The Shops of Britain
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The Shops of Britain

A Study of Retail Distribution

Hermann Levy

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The Shops of Britain

A Study of Retail Distribution

Hermann Levy

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About This Book

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XV of the eighteen in the Sociology of Work and Organization series and this book on The Shops of Britain follows the author's publication on Retail Trade Associations, a new form of monopolist organization in Britain. After the book had been completed, the Report of the Census of Distribution Committee, published in March 1946, urged the necessity of providing more statistical information about the distributive trades. One of the purposes of this book is to display how complex the structure of retailing is and to show that it is dependent on a great variety of economic, social, occupational and sociological factors which cannot be adequately assessed without a comparative analysis of all the various trades concerned with retailing.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136255472
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1
The Shops of Britain
Part I
Some Fundamental Aspects
Chapter I
The Multiplicity of Retail Outlets
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I
Alfred Marshall, writing in 1896,1 explained that “the advantages which a large business” has “over a small one” were conspicuous in manufacture, because it had “special facilities for concentrating a good deal of work in a small area”. At the same time he had noticed that the process of concentration had also reached the distributive trades. “In particular the retail trade”, so he continued, “is being transformed, and the small shopkeeper is losing ground daily.” Fifty years later, in spite of the enormous increase of department stores and big retail outlets of other types, the process of concentration in retail distribution has not yet approached the position in industry and some of the public utility services. The number of outlets in retail trade is estimated to be at least 750,000, and some estimates give a figure of 1,000,000 (see later, pp. 32–33). Moreover, these figures do not even include the large number of retailing outlets which do not take the visible form of shops such as mail-order businesses or the sale of goods by restaurants or clubs or costermongers. Thus even at the most cursory glance there is not the slightest justification for speaking of the disappearance of the small retailer.
No doubt, as we shall describe later, large numbers and many types of small shopkeepers may be what Robert Sinclair has called “a curious survival”.2 It may also be—a development scarcely foreseen in Marshall’s time—that “amalgamations remove the shopkeeper but seldom remove the shop”. Yet there has been a revival as well as this survival. Towns do not invariably concentrate the shopping population, especially when they grow and sprawl beyond a certain size. Suburbs of a townlike character are largely replaced by settlements on the outer fringes which more resemble villages. This is made possible by improved facilities for travel and the quicker access to the town centre. These outlying housing estates are the seat of the revival of small shops ; they are new cells for the development of retail units of a relatively smaller size. They add yearly to the numbers of shops and offset the high rate of mortality. But the so-called problem of the small shopkeeper does not arise here where a new chapter in the history of the small independent trader may be beginning. That problem rather arises where this history seemed, already in Marshall’s time, to be coming to an end, that is in the densely populated town centres, where the struggle between large and small distributing outlets presents a nation-wide issue.3
Let us make this problem quite clear even at the risk of over-simplifying it. In industry, in shipping, and in many other services, the big unit with a large output and large turnover has gradually eclipsed its smaller and less “efficient” (i.e. in general technically obsolete) competitors. The overhead charges of the larger units, already relatively low, have been still more reduced where, through amalgamation, big firms have taken over the entire production of the smaller firms. Where cartels and combinations opposed this process of concentration by protecting the rank and file of producers trustification within the cartel went on.4 Similar tendencies may be observed in the activities of retail trade associations, the “cartels” of distribution. But, on the other hand, there is a difference. There are thousands of retail outlets in every trade. An attempt to concentrate the trade in a few big outlets would be futile. Hundreds of blast furnaces have been shut down in the history of the British iron industry and their production taken over by the leading concerns and plants. But in retail trade, even where the chain store system has established a financial nucleus of an enormous and unprecedented size, the number of retail outlets has, in many cases, remained exactly the same. When a giant trust arose in the British tobacco industry the number of retail outlets, even of those controlled by the trust, remained scattered and many. Here is the contrast between concentration in industry and concentration in retail trade. The size of the industrial unit is dependent on industrial technique. The extent to which technique is developed depends on what markets will be able to digest at a profitable price to the producer ; the concentrated demand of far-distant markets may make it profitable to carry through industrial concentration and introduce mass production ; the best location for the industry will be dictated by labour supply, the nearness of raw materials and facilities for transport. The position of the retail trade is very different. The problem of “location” of retail outlets depends on social and sociological circumstances which do not affect industry. The structure of retailing is a consequence of historical causes, it has been retained through habit and custom and is largely independent of purely economic considerations. There is a conflict between the economic rationale of retailing and its actual, historically developed pattern. To describe this structure and pattern in detail, and to indicate its special characteristics in the different trade groups will be one of the main tasks of this book. First of all, however, it may be useful to enumerate the principal factors which have been responsible for the retention, in contrast to industry, of a surprisingly great and multifarious number of units in retail trade. There has been a concentration of retail buying, mainly due, as Marshall was again eager to explain, to the progress of local passenger and goods transport. This tendency towards large-scale retail businesses came almost 100 years later than the Industrial Revolution ;5 the Bon MarchĂ© came in 1852, the first departmental stores in the United States in the later ‘fifties, Whiteley’s in 1860. It was only with the acceleration of the urban traffic, the appearance of tramways, and later, electrical tramways, the bicycle and the network of suburban trains that the possibility arose of asking the shopper to shop at a distance from his home. In the same way the improvement of transport enabled big stores to deliver goods over increasing distances. This development is still in progress. The motor-van and the highly specialized commercial vehicle have had a revolutionary effect, enabling shoppers to buy goods in person at distant stores without regard to their bulk. Delivery did what the shopper could not do, i.e. carry the purchases home, and delivery became more and more refined and frequent. To buy furniture in London for a suburban home (in peace time) now requires no greater, perhaps even less difficulty than if it was bought from and transported by a local furniture shop. The errand boy of the small shop was soon replaced by the delivery van of the big one.
From these changes in transport arose the department store, the bigger shops in the “main street” mostly chain stores, the fixed-price chain store and the co-operative store which, after all, apart from its associative peculiarities, is only a form of the large multiple shop.6 Just as in industry the large unit was the outcome of the development of concentrated mass transport designed for distant markets,7 the big unit in retailing became a reality at the moment when transport facilities for buyers and commodities made it possible to sell in bulk to crowds at the retail selling point or to supply crowds in their distant homes. The effect on the type of sale was not less revolutionary than the system, of sale itself. Large buying crowds meant a huge turnover per trading unit and at the same time a turnover which could be greatly accelerated. Both factors meant a reduction in overhead charges and thus offered a possibility of lower prices. Here was the first attraction for the buyer shopping away from his local street.
Next to the advantage in price came the advantage in variety. Where crowds buy, something for every taste may be provided. The individual commodity may be replaced by far greater ranges. It is worth while to keep a stock of every type, for among the masses of buyers there will be enough customers for each line. The large book shop can be sure of selling some high-priced speciality during a season or at Christmas, the small book shop may see no chance of selling a single copy. Where fashion plays a part the huge and rapid turnover of the large store makes it possible to change stock as fashion changes. This is an attraction which has increased with the enhanced use of persuasive advertisement in the daily papers ; and it is not an accident that changes in fashion have greatly increased in speed since the development of the large department store and the concentration of large-town buying centres.
The question which is constantly being put nowadays concerns the significance of this process of transformation. The so-called small independent shop, the unit shop, the shop in the side street, the surviving small shop in the main street, are all these to disappear with the regularity of an economic law—as in the eighteenth century the small holdings in agriculture succumbed to the large farm?8 Should this process be accelerated by legislation and by planning bodies? Or, on the contrary, is the large number of small retail outlets still remaining as a proof of their still widespread profitability? Or again : is the process of transformation to be regarded as limited to certain groups of retailing, varying in intensity from trade to trade? The technical argument is frequently over-simplified. From the view of overhead charges and the obvious advantage of selling large quantities from centralized points a plea for the absolute superiority of the large shop is often made. This does not take into account the social aspect of the matter, which may make centralized retail buying agreeable and profitable to one part of the population but not to another. It does not take into account the possibility that such centralized retail selling points may be feasible for certain commodities but not for others, and may not be applicable to whole branches of the retail trade.
A warning should be sounded from history. It was for merely technical reasons, deduced from the advantages of corn growing and cattle farming on a large scale, that writers in the last half of the eighteenth and during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century glorified the large holding as the only really economic unit in agriculture. It was later that the discovery was made9 that the small holder was in many ways economically superior in certain branches of agriculture, and that indeed the whole question of the superiority of the large or the small farmer was a relative one, dependent on what the one and the other were producing. Measures enacted when the dogma of the superiority of large farms was accepted as gospel were regretted when it became evident that they had led to the disappearance of an economically useful set of producers, which it was difficult to revive. While we are not suggesting anything like a policy for protecting small shops or small shopkeepers we believe it essential to analyse in detail, and with explicit reference to all the practical problems involved in the main single groups of retailing, the condition of small versus large shops before laying down rules as to the economic and social justification of the one or of the other. It is, for this task of analysis, regrettable that a Census of Distribution is not yet available, although it should be well recognized, and perhaps even more recognized after reading the following chapters of our investigation, that such a Census, if confined to statistical data, would hardly exhaust the knowledge that is required.10
The still redoubtable number of shops suggests that there are very powerful economic factors at work to maintain small units which some decades ago were already considered dying out. We have already mentioned one of these factors, the increase in semi-rural housing estates which have more kinship with the former village community and its opportunities for small independent shops than with the conditions of town and suburban life. But the chief problem concerns the continuing competition of different types of retail outlet in the already existing buying centres of the nation ; why does shop survive? It does not always survive to do an old and traditional type of business. Modern industry and entirely new commodities, such as radio sets or motor-cycles, have provided opportunities for both the survival as well as for revival of small retailing units. But the main battle is certainly fought between the old-fashioned small shopkeeper and the modern centralized department store, co-operative store or chain store with a large turnover.
II
Two sets of conditions should be carefully distinguished in this investigation. One set concerns the consumer and his buying habits. The other the shopkeeper himself and his competitive ability.
The small shop has still retained a definitely favourable position where nearness to the home of the consumer is important. “Buying round the corner” has by no means displaced the big department or multiple store. A. and F. Pears, the soapmakers, lately reported that “many sales are lost if the street-corner type of shop regularly selling soaps is not a stocker of Pears. We have seen that the housewife who deals with a shop of this style will accept a substitute rather than make a longer journey.”11 This habit of buying “round the corner” does not wholly disappear when small streets are transformed into large blocks of modern flats. Where such flats are not very near bigger buying centres they provide custom for nearby shops catering for ioo or 50 families with similar wants grouped in a single block. The more fashionable of these modern flats generally give an opportunity for new, small, independent shops ; it is a convenience to have a barber or a chemist or a stationery-newspaper shop within the building. Moreover, poverty may play a part in preventing people from buying in distant places with their larger shops. Jarrow, for instance, is in a sense an industrial suburb of Newcastle-on-Tyne, it is certainly not a self-contained distributing centre. Yet, the poverty of the inhabitants is such that very few of them before the war could afford even the moderate expense of a journey to Newcastle to do their shopping.12 Perhaps unconsciously the workers’ wives will reckon that this or that purchase at the larger shop—though the price of the commodity would be lower—would in fact be dearer if the time lost in shopping at the more distant buying centres were added in terms of shillings and pence. Another factor in fa...

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