ABSTRACT

Wholesalers have been key participants in marketing channels for a very long time. Indeed, historical research shows that references were made to wholesalers in the Far East as long ago as 5,000 years (Beckman, Engle, and Buzzell 1959). By the time of ancient Greece wholesaling and wholesalers were recognized as a distinct branch of commerce and a specific word, ‘emporos’, was used to describe them. The emporos was the merchant who imported foreign goods and sold them ‘by wholesale’. He usually owned ships and sold his goods to other wholesalers, broker-like agents, or retailers. During the times of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the mercantilist period in Europe, right into the modern era ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, wholesaling continued to flourish. In the nineteenth century wholesalers played a vital role in the rapid economic development of the United States (Alderson 1949) and most other industrialized countries, and they continue to do so right up to the present time (Danenburg, Moncriet, and Taylor 1978; Rosenbloom 1983).