ABSTRACT
The distributive trades in Great Britain, as has been remarked, consist of about half a million establishments, and they are owned and operated by several hundred thousand organizations. These establishments stand between a somewhat similar number of manufacturing establishments (at home and abroad) and the 50 to 60 million consumers who live in Great Britain or visit it. They have to cope with the changing technology of the producers, the changing tastes of the consumers and the ebb and flow of other economic events, and they or their managers achieve this by competing with each other. They all form part of one competitive system; a butcher in Cornwall is related in competition by only a few stages with a draper in the north of Scotland. It is what is regarded by some as the ‘jungle of private enterprise’.
