chord

'Jefferys and his influence on the history of early-modern retailing'
E-mail: n.c.cox@wlv.ac.uk and k.dannehl@wlv.ac.uk

Jefferys’ classic exposition on retailing provided modern economic historians with a framework and a methodology that still resonates today. For early-modern historians, his influence has been less benign. There are two reasons for this. The first is the shortage of data prior to 1800 for analysis comparable with that of Jefferys and his successors. The second is that the quantitative analysis pursued by Jefferys et al. required and requires neat definitions to deal with large amounts of data. The result has been a series of working definitions of terms like ‘multiple retailing’ and ‘department store’, and even of retailing, which do not fit prototypal developments and the fuzzy edges of the distributive network found earlier.
One victim is the concept of ‘shopping’. Jefferys himself observed changes in shopping habits after 1900, although it was others who came to the firm conclusion that shopping, as opposed to purchasing, was a consequence of the twentieth-century mass market and parallel improvements in marketing. Recently this has been challenged, and it is now accepted that the nineteenth century and even the eighteenth saw evidence of shopping as a leisure activity. But the earlier period remains little explored and no attempt has been made to produce a working definition of shopping applicable to all stages of retailing development.

Andrew Godley and Bridget Salmon, University of Reading

'The chicken, the factory farm and the supermarket: the industrialisation of poultry farming in Britain, 1950-1980'
E-mail: a.c.godley@reading.ac.uk and b.l.williams@reading.ac.uk

In 1950 poultry was a rare luxury in Britain, only two per cent of the total meat consumption. But over the next thirty years chicken consumption grew at the remarkable (compound) rate of 10 per cent per annum, while the consumption of all meat barely rose at all. By 1980 poultry had become the single most important source of meat, with over a quarter of the total share of the market, replacing former favourites like beef, mutton and bacon in the British diet. Such a transformation of a mature market like meat is very rare. Incumbents possess all the advantages. Innovative entrants typically struggle to overcome established patterns of consumer behaviour without some dramatic change in technology. The emergence of intensive rearing (first in the United States and then quickly diffusing to the United Kingdom) was indeed one such dramatic change in production, dependent on technological changes in pharmaceuticals and feedstuffs production, in refrigeration and slaughtering. While these innovations all had their origins in the United States, the paper argues that the catalyst for the transformation of poultry farming in Britain was not any change in production technology but rather the transformation of distribution. In contrast to the United States, the modern poultry industry emerged in the first thirty years after the Second World War in Britain because of the deliberate investments made by a select group of leading food retailers, who needed to economise on the costs of meat distribution as they pioneered the self-service format.

Andrew Hann, University of Greenwich

'The early nineteenth century: a forgotten period in the history of retailing'
E-mail: agh6@leicester.ac.uk

Few historians now believe, as Jefferys did, that early-modern retailing was traditionally organised, local and primitive, yet the period after 1850 is still often represented as one of revolutionary change with the emergence of multiple retailing, department stores and modern retail practices. This paper argues that we should thus take a closer look at the early nineteenth century, which by implication must have been a critical phase in the development of a ‘modern’ retail system. Hitherto this period has been rather overlooked due to the paucity of systematic sources and a preoccupation with looking for the earliest precursors of modern retailing. Focusing on two areas, the West Midlands and Kent, the paper explores two key aspects of modern retailing identified by Jefferys: the growth in the number and variety of fixed shops, and the concentration of such shops into clearly defined central business districts. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including trade directories, taxation records, trade card, newspaper advertisements and shopkeepers’ account books, it argues for an acceleration of change during this period at least as great as that after 1850. This adds support to the argument that development in the retail sector after 1660 was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but also highlights the early nineteenth century as a critical moment in this process. Furthermore, comparison between the two study areas is used to explore the spatiality of early nineteenth century retail change, and in particular to assess whether proximity to London acted as a spur or hindrance to development.

Bill Lancaster, University of Northumbria at Newcastle

'The historiography of the department store since the 1930s'
E-mial: william.lancaster@unn.ac.uk

The department store has been the subject of scholarly research for almost three quarters of a century, but its historiography is fragmented and often reflects academic trends. This presentation will survey the emergence of department store scholarship at Harvard during the 1930s and the factors that stimulated these early studies. The paper will also look at the work produced in the UK in the same period. The immediate post war period saw the production of Paserdmadjian’s classic study of the department store as well as his often overlooked work on trade organisation. The Grand Magasin is featured in Jeffreys work; it is, of course, just one element in his general survey of retail history and for a more considered view of his work on department stores we need to take into account his numerous editorials for the IADS monthly newsletter.
The majority of post war writing on the subject was made up of individual store or company histories. Useful for facts grubbing most are celebratory - even Briggs study of the Lewis Company - but there are exceptions such as Moss and Turton’s work on the House of Fraser. Since the 1980s the department store has been the subject of an expansion of scholarly attention. Feminists, cultural studies practitioners, post modernists, anthropologists and social historians have explored department store history. The department store, thanks to this ‘cultural/social turn’ is now regarded as an icon of modernity. But how complete is our knowledge of the department store? Have historians neglected some obvious and vital areas in their pursuit of the fashionable? The presentation will conclude by identifying some major gaps and suggesting a research agenda to remedy the current incompleteness of department store studies.

Historical surveys of consumer credit in the United Kingdom identify the importance of check trading without documenting its magnitude or development. Check traders provided promissory notes redeemable with local retailers, who paid discounts in return for the custom. The Provident Clothing and Supply Company established the system in 1880, and by 1910 had obtained an annual turnover of £1,000,000. Checks were used to purchase goods at what Provident argued were `ordinary retail prices’. This paper offers a detailed analysis of the Provident’s growth between the mid-1920s and the 1960s, when the company faced the decline of the traditional check trade. It examines the size of the company’s customer base, the extent of its agency network, the distribution of its offices, and the cost of credit. While critics claimed the system offered poor credit bargains check trading remained unregulated compared to moneylending and hire purchase. Although imperfect in many respects, the check trade offered one way for working class consumers to break liquidity constraints and rearrange their spending in a transparent and flexible manner. While the system’s decline was undoubtedly due to alternative credit opportunities, the inflexibility of checks in meeting modern consumption needs.

Jefferys in Retail Trading in Britain charted the changing dynamic relationship between the three main sectors of retail trading, independents, department stores and multiples. When his survey finished in 1950 Britain’s retail was still in a weak position slowly recovering from a wartime economy. Jefferys in his conclusion noted that the continuing trend was for large scale retailing, due partly to the ‘inability of newcomers to enter the field…’ Whilst in general his views are sound, within ten years a new youth generation would be asserting itself through new independent fashion boutiques, catering to a new market of young confident consumers.
The aim of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of the changes in retail development and ownership, which led in the mid-1950’s and early 1960’s to the pop culture exemplified, by Carnaby Street and the Kings Road. In London particularly, new ideas for fashion and new environments to sell it, led to the development of independent entrenepurial retailers which the established multiple and department store groups tried hard to emulate and respond to. The department store sector was in decline, Biba, for a while inhabitating the Art Deco shell of what had been Derry & Toms in Kensington High Street was a symbol of this until it expired. Conversely, the power and trading networks of the multiples were able to capitalise on this new wave by establishing their own boutiques, Top Shop at Peter Robinson being an initial key example.
The fashion boutique of the period symbolised and focused a clear demand for change from a new consumer group. Whilst a few survived and evolved, most, having served their purpose withered and died, allowing the multiples and (some) department stores to evolve and continue.

Jeffery’s survey of the distribution of consumer goods, published in 1950, indicated some unusual features of the retail trade in sports goods, notably the large number of irregular outlets through which it was conducted. Though specialist sports goods retailers accounted for around 60 per cent of sales, a further 12 per cent was via golf and tennis professionals, and up to 28 per cent via what are vaguely described as ‘other outlets’. In addition, Jeffery makes it clear that sales to clubs and schools, though excluded from the estimates in his study, ‘were an important feature of the trade and represented some ten per cent of total sales’.
All this suggests that the retail structure underpinning the distribution of this class of goods had some highly unusual features. A perusal of the trade press suggests that this was a matter of great concern to the owners of high-street sports goods shops. They believed that they were constantly being undercut by manufacturers selling direct to clubs and schools, and by the informal retailing activities of sports club members who used their social connections to sell goods and equipment as a sideline. The intention here is to focus especially on sports good retailing via ‘other outlets’ in the period c.1930-1960.

An important aspect of Jefferys’ survey of British retail trading is its attention to the development of modern forms of retailing. The book thus provides a pioneering survey of the growing importance of various forms of multiple and department stores. In some ways, however, Jefferys’ account is fragmentary, not least in treating separately the contributions to such developments made by the private sector and the co-operative movement. This division between co-operative and private retailing has been perpetuated by a number of subsequent studies. One result has been the relative neglect of co-operative contributions to retail modernisation. Societies were amongst the pioneers of multiple retailing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the inter-war decades also saw efforts to redevelop or replace existing central premises, so as to create co-operative department stores in urban centres throughout Britain. Some of the latter were innovative both in design and business methods, representing an engagement with modernity that was in advance of common practice in the private sector. This paper offers both an evaluation of the co-operative contribution to the development of British department stores prior to WW2 and an exploration of the thinking that inspired the development and design of co-operative department stores.

Clare Rose, Chelsea College of Art and Design
' "The Boy and How to Suit Him": advertising boys’ clothes, 1850-1900'
E-mail: c.rose@chelsea.arts.ac.uk

Jefferys’ seminal account of the development of retail practices identified important differences in gendered and classed practices of clothing retailing. These were mapped on to different types of retailers, so that department stores were the haunt of middle-class female consumers, while multiple clothing retailers were seen as directed mainly at working-class males. Evidence for this differentiation was found in the location, display, and publicity of retailers as well as in their prices. This paper will examine the advertising practices of retailers selling boys’ clothing c1850-1900, using documents from the Stationers’ Hall and John Johnson archives. These show that distinctions between sole traders and multiples, and between retail and bespoke sourcing of goods, were far from clear-cut. However advertising material tended to obscure these differences, with mass-produced images used to promote stores claiming an individual service. These documents also show a gradual rather than a polarised approach to class distinction in sales techniques, with brash statements of sale prices and careful depictions of the latest fashionable styles co-existing on the page. The provision of new and appropriate styles depended on changing practices in the mass clothing industry, for which boys’ clothing formed a crucial testing ground.

Bridget Salmon, University of Reading

'The ‘real’ retailing revolution: the impact of self-service methods on food retailing in postwar Britain'
E-mail: BridgetSalmon@aol.com

When Jefferys’ study was published, British food retailing was on the brink of a watershed. The rigidities he identified in retailing in the interwar period had begun to be challenged by the introduction of new technologies and forms of organisation. In the succeeding quarter-century these were to fundamentally change the structure of food retailing. The innovation which effected these changes was the introduction of self-service supermarkets. Jefferys acknowleged that self-service methods held potential for productivity gains, but his study was published too early to permit a full understanding of their impact. This paper summarises the results of a study of the introduction of self-service into J. Sainsbury Ltd, a leading exponent of the new retailing methods.
It explores the context of self-service introduction, the stimuli for change and the management challenges faced by early innovators. It shows that the introduction of self-service methods by British food retailers in the postwar period bore the hallmarks of a classic economic ‘revolution’ in terms of its capacity to generate sustained economic growth in a stagnant sector through the use of capital-intensive technology and factory-style forms of organisation.
The paper disaggregates the effects of different inputs and analyses their contribution to Sainsbury’s growth, compared with other retailers’ experiences. It considers the long-term impact of different retailers’ innovation strategies and concludes that the net effect was more for self-service radically to transform distribution channels than, as Jefferys and others predicted, to economise on labour.

Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary College/Birkbeck College, University of London
'From 'push' to 'pull'? The uneasy relationship between the advertising industry and the shopkeeper in Britain, ca. 1900-1950'
E-mail: an_tulach_mhor96@hotmail.com

This paper will use J. B. Jeffery’s seminal study on "Retail Trading in Britain" as a vantage point to study the ever-changing and often uneasy relationship between shopkeepers and the advertising industry in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that the nineteenth- and twentieth-century "retailing revolutions" (Mathias) also revolutionised the relationship between the advertising and the retail industry in a way that independent shopkeepers and their staff slowly came to be seen as a problematic, unmanageable factor in and even barrier to the effectiveness of national advertising campaigns for branded consumer goods.
I will show that the independence and social power of shopkeepers and sales assistants forced the advertising industry to devise various means to re-balance "push" and "pull" strategies in national advertising campaigns. These campaigns had to capture the attention of mass consumers to choose one brand over another. Yet marketing and advertising historians have often ignored that shopkeepers and sales staff, too, needed persuasion to stock heavily advertised products, to give prominence to the display of branded products and to abstain from selling rival products in place of products consumers had asked for (substitution).
Thus, at the heart of this paper lies the question how the advertising industry managed to limit the powers of independent shopkeepers to influence buyers’ decisions over the course of the early twentieth-century. In order to study the love-hate relationship between the advertising industry and the retail sector in the age before the supermarket a number of sources will be exploited, such as advertising trade journals, the papers of professional organisations (IIPA, ISMA) and the archives of a various advertising agencies.

Existing models of retail innovation suggest that change tends to be driven by low-cost retailers creating increased price competition. This is also associated with new retail formats such as self-service and the supermarket. This paper examines the ideas surrounding the standard models of retail institutional change in the context at the early phases of the self-service and supermarket revolution in early post-war Britain. More specifically the paper focuses on the role played by co-operative societies in the period c1947 to c1955. The discussion focuses on the motives for adopting self-service techniques and how this innovation was perceived by British co-operative societies. In doing so the research provides a very different perspective on the more general models of retail change associated with innovation. The research forms part of the Leverhulme sponsored project on ‘The Coming of the Supermarket’.

While furniture showrooms (warerooms, warehouses) from the late eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century have been regarded as the place of selling ready-made goods, it is also necessary to consider the role of the showroom as the place for interactivity between vendors and purchasers. Using Gillows London showroom account book during the period 1844-6, this paper examines the showroom as the space not only for displaying and selling goods, but also for communication between the maker and customers. The account book provides ample details of transactions and information about customers, and also implies the relationship between the producer and the consumer.
The paper starts with the examination of customer services system of the showroom, paying attention to their use of customer number and the existence of regular customers. The paper then focuses on the relationship between Gillows and customers through a wide variety of services - from house decoration, cleaning, altering, and repairing, to house letting, advertising, making inventories, arranging removals, and caretaking - and even to arranging funerals. These services may have required closer relationship with customers than just selling ready-made goods. They indicate indeed the firm’s active involvement in the private lives of its many eminent customers. The paper concludes with an assessment of the showroom as a medium for communication both between the maker and consumers, and among consumers.

Jon Stobart, University of Northampton

'The department stores of provincial England: geographical survey of the early twentieth century'
E-mail: Jon.Stobart@northampton.ac.uk

Department stores are often portrayed as one of the key developments in the history of retailing in western society. They lie at the heart of our conception of a nineteenth-century retail revolution, transforming experiences of shopping and the geography of the high street, helping to define the modern city and modern urban life. However, analyses have predominantly focused on the growth and experience of fashionable department stores in London’s West End. This overshadows the development of such shops in the provinces, especially away from the large regional centres or resort towns. The result is that we know relatively little about the origins and spread of department stores across the country: Lancaster (1995) provides a picture of the process of growth, but not its detailed geography, especially as it affected the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ towns.
Many fundamental questions about the provincial department store, therefore, remain unasked, let alone answered. Where were the estimated 150-200 stores in 1910 located? When had they emerged as department stores, and by what processes? Was there a process of diffusion out from London and/or down the urban hierarchy; did department stores emerge independently in different locations, and were certain types of town favoured (for example resorts or county towns)? Merely raising these issues serves to problematise the pivotal role accorded to the department store – questioning the chronology and geography of their influence on retailing practices in small and medium-sized towns. Answering them in a comprehensive manner is a different matter, and clearly beyond the scope of a single paper.
My aim here is rather less ambitious, but offers a foundation upon which more detailed analyses might be built. Drawing on a comprehensive survey of entries in Kelly’s Post Office directories, it reproduces the geography of English provincial department stores in what is often seen as their heyday in the 1930s, and then attempts to trace these patterns back into the late nineteenth century. Nothwithstanding problems of definition – no entry uses the term ‘department store’ – this analysis offers a unique insight into the growth and distribution of this key retail innovation. Yet the organic growth and modest size of many provincial department stores, especially those outside the major centres, questions their revolutionary nature. In many instances, small department stores can be seen as the product of a gradual accretion of services and premises: more retail evolution than revolution.

This paper will take as its central proposition Dorothy Davis’ 1966 assertion that the "Oldest shopping style of all …[one that privileges skill and reputation] is reserved nowadays for the sale of goods that have come onto the market … fairly recently".
Taking JB Jeffery’s 1956 text as its starting point, the paper will locate Jeffery’s account of the state of departmental store retailing and situate it alongside the views of relevant others, including Hrant Pasdermadjian, the Council of Industrial Design, Mass Observation, the British Institute of Management, Hulton Press, sociologists, and retailers themselves.
If, as seemed likely, a niche existed within which department stores could successfully expand consumer horizons (through introducing new products in a familiar retail environment), and provide the reassuring levels of customer service, product knowledge, and specialist expertise with which to ease and facilitate new patterns of purchasing, what in fact happened to this model over the following years?
Drawing on a wide variety of archival as well as published sources, the paper will suggest that Britain’s moment of affluence gave rise to a short-lived and often illusory perception of "opportunity", before growing economic pressures brought with them increasing constraints on the department store modus operandi.
The kinds and numbers of staff changed; store environments became more standardised; stock control and management hierarchies became ever more remote. This had a generalised impact on the shopping experience of store customers, which might be characterised as reductive and less satisfying.

Focusing on the period from the 1920s, when the UK chain store Marks and Spencer began to take on its modern form, to the end of the 20th century, when the company experienced an extended period of crisis, this paper will consider the store’s changing fortunes in terms of one particular vector – class. Whilst not wanting to suggest that class is the only, or indeed necessarily the key, frame through which to understand the place of Marks and Spencer in the British context, I would argue that unless we pay some attention to class dynamics we can neither appreciate aspects of the store’s ‘embedded’ character, nor dimensions of its retailing difficulties at the turn of the century.
The first part of the paper will briefly sketch three particular historical moments – the 1920s and 30s (the expansion of the lower middle class), the 1950s and 1960s (the expansion of a working class mass market), the 1980s (the middle class turn to ‘lifestyle’) to demonstrate the relation between M&S and changing class formations. This provides a background to the major section which attends more centrally to consumers’ perceptions of, and relationships with the store. Drawing especially on interviews with shoppers and writings received in response to a Mass Observation ‘directive’ (1995) the paper understands class as relational (cf Pierre Bourdieu 1984 Distinction) and considers how M&S as both material space in which to consume (the social and cultural economy of the shop floor), and discursive signifier circulating within the culture (branding in its broadest sense), provides opportunity for the marking out and expression of class positions, feelings and tensions. In turn the fragility of M&S’s class hold is revealed.