Birth of Box Stores

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America
By Marc Levinson
Published by Hill and Wang, September 2011
List price: $27.95
Pages: 384
ISBN-10: 0809095432
ISBN-13: 978-0809095438
For Columbia shoppers who prefer to buy goods from local owners, the seeming omnipresence of Walmart and other megastores owned by national chains presents a daily dilemma: Do I want to save a few dollars (or more) if Walmart offers the lowest price, especially if those savings might mean financial hardship for the small businesses owned by my neighbors?
The dilemma did not begin with Walmart or Target or other contemporary big-box stores. Rather, it began with the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, known informally as “the A&P.” It became the biggest retailer in the United States decades before Walmart and began as a tiny New York City tea shop during the 1860s. A&P was the genesis of a supermarket food and sundries chain that often drove local merchants to quit doing business.
Author Marc Levinson, a historian of business, does not invoke Walmart often, but he does not need to; the parallels between the dominance of the A&P and the dominance of Walmart are excruciatingly obvious.
Levinson has written a readable history that seems ripped from the headlines of the 21st century. Eventually, the A&P began to fail despite, or perhaps because of, its massive reach.
Will the same happen to Walmart or other big box stores, returning local small businesses to improve financial health? Will history repeat itself in the corporate realm? Not even a superb researcher such as Levinson can answer that question yet.