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"Chain stores United States History."
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COMPETITION AND PRODUCT QUALITY IN THE SUPERMARKET INDUSTRY
This article analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. Consumer Price Index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing more intense competition have fewer shortfalls. Competition from Walmart—the most significant shock to industry market structure in half a century—decreased shortfalls among large chains by about a third. The risk that customers will switch stores appears to provide competitors with a strong incentive to invest in product quality.
Journal Article
California Fair Trade: Antitrust and the Politics of “Fairness” in U.S. Competition Policy
In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.
Journal Article
Carl Wittwer
Colleagues know him as a brilliant and pioneering scientist who turned polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a mainstay of molecular biological research, from a laborious and time-consuming task into a quick and easy method-overturning fundamental assumptions about how DNA behaves in the process. In 1990, he would take his innovations to market by partnering not with big business but old friends Ririe and Randy Rasmussen, turning out prototypes in a corner of a shed housing parts for potato harvesting machines owned by Ririe's father. According to Ririe, Tori shares his father's reserved manner, as much as is possible for an eight-yearold.
Journal Article
Reluctant capitalists
Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail industries, has evolved from an arena dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. And as in other areas of retail, this transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process. This has been especially pronounced in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives that debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit? In Reluctant Capitalists, Miller looks at a century of book retailing, demonstrating that the independent/chain dynamic is not entirely new. It began one hundred years ago when department stores began selling books, continued through the 1960s with the emergence of national chain stores, and exploded with the formation of “superstores” in the 1990s. The advent of the Internet has further spurred tremendous changes in how booksellers approach their business. All of these changes have met resistance from book professionals and readers who believe that the book business should somehow be “above” market forces and instead embrace more noble priorities. Miller uses interviews with bookstore customers and members of the book industry to explain why books evoke such distinct and heated reactions. She reveals why customers have such fierce loyalty to certain bookstores and why they identify so strongly with different types of books. In the process, she also teases out the meanings of retailing and consumption in American culture at large, underscoring her point that any type of consumer behavior is inevitably political, with consequences for communities as well as commercial institutions.
eBook
MoneyWatch Report
Meanwhile, stocks closed mixed yesterday led by gains in tech and industrial companies. The Dow did decline twenty-six points. The NASDAQ closed up eighteen, hitting a new record. The S&P 500 gained three points.
Transcript
Walmart in South Africa: Precarious Labor and Retail Expansion
In 2011 Walmart's bid to buy a controlling stake in South Africa's Massmart Holdings, Inc. went before the country's Competition Commission and Competition Tribunal, both of which would determine whether to grant the merger outright or to place conditions on it. Massmart Holdings comprises a number of branded subsidiaries in the South African market, including Walmart-style general merchandise dealers, electronics retailers, do-it-yourself building suppliers, and food wholesalers—Game, Dion, Builder's Warehouse, and Makro, respectively—as well as the more recently acquired food retailer, Cambridge Food. South African unions, most prominently the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (Saccawu), with support from the Global Union Federation UNI Global and, in the United States, the United Food and Commercial Workers, fought the merger.
Journal Article
“Speaking of Tomatoes”: Supermarkets, the Senses, and Sexual Fantasy in Modern America
This essay analyzes the efforts of supermarket companies, between the late 1930s and early 19650s, to create a multilayered sensory aesthetic for their stores. Grocery retailers sought to excite suburban shoppers' five senses to exploit what they saw as a feminine longing for erotic excitement intensified by lives circumscribed by postwar domestic norms of \"sexual containment.\" The sensorial approach to supermarketing revolved around the suggestion that middle-class women could use grocery shopping to help fill the erotic and sexual voids of their lives. In so doing, supermarket companies reinforced the notion that middle-class women should look to the excitements of the homemaker role itself-in this case, family shopper -and not to challenges to existing gender arrangements for contentment.
Journal Article
Market rebels
Great individuals are assumed to cause the success of radical innovations--thus Henry Ford is depicted as the one who established the automobile industry in America. Hayagreeva Rao tells a different story, one that will change the way you think about markets forever. He explains how \"market rebels\"--activists who defy authority and convention--are the real force behind the success or failure of radical innovations.
Rao shows how automobile enthusiasts were the ones who established the new automobile industry by staging highly publicized reliability races and lobbying governments to enact licensing laws. Ford exploited the popularity of the car by using new mass-production technologies.
Rao argues that market rebels also establish new niches and new cultural styles. If it were not for craft brewers who crusaded against \"industrial beer\" and proliferated brewpubs, there would be no specialty beers in America. But for nouvelle cuisine activists who broke the stranglehold of Escoffier's classical cuisine in France, there would have been little hybridization and experimentation in modern cooking.
Market rebels also thwart radical innovation. Rao demonstrates how consumer activists have faced down chain stores and big box retailers, and how anti-biotechnology activists in Germany penetrated pharmaceutical firms and delayed the commercialization of patents.
ReadMarket Rebelsto learn how activists succeed when they construct \"hot causes\" that arouse intense emotions, and exploit \"cool mobilization\"--unconventional techniques that engage audiences in collective action. You will realize how the hands that move markets are the joined hands of market rebels.
eBook