The Great A and P and the Struggle for Small Business in America Part 5

9. "Employees to Share Chain Store Profit," NYT, June 5, 1925; "Great Atl. & Pac. Forms New Company"; "Increased Dividend and Extras Voted," NYT, August 17, 1928; Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. Certificate Book, HFF.

In February 1926, the U.S. Department of Justice brought an ant.i.trust suit against National Food Products Corporation, claiming that it was attempting to set up a "food trust" by acquiring control of numerous grocery retailers and manufacturers, including Great Atlantic & Pacific. The suit implied that the purpose of A&P's stock issuance was to enable it to partic.i.p.ate in the trust. The allegations were rather far-fetched. National Food Products was an investment company, similar to a closed-end mutual fund, intending to invest in the food industry, in which many companies were issuing shares for the first time. As of the date of the lawsuit it had raised $1.8 million through stock sales, not enough to control any major grocery chain, much less the largest retailer in the world, which by its own estimate was worth $58 million at the time (Adelman, A&P, 438). It is improbable that the Hartford brothers would have been interested in joining in the sort of trust described by the government, as this would have required them to surrender absolute control of their company. John Hartford denied that A&P was controlled by National Food Products and emphasized that the only reason for issuing stock was to provide shares for employees. See "Government Sues to Stop $160,000,000 Food Store 'Trust,'" NYT, February 14, 1926; "Lawyer Ridicules Suit on 'Food Trust,'" NYT, February 15, 1926; "Halsey Quits Board of New Food Trust," NYT, February 16, 1926.

10. Gx 103. A&P's annual data books, containing a standard set of tables and charts, are in RG 60, General Records of the U.S. Department of Justice, Ant.i.trust Division, Litigation Case Files, Enclosures to Cla.s.sified Subject Files, 193087, boxes 36 and 37, NARA-CP. Other data were distributed at the meetings of division presidents without inclusion in the annual book.

11. Charts for Division Presidents' Meetings, January 2728, 1927, February 9, 1928, and February 20, 1929, box 67, Danville trial enclosures; Gx 103 and Dx 212. The most common measure of corporate profitability, return on equity, is not relevant for A&P during this period, as the company had no publicly traded stock and its privately held shares had only the nominal value a.s.signed when they were issued. Adelman, A&P, 438, constructed estimates of the company's equity investment, including retained surplus. His calculations show that return on equity in 1924 was 7.1 percent, the lowest of any year during the decade. The company's stated investment was $25.3 million in the year ending February 1921; $62.6 million in the year ending February 1926; and $118.8 million in the year ending February 1930; see "A&P Growth Is Told at Hearing," WSJ, October 25, 1930. However, these figures are not consistent with those reported by Adelman. On the meager return in 1925, see Green, "Vertical Integration" (B.A. thesis), 22.

12. "Atlantic & Pacific Tea Sales About $450,000,000," NYT, January 1, 1926.

13. Hartford quotation, from the minutes of the division presidents' meeting of February 3 and 4, 1926, is in Gx 105. Adelman, A&P, 445, estimates that cash flow was negative in 1923, 1924, and 1925.

14. Dx 213, "Charts, Presidents' Meeting, February 3rd and 4th, 1926," box 67; "Brief for the United States," 13, Danville trial.

15. Adelman, A&P, 32, 257; "Brief for the United States," 13, 74, 153, 317, Danville trial; Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., Three Score Years and Ten, 18.

16. Adelman, A&P, 112, 120, 225.

17. FTC, Chain Stores: Final Report on the Chain-Store Investigation (Washington, D.C., 1935), 90; Adelman, A&P, 237.

18. "A&P Tea Co. Plans Increase in Advertising," Hartford Courant, July 2, 1926; Crowell, "You Don't Have to Be Brilliant," 112.

19. Gx 107 and 404; Green, "Vertical Integration," 17. Alfred Chandler was bewildered by the apparently informal coordination between A&P's central staff and its operating divisions, suggesting that it "may pose problems in maintaining effective central control." He thought the Hartfords might have modeled their organization's structure on that of Swift & Company, the largest meat packer, which published detailed information about its corporate structure in the 1920s and 1930s. See his "Management Decentralization," 16364.

20. Adelman, A&P, 112.

21. Baum, "Chain Store Methods," 282; Adelman, A&P, 468; Avis H. Anderson, A&P, 85.

22. Between 1914 and 1930, A&P acquired only 300 stores, representing 1.5 percent of the total number of stores it opened during that period. It closed 4,896 stores over the same period; FTC, Chain Stores: Growth and Development of Chain Stores, 36, 77; "A&P Price Action Credited in Growth," NYT, August 10, 1930; "St. Louis A&P Building," NYT, September 17, 1928; "Bond Flotations," NYT, May 9, 1929; "Bond Flotation," NYT, August 21, 1929; J. C. Furnas, "Mr. George & Mr. John," Sat.u.r.day Evening Post, December 31, 1938, 55.

23. Charts, Division Presidents' Meetings, January 2728, 1927, February 9, 1928, and February 20, 1929, boxes 35 and 67, Danville trial.

24. Gx 107.

25. "A&P Cuts Bread Prices," WSJ, February 7, 1927; "Great A&P Sales Up $100,000,000," WSJ, January 7, 1928; "Cigarette Prices Are Slashed Here," NYT, April 24, 1928; "Cut $4,000,000 Off United Cigar Net," NYT, January 10, 1930; "Schulte Demands Cigarette War End," NYT, April 17, 1929; "Retailers Aroused by Cigarette War," NYT, May 21, 1929; "Schulte Minority Hits Management," NYT, April 22, 1930.

26. In February 1927, A&P's balance sheet showed $15.6 million of cash and securities against $179,000 of debts; by February 1931, cash reached $41 million, and debts were only $458,000. Over the same period, even after generous dividend payouts, retained earnings climbed from $9 million to $57 million. Five years of balance-sheet data are shown in William Henry Smith, "A Billion-Dollar Cash Business," Barron's, November 25, 1929, 12. "A&P Expands in Houston," WSJ, October 28, 1927; "'A&P' in Canada," WSJ, June 27, 1927; "Atlantic & Pacific," WSJ, May 8, 1930; "A&P Decides to Sell as Well as Buy in Northwest," Business Week, April 8, 1931, 11.

27. FTC, Chain Stores: Sources of Chain-Store Merchandise, 2324, 29; Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., Three Score Years and Ten, 37.

28. Among the critics was Fiorello La Guardia, then a congressman and soon to become New York City's mayor, who warned in a March 1930 radio talk that shoppers needed to patronize independent stores to avoid "a gigantic food trust in this country." See box 37(A), WPP. FTC, Chain Store Manufacturing, Senate doc. 13, 73rd Cong., 1st sess., April 5, 1933, 30; "Puts U.S. Meat Bill at $5,000,000,000 Yearly," WSJ, November 8, 1930; "A&P Price Action Credited in Growth," Adelman, A&P, 265; "Postum Company, Inc.," Barron's, August 13, 1928, 10; Rentz, "Death of Grandma," MS, 54; William Henry Smith, "A Billion from 'Cash and Carry,'" Barron's, January 19, 1931, 22; A&P, "A&P, an Organization and Its Workers" (1930), 22, 29. The 1930 census counted 29.9 million "family households." The number of nonfamily households was not reported, but the 1940 figure of 3.5 million suggests that the 1930 figure would have been between 2.5 and 3 million, yielding a total of approximately 32 million households.

29. Rentz, "'Death of Grandma,'" 9; "A&P Construction Plan Gets Underway," WSJ, June 9, 1930; A&P, "A&P, an Organization and Its Workers," 5.

30. "Gives Outing to 200 at Mountain Retreat," NYT, September 29, 1929; "Capital Rise Voted by New Haven Road," NYT, April 17, 1930. John Hartford was elected a director of National Bank of Commerce on July 25, 1928. Board minutes give no indication that A&P did business with the bank prior to his election to replace a director who retired due to ill health. See National Bank of Commerce, Board of Directors minutes, 1927 and 1928, JPMC. When that inst.i.tution merged with the larger and more prestigious Guaranty Trust Company in 1929, Hartford joined the merged inst.i.tution's board, serving alongside such notables as John T. Dorrance, head of Campbell Soup Company, an A&P supplier; the retailer Marshall Field; the 1924 presidential candidate John W. Davis; Richard B. Mellon, brother of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and president of Mellon Bank; the investment banker W. Averell Harriman, who controlled a major stake in the Union Pacific Railroad; and several members of one of Guaranty Trust's founding families, the Whitneys; Guaranty News, February 1929 and March 1929, JPMC.

11: MINUTE MEN AND TAX MEN.

1. Evans Clark, "Big Business Now Sweeps Retail Trade," NYT, July 8, 1928. According to the article, the next seven chain operators, F. W. Woolworth, Kroger, J. C. Penney, S. S. Kresge, Gimbel Brothers, American Stores, and May Department Stores, had a combined 8,803 stores. A&P alone was said to have 17,500, although company records show a shorter number. The article estimated A&P's annual sales to be $750 million, and those of Kroger, the next-largest grocer, to be $161 million. A&P's reported sales were $761 million in the year ending February 1928.

2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 Retail Distribution: Summary for the United States (Washington, D.C., 1933), 45.

3. City of Danville v. Quaker Maid Inc., 211 Ky. 677. The Danville ordinance divided grocery stores, meat markets, and fish markets into three cla.s.ses. "Regular service" establishments were to pay $12 per year plus $5 for each employee over two. "Cash and carry" grocers without self-service stores were to pay $50 per year plus $25 for each employee over two, while self-service grocers operating on a cash-and-carry basis were to pay $40 per year plus $30 for each employee over two. The Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled that the way a store did business was not a reasonable distinction for purposes of taxation.

4. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 153; F. J. Harper, "'A New Battle on Evolution': The AntiChain Store Trade-at-Home Agitation of 19291930," Journal of American Studies 16 (1982), 412; Alfred G. Buehler, "Anti-Chain-Store Taxation," 350. A&P's average profit per store was $947 in the year ending February 1927, and $1,208 the following year. On the Pennsylvania law, see Richard C. Schragger, "The AntiChain Store Movement, Localist Ideology, and the Remnants of the Progressive Const.i.tution, 19201940," 1036.

5. "A&P Attacked," Time, April 23, 1928; Senate resolution 224, 70th Cong., 1st sess.; "Chain Head Can See No Basis for Probe," NYT, May 13, 1928.

6. "Chain Stores and the Groceryman," Review of Reviews 78 (1928), 109; Dx 998, 999, 1000.

7. James L. Palmer, "Economic and Social Aspects of Chain Stores," 277; President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York, 1933); Shideler, "Chain Store" (Ph.D. diss.), chap. 1, 9; W. A. Masters, "The Chain Store, the Catalog House, and the Tax Payer" (St. Joseph, Mo., 1928), 11, Mms 159, LSUS.

8. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 154; FTC, Chain Stores: Scope of the Chain-Store Inquiry, 10; FTC, Chain Stores: Cooperative Grocery Chains, xvi.

9. O'Pry, Chronicles of Shreveport and Caddo Parish, 355.

10. Ibid.; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Navigation, "Radio Service Bulletin," June 1, 1922. Dates of licensing were obtained from a helpful article, "Shreveport Radio Stations of the 1920s," jeff560.tripod.com/am14.html, accessed September 15, 2009.

11. U.S. Department of Commerce, "Radio Service Bulletin," September 1, 1925, 7; January 31, 1928, 20; February 28, 1929, 12; June 29, 1929, 17; Derek Vaillant, "Bare-Knuckled Broadcasting," 196; Harper, "'New Battle on Evolution,'" 413.

12. Doerksen, American Babel, chap. 5.

13. Philip Lieber, "The Menace of the Chain Store System" (1929), Mms 159, LSUS; Harry W. Schachter, "War on the Chain Store," Nation, May 7, 1930, 544.

14. Schachter, "War on the Chain Store," 544; Printers' Ink, February 20, 1930, 4.

15. Harper, "'New Battle on Evolution,'" 414; Charlie C. McCall, "Live and Let Live," Mms 159, LSUS; R. K. Calloway, "The Handicappers or the Chain Store Menace," Mms 159, LSUS.

16. Vaillant, "Bare-Knuckled Broadcasting," 199; Harper, "'New Battle on Evolution,'" 417, 423; Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 158. Pay for grocery clerks was commonly in the range of $15$30; see Edward G. Ernst and Emil M. Hartl, "Chain Management and Labor," Nation, November 26, 1930, 574.

17. Duncan was convicted in 1930 of indecency for uttering the phrase "By G.o.d" on the air, and the Federal Radio Commission revoked his station's license. Flowers, j.a.panese Conquest of American Opinion, 265; Flowers, America Chained, 57.

18. On Coughlin, see Brinkley, Voices of Protest. Brinkley makes no mention of the chain-store issue or the anti-chain broadcasters. W. K. Henderson, "On Chain Store Monopoly and Packers Consent Decree" (n.d., 1930), PSOC 5/31, Notre Dame University Archives, South Bend, Ind.

19. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 16061.

20. Ibid., 163.

21. Ibid., 164; Alfred G. Buehler, "Anti-Chain-Store Taxation," 350; Ingram and Rao, "Store Wars," 31; Hardy, "Taxation of Chain Retailers in the United States," 258; Lee, "Recent Trends in Chain-Store Tax Legislation," 267; Schachter, "War on the Chain Store," 545.

22. The first FTC report, Chain-Store System of Marketing and Distribution, was released as Senate doc. 146, 71st Cong., 2nd sess., May 12, 1930. Four further reports on chain stores had followed by the end of 1931, and many more throughout the decade. Numerous issue guides for debaters were published during these years, several of them with the a.s.sistance of the National Chain Store a.s.sociation; see, for example, Ezra Buehler, Chain Store Debate Manual, and Somerville, Chain Store Debate Manual. Oliver Clinton Carpenter, Debate Outlines on Public Questions (New York, 1932), 88102, addressed the chain-store question in more balanced fashion. James L. Palmer, What About Chain Stores? (New York, 1929); Russell, Lyons, and Flickinger, "Social and Economic Aspects of Chain Stores," 2736; Edward G. Ernst and Emil M. Hartl, "Chains Versus Independents," Nation, November 12December 3, 1930; John T. Flynn, "Chain Stores: Menace or Promise?" New Republic, April 1529, 1931; Arthur Capper, "The Chain Store Problem," address over WJSV, March 21, 1930, collection 12, box 38, KSHS.

23. Jackson v. State Board of Tax Commissioners of Indiana, 38 F.2d 652 (1930); State Board of Tax Commissioners v. Jackson, 283 U.S. 527 (1931); Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Maxwell, 284 U.S. 575 (1931).

24. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 129, 168.

25. Minutes of the meeting of division presidents, November 1011, 1927, vi, xiv, in box 35, Danville trial exhibits; Tedlow, New and Improved, 195; Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 169; A&P, "A&P, an Organization and Its Workers" (1930); Dx 124, box 66.

26. Gx 114; "A&P Price Action Credited in Growth," NYT, August 10, 1930.

12: THE SUPERMARKET.

1. "Financial Notes," NYT, July 26, 1928. The depreciated value of A&P's real-estate holdings fell 13 percent from 1926 to 1930 as the company shed property. Total a.s.sets nearly doubled over the same period, so land and buildings declined from 8 percent of the company's a.s.sets to only 3.6 percent, insulating the company against loss in the event the value of real estate needed to be written down; William Henry Smith, "A Billion from 'Cash and Carry,'" Barron's, January 19, 1931.

2. Ward, Produce and Conserve, 230; Davis, Don't Make A&P Mad, 45. Census product-line data are not available prior to 1929, but studies such as Croxton's Study of Housewives' Buying Habits in Columbus, Ohio, 1924 suggest that the vast majority of housewives purchased meat at meat markets and milk at dairy stores, rather than at grocery chains. The first census survey of 1929 found that meat accounted for 17 percent of sales at combination stores. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 Retail Distribution: Summary for the United States (Washington, D.C., 1933), 159; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 695.

3. Clarke, "Consumer Negotiations," 109; Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table, 13839; Rentz, "'Death of Grandma,'" MS, 54; Dx 438, box 66.

4. Shideler, "Chain Store" (Ph.D. diss.), chap. 2, 6, pointed out that one effect of the automobile and improved ma.s.s transit was to encourage mobility within the city. "With the shifting of families about the city, standardized stores ... have a distinct advantage because it in effect removes the strangeness of the new environment for the incoming family."

5. Dipman, Modern Grocery Store, 4, 8, 13, 23, 27; Davis, Don't Make A&P Mad, 44. Average sales at traditional stores were around $18,000 per year, at combination stores $33,000; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1930 Retail Distribution, 45.

6. Baxter, Chain Store Distribution and Management, 179; "A&P from A to Z," Business Week, September 30, 1932; Dx 401, box 67. A store that opened in Philadelphia in 1929 covered twenty thousand square feet, making it the largest unit in the entire chain; see "A&P Leases Philadelphia Store," NYT, December 11, 1929.

7. "Charts, Presidents' Meeting, August 16, 1928," box 67, Danville trial; "Brief for the United States," 156, Danville trial.

8. Appel, "Supermarket," 4143; Mayo, American Grocery Store, 138; Phillips, "Supermarket," 193. See also Goldman, "Stages in the Development of the Supermarket."

9. Tedlow, New and Improved, 22629. Cullen's letter appears in M. M. Zimmerman, The Super Market: A Revolution in Distribution, 3235, and is reprinted in substantial part in Tedlow, New and Improved, 38184. Data on combination store sales and operating costs are from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Distribution, Retail Chains (Washington, D.C., 1933), 3637.

10. Business Week, February 8, 1933; Appel, "Supermarket," 44; Mayo, American Grocery Store, 145.

11. For example, the San Francisco wholesaler Wellman, Peck & Company formed Neighborhood Stores Inc., a voluntary chain with three thousand member stores. Wellman, Peck & Co., Our First 100 Years (San Francisco, 1949).

12. M. M. Zimmerman and F. R. Grant, "Warning: Here Comes the Super-Market!" Nation's Business, March 1937, 21; Phillips, "Supermarket," 190.

13. Adelman, A&P, 4142; Gx 134.

14. Minutes of Central Western Division, January 13, 1933, Gx 146.

15. A&P's gross profit on coffee was 45 percent in 1920 and 1921, implying an 82 percent markup; after dipping as low as 20 percent in 1928, it settled in the 30 percent range for several years; see "Charts, Presidents' Meetings, year ending March 1, 1941," 162, box 36, Danville trial exhibits.

16. Minutes of division presidents meeting, June 25, 1931, box 67, Danville trial exhibits.

17. Dx 420; Tr 20438; Phillips, "Supermarket," 195; "The Consumer Accepts the Supermarket," Super Market Merchandising, November 1936, 15. Retail food sales were $10.8 billion in 1929, but due to deflation fell to $8.4 billion in 1935.

18. "Grocers Call A&P a Monopoly; Put Up the Money to Prove It," Business Week, June 22, 1932, 8. According to Dipman, Modern Grocery Store, 4, the average margin in food retailing fell from 25 percent around 1920 to 20 percent or less by 1931.

19. See, for example, "People," Time, September 21, 1931; "$100,000, Please, for Charm and Poise," Xenia (Ohio) Evening Gazette, September 19, 1931; "Highlights of Broadway," Albuquerque Journal, November 19, 1931; "Mystery Romance of the Chain Store Heir," Hamilton (Ohio) Daily News, November 28, 1931; "Josephine Hartford Bryce," NYT, June 10, 1992.

20. "Private Lives," Life, January 25, 1937, 58; "Spotlight Hits Shrinking Hartfords," New York Sunday News, January 9, 1938; "Huntington Hartford, A&P Heir Adept at Losing Millions, Dies at 97," NYT, May 20, 2008.

21. For contemporaneous discussion of the social factors behind the anti-chain movement, see James L. Palmer, "Economic and Social Aspects of Chain Stores." On the anti-chain movement in Chicago, see Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise, 7880.

22. The 1939 Census of Business, vol. 1, Retail Trade, pt. 1, 170, shows that 119,024 independent grocery stores then in operation were established from 1930 to 1937; typical mortality estimates imply that the number surviving in 1939 was less than half the total number established in 1930 to 1937. The number of proprietors rose from 284,277 in 1929 to 318,736 six years later and reached 351,981 by 1939; ibid., 57; Adelman, A&P, 430.

23. Baxter, Chain Store Distribution and Management, 17; FTC, Final Report on the Chain-Store Investigation, vol. 5, 38; FTC, Chain Store Inquiry, vol. 3, Chain Stores: Chain-Store Leaders and Loss Leaders, Senate doc. 51, 72nd Cong., 1st sess. (1932), xi.

13: FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT.

1. Alter, Defining Moment, 77.

2. Seamans to Roosevelt, January 19, 1933; Rund to Roosevelt, February 18, 1933; McKay to Roosevelt, April 13, 1933; Applegate to Roosevelt, n.d., all in OF 288, Chain Stores, 193334, FDR.

3. The foundational texts of 1920s consumerism were Chase, Tragedy of Waste, one of the first books to explore the manipulation of consumer preferences by advertising, and Chase and Schlink, Your Money's Worth, which became a bestseller. Chase and Schlink were the co-founders of Consumers' Research. Means, "The Consumer and the New Deal," 7.

4. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 319; Bolin, "Economics of Middle-Cla.s.s Family Life."

5. Perhaps the earliest articulation of the consumerist view was Orleck, "'We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public.'" See also Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 23539. Alan Brinkley goes even further, contending, "The 'New Dealer' anti-monopolists were worried princ.i.p.ally about protecting consumers"; End of Reform, 64. Subsequent a.s.sertions of consumers' preeminence can be found in Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic, 24; Donohue, Freedom from Want, 17182; McGovern, Sold American, 135; Deutsch, "From 'Wild Animal Stores' to Women's Sphere." Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 95135, provides a more balanced exploration of the tension between the New Deal's producerist and consumerist inclinations. The quotation is from Donohue, Freedom from Want, 228.

6. Brinkley, End of Reform, 59.

7. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, "Closed for the Holiday: The Bank Holiday of 1933," n.d.; Huff, Chain Store Tyranny and the Independent Grocers' Dilemma.

8. Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer, was among a small number of guests at Roosevelt's birthday party in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1933. Roosevelt subsequently named him head of the new U.S. intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, during World War II. "Report $99,460 Spent on Donovan Campaign," NYT, November 19, 1932; "Ford Paid $25,000 Radio Bill," NYT, January 7, 1933.

9. 48 Stat. 31, sec. 8; 48 Stat. 195, sec. 3.

10. National a.s.sociation of Chain Stores, The Chain Store Industry Under the National Industrial Recovery Act (New York, 1934), 41, 53.

11. Dx 144, box 66.

12. National a.s.sociation of Chain Stores, Chain Store Industry, 6567.

13. Dameron, "Retailing Under the N.R.A., I," 1.

14. Hawley, New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly.

15. Alexander, "N.R.A. and Distribution," 197.

16. M. L. Toulme (secretary, National-American Wholesale Grocers' a.s.sociation) to McIntyre, November 4, 1933; NAWGA, "News About Codes," November 3, 1933; NAWGA, "A Special Pet.i.tion to President Roosevelt," November 3, 1933, all in PPF 2538, FDR. NRA Consumer Advisory Board, "The Purpose of the N.R.A. as Seen by the Consumers' Advisory Board," Gardiner Means Papers, box 2, FDR. On the use of meat as a loss leader due to its exclusion from the food retail code, see Emanuel Celler to Hugh Johnson (administrator, NRA), August 24, 1934, in Leon Henderson Papers, box 11, FDR.

17. In 1933, 3.1 percent of A&P's stores were unprofitable, but 84 percent of the unprofitable stores had been open for three or more years, meaning that at most seventy-five of the hundreds of stores in operation for less than three years lost money; see data in Adelman, A&P, 450. Pelz, "Developments Under the N.R.A. and A.A.A.," 2122; Dameron, "Retailing Under the N.R.A., I," 20. For discussion of various proposals, see Retail Clerks International Advocate, SeptemberOctober 1933, 12, and JanuaryFebruary 1934, 14. As Charles F. Phillips points out, grocers conventionally took low markups on staples such as lard and sugar and higher markups on slow-moving items; attempts by chains to standardize markups during the 1920s proved "disastrous" and drove away business. See Phillips, "Price Policies of Food Chains," 379.

18. Dameron, "Retailing Under the N.R.A., II," 201; Records Related to the Roberts Committee Investigation, box 2, Records of the Compliance Division, Records of the National Recovery Administration, RG 9, NARA-CP; "Complaints Docketed by NRA State Offices," Office Files of Enid Baird, box 3, Records of the Trade Practice Studies Section, Records of Division of Review, Records of the National Recovery Administration, RG 9, NARA-CP; NRA, "Retail and Wholesale Distribution Project of the Division of Research and Planning," Leon Henderson Papers, box 4, FDR; Dx 419, box 66.

19. "State Chain Store Taxes (as of May 15, 1937)," Office of Tax Policy, Subject Files, box 13, RG 56, General Records of the Department of the Treasury, NARA-CP; Davis, Don't Make A&P Mad, 93.

20. Tide: Of Advertising and Marketing, February 1935, 13.

21. Alfred G. Buehler, "Chain Store Taxes," 180; Morris, "Economics of the Special Taxation" (Ph.D. diss.), 36; John P. Nichols, Chain Store Manual (New York, 1936), 74. A&P's financial reports did not distinguish chain-store taxes from sales taxes, which came into use during this period but were low and frequently exempted food; see Dx 499.

22. Ross, "Store Wars," 131; Morris, "Economics of the Special Taxation," 36.

23. "Food Trade Heads Aid Farm Revival," NYT, July 10, 1933; "Support Pledged for Blanket Code," NYT, July 22, 1933.

24. Brinkley, End of Reform, 61; Committee on Unfair Trade Practices, "Code-Making and Code-Enforcement," March 21, 1935, RG 40, Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, Business Advisory Committee Records, 193338, box 2, NARA-CP. "Five Picked to Pa.s.s on Industry Loans," NYT, July 4, 1934; Robert H. Jackson, "The Big Corporations Rule," New Republic, September 4, 1935, 99101; Gx 156, box 68; "A Vote on the NRA," Barron's, July 2, 1934, 5. In 1937, after he had become a.s.sistant attorney general for ant.i.trust, Robert H. Jackson told lawyers that only when all laws "are brought to exert their pressures toward the encouragement of small business rather than toward its destruction, can we say that we have a national policy against monopoly." "The Struggle Against Monopoly," speech to Georgia Bar a.s.sociation, May 28, 1937.

25. "NRA and Business Profits," Barron's, July 2, 1934, 6; Dx 506, box 66; Adelman, A&P, 51, 430, 434, 438; "Brief for the United States," 166, Danville trial.