ABSTRACT
The organization of contemporary distribution in North America is a product of several reconfigurations that have unfolded. In particular, it has been bound up with institutional transformations associated with the development of managerial capitalism, which were explored by Alfred D. Chandler. Retailing emerged in the United States between 1830 and 1860 and in Canada from 1860 to 1910. Retail organization expanded rapidly and was separated into two solitudes between the closing decades of the nineteenth-century and the Second World War. American national income originating in retail activities grew from $1.3 billion in 1899 to $5.9 billion in 1919 and $9.3 billion by 1929. The annual volume of wholesale business across the period nearly quadrupled. The era from the Second World War to 1980 was characterized by a rapid spread of consumption culture as distribution, rather than production, increasingly drove economic growth.
