67, 175, black market 399, 403, 404, 408, 409, 410
296 – 297; employment 1; Jeff Bezos 1, 297; Bon Marché 136, 138, 145, 229 – 230, 247, 266,
value/growth 1, 371, 392, 503 – 505 290, 333, 389, 461, 478 – 479, 492
American Federation of Labor (AFL) 246 – 251, Boots the Chemist 124, 131, 201, 271
254, 308 Brentano’s family 341 – 342, 343 – 344
Americanism, Americanisation 143, 166 – 167 Bresee’s (New York State) 265, 271
Anthony Hordern 333, 414 – 415, 418 – 419, 423 Briançonnais 346 – 347
anti-chain store movement 145 – 146, 222, Britain 1, 33, 39, 43, 82, 95, 105, 108, 122, 125,
289 – 290, 329 – 330 131, 145 – 148, 161, 165, 201, 206 – 209, 414,
anti-Semitism 398, 399, 403 448, 497; colonies 103, 182, 184 – 185
Apple 373, 392 broker 82 – 83, 85, 91
arcades 6, 26, 39, 45 – 46, 53, 60, 102, 124 – 125, Brown Muff 126, 269
127, 198 – 201, 232, 383, 388, 397 – 398, Bull Ring Shopping Centre, Birmingham
448; Barton 201 – 202; Burlington 198 – 199; 203, 208
Cleveland 200; Russia 401, 410
Argentina 218, 221, 256, 313, 431, 435, 437, 440 Cairo (shopping malls) 209, 212, 444, 449 – 450
artisans 15 – 19, 26 – 27, 86, 88, 138, 182 – 183, 189, Canada 218, 221, 223 – 224, 240, 254, 270 – 271,
379, 397, 490, 497 280, 293, 296, 302 – 303, 308, 359; British North

510
 Index

America 360 – 362; e-commerce 372; mail co-operatives 5, 9, 33, 42, 109, 208, 234, 264,
order 332 – 333, 336; mass retailing 363, 366; 386 – 387, 399, 451; consumer co-operatives
urbanisation and retail 363, 369 273, 301 – 314; Co-op AG (Germany) 309;
capitalism 94, 101, 163 – 165, 176, 223, 368, 396, Co-operative League of the United States of
400, 492 America (CLUSA) 308; Co-operative Party
Carlyle, Jane 83, 86 (UK) 305; Co-operative Wholesale Society
Carrefour 184, 220, 222, 279, 294, 296, 310, 440, (CWS, England) 305 – 306
444, 453 Costco 150–151, 174, 217, 279, 294–296, 371, 421
Carulla, José 436 – 437 Cotentin 346 – 347
category killer 150, 209, 369, 421, 473 Craftsmen 3, 16, 19, 185, 231, 341, 347, 380, 385
Cencosud 438 – 441 credit 19, 25, 38, 42, 91, 137, 185 – 186, 188 – 190,
central business district 119, 131, 203, 206, 205, 234 – 236, 262 – 263, 283, 322, 344, 347,
290, 367 348, 349; book credit 360 – 361; credit cards 5,
Central Department Store (TsUM) 402, 403, 151, 371, 440 – 441
404, 410 customer service 77, 146, 257, 263, 267, 289, 365,
central shopping area 125 – 127 371, 402, 423, 477, 497
chain stores 239, 254, 282, 285, 289 – 290, 498; Czechoslovakia 162, 168, 298, 304, 403, 405,
competition from 333 – 334; emergence of 407, 436
modern retailing 3, 56, 201, 234 – 237, 262, 280,
306, 364 – 368; High Street 119, 148; see also Daiei 467 – 468, 471, 473
anti-chain store movement; multiple retailers Daimaru 462, 479, 486 – 487, 491
charity shop 95 – 96 David Lewis 282, 297
Chennai 497, 498, 499 decentralisation 50, 57, 59, 106, 111, 130,
Chile 218, 239, 431 – 438, 440 – 441 272 – 275, 392
China 1, 168 – 169, 176, 209, 218, 221, 239, 256, democratisation 144, 313
296, 348, 370, 423, 478, 485 – 492, 500, 502, 504 Denmark 106, 128, 166, 270, 303, 305, 341, 345
Christie, James 84, 92 Dent, Abraham 180, 182, 184, 185, 191, 193
civil rights 7, 149, 207, 313 department store 136, 203, 206, 396; buyers
class and consumption 43, 54, 56, 94, 137, 8, 265 – 268, 271, 326; chains 59, 279 – 280,
142 – 144, 175, 271, 303 – 305, 324 – 325, 408, 286, 291, 293 – 301, 415, 499; conglomerates
503; and retailing 114, 120 – 121, 139, 149, 206, 283, 289, 293; Department Store Act of 1937
211, 235 – 236, 350, 366 – 368, 402, 403 (Japan) 460, 475; establishment of in Eastern
Cold War 31, 167 – 168, 252 – 253, 389, 396, Europe 397 – 398, 405, 407, 408; organisational
404 – 405, 406 – 407 structures 268; rhetoric about 398, 404 – 405,
collapse of communism in Eastern Europe 407; stock management 265 – 269; workforce
396, 410 246, 248, 250; see also individual department
Colombia 431, 436 – 439 store names
colonialism 447 – 450 digital high street 73 – 77
commercialisation 32, 109, 431 Dillard’s 292, 296
communism 164 – 165, 168, 254, 400; see also discount store chains 282, 291, 293, 369, 420
collapse of communism in Eastern Europe discounter/discounting 138, 217 – 218, 371
competition [and shops] 27, 56, 69, 90, 109, 124, display: merchandise 146, 397, 402, 461 – 463;
145 – 146, 154 – 156, 172, 183, 208, 232, 236, window display 58, 122, 126, 136, 141, 151, 232,
262, 265, 274, 309, 324, 331, 361, 367 – 369, 373, 238, 262, 331, 384, 407, 478
433 – 440, 488 distribution 3, 54, 109, 146, 305, 332, 341, 348,
consumer co-operation 301, 303, 308, 313 363, 390, 402, 474; distribution centre 219,
consumers: complaint 331, 390, 402, 406; culture 309, 333, 370, 468; distribution policy 167,
31, 34, 38, 171, 212, 237, 314, 378, 396, 404, 469, 497, 506; revolution 306, 460,
490 – 492; demand 27, 31, 72, 127, 186, 231, 312, 471, 474
335, 390, 405, 484; resistance 115, 221, 271, 449; downtown 2 – 6, 50, 54 – 58, 60 – 62, 128 – 131,
revolution 2, 5, 8, 32 – 34, 38, 45 148 – 150, 203, 206 – 208, 211 – 213, 217,
consumption 5, 19, 31 – 34, 39, 93, 101, 143, 399, 221 – 222, 290 – 291, 369, 407
429 – 431; of goods and services 26, 34 – 35, 115, dry goods store 279, 246, 416, 461 – 462, 478 – 479,
124, 379 – 382, 406; growth 20, 52, 111, 148, 483 – 486
393, 484, 501; mass consumption 41, 234, 327,
368, 400, 444, 452, 467; standards 27, 184 Eaton, Timothy 191, 332
containerization 219, 224 Eaton’s 137 – 138, 144 – 147, 150 – 151

511
 Index

e-commerce 1, 74 – 76, 209, 359, 371 – 373, gender 7 – 8, 173, 246, 257, 271, 362, 399,
496, 502 402 – 403, 406, 430
economies of makeshift/marginal economies general store/country store/general dealer 91, 94,
82 – 83 139, 187, 232, 319 – 320, 329, 360, 397
economies of scale 2, 35, 43, 154, 334, 364 – 365, Germany 17, 72, 105 – 106, 110 – 111, 124,
387, 393, 469 166 – 168, 221, 247, 264, 271, 296, 309, 311,
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) 219 333 – 334, 382 – 383, 390, 403; East 17, 72,
El Palacio de Hierro 435 – 436 105 – 106; West 166 – 167, 407
emulation 27, 82 Ghent 102, 105, 115, 303, 307
England 17 – 24, 32 – 35, 86 – 90, 102 – 108, globalisation 5, 8, 33, 114 – 115, 163, 216, 220, 255,
120 – 126, 136, 180 – 183, 201, 229 – 237, 247, 429 – 431, 434, 449
262, 305 – 306, 332 – 333, 349, 380, 382 – 392, Golden Rule Stores 281, 283 – 284
415 – 416, 495 Great Depression 44, 112, 147, 205, 217, 249, 251,
Enlightenment 32, 34, 37, 385 287, 306, 326
entertainment (at markets and fairs) 27, 381 Great Universal Stores 68, 334
environmental concerns 94 – 95 grocery store 128, 171, 239, 246 – 248, 368, 421;
E. Wong 433, 438 – 439 see also dry goods; general stores
Exito 437 – 438 Gruen,Victor 62, 197, 205 – 207, 209, 290
Exquisit 407, 409 guilds 16, 85 – 86, 308, 343
GUM (Glavnyj Universalnyj Magazin): state
Falabella 440 – 441 department store 400, 401, 402, 406, 409, 410
family: family-owned business 7, 132, 149, 216,
260, 265 – 266, 232, 333, 360, 373, 484, 497; Handelsorganisation (HO) 404 – 405, 406, 407, 410
and shop operations 188 – 190, 261, 273, Hankyu 462 – 463, 484 – 485
347, 349 Harrods 150, 267, 280, 389, 477 – 478
Faneuil Hall 52, 105 Heritage 391, 414
farm 146, 189, 191 – 192, 321, 328, 333, 343, House of Fraser 280, 282
402 – 403; rural economy 190, 193 housing 21, 59, 207, 280, 282, 326, 453; see also
fashion: centres 136, 139, 201; consciousness 27, suburbanisation
36 – 37, 121; cycles 32, 35, 42, 82, 84, 331; fast Hudson’s Bay Company 189, 269, 221, 280, 294,
373; shops 38, 41, 119, 402, 414; in socialist 360 – 361
countries 405, 406, 407, 408 Hungary 168, 405 – 407, 409
Federated Department Stores 148 – 150 Hypermarket 115, 156, 169 – 170, 174, 220,
female proprietors/managers/dealers 198, 235, 279 – 280, 294, 308, 311, 421, 440, 453,
290, 332, 352, 362 500, 506
female shop assistants/women clerks 8, 139,
144 – 145, 234, 250, 254, 271, 473, 477, 487 IGA; Independent Grocers Alliance 163, 312
Ferkauf, Eugene 291 – 292 India 85, 170, 209, 211, 256, 495 – 508
Field, Marshall 53, 145, 230, 237 – 238 industrialization 8, 31 – 32, 191, 230 – 231, 386, 431,
Filene, Edward 268, 270, 365 460, 479, 492
Finland 303, 305 information technology 175, 218, 220, 372
First Nations: as consumers 280, 361 innovation 33, 37, 42 – 46, 59, 62, 93, 154 – 156,
First World War 57, 94, 126, 144, 241, 248, 305, 223, 261 – 265, 267, 305, 312, 366, 368, 413,
321, 328, 399, 417, 464 471, 478, 483
five-and-dime store 271, 281 internal hierarchy 342, 347 – 348
food: adulteration 303; food deserts 160; hawkers International Association of Department
26; organic food 313; selling 231, 386; shortages Stores 270
19, 25; supply 101, 154, 305, 439; Whole Foods international trade 25, 102, 305, 381, 383, 508
174 – 175 Ireland 94, 181, 221, 282, 303
France 15 – 16, 25, 102 – 103, 108 – 109, 115, 127, Italy 17 – 19, 25, 32, 108, 120, 132, 302, 306, 311,
132, 137, 145, 166, 181, 183, 208, 220, 247, 340 – 341, 345 – 347, 378 – 379, 382 – 385, 409
270, 302, 332, 340 – 341, 434 – 452, 368 – 385, itinerant vending see pedlars
390, 461
franchise system 471 – 472, 474, 505 Jabłowski Brothers, Poland 398, 404
Freemans 334 – 335 Japan 256, 264, 270, 280, 460 – 475, 477 – 492
future of shopping 2, 213 Jewish merchants 343, 345, 398, 399, 403

512
 Index

Kansai Supermarket 470 – 471 380, 398, 496; terminal 110 – 111; wholesale
Kay’s 334 – 335 110 – 111
Khan 446 – 447 Marks and Spencer 1, 131, 132, 272, 273, 274, 281,
Kmart 150, 282, 291 – 292, 296 286 – 287
Kohl’s 280, 292, 296 Marshall Field’s 53, 55, 56, 60, 129, 140 – 141, 142,
Kolkata 495, 498, 501 143, 150 – 151, 230, 237 – 238, 267, 319, 328,
Korea 296, 313, 477, 485 – 488, 490 – 492, 508 365, 366
Korvette’s 291 – 292, 296 mass production 33, 52, 233, 234, 237, 261, 281, 365
mass retailing 3, 5, 230, 329, 333, 363 – 366
labour 2, 19, 33, 44 – 45, 224, 245; costs 149, 173, material culture 32, 35, 36 – 37, 45 – 46, 182
223, 256, 373, 436, 473; labour relations 7, 389; Matsuzakaya 462, 479, 484, 486 – 487, 491
organized 218, 221, 246 – 255 May Company 60, 282, 292
Large Scale Store Act of 1973 460, 471, 475 Mayhew, Henry 87, 91, 94
Larkin, John D. (Larkin Company) 322 – 326 membership warehouse chains 294 – 296
Latin America 170, 209, 264, 350, 429 – 441 Mexico 137, 168, 218, 221, 256, 296, 321, 430,
law/regulation 24, 44, 144, 166, 205, 213, 217, 433 – 436, 440
247, 289, 302, 309, 313, 329, 344, 506 – 507; Milan 201, 382; Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
patent 352; sumptuary 33, 182, 382, 392 199 – 200
leisure 45, 385, 393, 398, 403; on High Street 119, Milton Keynes Shopping Centre 206, 208
121, 124; shopping as 379, 389 Mitsukoshi 461 – 463, 477 – 492
Lidl 166, 280 modernization 222, 448, 454, 461 – 466, 478, 479,
Lipton, Thomas 125, 239 – 240, 387 485, 490, 491 – 492
Littlewoods 334 – 335 mom and pop stores 216, 469, 497, 505
local merchants 197, 221, 222, 446, 448 monopolies 25, 56, 85, 306, 307, 347, 353, 464
logistics 43, 76, 83, 224, 273, 309, 370, 372 Montgomery Ward 116, 253, 274, 283, 289, 290,
London 348 – 349; Billingsgate 105; Cheapside 22, 292; mail order business 319 – 322, 324, 326,
120, 122; Covent Garden Market 104 – 105, 110, 331 – 332, 365 – 366
121; Hungerford Fish Market 104 Moscow 106, 236, 297, 397 – 402, 406, 410
Louis Sebastien Mercier 352, 353 Muhtasib 445, 446 – 447
Low Countries 28, 32 – 35, 85, 90, 121, 124, Muir & Mirrielees 397, 398, 399, 400, 402
378 – 381, 383 multiple retailers 43, 69, 279 – 300; managerial
luxury: luxury culture 35 – 37, 144, 233; luxury practices 271 – 273; see also chain stores
debates 7, 20, 34, 382; luxury goods 26, 349, Mumbai 499, 500, 501, 503
403, 490; luxury retailers 38, 53, 120 – 123, 129, myths (about retailing) 41, 181, 302, 378
373, 383 – 384, 407, 501
nationalization of retail businesses 399, 400, 406
Macy’s 137, 145 – 147, 150 – 151, 238, 247 – 248, nearly new 83, 92
251, 265 – 267, 269, 279 – 280, 293 – 294, neoliberalism 208, 212, 216, 218, 293, 452 – 456
296 – 297, 365, 416 Netherlands 19, 20, 26, 33, 34 – 35, 166, 264, 390
Madrid 85; Cebada Market 108; Mostense New Deal 130, 223, 253, 338
Market 108 New Zealand 264, 270, 413 – 428
mail-order 75 – 77, 146, 265, 283, 420, 485; nostalgia 151, 410
catalogues 283, 319, 329 – 330, 419; opposition
329 – 330, 364 – 366; see also individual firm Oechle, Augusto Fernando 434 – 435, 438
names online retailing 67 – 77, 504; see also e-commerce
Main Street 63 – 64, 128 – 133, 150, 220, 222, 362 Osaka 461 – 465, 479, 482, 483 – 485, 487
mall see shopping mall out-of-town shopping 119, 131, 132, 206,
Manchester man 347, 348 – 349 208 – 209, 378, 390
Mandeville, Bernard 34, 385
market halls 22, 39, 101 – 118, 124, 127 – 128, 386 Pantaloon 499, 502, 504
market places 21 – 22, 25, 121, 123, 381, 496 Paris: arcades and galleries 123, 199, 201, 232;
markets: farmers markets 111, 114 – 115, 402; department stores 39, 41, 126, 127, 136,
municipal markets 102 – 103, 108 – 112; outdoor 138 – 139, 143, 229, 266, 267, 333; fashion and
109, 113, 402; saturation 220, 372 – 373; luxury trade 27, 33, 122, 123, 379, 383, 388,
segmentation/polarization 93 – 94; stalls 17, 423; market halls 103 – 106, 112, 113; pedlars
21 – 22, 26, 27, 35, 102, 103, 105, 109, 120, 121, 351 – 353; second-hand trade 24, 83, 84, 93

513
 Index

part-exchange 82, 85, 91 retail workers 8, 144 – 145, 149, 175, 218, 223 – 224,
pedlars 340 – 355; book pedlars 346 – 347, 351; 245 – 259, 266, 271, 289, 313, 359, 400 – 403,
definitions 340 – 341; Florist pedlars 349 – 351; 404 – 405, 407, 483; see also trade unions
network of migrant pedlars 341 – 352 REWE supermarket group 162, 166, 264
Penney, J. C. 59, 62, 146, 151, 251, 273, 279 – 281, Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society 234, 302, 303
283 – 290, 292 – 293, 296 – 297, 324, 332, 440; as
Primark 293 Sam’s Club 150, 174, 218, 294 – 296
personnel management 266, 268, 270, 271, 274 Sams, Earl Corder 284 – 285, 290, 297
Peru 431, 433, 435, 438, 439, 441 scientific management 4, 157, 162, 267 – 271, 321,
Philadelphia 51, 52, 53, 56, 62, 90, 103, 129, 233, 325, 335, 419, 471
254; department stores 137, 141, 266, 282, 322, Scotland 21, 105, 185, 305, 341 – 342, 345
326, 327, 477 Sears Roebuck 2, 58, 63, 146, 147, 150, 257,
philanthropic capitalism 94 – 95 274, 283, 289 – 290, 291, 296, 365, 366; mail
Piggly Wiggly 156, 218 order operations 319 – 322, 324, 325 – 326, 329,
point-of-sales (POS) 219, 478 331 – 332, 335; overseas branches 437, 438
Portugal 303, 346 second-hand 7, 20, 24, 28, 80 – 98, 351, 352 – 353,
power centre 209, 217, 371, 372 380, 463
Price, Sol 294 – 295 Selfridge, Harry Gordon 143, 145, 230, 237 – 238,
prices 42, 43, 90, 92, 102, 112, 115, 164, 185, 186, 240, 267
223 – 224, 255, 265, 290, 308, 309, 325, 329, Selfridge’s 142, 145, 238, 280, 282, 417, 419
352, 362, 369 – 370, 373, 387, 438, 449, 462, self-service 149, 156 – 159, 166, 167 – 168, 171 – 173,
464 – 465, 502, 504; discounted prices 132, 143, 207, 218, 253, 272, 293, 308 – 310, 366 – 367,
145, 150, 217 – 218, 239, 240, 291, 320, 321, 365, 408, 410, 431, 436, 438 – 439, 466 – 468
367, 371, 404, 422, 439, 473, 506; fixed prices 4, 7-Eleven 421; 7-Eleven Japan 471 – 475
7, 24, 35, 42, 187 – 188, 237, 263, 281, 324, 331, Shaver, Dorothy 290, 293
361, 364 – 365, 388, 397, 400, 434, 436, 463, 491; Shirokiya 462, 463, 479, 485, 487
regulated prices 5, 110, 111, 148, 404, 408, 445, shopkeepers 7, 37, 42, 46, 126 – 127, 180, 185,
451, 466 188 – 189, 198, 348 – 349, 360; managerial
private retailing in socialist countries practices 190 – 191, 261 – 262, 264; petty
401 – 402, 404 shopkeepers 145, 193, 231 – 236, 329 – 330,
productivity of retailing 4, 37, 46, 174, 223 – 224, 387, 398, 472; practices of selling 36, 92, 121,
309, 359, 372 – 373, 387, 466, 469, 473 122 – 123, 192, 263 – 264, 384, 385, 388, 397
professionalization 307, 364, 419 Shoppers Stop 499 – 500, 502, 504, 508
Puerto Rico 212 – 213 shopping: arcades and galleries 26, 42, 60, 120,
Pyrenees 341, 345 127, 198 – 201, 383; behavior/experience 36,
38, 52, 121, 124, 142, 150, 151, 156, 168, 170,
race and racial discrimination 7, 143 – 144, 149, 175, 186 – 188, 211 – 213, 219, 232, 238, 359,
207, 248 – 249, 366; see also African American 371, 381, 385, 389 – 390, 402, 416, 484, 485,
railways 127, 129, 191, 200, 486, 498; and 492, 504; carts 158, 159, 170, 218, 368, 369, 390,
department stores 462 – 463, 484 – 485 436; centres 6, 50, 58, 59 – 60, 131, 148 – 149,
rationalization 104, 111, 156 – 157, 167, 220, 201 – 209, 217, 290, 296, 333, 366, 369, 414,
267 – 268, 307, 335 453 – 455, 498(see also urban regeneration);
rationing 148, 399, 402, 404, 405, 409 – 410, 451 culture 38, 45 – 46, 63, 92, 114, 171, 230, 365,
refrigeration 109, 110, 112, 158, 159, 368, 378, 379 – 384, 389, 392 – 393; districts 52 – 53,
420, 471 56, 62 – 63, 125, 126, 272, 290 – 291, 368,
regulation 24, 86, 91, 110, 121, 305, 381, 506 – 507; 391 – 392, 397, 498; malls 50, 63, 132, 151, 162,
behavioural 199, 201, 211 – 213; government 201 – 209, 217, 291, 292 – 293, 369 – 370, 414,
5, 16, 52, 271, 440, 455, 469, 469 – 470; see also 429, 431, 439, 440 – 441, 500; streets 22, 38, 39,
prices, regulated prices; urban, planning 52, 119 – 135, 350, 384, 385, 389, 407; tourism
religion 398, 401, 445, 496 – 497 141, 407, 409; see also self-service
reputation 24, 88, 136, 198, 285, 340, 384, 420 showrooms 35, 123, 138, 150, 372, 383, 416,
restaurants 39, 130, 201, 206, 391, 400, 405, 410; 488, 490
in department stores 38, 141, 142, 365, 461, Simpson’s 141, 332
487 – 488, 490 Sinegal, James D. 294 – 295
retail chains see chain stores; multiple retailers single-unit stores 280, 281, 284, 289, 292; see also
retail culture 27 – 28, 155, 171 – 173, 176, shopkeepers
398, 401 Smith, Adam 35, 101

514
 Index

socialism 396 – 397, 404, 408, 451, 452, 454 Tokyo [Edo] 128, 184, 466, 472, 479; department
socialist: consumerism 396, 404, 406, 408; retailing stores 461, 463 – 464, 484 – 485, 487, 488;
400 – 403, 404, 405, 406, 407 municipal retail markets 465
social media 73, 74, 95, 373, 377 town planning see urban, planning
South Africa 85, 168, 256, 264 trade unions 247, 249 – 255, 271, 308, 409
Southdale Regional Shopping Centre 60, 197, 208 training 85, 191, 263, 264, 268 – 269, 270, 271, 284,
Soviet Union 168, 236, 405, 408 286, 307, 419, 439, 470, 483, 507
Spain 21, 85, 132, 167, 270, 307, 379; markets/ transportation: of goods 54, 55, 109, 110, 114, 160,
market halls 105, 108, 112; pedlars 340, 341, 162, 164, 182, 191, 219, 232, 327, 333 – 334,
345, 346, 347, 352 335, 344, 364, 448, 497; of people 54, 59, 62,
Spiegel 322, 324, 331, 332 127, 129, 160, 200, 205, 209, 371, 390; see also
stalls see markets, stalls railways; suburbanisation
standardisation: goods 33, 42, 148, 158, 239, 326, Trent retail group 499, 502, 508
386, 388, 408; retailers/retail practices 138, 151, TsUM (Central Department Store) 402, 403,
157, 203, 205, 211, 217, 273, 286, 289, 311 404, 410
state intervention 109, 112, 305, 314, Turner, Thomas 185, 187, 188, 189, 190
399 – 409, 445
Stewart, Alexander Turney 53, 129, 136 – 137, unions see trade unions
229 – 231, 237, 265 Universal Product Code (UPC) 219, 256
Stock: control 261, 266, 268, 271; turnover 59, upholder/upholsterer 36, 80, 84, 86, 88 – 90
143, 146, 205, 217, 235, 240, 283, 346, Upper Canada 184 – 187, 190, 191
388, 475 Upper Trading Rows, Moscow 397, 398,
store layout and organisation 6, 149, 156, 157, 263, 399, 400
286 – 287, 307, 402, 420, 477, 503 urban: decline 4, 61 – 63; planning 208, 222,
Stout, William 188, 190, 191, 262 369 – 370, 465; regeneration 61 – 62, 203;
suburbanisation: residential 4, 108, 112, 148 – 149, sprawl 59, 108, 160, 206, 216, 217, 222; see also
197, 203, 205, 211, 217, 220, 253, 331, 369, decentralization; suburbanisation
386; retail 6, 57, 59, 129, 149, 154, 160, 203, urbanisation/urbanism 39, 56, 63, 154, 159 – 161,
205 – 207, 253, 290 – 293, 366, 390, 415, 453, 328, 366, 377, 378, 381, 453, 454, 499, 501
463; see also decentralization; urban, sprawl USSR see Soviet Union
supercenter 156, 174, 219, 222, 279, 294, 296,
297, 365 vendue 80, 88, 90 – 91
superette 155, 168 vertical integration 234, 238, 239, 264, 292, 305,
supermarkets 5, 9, 59, 112, 114, 132, 154 – 179, 205, 306, 307, 364, 367, 436
208, 217, 219, 221, 224, 256, 368, 389 – 390, 408, Vietnam 168, 313, 487
414, 420 – 421, 424, 431, 436 – 441, 466 – 472, village shops 19, 24, 36, 125, 180 – 196, 231, 232,
475, 500, 506; co-operative supermarkets 303, 385, 446
308 – 309, 311 – 313; see also self-service
superstores 170, 174, 222 – 223, 224, 287, 291, 294, Wal-Mart 63, 150, 209, 212, 216 – 224, 255 – 257,
371, 420, 421 – 424, 508 279, 281, 292, 294, 296 – 297, 365, 369 – 371, 505
suq 445, 446, 448, 449, 450, 456 Walton, Sam 216, 217 – 219, 221 – 222, 223, 292,
Sweden 166, 270, 308, 334, 341, 345, 385, 408 293, 294, 297; see also Sam’s Club; Wal-Mart
Switzerland 166, 302, 341, 343 Wanamaker, John 282 – 283
Ward, Aaron Montgomery 319, 366
Takashimaya 462, 463, 479, 482, 483 – 485, warehouses 69, 158, 189, 219, 232, 250, 255, 305,
486, 487 344, 346, 370; mail order warehouses 283, 289,
Target 150, 209 334; see also distribution, distribution centre
technological change 41, 112, 141, 147, 154, warehouse stores 3, 63, 151, 155, 170, 174, 218,
156 – 159, 173, 174 – 175, 218 – 220, 223, 224, 294 – 296, 367, 368, 369, 371, 421
263, 267, 275, 309, 327, 370, 372 – 373, 415, 420, welfare state 33, 208, 248, 306, 389
483, 507 – 508; see also information technology Wertheim, Germany 397, 403, 404
terminal department store 209, 462 – 463, West Edmonton Mall 209, 369 – 370
484 – 485 westernisation 399, 475, 477, 478, 479, 485, 488, 492
Tesco 68, 69, 131, 166, 220, 280, 294, 296, 499 wholesalers 21, 42, 52, 54, 105, 109, 110 – 112, 115,
Ticino 346 – 347 158, 185, 190, 192, 232 – 233, 235, 237, 240, 264,
Tito 406, 409 305 – 306, 309, 311, 343, 370, 416, 447, 464,
T.J. Maxx 150, 371 505 – 506

515
 Index

window displays see display work: conditions 8, 41, 42, 44, 145, 246, 247, 250,
women 142 – 143; hawkers 351 – 353, 409; retailers/ 254, 255, 261, 269, 273, 275
managers 7, 21, 27, 190, 234, 290, 362 – 363, working class: consumption 42, 143, 235, 303,
504; shoppers 7, 41 – 42, 53, 95, 128, 131, 136, 351 – 353, 366, 400, 438
141 – 143, 151, 173, 187, 198, 211, 237, 271, 322,
335, 361, 398, 437, 455, 492; shop workers 8, Yoshio Takahashi 461, 477, 478
19, 144, 146, 149, 245, 246 – 248, 252, 257, 403, Ypres 15, 22, 24
406, 439, 483, 487 Yugoslavia 158, 405, 406,
Wong, Erasmo 438 – 439 407, 409
Woolworth, F. W. 56, 68, 125, 126, 146, 197, 240,
250, 251, 271, 274, 281 – 282, 292, 420 Zola, Emile 41, 136, 389

516