Hermann Levy - The Shops of Britain

The International Library of Sociology

THE SHOPS OF BRITAIN

The International Library of Socialogy

THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK AND ORGANIZATION

In 18 Volumes

THE SHOPS OF BRITAIN

A Study of Retail Distribution

by

HERMANN LEVY

First published in 1948 by

Routledge

Reprinted in 1998, 2001 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1948 Hermann Levy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of the works reprinted in The International Library of Sociology. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies we have been unable to trace.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Shops of Britain

ISBN 0-415-17691-3

The Sociology of Work and Organization: 18 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-17829-0

The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes

ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

Foreword

This book on The Shops of Britain follows the authors publication on Retail Trade Associations, a new form of monopolist organization in Britain. After the book had been completed, the Report of the Census of Distribution Committee, published in March 1946, urged the necessity of providing more statistical information about the distributive trades. A census of distribution as recommended in this excellent report will greatly enrich our knowledge about the shops of Britain. Simultaneously with these official proposals, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is beginning an inquiry into the economics of distribution. As The Economist has pointed out, the two projects interlock : one studies the anatomy, the other the pathology, of a very large and growing sector of national economy.

Many problems cannot be solved without the collection and analysis of all the relevant figures, but essential though this statistical information is it cannot by itself provide the solutions. One of the purposes of this book is to display how complex the structure of retailing is and to show that it is dependent on a great variety of economic, social, occupational and sociological factors which cannot be adequately assessed without a comparative analysis of all the various trades concerned with retailing. It is to this analysis that the present book hopes to make some contribution.

The author would like to express his particular gratitude to Mr. Donald Tyerman, who has generously assisted him in shaping the final wording of the text and to whom he is indebted for much fruitful criticism.

HERMANN LEVY.

Richmond, Surrey,

March 1946.

The Shops of Britain

Part I

Some Fundamental Aspects

Chapter I

The Multiplicity of Retail Outlets

I

Alfred Marshall, writing in 1896,1 explained that the advantages which a large business has over a small one were conspicuous in manufacture, because it had special facilities for concentrating a good deal of work in a small area. At the same time he had noticed that the process of concentration had also reached the distributive trades. In particular the retail trade, so he continued, is being transformed, and the small shopkeeper is losing ground daily. Fifty years later, in spite of the enormous increase of department stores and big retail outlets of other types, the process of concentration in retail distribution has not yet approached the position in industry and some of the public utility services. The number of outlets in retail trade is estimated to be at least 750,000, and some estimates give a figure of 1,000,000 (see later, pp. 3233). Moreover, these figures do not even include the large number of retailing outlets which do not take the visible form of shops such as mail-order businesses or the sale of goods by restaurants or clubs or costermongers. Thus even at the most cursory glance there is not the slightest justification for speaking of the disappearance of the small retailer.

No doubt, as we shall describe later, large numbers and many types of small shopkeepers may be what Robert Sinclair has called a curious survival.2 It may also bea development scarcely foreseen in Marshalls timethat amalgamations remove the shopkeeper but seldom remove the shop. Yet there has been a revival as well as this survival. Towns do not invariably concentrate the shopping population, especially when they grow and sprawl beyond a certain size. Suburbs of a townlike character are largely replaced by settlements on the outer fringes which more resemble villages. This is made possible by improved facilities for travel and the quicker access to the town centre. These outlying housing estates are the seat of the revival of small shops ; they are new cells for the development of retail units of a relatively smaller size. They add yearly to the numbers of shops and offset the high rate of mortality. But the so-called problem of the small shopkeeper does not arise here where a new chapter in the history of the small independent trader may be beginning. That problem rather arises where this history seemed, already in Marshalls time, to be coming to an end, that is in the densely populated town centres, where the struggle between large and small distributing outlets presents a nation-wide issue.3