The Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing

Jon Stobart, Vicki Howard, Jon Stobart, Vicki Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317199502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

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.

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 negatively 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 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, undercutting 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 economies 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 markets. 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 Employment, 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 evolution 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 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 history 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 methodologies: 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 historians 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 disciplinary 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. Starting 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 itinerant 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 craftsmen 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 separation 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 development 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 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, especially 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 harbingers 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 readings 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 – department 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 transformation 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 creating 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 attempted to discover how changes in retailing and consumption were connected, and determine 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 transformation 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 markets 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 comprehens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Global perspectives on retailing
• Part I Contexts, trends and relationships
• Part II Spaces and places
• Part III People, processes and practices
• Part IV Geographical variations
• Index