The managerial revolution in British and American retailing

Peter Scott and James Walker examine the factors influencing the efficiency, growth and competitive advantage of large-scale retailing in Britain and the USA during the interwar years, using data assembled from academic/industry surveys.

Anglo-American comparisons of productivity differentials in retailing - and in services more generally - during the early twentieth century have typically indicated considerable lags in Britain's relative productivity. These have, in turn, been linked to Britain's alleged slow adoption, or even failure to adopt, high-volume, low-margin, trading methods of the kind that were said to characterise American large-scale retailing. However, such comparisons are based on very poor data - as there was no Census of Distribution in Britain prior to 1950.

Themes

This project examines the efficiency and productivity of interwar British mass retailing, in comparison with the United States. Retail distribution underwent a dramatic transformation during the interwar period, with unprecedented growth both in the absolute sales and market share of large-scale retailers (particularly nationwide multiples). As contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic were critically aware, the rapid expansion in large scale retailing reflected the emergence of the 'mass market', combined with a constellation of information processing and other innovations, collectively termed the 'retail managerial revolution'. Ground breaking innovations in new semi-self service display methods, managerial and accounting techniques, and supply chain innovations, were viewed by contemporaries as having major impacts on efficiency and productivity. Many were, in turn, pioneered in the United States and diffused to Britain via a variety of mechanisms, including: foreign direct investment; research visits to the USA; and research links between British and American retail associations.

This project will provide a comparative analysis of the growth of non-food mass retailing in Britain and the United States. The first phase examined department stores - which constituted the most important category of large-scale retailer in the United States until the late 1920s. The current phase of the project extends the analysis to variety stores, such as Marks & Spencer, Woolworths and British Home Stores in the UK, and Woolworths, S.S. Kresge, W.T. Grant, and S.H. Kress & Co. in the USA. Subsequent phases will examine retail pharmacist/drug store, and stationery, multiples.

Published research outputs (by Peter Scott and James Walker)

2012 `The British "failure" that never was? The Anglo-American "productivity gap" in large-scale inter-war retailing - evidence from the department store sector', Economic History Review (forthcoming).

2011 `Sales and advertising expenditure for interwar American department stores,'

Journal of Economic History, 71, 32-60 .

2010 `Advertising, promotion, and the competitive advantage of interwar British department stores, Economic History Review, 63, 1105-28.