Although transformations in retailing are of tremendous current interest, there is no single broad-ranging account of the evolution of retailing formats. A Business History of Retail fills this gap, providing a chronological presentation of changes in retail businesses and shopping experiences from pre-industrial times to the present. Retailing is explored as both an economic and a cultural phenomenon, tracing retail strategies and business operations as they are reconfigured by retailers adapting to changing conditions, new technologies, government policies, and evolving markets. Relationships between the makers, sellers, and buyers of goods are shaped and reshaped as retailers, large and small, respond to competition and pursue new opportunities. Areas of continuity are identified even as businesses grow and strategies evolve. After four centuries there are more retailers selling more merchandise in more ways to more customers. The mass consumption of goods and services is central to American and Canadian history and understanding consumer society requires understanding retailing. Combining original research with recent scholarship in business and social history, cultural theory, and readings in current retail business strategy, this study provides a valuable resource for students and scholars in a wide range of fields and will appeal to general readers with an interest in retail, shopping, and consumerism.

"The story of Wal-Mart Stores is the stuff of legends: in 1945 a poor boy from a poor state opens a variety store in a small town in rural Arkansas and, through hard work, ingenuity, and a commitment to providing customers with low-priced, high-quality merchandise, goes on to create the largest retail operation in the United States. In just 30 years Sam Walton and his Wal-Mart Stores transformed mass merchandising and revolutionized the shopping habits and expectations of American consumers. Moreover, Walton himself - a modest, simple man devoted to family, community, and his employees and customers - so inspired the American people that he was awarded the Medal of Freedom. Upon his death in 1992 Walton left his family a fortune estimated at $23.5 billion; that same year Wal-Mart Stores attained net sales of $43.9 billion and had 1,720 Wal-Mart units operating in 39 states." "This fascinating history of a man and his enterprise is adroitly chronicled by Sandra S. Vance and Roy V. Scott in Wal-Mart, the first scholarly study of Wal-Mart Stores and Sam Walton's remarkable career. Organizing their material chronologically, the authors trace Walton's evolving entrepreneurial style and mounting achievements, consistently linking the character of the man to the innovations he produced - starting with a tiny Ben Franklin variety store in 1945 and progressing to Walton's 5 & 10, Walton's Family Centers, and finally Wal-Mart Stores in the ensuing decades. Readers gain a wealth of insights into the history of American retailing and reach a solid understanding of the elements contributing to Wal-Mart's success: the steadfast dedication to customer service, the sophisticated mechanisms for keeping overhead low, the company policies designed to engender loyalty from employees and customers alike. Given particular emphasis are the factors that led to Wal-Mart's 1990-91 victory over its chief rivals, K mart and Sears, in becoming the nation's leading retailer; also highlighted is the issue of Wal-Mart's impact on the communities it serves and the small businesses therein." "Wal-Mart will hold the interest of students and scholars, of retailing executives and general readers, from first page to last."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A chronological/topical survey of business history in America. Designed as a core text.

A vigorous call for rethinking the field of business history. Business history needs a shake-up, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson argue, as many businesses go global and cultural contexts become critical. Reimagining Business History prods practitioners to take new approaches to entrepreneurial intentions, company scale, corporate strategies, local infrastructure, employee well-being, use of resources, and long-term environmental consequences. During the past half century, the history of American business became an unusually active and rewarding field of scholarship, partly because of the primacy of postwar American capital, at home and abroad, and the rise of a consumer culture but also because of the theoretical originality of Alfred D. Chandler. In a field long given over to banal company histories and biographies of tycoons, Chandler took the subject seriously enough to ask about the large patterns and causes of corporate success. Chandler and his students found the richest material for theorizing about the course of business history in large companies and their institutional structures and cultures. Meantime, Scranton and others found smaller firms, those specializing in batch work as opposed to mass-produced goods, far closer to the norm and more telling. Scranton and Fridenson believe that the time has come for a sweeping rethinking of the field, its materials, and the kinds of questions its practitioners should be asking. How can this field develop in an age of global markets, growing information technology, and diminishing resources? A transnational collaboration between two senior scholars, Reimagining Business History offers direction in forty-four short, pithy essays.

From the colonial era to the present day, small businesses have been an integral part of American life. First published in 1991 and now thoroughly revised and updated, A History of Small Business in America explores the central but ever-changing role played by small enterprises in the nation's economic, political, and cultural development. Examining small businesses in manufacturing, sales, services, and farming, Mansel Blackford argues that while small firms have always been important to the nation's development, their significance has varied considerably in different time periods and in different segments of our economy. Throughout, he relates small business development to changes in America's overall business and economic systems and offers comparisons between the growth of small business in the United States to its development in other countries. He places special emphasis on the importance of small business development for women and minorities. Unique in its breadth, this book provides the only comprehensive overview of these significant topics.

The authoritative account of the rise of Amazon and its intensely driven founder, Jeff Bezos, praised by the Seattle Times as "the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life." Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing. The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

What does it mean to be an American? What are American ideas and values? American Enterprise, the companion book to a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, aims to answer these questions about the American experience through an exploration of its economic and commercial history. It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we might be going in the future. Richly illustrated with images of objects from the museum’s collections, American Enterprise includes a 1794 dollar coin, Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 telephone, a brass cash register from Marshall Fields, Sam Walton’s cap, and many other goods and services that have shaped American culture. Historical and contemporary advertisements are also featured, emphasizing the evolution of the relationship between producers and consumers over time. Interspersed in the historical narrative are essays from today’s industry leaders—including Sheila Bair, Adam Davidson, Bill Ford, Sally Greenberg, Fisk Johnson, Hank Paulson, Richard Trumka, and Pat Woertz—that pose provocative questions about the state of contemporary American business and society. American Enterprise is a multi-faceted survey of the nation’s business heritage and corresponding social effects that is fundamental to an understanding of the lives of the American people, the history of the United States, and the nation’s role in global affairs.

China’s new retail revolution will completely transform how the world thinks about retail and digital innovation. But is the world ready yet? In this book, the authors share an insider’s perspective on what is happening in China to reveal the future for global retail, and a clear framework to help you prepare. The book presents a number of real-world cases, based on interviews and first-hand consumer experience, to decode China’s retail revolution so that you can understand what is happening and why, and what it means for the rest of the world. Crucially, the book identifies five critical stages in the development of new retail that global retail executives need to grasp now: lifestyle commerce, Online-Merge-Offline retail, social retail, livestream retail and invisible retail. To help the industry get ready for this new, China-inspired paradigm in retail, the authors present a practical and simple framework – a ten-year strategic roadmap for global retail executives, which we call the “Beyond” the Value Chain Model. China’s new retail is not just about fashion, cosmetics, snacks, data-driven convenient stores and commercial live streaming. At a time when the world of retail is being upended, it offers inspirational lessons in innovation, purpose and agility for global executives across the entire retail spectrum.

With crisp and insightful contributions from 47 of the world’s leading experts in various facets of retailing, Retailing in the 21st Century offers in one book a compendium of state-of-the-art, cutting-edge knowledge to guide successful retailing in the new millennium. In our competitive world, retailing is an exciting, complex and critical sector of business in most developed as well as emerging economies. Today, the retailing industry is being buffeted by a number of forces simultaneously, for example the growth of online retailing and the advent of ‘radio frequency identification’ (RFID) technology. Making sense of it all is not easy but of vital importance to retailing practitioners, analysts and policymakers.

This introduction looks at the rise of the American economy from its colonial and frontier beginnings. What made the United States an attractive testing ground for entrepreneurs? How did the United States come to have the largest business enterprises in the world by the early twentieth century? Why did business organizations gain a central place in American society?