Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T16:25:03.334Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Biggest Small-Town Store in America”: Independent Retailers and the Rise of Consumer Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Vicki Howard
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The case study of Bresee's Department Store in Oneonta, New York, suggests that small-town department stores were not necessarily fully “modern” by the early twentieth century. This article demonstrates how modern, big-store, business methods came later and documents how earlier modes of trade, such as credit and bartering, persisted into the early twentieth century, even in non-rural, northern contexts. Preliminary findings suggest that eliminating the urban bias in much historiography by including small-town retailing practices may lead to a later periodization of American consumer society.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 457 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Andersen, Fred W. The Miracle Merchant: How I Built My Department Store in a Town of 1300 to an Annual Volume of Over $300,000. Cozad, NE: np, 1925.Google Scholar
Beckman, Theodore N., and Herman, C. Nolen. The Chain Store Problem: A Critical Analysis. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1938.Google Scholar
Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Cus-tomers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Blanke, David. Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imaging Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Calder, Lendol. Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Con-sumer Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Clark, Thomas D. Pills, Petticoats & Plows: The Southern Country Store. Nor-man, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944.Google Scholar
Crossick, Geoffrey, and Jaumain, Serge, eds. Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 1999.Google Scholar
Davis, Janet. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Elvins, Sarah. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920–1940. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Gault, Edgar H. Departmental Merchandising Results in Small Department Stores, 1948. Bureau of Business Research, Report No. 17. Ann Arbor, MI: School of Business Administration, University of Michigan, 1949.Google Scholar
Hardwick, M. Jeffrey. Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. Baltimore, MD: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Howard, Vicki. Brides, Inc. American Weddings and the Business of Tradition. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Isenberg, Alison. Downtown America: A History ofthe Place and the People Who Made It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Kline, Ronald R. Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1993.Google Scholar
Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Longstreth, Richard. City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automo-bile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.Google Scholar
H.A. Manning Co. Manning’s Oneonta Classified Business Directory. Vol. 18. Schenectady, NY: H.A. Manning Co., 1928.Google Scholar
Milener, Eugene D. Oneonta: The Development of a Railroad Town,2nd and revised ed. Oneonta, NY: Hartwick College, Publications, 1997.Google Scholar
Miller, Michael B. The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Monod, David. Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890–1939. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Olegario, Rowena. Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making ofthe American Mass Market. Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982.Google Scholar
Webb-Vignery, June. Jacome’s Department Store: Business and Culture in Tucson, Arizona, 1896–1920. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1989.Google Scholar

Articles and Essays

Cohen, Lizabeth. “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America.” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (October 1996): 1050–81.Google Scholar
Gardner, Mark L. “Rich’s of Atlanta-Does a Change of Ownership Affect Corporate Culture?” Essays in Economic and Business History 11 (1993): 272–82.Google Scholar
Klassen, Henry C. “T.C. Power & Bro.: The Rise of a Small Western Department Store, 1870–1902.” Business History Review 66 (Winter 1992): 671–722.Google Scholar
Manning, Gordon. “We’re Telling You Macy’s.” Colliers (November 12, 1949).Google Scholar

Oneonta DailyStar

Shaw, Gareth. “The Study of Retail Development.” In The Evolution of Retail Systems c. 1800–1914, eds. Benson, John and Shaw, Gareth. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

Unpublished Document

Dyer, Stephanie. “Markets in the Meadows: Department Stores and Shopping Centers in the Decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920–1980.” PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2000.Google Scholar

Archival Source

Marc Bresee Papers. Personal collection. Oneonta, New York.Google Scholar

Government Documents

U.S. Department of Commerce, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Distribution, Vol. I, Retail Distribution, Part I-Summary for the Unites States, and Statistics for Counties and Incorporated Places of 1,000 Population and Over. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Commerce. Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930; Distribution, Vol. 1; Retail Distribution, Part 1. Table 21-The United States-Seventeen Kinds of Business by Type of Operation. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933.Google Scholar