Word: chain
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Washington last week to put the screws on Congressmen and Senators went a delegation of independent U. S. grocers, druggists, jobbers and their lawyers. Their purpose was to lobby for anti-chain-store legislation, particularly the so-called Robinson-Patman Bill, one of a score of measures introduced in this session of Congress with the avowed intention of undercutting the advantages of large-scale merchandising. The "little businessmen" were received with vociferous sympathy. Senator Borah marked the occasion by introducing still another bill intended to forbid selling more cheaply to large buyers than to small ones. Texas' Representative Patman...
Very little was said about John Consumer, who is the chief beneficiary of the lower prices made possible by mass buying. Smart, efficient independent merchants, able to offer quality and service which chains cannot afford to provide, do not worry about chain-store competition. But merchants of this type are rare. And while the ethics of chain-store purchasing are certainly elastic, the average storekeeper merely wants his competitive position restored without improving his merchandising methods-at the consumer's expense...
Whatever its sins and indiscretions, the velocipede deserves no such tyrannical treatment. From Dunster House to Divinity the clicking of the chain and the whirring of the silver spokes are forever silenced, and Fascism has thrust its iron fist into the Yard for the first time. The insidious forces of United Shoe Machinery, General Motors, and Standard Oil, hurling the lie at those who said it couldn't happen here, have made a vital stab at the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity...
Almost axiomatic is the belief that jobbing is doomed as an economic function. The wholesaler, runs the argument, will be inevitably squeezed to death between chain-store competition and direct-to-retailer selling by manufacturers. One jobber who has refused to accept this fate is Butler Brothers, one of the biggest U. S. wholesale houses.* Last week Butler's President Frank Simpson Cunningham told his stockholders that in 1935 their company sold $73,000,000 worth of hardware, cutlery, jewelry, furniture, notions, dresses, towels, etc., and retained $1,285,000 as net profit. That was a little better than...
...town merchants, the company began to suffer in the 1920's. Automobiles and good roads, carrying shoppers to larger cities, cut into the rural merchant's trade. Better transportation also carried salesmen to the merchants that survived, undercutting Butler's mail-order business still further. Meantime chain stores were mushrooming...