Cornering the Market

In 1930, the first US census to include retail store numbers counted more than 300,000 grocery stores. Eighty-three percent of them were operated by independent entrepreneurs, not chain-store organizations. This staggering number of stores suggests the formidable task that Susan Spellman faced when she set out to study the role of independent grocers in the United States: how to study such a vast number of small businesses that left few traces to document their company histories? Given the varied regional dynamic of the food trade, how does one understand the role of independent grocers in the diverse local communities where they did business? Following the tried-and-true methods of social history, some might take a case-study approach, perhaps achieving a regional framework by comparing grocers in specific cities or small towns from different parts of the country. Undaunted, Spellman established a national scope for her study and an expansive time frame to understand the growth of the grocery trade from the Civil War through the 1940s. The result is a long overdue examination of the role independent grocers played in modernizing the food trade.

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