The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America Quotes

“In a country of thirty-two million households, A&P served five million customers a day. In 1929, it became, as John had predicted, the first retailer anywhere to sell $1 billion of merchandise in a single year.28”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“When A&P made its long-awaited move into California, in 1930, it did so in force, opening 101 stores in Los Angeles in less than a year. Merchants everywhere had reason to fear it.26”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“A well-drawn contract would typically include a provision stipulating the sales volume claimed by the seller and requiring the seller to work in the business for a specified amount of time. If the store did not achieve the sales the seller claimed it to have, the buyer could back out of the deal.”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“The average urban family spent fully one-third of its budget on food.8”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“Stores offering credit typically charged higher prices to cover the inevitable credit losses, driving cash-paying customers to chain stores that offered no credit but lower prices.7”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“A grocer named Clarence Saunders had opened the country’s first self-service food store, Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis in 1916, but the concept had not spread widely by the early 1920s.”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“Traveling in France in 1899, Edward attended a bicycle race and observed that a spring attached to the front fork helped stabilize the winning cycle. He and his father bought the patent rights, and Edward developed the concept into the shock absorber, soon to become standard on every car. Edward went on to invent brakes, jacks, and other auto components, all of which were produced at the Hartford Suspension Company’s plant in Jersey City, adjacent to Great Atlantic & Pacific’s headquarters.”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America

“Competition is often conflated with capitalism, but they are not at all the same. Capitalism involves private ownership of the means of production and distribution, but the word implies nothing about the way in which privately owned firms do business. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with a society in which a powerful state doles out favors to private monopolies, protects some enterprises from others, or even sets the prices privately owned firms may charge for their products. Indeed, while capitalists tend to praise the virtues of competition, many of them would just as soon avoid it.”
― Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America