Cornering the market: Independent grocers and innovation in American small business, 1860--1940.

摘要

This dissertation draws on social and cultural perspectives to analyze the foundations of the modern American grocery trade. I argue that independent grocers (archetypal small businessmen) have been overlooked as a source of innovation in the formation, method, and operation of the grocery trade. This study contributes to a business and cultural history of American enterprise and capitalism by showing how independent grocers made possible the growth and development of a national industry. Between the Civil War, when radical changes in the production, transportation, and selling of groceries took root, through the New Deal economic programs of the 1930s, when independent grocers and small businesses gained government support in their roles as business and community leaders, "corner" grocers built establishments and organizations that were progressive in structure yet local in character. My work revises older images of such stores as either cultural institutions with little economic significance or outmoded forms of business destined to be replaced by chain stores. Chapter one establishes the broad conditions of the nineteenth-century grocery trade, demonstrating how even the most rural of small-town grocers focused their energies on business concerns rather than social pursuits. Chapter two shows how wholesale grocers innovated by employing traveling salesmen as "trust brokers," mediators between wholesale and retail grocers, to shore up relations with retail grocers in a burgeoning marketplace. Chapter three focuses on independent grocers' adoption and adaptation of the cash register, showing how small businessmen innovated the latest retail technology from "the bottom" up. Chapter four details retail grocers' efforts to grapple with an expending economy by forging strategic alliances with other retailers to eliminate middlemen (in this case wholesale grocers) from the distribution chain. Chapter five explores the battle between independent grocers and chain stores to become the model for both grocery retailing and American enterprise. Even by the 1930s, neither business form could claim dominance nor be assured of their future within either the grocery trade or American business. I demonstrate how small businessmen informed and contributed to the fight over how the national marketplace was to be constructed and who was to participate in and control that process.