ABSTRACT
THE great variety and number of retail outlets in many trades goes far to explain the difficulties which the formation of a pricefixing retail association may encounter. At the same time, it explains the strong motives which inspire the members of such trades to see something done, outside their range of individual action, to secure their existing profits against what they believe to be unfair competition. In the case of branded and pricemarked or coded articles this means associative price-maintenance. Though the desire to see this established may be present with every retailer, and perhaps mostly with the small and financially weakest retailer, the great number of small units makes the achievement of the purpose, as we have seen before, least probable; on the contrary, it generally rests with the bigger representatives of a retail trade, or upon a nucleus of bigger firms which may be able to exert some definite price-leadership in an organisation, to inspire a movement for trade association and to maintain its strength when it is once formed.
