The esercenti movement in Milan was much concerned with the need to develop a distinctive shopkeeper identity that would, in turn, sustain the movement. Each component part of the movement tried to mould this identity into line with its own outlook, leaving the historian the difficult task of untangling the various strategies proposed by different factions within the movement, and assessing the relative appeal of these to the esercenti. It would be foolish to imagine that a definitive history of the development of a shopkeeper consciousness could ever be written, but analysis of the Milanese movement does provide a concrete context in which the questions raised about shopkeeper history and politics in the Introduction can be addressed.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s the division of Milan into two different dazio consume zones dominated commercial, industrial and political life in the city. The origins of the shopkeeper movement reflected this division very clearly. It was the mica affair and the continuing efforts of the city administration to raise more revenue from the suburbs that created the circumstances in which L'Esercente and the Federation were able to establish themselves. Their constituency was the proprietors of those stores which would be most affected by changes in the application of the dazio consume: those provisioners of staple goods – such as bakers, pork butchers and grocers – who formed the greatest part of the retail community in the suburban districts.