Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business by Susan V. Spellman (review)

In her crisp monograph densely packed with historical detail from an impressively wide array of sources, Miami University historian Susan Spellman seeks to upend historical narratives of innovation that begin with the chain store and end with supercenters. Spell-man argues convincingly that the real source of American business innovation from the earliest days of the republic to the present has been in the independent grocery store. These independent stores, she argues, have not only been omnipresent in American society from the beginning; because of their place at the nexus between daily customer interaction and nationwide retail competition, these stores are polar opposites of the "corner store" denigrations often assigned to stores operating in the pre–chain store era. They have been undervalued by historians and students of business alike, Spellman believes, precisely because of the "backwoods" stereotype often assigned to independent grocers. Spellman's narrative traces an easily navigable course of grocery store history from the earliest days of the republic, through the Jacksonian era, and concludes with the regulatory atmosphere of the New Deal era, placing the heaviest emphasis on the Gilded Age and the arrival of both chain stores and large corporations. Spellman skillfully avoids entanglements with the major wars involving American commercial life while demonstrating the relevancy of the corner store in the wartime home front environment.

Spellman's volume merits wide readership and fills a vacancy in the everyday histories of local communities throughout the United States. It also contributes a fresh perspective to studies of Gilded Age history, a historiography rife with narratives of chain stores and the growth of large corporations, while lacking in attention to the corner marketplace that trusts and chain stores were very much a part of. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Spellman's monograph is demonstrating how actions of the large corporation, the chain store, and the commodities wholesaler played out at the local level. By challenging the chain store narrative of American small business history, Spellman's volume is not only compelling but impressively original. Further, Spellman's intimate personal knowledge of the topic continuously flows through the text, adding authenticity to the narrative, as do the copious references from a wide geography. Spellman draws connections between independent stores throughout the continental United States, while placing particular emphasis on the East Coast and the South.

Spellman painstakingly unpacks what she argues are mistaken historical narratives that suggest independent grocers in the past were obstacles to commercial progress, concluding her narrative with references to the current trend of small-scale grocery operations headed by even the largest grocery firms, including Walmart and others. The "local store appeal" mistakenly mocked in the past for backwardness has in fact been a successful selling point that has transcended generations of retailing in the United States. Spellman cites a staggering complexity of ritual and innovation at the local level that independent grocers had the experience to navigate as one of the reasons these stores continue to have market appeal. This appeal has protected independent small businesses from extremes of competition, numerous market downturns, and the Depression, leaving the independent grocer a ubiquitous feature of American life easily taken for granted.

Each phase of the narrative serves to illuminate the progressive degrees of complexity independent grocers continually embraced, rather than repudiated, over time. This willingness to embrace new ideas and new technologies, Spellman argues, is why neither the chain stores of the last century nor modern megastores like Walmart have successfully eradicated the independent grocer from American society. Further, Spellman argues, independent grocers' willingness to share information and construct trade networks, sales cooperatives, and wholesale syndicates to outfox chain stores, wholesaler combinations, and trusts forced those larger entities to compete with the independent grocer, not vice versa. The networks established by these independent grocers dramatically contradict any view of local grocers as backward, and instead recast...