Guest editorial

Citation

Deutsch, T. (2010), "Guest editorial", Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jhrm.2010.41202aaa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, Volume 2, Issue 1

Welcome to this special issue of the journal. The theme for this issue is new work on the history of North American retail. The editor's expectation and hope is that this will demonstrate what an exciting time this is to be working on retail history, encouraging people to pursue projects in the field and to read broadly in it. What follows is a short introduction to the issue, to its authors and supporters, and encouragement to read on.

Above and beyond all else, this issue demonstrates the liveliness and significance of current retail and marketing history. The papers you will read here come from scholars working in business schools and history departments, in Latin American cultural history and US labor, urban, economic and African-American history, and in time periods ranging from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth century. This broad group of scholars has chosen to study retailers because stores, as readers of this issue will see, open themes at the heart of marketing history (and, I would add, at the heart of current social and economic history). These pieces embed retail in stories of race relations, transnational business and empire-building, managerial structure and strategy, business failure, advertising history, and firms' investments in shoring up local economies during moments of economic collapse. Their work is stark reminder of the important social and economic structures that are sustained by retail spaces, and the importance of social, political, and economic contexts to the success and failure of these firms. Stores, in other words, are places where important things happen.

The work presented here focuses on particular episodes in the longer history of retail, each revealing a particular theme. Howard Stanger addresses questions of business failure in his account of the collapse of the once-thriving mail-order firm, the Larkin Company. The Larkin Company's innovative distribution system and vertical integration (it owned some of its own factories) did not help it in the World War I. Stanger focuses on the firm's ill-fated efforts to expand into what seemed a sure bet – chain grocery stores. The firm's failure epitomizes the sorts of challenges often faced by retailers – stiff price competition, entrenched management, unwieldy distribution systems, and accidents of timing, such as the transition to an untested generation of owners.

Steven B. Bunker narrates quite a different story: the role of Mexican department stores in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Self-proclaimed purveyors of modernity, these stores were vital nodes in networks of manufacturing, migration, and distribution that reached from urban Mexico across the Atlantic Ocean to France (and, importantly, not to the USA). Bunker's analysis links culture and firm structure, realms usually studied separately and reminds readers of the many systems that come together in the spaces of stores.

Department stores emerge as an important theme in this issue. Vicki Howard vividly recounts small town American department stores' commitment to local promotional campaigns, asking how and why such campaigns continued to make sense in the face of increasingly nationally scaled marketing campaigns. Howard illuminates the tight linkage between department stores and place – and the challenges stores faced in making use of regional or national radio and television.

Sarah Elvins illuminates a little-known chapter in American retail and economic history in her analysis of locally produced scrip in the 1930s. Elvins places large retailers, especially department stores, at the center of local currencies and the debates surrounding them. Arguing for the importance of municipal governments and their efforts to alleviate the worst effects of the depression, Elvins' story has particular resonances to our own current economic crisis, which has undermined large retailers in similar ways, but which has not (at least not as of this writing) evoked the sort of locally based panoply of solutions witnessed in the early 1930s.

Beth Kreydatus shares this focus on department stores, but shifts the focus to their labor practices, and particularly the understudied history of African-American department store employees in the Jim Crow south. Here, Kreydatus argues for the importance of racial segregation and race itself to stores' everyday operations. African-American workers were especially important to the service work of stores, and were expected to provide extraordinary levels of assistance to white customers, all the while performing the role of happy and willing servant. Such efforts took their toll on black workers, but also on the stores, which could only barely contain the reality of discrimination and frustration and ultimately failed to promote an image of their workers as a cohesive and happy family.

Finally, the issue closes with its Explorations and Insights section. Stanley Shapiro kindly consented to let my own analysis of retail history, and new scholarship in it, dominate here. My synthetic essay places the essays contained in this special issue in the context of retail history as a whole, and considers the questions and themes raised by their juxtaposition.

I want to thank Howard Stanger for his work early on in imagining and then recruiting participants for this special issue, as well as Brian Jones, for providing support and advice from beginning to end and his commitment to publishing work that straddles very different disciplines. And, finally, I want to thank the authors who appear here for their hard work writing, revising, and polishing their papers, their willingness to write across disciplinary lines, and their contributions to current thinking about the complicated, contingent, and fascinating world of retail. Working with them has reminded me how many things happen in retail spaces, how complicated their histories are, and how much scholars will need each other to understand what they have to say to present-day challenges and problems. I have learned an enormous amount from all of them, and I am delighted to bring their important work to a broader audience.

Tracey DeutschGuest Editor