Store Wars

Historians have traditionally argued that economic change before the Second World War destroyed the world of the independent storekeeper, and have consequently interpreted protest by the independents as a desperate counter-attack against the emergence of a society based on mass production and mass consumption. In Store Wars David Monod counters that myth by showing that the rate of small-business growth in retailing remained relatively constant into the 1930s despite rising competition by the mass marketers. Monod finds that independent retailing, rather than being destroyed by modernity, was transformed by it, as the success of small-business people came to depend on the store owners' ability to adapt to the demands of an economy increasingly predicated on 'bigness.' Shopkeepers had to modernize their stores, improve their accounting, retreat from open-book credit, develop closer relations with their suppliers, and depend more on manufacturers for advertising, pricing, and promotion. Monod describes the profound impact of this adaptation on retail unity, on small-business values, and on shopkeepers' political and associational activities, and reveals how trade associations were used by 'progressive' merchants to fight for trade reforms that hurt marginal competitors.