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Urban Retailing 100 Years Ago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Extract

An address delivered by Dr. Ralph M. Hower at the Annual Meeting of the Business Historical Society.

I propose to interpret my subject rather liberally and to concentrate upon what seem to me to be some fundamental changes in retailing—ranging the whole of the 19th century, but focussing attention especially upon the years from 1850 to 1875, a period of great innovation. And please note that all my remarks have to do with American experience.

To start, then, let me sketch briefly the retailing picture in the larger American cities about 1850. In general the principle of specialization dominated the scene: both retail and wholesale trades were split up, by types of merchandise, into single-line or specialty stores. If you examine the advertisements and business directories of the period, you will find a really astonishing array of stores, each of which confined itself to a narrow range of goods.

Type
Oration
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1938

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References

page no 92 note 1 For a good sketch of the entire marketing scene at this time, see Jones, Fred Mitchell, Middlemen in the Domestic Trade of the United States, 1800–1860 (Urbana, Illinois, 1937).Google Scholar

page no 92 note 1 United States Economist, May 28, 1853, p. 92.

page no 93 note 1 Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, vol. xxxii (1855), pp. 776–777.

page no 94 note 1 Ibid., vol. xxiii (1850), pp. 248–249, and vol. xxxii (1855), p. 766.

page no 94 note 2 Ibid., vol. xx (1849), p. 570

page no 95 note 1 Advertisements in the Haverhill (Mass) Gazette, 1853.

page no 95 note 1 Advertisement, Oswego Palladium, April 27, 1855.

page no 96 note 1 Vol. xvii (1848), p. 452.