Big Box Panic

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In 1928 New York Times reporter Evans Clark observed breathlessly that American corporations were engaged in a ruthless campaign of economic expansionism and were making “deep inroads into the retail store business” abroad. Lurking behind the ubiquitous Boots drugstore signs in Great Britain, Clark wrote, was the invisible hand of American capitalism: The chain was owned by the Boston-based conglomerate United Drug Company, which at the time operated 10,000 drugstores in the United States and 800 in the United Kingdom.

American business reached far beyond the traditional trading boundaries of the Anglosphere: “The familiar red signs of a well-known domestic five-and-ten-cent chain appear both on Berlin and London street corners; the laboratories of a St. Louis chemical concern turn out American mouthwash in Madrid; the plant of a Detroit manufacturer assembles American automobiles in Osaka . . . fifty-four theaters in Brazil are now linked in a continuous chain of management with the movie palaces of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.” In certain areas of industry, the Times ruefully observed, “American companies have practically monopolized world output and sales.”

Three months later Clark returned to the pages of the Times, this time to warn readers of big business’ domestic plot to “displace the neighborhood store” through predatory pricing and sweetheart distribution deals. Beneath an image of a cigar-chomping capitalist casting a malevolent gaze over a map of America, the paper signaled the death knell of the neighborhood enterprise, writing that the “storekeeper of today is a corporate executive, who presides over chains of a thousand.”

The trade journal Printers’ Ink expressed similar concern for the neighborhood store: “Think a moment. What has become of the old corner tobacconist? Answer: United Cigar Stores. What has become of the old ‘home-cooking’ restaurants in so many cities? Answer: Child’s, $12,000,000 (backed by Standard Oil) and Thompson’s, $6,000,000—to say nothing of several others. Big Business (United Drug Company and Riker-Hegeman) already dominates the drug stores of New York, Boston and Chicago.”

This doom-laden rhetoric sounds strikingly familiar. The anti–big box activism of recent years, directed primarily against retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble, has its antecedents in the activism of the 1920s, the apogee of the first wave of anti-chain fear. As the business reporter Anthony Bianco argues in his book Wal-Mart: The Bully of Bentonville: “For many people over 30, the phrase ‘the corner store’ continues to be powerfully evocative of an establishment where the person across the counter knew you and would even extend credit if you were a bit short, a place that was as distinctively personal as its proprietor’s fingerprints.”

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