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The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America Review"The Great A & P" drew me in for several reasons. It brings back nostalgia. As a child I made many visits to A & P in "Shop City" in East St. Louis. This book gave me the chance to learn the story behind the grocery, the Nancy Anne Bakery goods, the Eight O'Clock Coffee and other products that I saw so often. It brings something for the Trivia enthusiast. Now, when we are urged to buy cloth bags to the grocer, did you ever wonder when and why grocers started using paper bags? According to this book, it was because the cotton for cotton bags became unavailable during the Civil War. As a history buff I found the social and political history aspects intriguing. The narratives concerning the shift from full service to self service stores reminds me of my mother's story about having to wait at a store in Belleville while the clerk served adults and how her grandmother took her back and gave the clerk a tongue lashing about the disrespect shown to her representative. As a student of business I found the case study of how A & P became the world's largest retailer and then fell to having only a regional presence and the attempts to legislatively suppress chain stores to be very interesting. The sections dealing with anti-trust prosecutions provided a brief refresher course on topics I had not considered much since law school.
The story of A & P is a great one. Founded as a tea importer it gradually grew and morphed into a chain of grocery stores, manufacturing businesses, food wholesalers and, eventually, supermarkets. As in any business, management had to decide what to offer the customers: credit and delivery or neither, but low prices. It had to challenge a myriad of small businessmen, including the fathers of Richard Nixon and Lady Bird Johnson, for the right to provide food to the nation.
The A & P story is not one of straight line development. Along its route it had to fight off attempts to run it out of business by applying taxes that grew with each store a business had in a state. These fights were fought in most states and in Congress, where its foe was the long-time power, Rep. Wright Patman of Texas. As difficult as it is to believe now, government policy during the Depression was focused on keeping prices up and protecting small, inefficient business against competition from larger enterprises to whom the customers would turn if given an uncoerced choice. The NRA and other New Deal programs required all members of an industry to adhere to the price schedule established by the industry codes. This was a handicap for low cost retailers, like A & P, that lost the advantage that had made them attractive.
After surviving political attacks and the disruptions of World War II, A & P failed to negotiate the seas of prosperity. The deaths of its long time leaders, brothers John and George Hartford, left it with a management devoid of the vision needed to lead it into the new world of mass marketers and suburbia. While others seized the opportunities and grew, A & P descended into a period of decline that extirpated its familiar logo from most of the country.
As fascinating as the story is, it requires a good teller to hold the readers' interest. It has that in Marc Levinson. The book moves on from topic to topic in an uninterrupted flow. It can report on an anti-trust trial, bills submitted to restrict chain stores and competitive price wars without ever becoming bogged down in statistics or details. He confirmed the thoughts that I developed while reading the book, that the things that were said about A & P in the last century are being said by Walmart today. Whether your interests are nostalgia, trivia, history, business, economics, politics or just a good read, this is a book for you.
The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America OverviewFrom modest beginnings as a tea shop in New York, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company became the largest retailer in the world. It was a juggernaut, the first retailer to sell $1 billion in goods, the owner of nearly sixteen thousand stores and dozens of factories and warehouses. But its explosive growth made it a mortal threat to hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop grocery stores. Main Street fought back tooth and nail, enlisting the state and federal governments to stop price discounting, tax chain stores, and require manufacturers to sell to mom and pop at the same prices granted to giant retailers. In a remarkable court case, the federal government pressed criminalcharges against the Great A&P for selling food too cheaply—and won.
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