Category Archives: Retailing

My Adventures in Self-Publishing

When my book The Great A&P was published back in 2011, a major commercial publisher handled the copy editing, the design, the printing, and the distribution. My main jobs were the parts I’m good at, the research and the writing. It was a piece of cake.

When I decided to put out a revised edition, I had to figure out how to handle all those other tasks I’m not so good at — or find others to do them. It wasn’t a piece of cake. Now that the book is out, I’ve written an article about my experience for the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. It’s called “Self-Publishing a Second Edition: A Historian’s Adventures in Going It Alone.” I hope you enjoy it.

The Great A&P Revisited

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When it was published back in 2011, many readers took my book The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America as an allegory about Walmart: the battle between a highly efficient, vertically integrated grocery chain and the mom-and-pop grocers it was driving out of business seemed to parallel the modern conflict between the giant discounter and the locally owned retailers who could not match up. But things change: now, as I publish a second edition of The Great A&P, Walmart has almost ceased to be regarded as a villain, and the merchant most widely blamed for destroying brick-and-mortar retailers is Amazon.

Walmart is, in many ways, similar to A&P. Its sheer size enables it to bargain low prices for merchandise, it runs a highly efficient logistics operation, and it aims to build local market share, especially in food retailing, to gain efficiencies in distribution and advertising. In recent years, it has even followed A&P’s lead by integrating vertically: Walmart now bottles milk in its own plant, contracts with ranchers to raise Angus beef cattle to Walmart’s standards, and last month opened its first beef processing plant .

Amazon, on the other hand, is quite unlike A&P. The brothers who controlled A&P, George L. and John A. Hartford, stubbornly insisted on earning a profit; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was willing to tolerate losses for years in order to build the business. For all Bezos’s ambition and imagination, Amazon’s rapid rise owed much to the federal government: in 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a state could not collect sales taxes on goods sold to its residents unless the seller had physical presence in the state, which gave Amazon a huge advantage. By the time the Supreme Court unanimously reversed itself in 2018, declaring that its 1992 decision “creates rather than resolves market distortions,” Amazon was well established and hundred of thousands of retail establishments had closed their doors. Amazon also benefits immensely from its ability to capture and use more customer data than its competitors, allowing it to control pricing and product selection in a way that A&P could not. In the twenty-first century, information technology creates economies of scale in ways that were impossible in the Hartfords’ day.

These differences point to the need for fresh thinking about competition. Those who argue that the only test of excessive market power is whether a firm can raise prices to consumers did not foresee that consumers might be asked to pay by surrendering personal information rather than dollars and cents, or that a seller can change prices instantaneously based on an individual consumer’s behavior, or that its trove of information about customers might give an established company an unsurmountable advantage over potential challengers. Unfortunately, the dusty volumes of court rulings about monopoly dating back to the 1890s provide only limited guidance for measuring market power in the digital age.

Payless: A Brief Obituary

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Back in 1956, there were a couple of events that helped shape the course of globalization. One, about which I wrote in my book The Box, was the first modern containership voyage. This would eventually lead to the behemoths, some carrying more cargo than 10,000 full-size trucks, that move much of the world’s trade today. The other was the most prosaic development one could imagine, the opening of a shoe store in Topeka, Kansas, by two entrepreneurial cousins, Louis and Shaol Pozez. Sixty-three years later, that company is about to go out of business, the victim of the globalization it played a small role in bringing about.

My family knew both Pozez families and we shopped in their store. Payless-National, as they ambitiously called it, aimed to offer quality shoes at discounted prices. It did so by keeping costs low. The floor was covered with linoleum, not carpet, and the wooden shelves weren’t even painted. Payless laid out its merchandise in shoeboxes. Sales clerks were few; customers were expected to find their size and try on the shoes themselves. In return for putting up with these rather austere conditions, shoppers could buy two pairs of shoes for five dollars.

The Pozez cousins were able to undercut their competitors thanks to a series of court decisions in the early 1950s that effectively prohibited manufacturers from fixing retail prices. Importing was not part of their strategy: the United States imported very little footwear in 1956. Although shoes cost far less to make in many other countries, the United States still had a vibrant shoemaking industry, with 1,900 factories employing more than a quarter-million people in places like Endicott, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri. Thousands more people were employed in tanneries and in factories that made synthetic shoe materials.

But while making footwear provided plenty of jobs, those jobs came at a cost. By today’s standards, shoes were expensive. Men’s dress shoes from Florsheim started at $18.95 a pair. That’s about $170 in today’s prices—which is far more than an equivalent shoe from Florsheim costs today. A pair of men’s loafers from Sears for went for $8.65, or about $77 in today’s money—nearly twice the price of the loafers available right now on Sears’ website. StepMaster children’s shoes cost $5.50 a pair. No wonder Payless’s offer of two pairs of shoes for five dollars seemed like a good deal to a bus driver or factory worker earning two bucks an hour. Payless became a huge success, operating thousands of stores. It was purchased by a big department store chain in the 1970s, then spun off as a publicly traded company, and eventually ended up in the hands of private equity funds.

Footwear manufacturing has proven difficult to automate, making labor costs the single most important factor in choosing production locations. As factories in low-wage Asian countries filled millions of containers with cheap plastic and synthetic shoes and shipped them across the pacific at only a few cents per pair, the U.S. shoe industry couldn’t come close on price; today, about 98 percent of the shoes sold in the United States are imported, mainly from China. To keep its lead in the discount shoe business, Payless became one of the largest shoe importers. For it, as for many other companies, globalization was not a choice, but the only alternative.

What killed it, at the end, was the same thing that made it a success—the constant quest for lower prices. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average consumer price of footwear has gone up all of 8 percent over the past 25 years. Rent and workers’ wages, meager though those may be, have been rising much faster, squeezing shoe retailers’ margins. In that environment, even globalizers can end up as road kill.

Of Sears and the Great A&P

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The death of a major retailer rarely comes as a surprise. You can usually see the signs years ahead: the half-empty shelves, the dreary displays, the dim lighting, the odd combinations of merchandise as store managers struggle to fill space on the floor. The impending demise of Sears is no different. While the courts may have to decide whether Eddie Lampert, its chairman, has looted the company, as some investors claim, the truth is that by the time he took Sears over, in 2004, even a merchandising genius couldn’t have turned the chain around. Lampert made a bad situation worse when he combined Sears with Kmart, but he would have been hard-pressed to make it better.

Lampert is a financial guy, and like most financial guys he keeps his eye on the balance sheet. When it comes to retailing, though, the balance sheet doesn’t reveal the whole story. It will tell you about cash on hand — a valuable piece of information, to be sure — and about leases and credit card receivables, but it doesn’t capture the worth of a retailer’s most valuable asset, its brand.

There was a time when the Sears brand connoted reliability: whether you shopped in the store or ordered from the catalog, you expected quality merchandise at a reasonable price. It started to lose that reputation in the 1980s, when management was seduced by the glamour of selling stocks and real estate and lost interest in toys and underwear. By the time Wal-Mart began its nationwide expansion, in the 1990s, Sears had already forfeited much of its standing. Middle-class shoppers still went there for Craftsman tools and Kenmore appliances, but the rest of the business began to die.

The recovery plan involved buying Land’s End, the mail-order clothing retailer, in 2002. Land’s End, slightly trendy but definitely not haute couture, offered a plausible way to infuse a bit of excitement into Sears’s fashion offering without driving away long-time customers. But Sears couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Should Land’s End live alongside store apparel departments? Should it be the Sears apparel business? Management couldn’t decide, squandering an opportunity to restore a bit of the company’s diminished luster. All this occurred before Eddie Lampert loaded the company up with debt and Amazon induced consumers to do much of their shopping online. By the time of those events, Sears was already yesterday’s store.

To someone who has studied the rise and fall of the Great A&P, this story is familiar. Like Sears, A&P terrified its competitors for decades. Its stores were everywhere, and its commitment to low prices and its uncanny feel for changing consumer tastes made it the world’s largest retailer for more than 40 years. But in the 1950s, under managers who preferred to collect fat profits rather than investing in the business, A&P lost its edge. Customers complained that the stores were dowdy, and store brands like Ann Page and Jane Parker lacked the allure of the brands advertised prominently on national television. A&P became the place where grandma shopped, its name in such disrepute that the company tried to disguise its ownership of chains like Waldbaum’s and Food Emporium. No business strategy had a prayer of bringing A&P back.

Whatever the bankruptcy courts decide to do with Sears, I expect that the company will follow A&P to that great retail graveyard in the sky. A place where no one wants to be seen shopping doesn’t have much of a future in retailing.

Who Owns the Curb?

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How we define a problem often affects how we think about it. Consider the question of how we deal with the demand for curb space in our urban areas. If one were to approach this question as an engineer, one might look for ways to redesign our streetscape and reallocate the curb to certain users. If one were to approach this question as an economist, however, one might ask whether there’s a pricing problem.

As discussed earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), a government-sponsored research organization, this is an engineering problem. The assertion is that new ways of doing business have left us with too many vehicles at the curb. The growth of online shopping means more trucks making deliveries, and the growth of ride-sharing services has brought Uber and Lyft drivers waiting to pick up customers. Therefore, the logic goes, we need to provide more unloading zones for trucks and more pick-up locations for ridesharing vehicles. The presentations at TRB suggested that other uses, such as bus lanes, bike lanes, and parking of passenger vehicles, may have to give way.

The underlying assumption, you may have noticed, is that because consumers want online shopping and ridesharing, our streets should accommodate these uses. But there’s another way to look at the problem. Curb space is obviously of great value in some urban areas. That value belongs to local taxpayers. Every time a UPS truck parks at the curb to provide “free delivery” from Amazon, those local taxpayers are subsidizing Amazon customers unless UPS is paying the full market value of that parking space. Every time an Uber driver idles at the curb in Midtown Manhattan, she is occupying valuable real estate without paying for the privilege, and that subsidy is reflected in the artificially low cost of the ride.

Can the demand for curb space be met with economic measures rather than engineering? There is enormous pressure not to find out; in 2014, when Washington, DC, imposed a $323 annual fee for a decal that permits a truck to park in a loading zone, the trucking industry howled–even though that fee, about 88 cents per day, is far less than automobile drivers would gladly pay for a space one-third that size in many parts of the city. But perhaps if trucks and ridesharing vehicles paid the full value of the public assets they use, consumers would make less use of their services and businesses would save money by accepting deliveries at times when the value of curb space is low. Such changes could help relieve traffic congestion without remaking urban streets. There’s something to be said for paying full freight.

Information and Competition

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It seems that competition regulators at the European Union are looking into whether “Big Data” is a potential threat to competition. The concern, apparently, is that a company may be able to use a trove of proprietary data about consumers in ways that foreclose competition — and that the assets changing hands in a merger could include enough data to give the merged firm an insurmountable advantage over would-be competitors.

There’s no doubt that control over data can affect competition. But it’s not so obvious how to ensure that consumers benefit.

Consider the logistics business. Every containership line publishes a schedule with the rate for moving one container from, say, Shanghai to Los Angeles. In practice, though, almost all ocean freight moves under confidential contracts between shippers and carriers. These contracts may be filled with contingencies providing for bonuses and penalties if the parties exceed or fail to meet their respective commitments. A large retailer, manufacturer, or freight forwarder has many such contracts in force at any one time, and it is always negotiating new ones. This means that big shippers have lots of up-to-date information about current shipping rates.

Now, imagine a small shipper, a modest retail chain rather than a Walmart or a Carrefour. Because of its size, this firm has only a handful of contracts with ship lines, and it may go months without negotiating a new one. It therefore lacks the current rate information its bigger competitors possess, so it will have a tougher time bargaining for the best rates. It may use a freight forwarder to get better rates, but then must pay the forwarder for its trouble. Either way, the smaller company’s information deficit will force it to pay more to move its goods than its larger competitors do.

This information disadvantage is one reason smaller retailers and manufacturers have been having such a difficult time. Their supply chains are comparatively costly to operate, on a per-container basis, and their higher costs make it hard for them to match their competitors’ prices. I suspect this is one reason we’ve been seeing increased concentration in so many industries. The big benefit from their control of big data about shipping costs; the small are harmed by their lack of information.

Is there a solution to this problem? Of course there is: it could be made mandatory to publicly disclose information about shipping costs. We actually tried such a policy in the United States in the early days of railroad deregulation. What happened? Railroads were reluctant to offer discounts to individual shippers when they knew that publicity would lead other shippers to demand similar discounts. Little freight moved under contract and rates remained relatively high. Only after confidential agreements were permitted did railroads’ freight rates fall and their service improve.

I think there’s a lesson here. Control of information can be anti-competitive, no question. But public disclosure of information can be anti-competitive as well, potentially raising costs for consumers. The EU will face a challenge getting the balance right.

Amazon, Whole Foods, and The Great A&P

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A lot of people are concerned that if Amazon.com’s purchase of Whole Foods Market goes through, Amazon will be able to use its might and technological savvy to monopolize the grocery business. I’m not concerned about that myself, because I think the grocery business is pretty difficult to monopolize. Even the Great A&P, the subject of one of my books, never managed to amass enough power to force up the price of food; indeed, when a federal court found it guilty of violating antitrust law in 1946, the charge was that it was using its size to sell food too cheaply, not to raise prices unfairly.

So when the New York Times asked me to write about Amazon and Whole Foods in mid-June, I used my space to wonder why Amazon, which reports precious little profit from all the goods it sells, wants to go into the low-profit grocery business. Perhaps, I suggested, Amazon should take a portion of the space in Whole Foods’ stores, most of which are in affluent neighborhoods, and turn it into an exciting retail concept that sells exclusive merchandise at a high mark-up. I was thinking of something similar to the Apple Store, which is a far more profitable retail venture than Amazon.com.

Amazon.com hasn’t yet offered me a consulting contract, so it apparently didn’t think much of my idea. Jeff Bezos seems to be a pretty smart guy, so if he thinks his company can make billions shaking up the stodgy grocery industry, perhaps he’s right. But the list of others who have thought the same thing is very long indeed.

Time for a Timely Demise

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As a young journalist, I was taught never to refer to someone’s “untimely” death: those words carry the implication that someone else’s death might well be timely. But perhaps there are some deaths that truly are timely. One might be that of Sears Holdings, the company that owns Sears and Kmart.

A few days ago the company announced that there is “substantial doubt” that it can survive. That news surprised the many Americans who were unaware that Sears was still in existence. Anyone who has been in a Sears store in the last 10 or 15 years wasn’t surprised at all. Everything about the store, from the dim lighting to the hodgepodge of merchandise on display, screamed “going out of business.” It was hard to tell who they thought they were selling to.

Sears has been struggling for decades. Its encyclopedic catalog, offering everything from undershirts to mechanic’s tools, was last published in 1993, and many commentators have observed that competitors such as Home Depot, Target, Costco, and Bed, Bath and Beyond have been nibbling away at pieces of its business since the 1980s. Amazon’s transformation from a mere bookseller to an on-line emporium left Sears in the dust. Eddie Lampert, the hedge fund genius who took over Kmart in 2003 and used it to take control of Sears two years later, has had more success disassembling the two retailers–often in ways that benefit his hedge fund–than making them attractive places to shop. When a retailer tells its shareholders that “Affiliates of our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, whose interests may be different than your interests, exert substantial influence over our Company,” it’s a good bet that the story won’t end well.

Why might Sears’ demise be timely? Like The Great Atlantic and Pacific, which I wrote a book about several years ago, Sears used to have some of the most powerful brands in the world. A&P’s brands–Ann Page, Jane Parker, Eight O’Clock Coffee, and the A&P brand itself–went from world-beating to down-at-the-heels over the decades as the stores declined; by the early years of this century, A&P ran many of its stores under other names and went to great lengths to hide their connection with A&P. Sears is now in a similar situation. While its Kenmore appliances were once a safe choice for middle-class homeowners, the brand has been tarnished by its association with a failing chain. Much the same is true of Die Hard car batteries. The Sears name itself is likely a negative when it comes to attracting shoppers, save for a handful who still remember the chain’s glory days. The longer Sears hangs on before giving up the ghost, the less its storied brands are likely to be worth.

Supply Chain Insurance

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As of this writing, 47 people have been killed and many more injured by the earthquakes that have struck the Japanese island of Kyushu since April 14. These tragic events have had economic ramifications as well, offering a reminder that business risks can be hard for outsiders to evaluate.

The complicated industrial supply chains that are routine today began to develop in the 1970s, in good part because the spread of container shipping drove down the cost of transporting parts and components from one place to another. As I discuss in The Box, low transport costs made it practical for big manufacturers to decentralize: instead of running vast factories that churned out all sorts of inputs and assembled them into finished goods, they could farm out much of the work to specialized factories far away. Large retailers have done much the same. These long supply chains were seen as having two main advantages. Companies were able to draw on low-wage labor in developing countries, and they could gain economies of scale because a supplier might make just one or two components in enormous volume instead of lots of different things in small quantities. The result was lower costs—or so it seemed.

Invariably, though, the beancounters who made these calculations were afflicted with a dangerous myopia. Supply chains can lower costs, but they can also create risks that aren’t always visible. Some of these risks are reputational: if a supplier is accused of being a bad actor by polluting the water or by running an unsafe workplace, consumers may blame the better-known company that contracted out the work. There may be legal risks if the supplier’s shoddy work results in unsafe goods. And then there is the risk of supply-chain interruption. Interruptions aren’t high-frequency events: in a well-organized supply chain, most goods get where they’re supposed to be almost all the time. But when goods aren’t delivered due to weather, labor unrest, electricity cutoffs, or earthquakes, the cost can suddenly become extremely high.

The Kyushu earthquakes have halted plants that supply critical parts for many other consumer goods. But from what is known so far, the costs of this interruption may be less than might have been expected. The reason is that, with little publicity, companies like Toyota, Sony, and Honda seem to have reduced their potential losses by making sure that Kyushu is not their only source of critical inputs. While some of their plants will be shuttered, in some cases for several weeks, many of the key components produced in the earthquake-hit region are also made elsewhere. Those supply chain links will continue to function normally.

After the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami in 2011, factories around the world shut down for lack of components made only in the devastated region. Major industrial companies appear to have drawn lessons from that experience. Some of them have protected themselves against earthquake-related disruptions by developing redundant supply chains, so that an event such as the Kyushu earthquake won’t cripple their operations. This undoubtedly reduces efficiency and raises the firms’ normal operating costs. But supply-chain redundancy is not a frivolous expense. Like most insurance, it seems wasteful only until you need it.

In Defense of Industrial Food

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The other night I watched Michael Pollan’s new documentary, In Defense of Food. I’m a great fan of Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is gorgeously written and extremely thoughtful. The documentary, I regret to report, is neither. On the contrary, it’s a scattershot attack on what Pollan refers to as “industrial food,” with far too much romantic nonsense about what a natural diet ought to be and far too little serious discussion of the challenges of feeding a populous, highly urbanized world. It’s an opportunity missed.

As I show in my book The Great A&P, an industrial food distribution system was a signal accomplishment of the twentieth century. Before it came along, most people’s diets were calorie-rich, nutrition-light, and boring. In the summer, sure, there were lots of fresh vegetables and fruits. In the winter, there were cabbage and potatoes and potatoes and cabbage. Protein mainly came from smoked or cured meats or from fish caught in polluted rivers. Lard was widely used in cooking and baking. Fresh milk, when it was available, was often unsafe to drink. It’s not as if people ate healthy.

This isn’t ancient history. Growing up in the Midwest, I never ate fresh fish, because the food industrial complex hadn’t yet figured out how to deliver it a thousand miles from the ocean. Frozen foods were a staggering success in the 1950s mainly because they offered consumers unprecedented variety at any time of year. Today we may look down our noses at frozen orange juice as inferior to “fresh” juice, but when it arrived in grocery stores around 1950 average families could obtain essential vitamins in the middle of winter. That was an enormous change for the better.

It should also be said—and Pollan doesn’t say it—that food used to be staggeringly expensive. As late as the 1930s, urban families in the United States routinely spent a third or more of their incomes on food, with much of that money going to keep inefficient wholesalers and retailers in business. Chains like The Great A&P in the 1920s and 1930s and Wal-Mart and Aldi more recently have made food consumers much better off by squeezing costs out of the distribution system. Much of this saving is achieved from economies of scale in production and distribution. Pollan, judging by the film, doesn’t much like economies of scale; he’d rather have us buying from farmers who are selling green beans they just picked by hand this morning. Nothing wrong with fresh-picked green beans, but there’s a trade-off that Pollan refuses to recognize. You can see it in the fact that those farmers’ market green beans cost three times as much as the green beans at Costco.

Pollan’s documentary muddles a lot of things. It’s absolutely true, as he shows, that manufacturers of processed foods make misleading claims about their products. There is no doubt that some processed foods are unsafe and that many of them are unhealthy. I agree with his attack on what he calls “nutritionism,” the idea that adding a drop of one or another nutrient to a food product magically makes it better for us to eat. But the industrial food system has brought us a lot of benefits along with Big Gulps, Twinkies, and gluten-free burritos fortified with antioxidants. Pretending otherwise is just pop nutritionism.