American Grocery Store

When people think of a grocery store, they have a multitude of images from a neighborhood shop on the corner to the modern-day supermarket. The grocery store has had a rich history, as business conditions have contributed to changes in both its economic and its architectural character. This book provides a history of the grocery store. Beginning with the public markets and general stores of our early cities and the general stores of small towns and hinterlands, this volume traces the evolution of the all-purpose grocery store with the advent of mass distribution, the growth of the supermarket, and the present-day convenience stores, co-ops, warehouse markets, hypermarkets, and wholesale clubs.

?Mayo's book is marvelously informative and entertaining. It outlines the development of a people who do everything on their stomach.?-Journal of American Culture, ?This book provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the history of the grocery store in America from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. It offers new insights into grocery store history. It is important and useful to see the story of the grocery store in the larger historical perspective and Mayo's book allows us to do this. A strength of Mayo's analysis is that is focuses on the dynamic process of a market structure that has evolved over time. Overall this thoughtful and well-illustrated book is very satisfactory business history that pushes forward the history of the grocery store, not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in earlier time periods. Mayo has provided a most interesting account from which many will profit.?-Business History Review, "Mayo's book is marvelously informative and entertaining. It outlines the development of a people who do everything on their stomach."-Journal of American Culture, "This book provides the most comprehensive assessment to date of the history of the grocery store in America from the seventeenth century to the 1980s. It offers new insights into grocery store history. It is important and useful to see the story of the grocery store in the larger historical perspective and Mayo's book allows us to do this. A strength of Mayo's analysis is that is focuses on the dynamic process of a market structure that has evolved over time. Overall this thoughtful and well-illustrated book is very satisfactory business history that pushes forward the history of the grocery store, not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in earlier time periods. Mayo has provided a most interesting account from which many will profit."-Business History Review

JAMES M. MAYO is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Kansas. He is the author of War Memorials as Political Landscape (Praeger, 1988).