The Market Makers

The Market Makers
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The Market Makers
How Retailers are Reshaping
the Global Economy
Edited by
Gary G. Hamilton, Misha Petrovic, and Benjamin Senauer
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Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we want to acknowledge the support and encouragement

of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and in particular Gail Pesyna, the Program
Officer for Sloan’s Industry Studies Program, and Frank Giarratani, Professor of
Economics, University of Pittsburgh, and Director of the Center for Industry
Studies. Throughout the process, they have both been exceedingly helpful in
making this book possible.
The idea for the book emerged out of a Sloan-sponsored workshop that was
held on June 7–8, 2004, at the University of Washington. The workshop
focused on “the role of intermediaries in global value chains.” Robert Feenstra
and Gary Hamilton had emphasized the importance of this topic in their book
Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths: Economic Organization and International
Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (2006), but they also recognized that relatively
little research had been done on the topic. In an effort to work out the
implications of intermediaries (mainly retailers, merchandisers, and trading
companies) in international trade, Hamilton, along with Suresh Kotha and
Misha Petrovic, organized a workshop that pulled together many of the
leading researchers in the USA working on retailing and global trade. During
this workshop, Hamilton and Petrovic introduced the market-making perspec-
tive, which, as discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, is an analytic approach
centered on the institutional arrangements that structure and facilitate market
transactions. The idea of intermediaries as market-makers provided a collec-
tive focus that allowed workshop participants working on diverse topics to
converge on a core theme: the global significance of large retailers.
Building on the enthusiasm generated from the first workshop, Hamilton,
Petrovic, and Senauer received additional support from the Sloan Foundation
to hold a second workshop in order to prepare this book. We used the second
workshop, held in Boston, on April 26 and 27, 2007, to present early drafts of
some of the chapters and to revise the book’s contents to reflect the ongoing
research of the group.
We wish to acknowledge a number of people who contributed to and
commented on the proceedings of the first workshop, but who did not
contribute chapters to the current volume: Robert Feenstra (Economics,
University of California, Davis), Frank Giarratani (Economics, University of
Acknowledgments
Pittsburgh), Greg Magnan (Albers School of Business, Seattle University), Mary

Ann Odegaard (School of Business, University of Washington), and Thomas E.
Reifer (Institute for Research on the World System, University of California,
Riverside). In addition, at the first workshop, we benefited greatly from indus-
try spokespersons who helped clarify the role of intermediaries in value
chains: James Ayers (CGR Management Consultants), Kristina Erickson (Boe-
ing Corporation), Kal Raman (Drugstore.com), Kim Suchomel (Costco), and
Herman Uscategui (Starbucks).
Hamilton and Petrovic also wish to acknowledge the support of the Rocke-
feller Foundation, and in particular Katherine McFate, then a program officer
at the Rockefeller Foundation, for funding some of the research on which our
chapters are based.
Finally, we want to thank David Musson at Oxford University Press, who
heard about our workshop and encouraged us to write this book. His help
came at just the right time, and for that we are grateful. We also want to thank
Emma Lambert, also at Oxford University Press, who helped us prepare the
manuscript for publication.
vi
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables x
Abbreviations xi
Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
Gary G. Hamilton and Misha Petrovic
Part One: The Market Makers: A General Perspective
1. Retailers as Market Makers 31

Misha Petrovic and Gary G. Hamilton
2. Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for

the Retail Revolution 50
Frederick H. Abernathy and Anthony P. Volpe
Part Two: Making Consumer Markets
3. US Retailing and its Global Diffusion 79

Misha Petrovic
4. Globalization of European Retailing 117

Michael Wortmann
5. Amazon and eBay: Online Retailers as Market Makers 155

Suresh Kotha and Sandip Basu
Part Three: Making Supplier Markets
6. The Asian Miracle and the Rise of Demand-Responsive

Economies 181
Gary G. Hamilton and Cheng-shu Kao
7. Global Logistics, Global Labor 211

Edna Bonacich and Gary G. Hamilton
Contents
8. Making the Global Supply Base 231

Timothy Sturgeon, John Humphrey, and Gary Gereffi
9. Transnational Contractors in East Asia 255

Richard P. Appelbaum
Part Four: Industries and Market Making
10. The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing 271

Benjamin Senauer and Thomas Reardon
11. Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry 291

Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer
Notes 311
References 326
Index 351
viii
List of Figures
4.1. Grocery market share according to store size, four European

countries, 2006 124
5.1. Book industry value chain prior to online stores 160
5.2. Book industry value chain after the entry of online book stores
such as Amazon.com 162
5.3. Value added by online services 171
6.1. US total foreign trade and trade in goods as a percentage of
GNP, 1890–2000 184
6.2. Import penetration as a percentage of total US consumption of
selected consumer goods, 1965–1995 185
6.3. Imports from East Asia as a percentage of total US imports of
consumer goods, 1975–1995 186
6.4. Number of seven-digit TSUSA categories of US imports from
South Korea and Taiwan, total and footwear + garments (F&G)
combined, 1972–1988 186
6.5. Categories of US imports of footwear from South Korea and
Taiwan, 1972–1988 190
8.1. The evolution of supply-base modularity, consolidation, and
global integration 251
8.2. World imports of intermediate, capital, and final goods, 1962–2006 253
10.1. Supermarket share of the retail food market, 1940–2010 280
11.1. Indirect distribution 293
11.2. Direct distribution 294
List of Tables
0.1. Retail concentration in grocery trade, select economies, 2005 11

0.2. Retail concentration, market share of top firms, United States, 2002 12
0.3. Number and density of retail establishments, 2001 13
4.1. Top-five national grocery retailers, four European countries, 2007 123
4.2. Top sixteen European grocery retailers, store count, 2007,
and sales, 2008 147
4.3. The biggest grocery retailers, five Eastern European countries, 2006 152
5.1. Online retailers vs top ten specialty retailers and general merchandisers 157
5.2. Categories of goods over $1 bn traded on eBay Inc., 2007 172
5.3. Forrester’s forecast of US online retail sales, 2010–2013 173
9.1. A sample of Chinese “global champions,” 2004 266
10.1. The ten largest global food retailers, 2007 275
10.2. Factors driving the spread of modern food retailing 281
11.1. US PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 294
11.2. Comparison of market-making models in US PC market 295
11.3. US branded PC makers as market makers, percentage of shipments
by channel, 1995–2005 297
11.4. Market-making activities in PC industry 299
11.5. Worldwide PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 304
11.6. Non-US PC makers as retailers, percentage of shipments
by model, 1995–2005 305
11.A1. Asia Pacific PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 309
11.A2. Latin America PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 309
11.A3. Western Europe PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 310
11.A4. Central/Eastern Europe PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 310
11.A5. Middle East/Africa PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 310
x
Abbreviations
A&P Great Atlantic and Pacific

AGOA African Growth and Opportunity Act
ARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency
BIOS board-level input/output system
BOA Bank of America
C&C cash and carry
CAD computer-aided design
CNC computer numerically controlled
CPU central processing unit
D2S design to store
DC distribution center
EAN European Article Number
ECR Efficent Consumer Response
EDI electronic data interchange
EDLP every day low pricing
ELS Extra Long Staple
FPL Field, Palmer, and Leiter
ERP Economic Recovery Program
FDI foreign direct investment
FLA Fair Labor Association
FTP File Transfer Protocol
GMA Grocery Manufacturers of America
GVC global value chain
HVAC heating, ventilation, and air conditioning
IBEC International Basic Economy Corporation
IBT International Brotherhood of Teamsters
ICC Interstate Commerce Commission
IDC International Data Corporation
IDS Integrated Distribution Services
Abbreviations
ILWU International Longshore and Warehouse Union

IP Internet Protocol
ISO International Standards Organization
ITGLWF International Textiles, Garment and Leathers Workers Federation
MFA Multi-Fiber Agreement
MNC multinational corporation
NAFC National Association of Food Chains
NBI National Bank Americard, Inc.
NGO non-governmental organization
NIC newly industrializing country
NIST National Institute of Science and Technology
OBM original brand manufacturer
ODM original design manufacturer
ODM/CM original design manufacturer/contact manufacturer
OEM original equipment manufacturer
PC personal computer
PMA Pacific Maritime Association
POS point of sale(s)
PPP purchasing power parity
RFD rural free delivery
RFID radio-frequency identification
SHV Steenkolen Handelsvereniging
SI systems integrator
SKU stock-keeping unit
SMEs small and medium-sized enterprises
TCP Transmission Control Protocol
TEU 20-foot equivalent unit
TSUSA Tariff Schedule of the United States Annotated
TWC The Waterfront Coalition
UPC Universal Product Code
USDA NASS US Department of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service
VAR value-added reseller
VMI vendor-managed inventory
WCWC West Coast Waterfront Coalition
WTO World Trade Organization
WWW World Wide Web
xii
Contributors
Frederick H. Abernathy is Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of

Engineering and Gordon McKay Research Professor of Mechanical Engineering and
Director of the Sloan Foundation Center on Textiles and Apparel, Harvard University.
Abernathy is the co-author of A Stitch in Time: Lean Retailing and the Transformation of
Manufacturing: Lessons from the Apparel and Textile Industries (1999), the authoritative
book on the textile industry in the late twentieth century and the book introducing the
concept of “lean retailing.”
Richard P. Appelbaum is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Global
Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Appelbaum published extensively in
the areas of social theory, urban sociology, public policy, the globalization of business,
and the sociology of work and labor. He is currently engaged in a multi-disciplinary
study of supply-chain networks in the Asian-Pacific Rim.
Sandip Basu is Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business and
Economics, California State University, Hayward. His current research includes work on
corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, and new venture creation.
Edna Bonacich is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University
of California, Riverside. She is the author and editor of numerous books related to
retailing, including Global Production: The Apparel Industry in the Pacific Rim (1994),
Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel Industry (with Richard Appelbaum)
(2000), and the important, recently published book Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and
the Logistics Revolution (2008).
Jason Dedrick is Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse
University. He, along with Kenneth Kraemer, is one of the world’s leading experts on
the computing industry and the author of many articles and books on the topic,
including Asia’s Computer Challenge: Threat or Opportunity for the United States and the
World? (with Kenneth L. Kraemer) (1998).
Gary Gereffi is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Globalization,
Governance, and Competitiveness at Duke University. He is the developer of “global
commodity chain” analysis and one of the world’s leading authorities on global supply
chains. He is the author of many books and articles on the topic, including The New
Offshoring of Jobs and Global Development (2006).
Gary G. Hamilton is a Professor of Sociology and of International Studies at the
University of Washington. He is an author of numerous articles and books, including
most recently Emergent Economies: Divergent Paths, Economic Organization and
Contributors
International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (with Robert Feenstra) (2006) and
Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (2006).
John Humphrey is a Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies,
University of Sussex. He has published widely on current trends in globalization and
has researched extensively on global value chains, economic governance, and
standards.
Cheng-shu Kao is Professor of Sociology at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He is also
Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Feng-Chia University in Taiwan. He is the
founding director and a continuing associate of the Institute of East Asian Societies and
Economies at Tunghai University, which is the location of the world’s most extensive
archive of interviews with Taiwanese businesspeople. He is the author of many books
and articles, including most recently The Boss’s Wife (1999, in Chinese).
Suresh Kotha is Douglas E. Olesen/Battelle Excellence Chair in Entrepreneurship and
Professor of Management and Organization at the Michael G. Foster School of Business
at the University of Washington. He is a leading authority on e-commerce and the
author of many articles and book chapters on this and related topics.
Kenneth Kraemer is Research Professor in the Paul Merage School of Business. He is
also Associate Director of the Center for Research on Information Technology and
Organizations (CRITO), as well as Co-Director of the Personal Computing Industry
Center at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author and co-author of many
books, including Asia’s Computer Challenge: Threat or Opportunity for the United States and
the World? (1998), Global E-Commerce: Impacts of National Environment and Policy (2006),
and Computerization Movements (2008).
Misha Petrovic is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National University of
Singapore. His dissertation, “Market Makers and Market Making: The Evolution of
Consumer Goods Markets in the United States, 1870–2000” (University of
Washington, 2005), is a pioneering study of the market-making perspective applied to
the United States.
Thomas Reardon has been a Professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and
Resource Economics at Michigan State University since January 1992; from, 1984 to
1991 he was with the International Food Policy Research Institute. His research focuses
on links between agri-food industry transformation and food security in Asia. He has
worked extensively on the “supermarket revolution,” transforming horticultural and
dairy product supply chains, and novel development strategies to link small farmers to
dynamic markets. He was an invitee to the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos in
2009 and is a member of the WEF’s Global Alliance Council for Food Security, as well as
a member of the expert panel on food security and agricultural development for the
Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Benjamin Senauer is a Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota
and a past Co-Director of the Food Industry Center with the Sloan Foundation
Industries Study Program. He is one of the foremost experts on food retailing and food
policy. His numerous publications include the books Food Trends and the Changing
xiv
Contributors
Consumer (1991) and Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Globalization and Food Security
(2003).
Timothy Sturgeon is Senior Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Industrial Performance Center. He is a leading authority on global value
chains and on the evolution of global industries. He is the author of many articles on
the topic and co-editor (with Momoko Kawakami) of The Dynamics of Local Learning in
Global Value Chains: Experiences from East Asia (2010).
Anthony P. Volpe is a senior research associate at the Harvard Center for Textile and
Apparel Research. His latest work centers on the role of analytics in retail environments.
He is currently a Global Product Manager in the retail division of SAS institute, Inc.
Michael Wortmann is currently in the School of Management, University of Surrey,
UK. He is a researcher in the Social Science Research Center in Berlin and at FAST e.V.,
a research and consulting organization he co-founded in 1986. He is one of the
foremost specialists on the retail industry in Europe and has written many articles on
the topic.
xv
Introduction
The transformation of retailing in the last half of the twentieth century

substantially changed the global economy. This transformation is both obvi-
ous and largely unrecognized. It is obvious, because the transformation is a
part of our everyday lives. In the United States, in 1954, there were only 500
shopping centers across the country, most of which by today’s standard were
minuscule. After a change in tax laws in 1955 allowing for accelerated depre-
ciation on commercial construction, shopping centers in the USA jumped to
7,600 by 1964 and accounted for 30 percent of US retail sales (Hanchett 1996).
By 2006, the shopping centers in the USA alone approached 50,000, many of
which are gargantuan.1 Moreover, this expansion has happened not just in
the United States, but throughout the world. In fact, the largest shopping
centers are no longer in the USA, but are scattered around the globe. Many of
the newest and largest of them are now in Asia.
The obviousness of the shopping-center boom and other similar changes in
the retail landscape is matched only by how few scholars recognize its signifi-
cance for the global economy. Most economists and economic analysts con-
tinue to use equilibrium models to interpret aggregated economic data and
ignore qualitative changes that have occurred over time. They see the severe
global crisis of 2007–9 in terms of recurring business cycles, and compare this
crisis to the ones that occurred in the 1980s or even in the 1930s in order to
predict its course. Although such comparisons are warranted, it is the structural
differences in how the economy is organized and not the apparent similarities
that are most telling and ought to be examined the most thoroughly.
One of the biggest differences between the global economy throughout
much of the twentieth century and the global economy in the first decade
of the twenty-first century is the extent to which the latter is organized by
retailers and through retailing. The expansion of shopping centers is just the
tip of an iceberg. Underpinning this expansion is the dominance of large

retailers. In 1963, large retailers, each operating a hundred or more stores,
accounted for just under 20 percent of US retail sales; in 2002, their share was
almost 60 percent (US Bureau of the Census, various years). In sectors as varied
as electronics, drug stores, books, office supplies, and general merchandise, the
four largest retailers have over a 50 percent share of the US market. Best Buy,
Costco, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, and Staples—to name a few—are
amongst such national-level operators that dominate their respective retail
sectors. The spread of chain stores and the huge market share they command
are a global trend as well. The ten largest retailers in the world had combined
sales of well over US$1 trillion, around 10 percent of the world’s total, in 2007
(Deloitte 2009: 66).
These are amazing numbers, especially when one considers the absolute size
and the unique character of the retail sector. Large global retailers of food and
general merchandise typically deal with thousands of suppliers from many
different industries and with millions of individual consumers. They also
manage vast organizational networks consisting of hundreds, or even
thousands, of stores, and many warehouses, buying offices, distribution cen-
ters, and processing facilities scattered around the globe. This multitude of
diverse roles and tasks creates a potential for exercising a considerable influ-
ence on the shape of the global economy, but also means that efficient large
retailers were slower to develop and more reluctant to expand to international
markets than their manufacturing counterparts.
In the early decades of industrial capitalism, large manufacturers of con-
sumer goods and large retailers rarely interacted with each other. Early
advances in mechanization and transportation allowed manufacturers to benefit
from economies of scale; they located factories in strategic locations, enlarged
those factories to fit market conditions, and distributed their products as far as
they could extend the market for their goods. As a result, many manufacturing
sectors, such as those for cars, gasoline, home appliances, tobacco, and packaged
and processed food, rapidly became more concentrated as their market reach
widened. Large manufacturers started specialized marketing departments,
organized distribution of their products, and often exercised a considerable
market power over small and localized retailers that sold their products.
In other industries, such as printing, apparel and footwear, furniture and
housewares, and most perishables, the available technology did not allow for
concentrated mass manufacturing, and there it was often a large retailer who
took the incentive in organizing the distribution, and occasionally even the
production of goods (Scranton 1994, 1999). This bifurcation led, in the early
years of US capitalism, to the establishment of two parallel ways of marketing
consumer goods, one based on the links between large manufacturers and
small dealers, and the other on the links between large retailers and small
2
Introduction
suppliers. Although these two types of marketing developed at the same time,
between 1890 and 1930 in the USA, and somewhat later in the leading
European economies, by the mid-twentieth century the one led by large
manufacturers became recognized everywhere as dominant. This was due
partly to the climate of economic planning and regulation that favored the
large producers, itself a consequence of the Great Depression and the war
effort, but also to the greater ease with which large manufacturers expanded
globally. Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, domestically as well as
globally, large manufacturers were arguably the main driving force of the
rapidly globalizing economy.2
All that has now changed. By the end of the twentieth century, large
retailers had replaced large manufacturers as the key organizers of the world
economy. This transformation, we suggest, amounts to a retail revolution on
the global scale.
The Retail Revolution
The expression “retail revolution” is certainly not new. It has been used many
times for everything from the introduction of the first department stores,
chain stores, and supermarkets, to the post-Second World War adoption of
US retail formats in Europe and Japan, to the more recent technological
advances in retailing and international expansion of large retailers. All of
these, however, saw the retail revolution as the process limited to the retail
“industry” itself. When Bluestone and his colleagues (1981), for instance,
titled their investigation of the transformation in the US department store
sector The Retail Revolution, they focused on the processes of the “industriali-
zation of retailing,” characterized by the adoption of new technologies and
corporate managerial hierarchies, the emergence of giant firms (such as Sears
and J. C. Penney’s) that were then “about to buy out or drive out their
competition” (Bluestone et al. 1981: 143) and the concomitant changes in
retail labor.3 The US retail sector, they emphasized, was about to catch up with
the developments that had been present in manufacturing for many decades.
In our view, the retail revolution should be understood as a more funda-
mental transformation in the organization of the overall global economy, the
transformation that continues to change not only the world of retailing, or
even the relative power between retailers and their suppliers, but also the
shape of international trade, economic development, product worlds, and
consumption practices.
The rest of this volume is dedicated to addressing various aspects of this
transformation. Here we summarize some of the main trends from the 1950s
to the first decades of the twenty-first century that helped propel what was
3
initially a limited change of the US retail landscape into a major force of the
global economy.
The first such trend, already indicated above, was the phenomenal growth
of large retailers. The growth has been predicated on the convergence of
major retail innovations—self-service, broad product mix, and chain-store
replication—toward a standard business model adopted by retailers in many
different sectors. The revolution started in the USA, in the late 1950s and
early 1960s, based on the application of the supermarket model to general
merchandise and specialty retailing and on the dramatic expansion of retail
space in shopping centers. Some of its protagonists and major beneficiaries
were already established operators, such as Sears and J. C. Penney’s, Wool-
worth’s and Kresge’s, A&P (Atlantic and Pacific), Safeway and Albertsons,
May and Federated department stores. But the change in retail formats also
created opportunities for new specialty stores, such as The Limited (founded
in 1963), CVS Caremark (1963), The Gap (1969), Best Buy (1977), Home
Depot (1978), Costco (1983), and Staples (1986). Wal-Mart, Kmart, and
Target, the big three of discount general merchandising, all started their
operations in 1962, as did Kohl’s. As the US retail formats spread abroad
(see Petrovic, Chapter 3 this volume), similar transformations occurred in
Western Europe and Japan, and then in a number of other economies,
bringing to the fore new efficient operators, such as Carrefour, Tesco,
Metro, and Aldi. This new generation of retailers would eventually converge
on a portfolio of standardized retail formats, and come to dominate global
retail markets.
The second major trend has been the blurring of boundaries between man-
ufacturers, brand-name merchandisers, and retailers, as all of them increas-
ingly saw marketing as their core organizational activity and competence.
Before the 1960s, most brand-name merchandisers were also manufacturers
who promoted, often through extensive advertising, the products that they
actually made. In the 1970s, however, this pattern gave way to brand-name
merchandisers that sourced from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs)
most if not all of the goods sold under their brand name. Nike (1972), Ralph
Lauren, and The Limited were amongst the first and most well-known mer-
chandisers to do so, but the list of these factory-less brand-name merchandi-
sers is now quite long. Most of them never had factories in the first place, while
some of them, such as Schwinn bicycles, Eddie Bauer clothes, RCA TVs, began
as manufacturers, but by the 1980s had closed all or most of their factories and
simply became designers and merchandisers of products made by contract
manufacturers. By the late 1980s, this same pattern of shifting from
manufacturing to merchandising also swept through consumer electronics.
Dell, a factory-less brand-name merchandiser and now one of the world’s
largest sellers of brand-name computers, established its business only in
4
Introduction
1984. Dell’s chief competitors in the area of personal computers, IBM, Hewlett
Packard, and Compaq, all began as PC manufacturers and ended as merchan-
disers relying on contract manufacturing.
The third major trend concerns various momentous changes in retail tech-
nology, what Abernathy and his colleagues (1999; Chapter 2 this volume)
refer to as “lean retailing.” At the core of this transformation is the application
of information technology to all aspects of selling products, from tracking
consumer purchases to managing inventories and supply chains. One of the
best examples of such technologies is the Universal Product Code (UPC).
Supermarkets and food firms jointly developed bar codes and scanning
devices in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, Wal-Mart and Kmart were
amongst the first retailers to expand UPC to include non-food items, which
enabled them to develop computerized inventory systems. Most other firms,
large and small, followed suit later in the decade, so that, by the 1990s, UPC
had become nearly universal. From the mid-1980s on, the spreading use of bar
codes allowed a transformation in logistics, including containerization,
shipping, warehousing, stocking, and tracking consumer choices from
point-of-sales information.
Technological changes pushed retailers into the front category of technology
adopters and users. By allowing them directly to access and track consumer
demand at the checkout counter, new information and communication tech-
nologies gave retailers the means to refashion the relations with their suppliers.
Before the 1980s, business practitioners conceptualized the distribution of
manufactured goods from the viewpoint of manufacturers, as “distribution
channels.” After the 1980s, they coined new terminology to conceptualize the
distribution of goods from the perspective of the retailer: “supply chains.” With
the help of information technology, retailers began to practice “supply-chain
management,” which is another way of saying that they created price-sensitive
networks of firms that turned manufacturing and logistics into organizational
extensions of retailing (Feenstra and Hamilton 2006: 233).
The increasing concentration at the retail end largely results from the
national and international proliferation of chain stores that sell more or less
the same set of products everywhere the companies establish their retail out-
lets. The proliferation of chain stores creates a tremendous intermediary
demand (that is, the demand generated by the big buyers) for logistical and
manufacturing solutions that can supply each outlet with exactly those goods
required to restock their inventories. This intermediary demand always
extends beyond the boundaries of individual firms to incorporate all other
firms with which the specific retail firms do business. The networks of firms
organized around the intermediary demand for products makes manufac-
turers and logistics providers into “vendors,” into mere suppliers of goods
and services that the “big-box” retailers “buy” for their customers.
5
The fourth and perhaps the most important aspect of the retail revolution
is the fact that the goods that American and European consumers buy have
been increasingly sourced from suppliers located outside the United States
and Europe, particularly from East Asia. As we describe in Part III (see espe-
cially Hamilton and Kao, Chapter 6 this volume), starting in the mid-1960s
there was a dramatic increase in US imports of select categories of consumer
goods. Before 1965, imported goods represented a negligible part of US
consumption, but by the late 1970s they came to dominate consumption
of many common categories of consumer goods, from apparel and toys to
electronics and, increasingly, motorcycles and cars. From the very first begin-
nings of this trend, these consumer goods came predominately from East
Asia. This trend, which continues today, has had dire consequences for US-
based manufacturing of non-durable consumer goods, but was at the same
time a major factor in the development of manufacturing competences of
Asian firms and, by implication, in the general economic growth of Asian
economies. The ability of US, and soon after also European, retailers to find
alternative sources of supply and weaken the competitive position of domes-
tic brands increased the relative power of retailers over manufacturers.
The final aspect of the global retail revolution is the transformation of
consumption.4 The role of large retailers in globalizing consumption patterns
has been largely ignored in favor of more striking references to McDonaldiza-
tion and other similar putative processes of the globalization of American
brands, products, and popular culture. We believe that the transformation of
consumption brought about by the large retailers has been both more subtle
and ultimately more consequential than what such examples centered on
particular companies and products suggest. The issue is one not of
homogeneity versue diversity, globalization and localization, but rather of
the global convergence toward certain types of retail markets, product worlds,
and expectations of choice.
This convergence has increasingly created new types of consumers, as well
as an array of new types of retailers that cater to these consumers. Retailers
have been able to create new consumer markets throughout the world, not
simply because they offer cheaper prices, for that is usually not the case, but
rather because they promise a new way of life for people who come to see
themselves in a new light.
Social scientists have known for a long time that people consume what they
do as a means of conveying to others a sense of who they are as individuals.
Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was the first social
scientist to develop a demand-driven theory of the economy. He showed that
the logic of consumption was to convey a sense of self-worth to others by
means of making invidious distinctions. People who regard themselves as
privileged in one way or another will use status-marking objects and actions
6
Introduction
as a way to establish their distinctiveness. For Veblen (1899), writing in the

Gilded Age, this distinctiveness was based on a class identity, and to establish
oneself in the upper class was to create an image of non-utilitarian consump-
tion of goods and time, which is what he called “conspicuous consumption”
and “conspicuous leisure.”
A long line of sociologists have substantiated Veblen’s insights: consump-
tion and stratification go hand in hand. But more recent researchers (e.g., Holt
1997) have also qualified these insights by showing that class stratification is
not what it used to be. When asked, almost everyone in the US with any
means whatsoever put themselves into the middle class. Although the actual
items of consumption vary greatly from person to person, the invidiousness
attached to objects and actions cannot be comfortably ranked by class posi-
tion. Instead of class, objects and actions increasingly attach themselves to
lifestyles, which are only indirectly associated with class and income. Today,
lifestyles, not class, are the vehicles of self-representation and also of stratifi-
cation (Holt 1997).
The core of this phenomenon is to see that retailers today, in whatever
business, have entered into a virtual, and sometimes an actual, conversation
with their customers. Customers discover who they are by exploring what is
being offered to them, and, once those identities form and once those iden-
tities signify a lifestyle filled with ideal and material goods, retailers strive to
supply those goods, and in so doing expand the lifestyle. Demand-driven
retailing responds to buying. What is bought gets made, and more and more
of it, establishing a feedback loop.
What only the very rich could afford to do in Veblen’s time has now become
available, throughout the world, to people of a wide range of income cate-
gories. Instead of being synonymous with class, lifestyles themselves become
stratified according to one’s level of income. Eating foie gras in Paris and bird’s
nest soup in Hong Kong, playing golf at Pebble Beach and doing yoga at
Borobudur, climbing the Matterhorn, and snorkeling off the Great Barrier
Reef—all these are conspicuous activities that people can do today, even
with modest incomes. And the very rich may not even have the most fun
anymore. Only the very poor and dispossessed get left out, and the knowledge
of their exclusion makes their plight all the more unbearable. For everyone
else, an array of lifestyles is there for the choosing. Select the lifestyle that suits
you, refine that lifestyle in terms of reachable goals, Google those goals on the
Web, and, presto, here they are: travel agents to help you arrange your trip,
retailers to give you a price and a delivery date for the objects you want to
buy, clubs to join to help you become sophisticated consumers of that acti-
vity, even friends and potential friends with whom to enjoy your way of life.
This is not Veblen’s world, but it is the world we live in today, a variegated
and expanding world of diverse lifestyles and identities that go with them.
7
However anachronistic they may be, these lifestyles and identities are neces-
sarily contemporary ones. They are up to date precisely because retailers and
other purveyors provide the necessary accoutrements to establish a contem-
porary way of life. Without these retailers, a particular lifestyle might be
difficult if not impossible to establish: difficult to find the right stuff, difficult
to find others to associate with, difficult even to know about. Demand-driven
retailing helps define and fill out lifestyles that would hardly exist otherwise.
It is also clear that, outside Europe and the United States, the feedback loop
between retailers and the new consumers has helped to create new identities
out of the apparent convergence that so many people have observed. Music,
movies, the Internet, technology hardware and software, vacations and tour-
ism, strategic English, standardized national languages, houses that call for
interior decoration, cuisines that require specialized kitchenware, occupations
that necessitate a standardized education—the list of convergences go on and
on. But what this listing obscures is the fact that these are the very media of
differentiation.
Demand-driven retailing allows consumers to create distinct worlds out of
standardized points of entry. The youth of each country use cell phones to
text to their friends and create their own rap songs; in turn, both media relay
to the audience what it means to be young and in a particular place. Bolly-
wood helps Indians to understand who they are or might be, a fact that can be
shared with movie-goers around the world, who in turn can understand who
they are not. Google and other Internet search engines adapt to each locale, as
well as to differentiate amongst locales, and Google and the other search
engines are strictly speaking demand driven; they rely on information fed by
its users.
The standardization of entry points encourages cultural differentiation,
encourages the formation of new worlds filled with new identities to
explore. Mathews and Lui (2001) show, in their fine collection on consum-
erism in Hong Kong, that shopping in Hong Kong has become a way of life,
not a Western way of life, but a new Hong Konger way of life. Chua, in Life Is
Not Complete without Shopping (2003), makes the same argument for Singa-
pore. In both locations, a unique consumer culture has emerged, including
styles of clothing, home decor, movies, and food. Mona Abaza (2001) lets us
see that shopping malls in Cairo offer a new space for Egyptians, not as
Westerners, but as Egyptians forging new identities to fit the times, for
women who are finding a space away from Islamic restrictions, for couples
who can look into each other’s eyes longingly and without shame. In Golden
Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, James Watson and colleagues (2006)
look at variations in how customers in different Asian societies respond to
McDonald’s, and make it clear that there is nothing uniform in the diffusion
8
Introduction
of McDonald’s in Asia. Like everything else, McDonaldization is a source of

differentiation, the globalization of differentiation.
Large Retailers and their Impact on the Global Economy
The retail revolution today engulfs the world economy. Despite the obvious-
ness of this transformation, and despite the fact that consumers experience its
effects every day, there has been very little research and very little writing that
explore the dimensions and effects of global retailing. To be sure, Wal-Mart
has been in the news and under the pen of many writers, often bitterly
criticized for its employment practices and for its ability to drive out local
retailers from the communities in which it builds new stores, and occasionally
praised as a champion of efficiency and consumer well-being (Bianco 2006;
Fishman 2006; Lichtenstein 2006, 2009). While somewhat overshadowed by
this focus on Wal-Mart, other large US retailers—such as the rapidly growing
Costco, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walgreen’s, and Best Buy; e-commerce
leaders such as Amazon, eBay and Dell; even those less stellar performers such
as Sears and Kmart, and Federated and May Department Stores;5 and super-
market chains such as Kroger, Albertsons, and Safeway—have also contributed
to the recent wave of interest in retailing and retailers. In Europe, the spotlight
has been on European retail giants, such as Carrefour, Tesco, Metro, Schwarz,
and Aldi and their efforts to integrate the EU retail market, expand interna-
tionally, and meet the competitive challenge posed by the ultimately unsuc-
cessful entrance of Wal-Mart into Germany and its successful move into Great
Britain.
This reportage, however, addresses only a small piece of what is a much
larger and much more complex phenomenon, a veritable transformation of
global markets for consumer goods, and of the global economy as a whole.
Market making
The chapters in this book analyze the scope and effects of the world’s largest
retailers in terms of their market-making activities. By the term “market
making” we mean something that is often overlooked in economic analysis
but is very important for the analysis of economic development and
globalization: large retailers “make” the markets for those products that they
sell. Often in fierce competition with each other, retailers assiduously calcu-
late how to generate, channel, and capture consumers’ demand. They locate
store sites and establish websites, select the mix of goods and services, set
prices and plan promotions, advertise and manage manufacturers’ and their
own brands, process and facilitate thousands of consumer transactions. In
9
doing this, retailers create and expand consumer goods markets, and shape
consumers’ preferences and behavior.
Large retailers do not only make consumer markets; they also make “sup-
plier markets.” Capturing sizable shares of the actual consumer markets for
products, large retailers gain commanding positions to structure and organize
suppliers for the products they sell. Conventional thinking describes retailers
as middlemen, the passive conduit between manufacturers and consumers.
The retail revolution, however, has made retailers proactive agents in design-
ing products, organizing suppliers, and even shaping consumers’ behavior. As
brand-name merchandiser Apple Computers did for the iPod, retailers often
create whole new markets—on both the consumer and the supplier side.
Understanding this fact allows one to track the changing role that manufac-
turers have had in the emerging system of global markets. For most consumer
goods, the manufacturer has become a contingent supplier of the goods it
makes, one of many firms that could manufacture comparable goods. The
markets in final goods, in turn, structure the markets for intermediate and
primary goods.
By being able to establish markets for the final goods they sell directly to
consumers, large retailers also shape global markets for many other goods and
services as well. Their decisions on which manufacturers to select, where those
manufacturers are to be located, what exact products the manufacturers
should make, under what conditions the manufacturers will make and pack-
age and deliver these products, and what price retailers will pay the manufac-
turers for all these goods and services are amongst the most significant factors
that shape the contemporary global economy. The concentration of global
manufacturing in East Asia, the rise of huge contract manufacturers, the
development of global logistics—these are but a few of the cascading effects
of the retail revolution that we will explore in this book.
Size and concentration

The largest global retailers are very large indeed. From 2002 on, Wal-Mart has
often topped the list of the world’s largest companies (measured by revenue
size), edging out the oil giants Exxon Mobil and Shell Oil. Nine other retailers
(Carrefour, Home Depot, Metro, Ahold, Schwarz, Tesco, Kroger, Costco, and
Target), although smaller than Wal-Mart, have also found their way into the
top one hundred largest global companies over the last five years of the decade,
and are consistently ranked amongst the largest firms in their home countries.
These firms are also amongst the largest private employers in their home
countries, with Wal-Mart being the largest in the world.
The global spread and huge size of modern retailers are new things. Until
the 1980s, retail sectors in most countries were highly fragmented; most retail
10
Introduction
Table 0.1. Retail concentration in grocery trade, select economies, 2005 (%)
Country % share of top five Country % share of top five

retail firms retail firms
Finland 90 Netherlands 62
Australia 83 United Kingdom 59
Ireland 80 Italy 35
Germany 70 United States 34
France 70 Japan 11
Spain 65 China 6
Sources: Planet Retail, Euromonitor, authors’ estimates.
stores were small, locally owned shops, and large chain operators were more
an exception than the rule. More recently, with the phenomenal growth of
Wal-Mart and “category killers” in the USA, and with the consolidation of the
European retail market, mostly by German and French retailers, concentration
in global retailing has been rapidly increasing. In some smaller European
economies, a few major retailers came to dominate large parts of the overall
retail sector. Table 0.1 shows the proportion of the grocery trade, traditionally
the largest retail sector, controlled by the five largest firms in select developed
economies and China.
The absolute size of the US market has so far precluded the levels of concen-
tration reached in smaller economies. In the comparable-sized EU-15 market,
the concentration ratio is around 25 percent, while in the Asia-Oceania
region, it is no more than 13 percent. However, if the huge and diverse retail
sector is further divided into subsections, the concentration ratios are much
higher. In the United States, as Table 0.2 shows, some of the major retail
sectors, including the “general-merchandise” sector (corresponding to the
last two rows of Table 0.2), exhibit very high concentration ratios. In each of
these sectors, there are “category killers,” such as Home Depot and Lowe’s, or
CVS and Walgreen’s, which dominate the category. Moreover, the share of
general merchandisers, such as Wal-Mart and Costco, in the sales of apparel,
consumer electronics, and groceries is often higher than that of the major
specialty retailers.
This trend of increasing retail concentration is particularly significant in
some smaller economies around the world that have recently deregulated
their retail markets and opened them to foreign investment. These economies
have seen astonishing increases in retail concentration take place during a
very short period of time (Reardon et al. 2007; see also Chapter 10 this
volume). For instance, the market share of top-ten food retailers in Greece
grew from 18.5 percent in 1990 to 72 percent in 1999, and in the Czech
Republic, from less than 10 percent in 1993 to over 50 percent in 2005.
11
Table 0.2. Retail concentration, market share of top firms, United States, 2002
Sector Four largest firms Twenty largest firms
Total retail 11 23
Electronic shopping 29 51
Clothing stores 28 52
Grocery stores 31 55
Health and personal care 46 60
Electronics and appliance 44 61
Shoe stores 40 68
Book stores 66 74
Office supplies 78 81
Home improvement centers 91 93
Department stores 72 99
Discount stores, warehouse, supercenters 94 99
Source: US Bureau of the Census (2002).
The impact on retail structures

What is the impact of the rapid increase in size and market share of the largest
retailers on the rest of the retail sector? First, there are concerns about the
changing competitive structure of the sector, including issues of market
power, collusion, anti-competitive practices, and the decline of consumer
choice. When measured at a national, let alone the global level, retail concen-
tration is still relatively low compared to the concentration in most
manufacturing sectors. However, competition between retailers takes place
not within an abstract space of a retail “industry,” but in local markets, and it
is not unusual for such markets to be dominated by a few large retailers.
Oligopolistic competition can be very intense, but it also creates opportunities
for price collusion and other forms of anti-competitive behavior. Neverthe-
less, there is little evidence of a decline in retail competition in developed
economies; if anything, the low profit margins of the largest global retailers,
their cost-reduction focus, and their success in entering new markets, all point
to intensification rather than a decline of competition. There is even less
evidence that the increase in retail concentration has led to higher prices for
consumers, although this issue continues to be monitored and investigated by
various government agencies.
The second concern regarding the impact of big retailing business refers to
the competitive threat that large retailers pose to small ones. This concern
goes well beyond the issues of competition and efficiency. Throughout the
world, small retailing establishments represent the most numerous form of
small business. As shown in Table 0.3, even in the most developed economies,
characterized by the domination of large operators and by relatively low
12
Introduction
Table 0.3. Number and density of retail establishments, 2001
Total retail Total retail Retail establishments

firms (000s) establishments (000s) per 1,000 inhabitants
United States 444.5 694.3 2.5

Canada 57.6 110.3 3.6
Germany 268.5 412.9 5.0
United Kingdom 231.5 308.5 5.2
France 319.5 368.1 6.2
Turkey 514.3 517.8 7.9
Japan 1,215.0 1,222.1 9.6
Brazil 1,154.7 1,660.3 10.0
Mexico 1015.7 1091.0 10.9
India 10,585.5 11,165.0 11.0
Italy 653.1 749.4 13.0
China 16,875.4 20,287.2 15.9
Spain 548.2 685.5 17.4
Greece 167.6 188.1 17.8
Note: These numbers do not include gasoline stations and car dealerships.
Sources: Euromonitor (2002).
density of retail establishments, most retail firms operate only a single store.
In the US retail sector, arguably the most advanced in the world, almost
80 percent of retail establishments have fewer than ten employees, account-
ing for 15 percent of all firms of that size in the economy.
Small retailing businesses often serve as a substitute for social welfare
mechanisms, especially in developing countries, with a high proportion of
self-employed, underemployed, and part-time workers. In addition, the large
number of retail proprietors and entrepreneurs and their embeddedness in
local communities give small retailers a measure of social and political impor-
tance that often exceeds the lobbying power of the big retailers. Hence, in
most developed countries, the government regulation of retail competition
typically includes measures that specifically protect small retailers from the
competitive threat posed by the large retailers. These measures take the form
of price regulations, strict zoning and development laws, limits on operating
hours, and so on. Ostensibly, they sacrifice a degree of efficiency that comes
with the expansion of the big retailing business in favor of alternative goals
such as consumer convenience and equity, preservation of local communities,
and environmental protection. However, just as in developing countries
where similar measures are defended more directly in terms of the protection
of domestic retail sector against foreign corporations, the impact of these
regulations on consumers’ welfare is at best ambivalent, and often negative,
thus favoring the special interests of small retailers over those of the consumer
majority.
13
Large retailers and their suppliers

The impact of large retailers is not limited to the retailing sector. Since the late
1970s, the early phase of what we described above as the retail revolution, an
increasing number of industry observers have been noticing the shift in
market power from manufacturers to retailers.6 Large retailers, it is argued,
are increasingly able to squeeze their suppliers and induce various forms of
concessions. These concessions range from direct price discounts to large
buyers, to shelf fees and trade promotions. Several purported causes for this
power shift have been identified, including the already noted increase in retail
size and concentration, technological advances that allow retailers to use
point-of-sale data directly to assess consumer preferences, the decrease in
effectiveness of mass media as marketing channels, and the rapid globaliza-
tion of consumer goods industries. In addition to getting better purchasing
terms on branded consumer goods, large retailers have also benefited from
being able to procure an increasing amount of competitive private labels (store
brands) in most major categories of consumer products. Store brands bring
higher margins to retailers and enhance their negotiating power in dealing
with the manufacturers of branded goods. At the same time, since the suppli-
ers of store brands are typically smaller than the brand manufacturers and
operate in highly competitive markets for undifferentiated products, they also
have less negotiating power in the marketing channel.
The shift of marketing-channel power toward retailers has also led to the far-
reaching reorganization of the structure of supply chains. As Chapter 7 shows,
as retailers and brand-name marketers take more responsibility in organizing
and controlling their suppliers, the orientation of supply-chain management
shifts from production innovations and distribution efficiency to quick and
flexible adjustments in response to the changes in consumer demand. The
traditional distinction in marketing literature between push and pull market-
ing, both conceived as manufacturers’ strategies, has gradually given way to a
more general conceptualization of marketing channels as driven either by
manufacturers’ push or by consumers’ pull, the latter type being, in fact,
governed by the retailer, who has privileged access to the data about consumer
demand.7 In terms of logistics and operational efficiency, retail-driven chains
are often seen as more responsive and transparent, better able to control stock
levels, and characterized by less adversarial relations between manufacturers
and retailers. The concepts such as “just in time,” “quick response,” and
“efficient consumer response” signify this reorientation in supply-chain col-
laboration and management.
The distinction between retail-driven and manufacturer-driven supply
chains has also been used extensively in the global commodity chain, or
value-chain, approach, in order to describe different forms of global
14
Introduction
“production networks.” Gereffi (1994b) emphasized the importance of

large global buyers, both retailers and brand-name marketers, in the for-
mation and control of global interorganizational networks, particularly in
labor-intensive consumer goods industries such as apparel, toys, furniture,
and some sectors of consumer electronics. Buyer-driven chains are charac-
terized by decentralized production networks, flexible specialization, and
the asymmetry of power between large buyers from developed economies
and their smaller suppliers, located mainly in developing countries.
Subsequent research in this tradition has highlighted the variety of inter-
organizational relations in global production networks, and in particular
the empirical importance of “modular production networks” (Sturgeon
2002; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005; Bair 2009) based on loose
contractual relationships and the relative autonomy of large OEMs from
their retail customers.
Technological change and productivity

Besides increasing market power and interorganizational control over their
smaller competitors and suppliers, the big retailers have also been a major
driving force in the adoption and diffusion of technological and managerial
change. Since the 1980s, rationalization initiatives and technology adoption
pressures—from bar codes and scanning devices, to electronic data inter-
change, direct store delivery, and quick replenishment, to integrated logistics
solutions and vendor-managed inventory—have increasingly flowed from
large retailers to their suppliers. Large retailers were not the pioneers of devel-
oping and using new technologies, including the information technology
that was the most dominant “general purpose technology” of the second
half of the twentieth century; the latter’s implementation in manufacturing
predates the first retailing applications by almost two decades (Cortada 2004).
However, once the changes in retailing reached a critical mass, which in the
USA occurred in the early 1980s, the sector was not only profoundly trans-
formed; it also induced substantial further changes in the wholesaling, trans-
portation and logistics, and manufacturing industries.8 While grocery retailers
led the way in the early adoption of point-of-sale technology, including
scanning devices and bar coding, retailers and brand marketers of apparel
were the first to implement just-in-time methods and electronic data inter-
change, thus driving the diffusion of technological innovation amongst their
suppliers (Abernathy et al. 1999; Chapter 2 this volume). By the mid-1980s,
both types of technological developments converged in the hands of large
general merchandisers, which emerged as the main driving force in the inte-
gration and reorganization of retailing and supply chains.
15
By the 1990s, these new, “lean retailers” had already garnered enough size
and momentum for the productivity gains to become apparent at the aggre-
gate level of the retail industry, as well as in wholesaling and logistics. US
retailers led the way, a fact highlighted by a series of McKinsey Global Institute
studies on sector-level productivity in developed economies. These studies,
summarized by Lewis (2004), suggest that one of the main reasons behind
the robust productivity growth that the US economy has largely enjoyed since
the mid-1990s has been the ability of large US retailers, led by Wal-Mart, to
restructure the retail industry as well as a number of related sectors. Retailing
and wholesaling sectors contributed about half of the US productivity growth
acceleration in the second half of the 1990s; Wal-Mart alone was responsible
for 4 percent of this growth, and the competitive pressure it exerted on other
retailers, as well as on wholesalers and suppliers, accounted for about twice as
much.
Leading European retailers, such as Carrefour, Tesco, and Metro, have similar
levels of productivity as Wal-Mart and other large US retailers, and were also
amongst the early adopters of new technologies. Yet, hampered by restrictive
regulations, European retailers influenced their respective national retail sec-
tors less than did US retailers, and their recent expansion has been due mainly
to their aggressive pursuit of internationalization opportunities. As a result,
while the productivity growth in information- technology-intensive indus-
tries, such as automobiles, industrial machines, computers, and consumer
electronics, has been equal or higher in the EU than in the USA, the productiv-
ity growth rate of distributive trades remains much lower (Denis, McMorrow,
and Röger 2004).
The productivity-enhancing effects of large retailers’ drive for efficiency are
felt globally, even when those retailers themselves operate in only a handful of
countries. Most large retailers source their products globally, and so their
productivity gains create spillover effects in their supply chains. Global sour-
cing predates the globalization of retailing and has already played a major role
in the development of export-led, or, to use a more appropriate term intro-
duced by Feenstra and Hamilton (2006), “demand-responsive” economies.
The “Asian Miracle,” certainly the most striking example of economic success
in the twentieth century, was to a large extent induced and supported by the
efforts of US retailers to generate, channel, and organize “intermediate
demand,” thus creating global economic linkages between American consu-
mers and Asian manufacturers. This demand-responsive development did not,
of course, stay limited to the export-oriented consumer goods industries, as it
triggered a cascading series of changes through sectors producing intermediate
inputs, logistics, financial and business services, and so on.
The resulting transformation of the overall economy, including the pro-
cesses of industrial upgrading and the emergence of the elaborate division of
16
Introduction
labor between East Asian economies, has also changed the social fabric of
Asian societies and the geopolitical situation in the Pacific region. The Asian
Miracle also often served as a role model for development policies in other
parts of the world, although with much more modest results. As a conse-
quence, a country’s degree of economic development became almost synony-
mous with the ability of its export-oriented industries to produce
technologically sophisticated, high value-added goods.
Impact on labor markets

Big retailers are also big employers. Wal-Mart alone employs more workers
than the five leading global car-makers, General Motors, Ford, Daimler
Chrysler, Toyota, and Volkswagen, combined. Overall, the retail sector acc-
ounts for about 13 percent of private-sector employment in the EU and
almost 20 percent in the USA. In developing countries, the share of retail
employment is typically lower, accounting, for instance, for just over 5
percent in China and around 10 percent in India. In most economies, a
major share of the retail workforce is either employed in small retail firms
or self-employed. In the EU, the proportion of retail employees working for
“micro-enterprises” (fewer than ten employees) ranges from over 70 percent
in Italy and Poland, to less than 30 percent in the United Kingdom, Nether-
lands, and Germany; in the USA, the estimated proportion is around 20
percent.9 The rise of big retail chains has generally led not only to a decline
in the share of small business employment and self-employment, but also to
an overall increase in retail employment, both in absolute terms and in
relation to the rest of the economy.
Retailers also tend to employ fewer skilled workers and pay lower wages
than their counterparts from other industries. This trend is especially visible in
the USA, where a high overall level of income is combined with a relatively
low minimum wage and the domination of large retailers to create a signifi-
cant concentration of low-paid workers in the retailing sector. These types of
employment generate major concerns about the shift in the overall labor
market from higher-wage, typically unionized, full-time manufacturing jobs
toward low-wage, low-benefits, part-time retail jobs. These concerns notwith-
standing, the ability of large US retailers to create new jobs at a time when the
rest of the economy, and in particular the manufacturing sector, had not
experienced stagnant or declining labor markets, had been a major factor in
keeping the overall unemployment rate at an acceptable level and easing
the structural adjustments in the economy. At the same time, the sluggish
domestic expansion of major European retailers, induced partly by restrictive
regulation, played a role in the maintenance of higher unemployment rates in
their domestic economies.
17
As with market power and productivity, the impact of large retailers on labor
markets is not limited to the retail sector. While a part of the shift from
manufacturing to retail jobs may be attributed to expected, and perhaps
unavoidable, structural adjustments in a developed service economy, US re-
tailers are also playing a causal role in the decline of domestic manufacturing
employment by their relentless pursuit of cost reduction and their global
sourcing strategies. The outsourcing of manufacturing, and, increasingly, of
service-sector jobs, has played a prominent part in recent public debates about
competitiveness and the long-term prospects of the American economy. It is
evident that large retailers are amongst the drivers of this process, as their
relations with their suppliers provide a major mechanism through which the
forces of global competition induce structural changes in local economies.
Impact on consumers
As we mentioned above, the effect of large retailers on consumers and their
shopping and consumption patterns is quite obvious and quite pervasive; yet
it has attracted somewhat less attention than the other effects discussed so far.
The fact that large modern retailers bring lower prices to the consumer is well
established and separable from the concerns about anti-competitive practices
and local price discrimination. The role of large retailers in standardizing retail
formats, product assortments, and shopping experience is less well documen-
ted, partly because these effects are more difficult to measure. The global
diffusion of modern retailing formats is perhaps the most observable of
these effects. Supermarkets, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants
have been successful in many different socio-cultural contexts and at various
levels of economic development. Large “combination stores” selling general
merchandise and groceries under the same roof, shopping malls, and big-box
specialty stores (“category killers”) are less universally adopted, but the main
reason for their slower diffusion seems to be restrictive regulation rather than
the lack of consumer acceptance.
The standardization and global diffusion of retail formats go hand in hand
with the standardization of products and product assortments. Even when
most products are sourced locally, as is generally the case in food retailing,
large global retailers are able to benefit from the procurement of global brands
and from the standardization of the merchandise mix. Outside the realm of
cars, consumer electronics, and a few luxury items, there are few brands that
are truly global, and this facilitates the attempts of large retailers to promote
globally their own store brands, and, even more importantly, to turn them-
selves into globally recognized brands.
All of this does not just standardize the ways of meeting the demand for
consumer goods, but also helps define and change this demand. It is
18
Introduction
somewhat ironic that, because of the efforts of a whole generation of histor-

ians, we know more about the role of the early modern retailers, above all
department stores, in creating various forms of mass consumption in Europe
and the USA of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than about how
contemporary mass retailers shape consumer behavior around the world.
Early modern retailers, mass marketers, and advertisers redefined the context
and meaning of shopping, and educated the consumer about new goods and
new techniques of consumption. This process continues unabated today, and
on a much broader scale. The transformation of developing nations such as
China and India into consumer societies must be considered one of the most
profound and far-reaching social processes that will define the twenty-first
century, just as the emergence of the first mass consumer society in the USA in
the early 1900s, and the adoption of its main features by West European
countries after the Second World War, defined the dynamics of the twentieth
century.
At the same time, the talk about “consumer power,” one of the buzzwords of
the current marketing research, only obscures the fact that contemporary
retailers play the same role as their predecessors, creating markets and shaping
consumer behavior and attitudes; indeed, the current era of “consumer-driven
marketing” is hardly an exception in the long history of mass marketing of
consumer goods. Retailers, as well as the producers of consumer goods, have
always expended a major share of their marketing efforts on figuring out
consumers’ preferences, and have also always tried actively to shape these
preferences. New information technologies have certainly enhanced their
ability to perform the former task and shifted the competitive advantage to
those firms who can access and analyze vast streams of point-of-sales (POS)
data. Still, technological advances do not make the efforts to shape consumer
preferences and behavior less important, let alone obsolete. If anything, the
ability quickly and efficiently to gather information about consumer demand
for particular products has enabled all major players in consumer goods
markets to intensify the efforts to shape this demand by managing product
life cycles, consumption complementarities, sales promotions, and other
marketing strategies in more sophisticated and elaborate ways. Similarly,
while the argument can be made that new contexts of shopping, such as
Internet-based retailing, allow consumers to gather product and price infor-
mation, compare retailers, and avoid impulse buying to a much higher degree
than ever before, it can also be argued that these opportunities are created
within an overall context of markets and product worlds of increased com-
plexity (see, e.g., Rezabakhsh et al. 2006 for a general discussion of the “con-
sumer power” thesis).
19
Overall impact on economic development

The retail revolution has changed and continues to change the organization of
the global economy. That is the conclusion that runs through this book. Our
analysis shows that these changes brought on by the retail revolution are both
pervasive and decisive. They are pervasive because retailing has changed both
developed and developing economies, though in somewhat different ways. As
we explain in the following chapters, large retailers are now able, directly and
indirectly, to create and maintain both consumer and supplier markets. After
the 1960s, as US and European retailers began more intensively to focus their
selling efforts in their relatively wealthy consumer home markets, they also
began, with equal intensity, to develop supplier markets in some of the least
developed areas of the world to provide them with the goods that they would
sell to their customers. The simultaneous growth of a global logistic infrastruc-
ture allowed these retailers to perfect the strategy of maximizing their leverage
in both types of markets at the same time, and in the process to create both
competent suppliers at one end and interested consumers at the other.
As competition amongst large retailers increased, this strategy continued to
evolve over the remaining decades of the twentieth century and drove a
global economic reorganization. Step by step, the locus of manufacturing
shifted from the developed to the developing economies at the same time
that developed economies began to split between high-end professions and
low- and medium-level jobs in service and retailing.10 Both the well-developed
and the rapidly developing economies became increasingly demand respon-
sive; both became integrated into a global economy reorganized around supply
chains.
These changes in the global economy have been not only widespread, but
also critically important for the rapid economic development that is occurring
today in China and India, as well as in other locations around the world. The
creation of supplier markets in East and South East Asia from the late 1960s on
(namely, in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore), which
in the years after the Second World War were amongst the poorest countries in
the world, began a process that led to the industrialization of these countries
and to a steady increase in the standard of living for most of their citizens.
These people have now become investors and consumers in their own right,
and, throughout these countries, global retailers, some locally and some
foreign owned, have opened new consumer markets.
As people in these economies became wealthier and as currencies in these
countries appreciated, core contract manufacturers in these East Asian econo-
mies moved all or part of their production offshore. Within a decade or so,
many of these contract manufacturers had moved portions of their business to
China, where they became the leading investors in China’s export-oriented
20
Introduction
manufacturing and were instrumental in driving China toward industrializa-

tion. The decade after China’s membership in the World Trade Organization
was a period when exports grew at an unprecedented rate of nearly 25 percent
per year, and during this period over 50 percent of China’s exports flowed out
of factories wholly or partially owned by non-Chinese nationals (Blonigen
and Ma 2010; Feenstra and Wei 2010). Most of these exports are from contract
manufacturers.
China is now the world’s second largest economy, still well behind the USA,
but moving ahead of Japan. The expansion of export-oriented contract
manufacturing in China is the primary reason China has grown so rapidly.
In fact, as Blonigen and Ma (2010) show, exports from foreign-invested firms
have increased rather than decreased since 2000, which is a clear indication
that contract manufacturing is driving China’s export expansion, and the
growth in global retailing is driving the growth in contract manufacturing.
We show in this book that the reason global retailing has grown so rapidly
since the late 1980s is because large retailers have dramatically increased their
international business. Large retailers are opening stores around the world,
especially in developing markets. New consumer markets are being tested,
new suppliers and new supply lines are being created, and new product worlds
are being established where they did not exist before. The global recession that
started in 2007 caused an abrupt drop in exports from China, but this decline
quickly turned around. As always occurs during post-Second World War
recessions, consumers buy what they need at the cheapest possible prices.
Discount retailers do well in recessions compared to their upmarket competi-
tors, and in this recession retailers such as Wal-Mart and Costco in the USA
and Carrefour and Aldi in Europe continued to thrive. For example, Wal-
Mart’s international division alone accounted for over $90 billion in sales in
2008, a more than 50 percent increase in two years.
In the post-Second World War era, global trade imbalances appear, on the
surface, to be imbalances in production, on the one side, and consumption,
on the other side. In the early twenty-first century, the global trade imbalance
is seen in terms of too much production in China, and too much consump-
tion in the USA. Seeing this imbalance as a problem of market equilibrium,
economists argue that at some point trade needs to equal out. But, if we
examine the underlying mechanism that is driving international trade, there
is no reason to believe that a tendency toward equilibrium is a characteristic of
international trade today, let alone that it will be “restored” at some point in
the future. Retailers and merchandisers, not central banks, manage supply
chains, and in so doing help to determine the balance of trade between
nations. Macroeconomic levers, such as interest rates and the relative value
of currency, may influence where contract manufacturers locate their factories
and where retailers source their goods. Social insurance and welfare policies
21
may affect how much consumers spend and on what types of goods. But it is
always the role of market makers to create and organize markets, on both the
consumer’s and the supplier’s side, and thus they play the decisive role in
organizing the global economy. Insofar as the most important of these market
makers today are to be found amongst the ranks of large retailers and mer-
chandisers, they are the key to understanding and perhaps also to resolving
the problems of imbalances in the global economy. Whether their actions will
lead to the decrease in trade imbalances, by, say, developing and expanding
domestic demand in China and other major developing economies, or will
continue to exacerbate the trends of the last couple of decades, remains to be
seen. What is certain is the fact that retailers will have a large and growing
impact on global development for a long time to come.
Overview of the Book
The four parts of this book survey the dimensions and effects of the rise of global
retailing. The two chapters in Part One provide the theoretical and historical
background to understand the ongoing global retail revolution. In Chapter 1,
Petrovic and Hamilton outline the market-making perspective. They argue that
conventional economic analysis routinely misses the importance of markets as
marketplaces, as institutionalized locations where transactions occur, and of
market making as an organized process of intermediation, a process linking
sellers of goods and services with buyers of the same. Without markets and
without firms whose specialty is creating and maintaining marketplaces, the
core feature of all capitalist economies—namely, the exchange of goods and
services—would seem difficult, if not impossible, to analyze, and yet modern
economic analysis pays scant attention to such phenomena and so pays little
attention to retailing as an important economic activity. This chapter corrects
this deficiency by providing the conceptual dimensions of the market-making
perceptive.
In Chapter 2, Abernathy and Volpe demonstrate the impact of technologi-
cal innovations, both as they enable retailing, such as the effect of contain-
erized shipping on global sourcing, and as transforming factors, such as the
impact of information technology in the development of lean retailing tech-
niques. These technological innovations have had profound effects on many
dimensions of retailing, including merchandising (that is, product mix and
variety), retail formats, services offered (including payment), and supply-
chain management and sourcing strategies. Most of these major technological
innovations have generally occurred in other sectors of the economy, but
retailers have been able to utilize them for their own advantage, either directly
or indirectly, in selling products. Some examples include the development of
22
Introduction
the railroads and improved ocean transportation, which allowed retailers

efficiently to expand the geography of their supply base. The shopping-mall
and big-box retailers were dependent on the automobile and the interstate
highway system, to bring them both their customers and their products.
Innovations such as bar codes and checkout scanning, plus payment by credit
or debit cards, would be impossible without the revolutionary changes in
computer hardware and software.
The three chapters in Part Two examine the development and institutional-
ization of consumer markets. In Chapter 3, Petrovic addresses American retail
formats and their global diffusion. All major formats that characterize con-
temporary retailing, from supermarkets, shopping malls and big-box stores to
gas stations, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants, originated in the
USA and then spread around the world. The first part of the chapter deals with
the origins and evolution of these formats within the US context. After
discussing the evolution and the limits of the department store, the only
major retail format that was developed simultaneously on both sides of the
Atlantic, the chapter delves into the interwar period and the two major “retail
revolutions” that shaped modern retailing throughout the twentieth century:
the proliferation of chain stores and the introduction of a large self-service
store, the supermarket. Petrovic emphasizes the continuities between major
retail formats—the supermarket as the department store for food, the discount
store as the hard-goods supermarket, the mall as the planned suburban mix of
the department store and specialty store—and their convergence toward the
modern big-box chain-store format.
The second section of Chapter 3 deals with the spread of American retail
formats, first to Western Europe, then to Japan, and then, from the 1970s,
throughout the world. The Americanization of global retail, somewhat iron-
ically, has rarely been carried out, at least until very recently, by American
retailers. Instead, it was mostly the local retailers who adopted and adapted
American methods to their local economies and regulatory environments.
During the first, limited phase of internationalization, the most successful of
such operators from Western Europe introduced modern retail formats
throughout Western Europe, but also to Latin America, Eastern Europe, and
Asia. The newest phase of retail globalization, from 1990 on, is characterized by
widespread and systemic adoption of modern retail formats in developing
economies as well as by accelerated internationalization of major retail players.
Still, as is repeatedly emphasized in the chapter, even the largest global retailers
have achieved only a limited presence outside their home region, and thus we
can expect the process of retail globalization only to increase in scope and
importance in the coming decades.
In Chapter 4, Wortmann examines European retailing and its global expan-
sion. Within the European Union, retail markets are still highly fragmented in
23
many respects. The national retail systems in Europe are significantly different
from one another, not only because of differences in consumer preferences,
but also because of variations in regulations affecting retailing. The most rapid
transformation in retailing in the opening decade of the twenty-first century
has occurred in Eastern Europe, in many cases with West European retailers
playing a leading role. Many of the changes in Europe mirror those in the USA,
with the development of self-service, larger store-size formats, horizontal
expansion, and retailer-led efficiency gains in the supply chain. However, in
no European country are these changes as advanced as in the USA. The higher
level of regulation not only hampers these changes, but modifies them, lead-
ing to new innovations and dynamics in some cases.
Wortmann focuses on retailing in four major countries. In France and Great
Britain retailing regulation has been relatively weak, so many of the trends
have materialized to a much greater extent than in Italy, which has very rigid
regulations. Germany is somewhere in between, attempting to limit store size,
but not merchandising practices, which has led to the growth of small-store
hard discounters, such as Aldi. In part because of the limited opportunities to
expand domestically, some of the major European retailers have been leaders
in the global expansion of retailing. The chapter includes case studies of some
of the major European retail innovators, such as Carrefour, Aldi, Metro, and
Tesco, as well as a general overview of the internationalization efforts of
European retailers.
The effects of the more recent technological changes, the development of
the Internet and of overnight delivery services, are described by Kotha and
Basu in Chapter 5. The Internet and online retailing have given rise to new
retailing formats for selling traditional products, such as in the case of books
and Amazon.com. In addition, these new technologies have generated new
forms of market making. Perhaps the best and most successful example is
eBay.com, which brings together millions of buyers and sellers in a cyber
marketplace. Online shopping has also impacted incumbent retailers,
whether they see the Internet as just another marketing channel or a new
approach to retailing. Some existing retailers, such as Wal-Mart, are trying
largely to use an online presence to leverage their physical assets, but that
could change in the future. Online retailers are still in the process of discover-
ing what works and what does not. Broadband connectivity has given a major
boost to online retailing. The next stage, just beginning to emerge, may be
global online retailing. Finally, the easy availability of information on the
Internet, especially with the development of sophisticated search engines,
such as Google, has helped create more knowledgeable consumers. Even if
they do not buy online, by using the Internet, many consumers are now much
better informed than in the past. When potential customers who have
24
Introduction
searched on the Internet come into automobile dealerships, they may literally
know as much about the car models and pricing as the salesperson.
The four chapters in Part Three examine the continuing development of
global supplier markets and the formation of global retail supply chains led by
large retailers and brand-name merchandisers. In the first chapter in the part,
Chapter 6, “Supplier Markets and the Asian Miracle: The Rise of Demand-
Responsive Economies,” Hamilton and Kao demonstrate that the industriali-
zation of East Asia that started in the late 1960s and that is known as the
“Asian Miracle” is most accurately seen as the widespread development of
supplier markets for mostly American brand-name merchandisers and retail-
ers. Asia’s export-driven industrialization quickly led to the development of
“demand-responsive economies.” Using Taiwan as an example, the authors
show, step by step and industry by industry, how, through the actions of big
buyers, Asian economies in the 1970s and 1980s became organized backwards
from the development of consumer markets in the USA to the creation of
supplier markets for consumer goods in East Asia. Using extensive interview
data from Taiwanese business people, the authors present a number of case
studies showing the process of economic integration (and disintegration)
around the development of supplier markets. Such supply-chain-driven
economies are the essence of the demand-responsive economies that emerged
in East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century and that are charac-
teristic of economies around the world today.
In Chapter 7, “Global Logistics, Global Labor,” Bonacich and Hamilton
explain the crucial role played by logistics providers in creating the supply
chains of global retailers. Goods produced in Asia and elsewhere via global
sourcing must be moved to the United States in a timely manner. To meet this
need, a complex logistics system has developed, which includes everything
from infrastructure to logistics management. Some retailers have large inter-
nal logistics management departments. Others rely on third-party companies
that specialize in logistics. Global sourcing has been dependent on the simul-
taneous development of crucial supporting actors, including ocean shipping,
railroads, the trucking industry, air freight companies, and warehousing op-
erations. A key factor has been the evolution of inter-modal transportation
systems that can move containerized shipments quickly from Asia and else-
where to points throughout the USA and Europe.
The development of a global logistics infrastructure has made retailers’
management of their supply chains a global reality. Because of their tremen-
dous volume, and concomitant power, large retailers have played a major role
in shaping the development of global economies, including, most impor-
tantly, China, which has become the world’s leading exporter of consumer
goods. Through their management of supply chains, retailers are able to put
tremendous pressure on their suppliers to achieve flexible production and cost
25
controls. This pressure translates in company-level policies that directly influ-

ence wages and working conditions for employees in manufacturing and
logistical service alike.
In Chapter 8, “Making the Global Supply Base,” Sturgeon, Humphrey, and
Gereffi analyze the co-evolutionary character of market making, in which the
initial trials with global sourcing in the 1970s and 1980s by a few retailers
helped spur the development of an increasingly competent group of contract
manufacturers mainly located in East Asia. These contractors acquired the
capabilities necessary to produce products to the specifications of leading
firms in the West. Some of the early deals were made directly with Asian
manufacturers, whereas others relied on Asian intermediaries (for example,
trading firms) to organize and coordinate production in Asia. These early
moves provided both an example and a ready-made supply base for other
retailers and branded marketers, not yet engaged in global sourcing.
The increasing competence of these contract manufacturers also dovetailed
with a trend toward outsourcing by manufacturing firms in the USA, includ-
ing leading companies in technology-intensive sectors such as electronics,
accelerating the creation of a global supply base of contract manufacturers.
In the 1990s, as retailers and brand-name merchandisers passed more respon-
sibility on to contract manufacturers for process development, material sour-
cing, and even some aspects of product design, the global supply base began to
be populated by large, “full-package” contractors with a full range of capabil-
ities. Today, the depth and breadth of the global manufacturing supply base,
along with new Internet-based tools for buyer–supplier matchmaking and
operational coordination, may be opening a new stage in the development
of global sourcing.
In Chapter 9, “Transnational Contractors in East Asia,” Appelbaum exam-
ines a subset of these contract manufacturers in much greater detail. The
trends just discussed in Chapter 8 have given rise to a few giant transnational
contractors, based primarily in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and China,
that operate factories throughout the world. The emergence of these giant
transnational contractors portends a dramatic shift in the organizational
power within global supply chains, which may provide a counterweight to
the growing power of large retailers. Global supply networks have typically
been buyer driven, with large retailers and branded manufacturers playing the
central role in their creation and coordination. Most of the contractors have
been small, reinforcing their vulnerability to big buyers. However, this situa-
tion is changing with the emergence of large contract manufacturers. This
chapter examines several examples of these giant contract manufacturers. The
Taiwanese multinational Nien Hsing Textiles is the world’s largest manufac-
turer of denim fabrics and denim garments. With a customer base that in-
cludes most of the major designer brands, Nien Hsing Textiles has factories in
26
Introduction
Taiwan, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Lesotho. Yue Yuen/Pou Chen, based in Hong
Kong and Taiwan, with a global workforce of 242,000 employees, is the
world’s largest maker of branded athletic and casual footwear. Its dominance
shapes the relative bargaining power it has with such major brand-name
merchandisers as Nike and Reebok. Increasingly, large contractors, and not
the retailers, manage the supply chain. Their emergence, along with the
pressure of lean retailing for cost cutting and quick response, is also compel-
ling retailers to shift critical functions such as inventory management to these
giant contract suppliers. China’s rise as an industrial power may further
change global supply-chain dynamics, with synergies arising from its supplier
clusters, investment in the next generation of technologies, and the rapid
growth of its domestic retail chains.
The two chapters in Part Four detail the multiple linkages between retailing
and manufacturing for two very different industries. In Chapter 9, “The
Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing,” Senauer and Reardon examine the
global transformation in the food industries and grocery retailing. Histori-
cally, some of the original global market makers were merchants trading
agricultural commodities, and such companies remained dominant until the
mid-twentieth century. In the period after the Second World War, major food
manufacturers, such as Coca Cola, Kellogg, and Nestle, became leaders in the
creation of multinational consumer markets for their products. In the last
quarter of the twentieth century, food retailers, including food service opera-
tors, began to play a major role in creating global consumer and supplier
markets. The fast-food companies, a uniquely American format, led the global
market making. McDonald’s, which in 2010 operates in some 120 countries,
excels at the creation of consumer markets for its format, offering a mix of
products and service, which in many of the countries it has entered literally
did not exist previously. At the same time, it has created a supplier base in
many of these countries.
Consumers have now become accustomed to having fresh fruits and vege-
tables year around and exotic food products from abroad, thanks to global
sourcing. A small number of European companies, including Carrefour,
Ahold, and Metro, along with Wal-Mart, are dominating the international
expansion of food retailers. The spread of supermarkets in developing
countries, typically regional chains, but also major global retailers, is having
a profound impact on their agricultural systems. It is reshaping the supply
chain for locally sourced products, all the way back to the farm level. Super-
market chains want to deal with a small number of reliable suppliers, not
hundreds of small peasant farmers. A contractual arrangement is frequently
established with a few “preferred suppliers” who can meet their standards.
In Chapter 10, “Market Making in the Personal-Computer Industry,” Kraemer
and Dedrick analyze a similar transformation in the personal-computer (PC)
27
industry. In the traditional structure of the PC industry, PCs were marketed

through a variety of channels from direct sales forces, to corporate resellers and
electronic superstores. The connection between the PC manufacturer and the
final consumer was weak (via advertising) or non-existent. In the mid-1990s, a
major shift began in the US market toward direct sales of PCs, led by Dell
Computer, which allowed PC-makers better to match demand and supply.
Dell Computers pioneered a new type of PC-maker, which was basically an
assembler of parts made by contract manufacturers and assembled according
to the consumers’ specifications. This approach cut out the distributor and
retailer, putting the PC-maker/brand-name merchandiser in the role of market
maker. Direct sales accounted for over half of all PC sales by 2005, dominating
the corporate market and augmented by the consumer acceptance of e-com-
merce. The direct sales model has made smaller inroads outside the USA.
By 2007 there were three major retail models in the US PC consumer market.
The first is the traditional indirect model and the second is the PC-maker as
retailer. The third, which might be called the retailer as PC-maker, includes the
private-label brands sold by some retailers, such as Wal-Mart and CompUSA,
and local “white-box” makers that sell primarily to small businesses. In terms
of impacts on suppliers, PC-makers have adopted just-in-time practices and
moved to vendor-owned inventory to reduce costs. As PC firms have focused
on retailing and marketing, they have outsourced even new product develop-
ment to a contingent of original design manufactures, mostly in Asia.
28
Part One
The Market Makers:
A General Perspective
1
Retailers as Market Makers

Introduction
When we think of capitalist economies, we think of organizations, or of

markets, but rarely of both together. On the one hand, modern capitalism
seems to be all about large organizations—big corporations and powerful
states—and the impact of their decisions on our lives. On the other hand,
modern capitalism is also seen as consisting of markets, self-organizing enti-
ties that emerge spontaneously, without anyone’s command or authority,
from the actions of many independent actors. The major actors of the capital-
ist economy may be, and typically are, powerful and highly organized; yet the
basic economic structure within which they act is understood, both descrip-
tively and normatively, as spontaneous and self-organizing.
The opposition between markets and organizations shows up in many
economic theories. For example, when theorists conceptualize communist
and capitalist economies in the abstract, they cast them as polar opposites.
The former is described as a command economy, in which the state makes
decisions about the allocations of goods and services, and markets play no
role; the latter, as consisting entirely of self-organizing markets with no
imposed organization, as a “market economy” where all buyers and all sellers
decide, by means of prices, which and at what cost goods and services will be
available. Similarly, transaction-cost theorists (e.g., Coase 1937; Williamson
1975) divide the geography of capitalist economies into “markets” and “hier-
archies,” a division that led one economist (Bowles 1986: 352) to characterize
the transaction-cost theorists’ view of “the capitalist economy as a multiplicity
of mini-command economies operating in a sea of market exchanges.”
The perceived absence or presence of imposed organization in markets is, of
course, an artifact of the theories used to understand economies. These the-
ories require that “organization” and “market” be set in opposition to each
other, with the market derived from Adam Smith’s conception of the “invisi-
ble hand,” and with organization cast as the “visible hand” (A. D. Chandler
1977) by which the wills of owners and managers are exercised.
In these and many other examples, the term “market organization” is an
oxymoron, a situation where more of one leads to less of the other. The subject
matter of industrial organization, a subfield in economics, is a good example
of how these two words do not get along. The primary topics of interest in this
subfield are actions of organizations, states, and firms that impede or other-
wise corrupt the “normal” operations of self-organizing markets. The result is
the economics of “imperfect competition” whereby strategic organizational
action leads to “market failure.” Organizations’ attempts to act on, rather than
strictly within, self-organizing, competitive markets naturally lead to pro-
blems, inefficiencies, and suboptimal outcomes.
The market-making perspective introduced in this volume seeks to elimi-
nate this artificial opposition between organization and market, by bringing
in the ideas of market making and market makers. In this perspective, markets
are not simple, spontaneously occurring, self-organizing structures. Rather,
they are made, maintained, and reproduced by economic actors, typically
large firms, that act as market makers. The results of their actions are the
markets of the modern economy—institutionally complex, consciously gen-
erated structures that enable and facilitate large numbers of transactions
between large numbers of diverse trading partners.
Our perspective thus shifts from abstract, purely conceptual markets of
standard economic theory, depicted by hypothetical supply-and-demand
curves, to retail stores, stock exchanges, trading companies, showroom floors,
all places where transactions occur, and to the institutional arrangements that
facilitate those transactions. It also shifts from looking at organizations as
either irrelevant for or detrimental to the functioning of the market, to under-
standing their crucial role in making market transactions possible.
Economic theorists, of one type or another, have been little interested in
market making and market makers. This disinterest is a result of two deeply
ingrained habits of thought in economic analysis. The first one, the equilib-
rium bias, we have already hinted at above. It treats markets as simple,
spontaneously emerging mechanisms of exchange and thus does not allow
for the ideas that markets could be institutionally complex and need to be
consciously created and maintained. In fact, markets are treated as non-
institutions, as paradigmatic examples of the celebrated “invisible hand”
that operates automatically and should be protected from being tampered
with. In such a perspective, market making can refer to little more than
guaranteeing the rules of the game, by the exchange parties themselves or by
an external legal–political authority, and perhaps regulating certain irration-
al behaviors of economic actors.
32
The equilibrium bias has often been identified and criticized for its theoreti-
cal shortcomings and policy implications. The other type of bias, although as
commonly espoused in economic analysis and no less detrimental to the
understanding of markets, is less well recognized.1 We refer to it as the
“productionist” bias, since it is based on the belief that markets are a some-
what epiphenomenal aspect of the economy when compared to the funda-
mental economic reality of production. The productionist bias does not deny
the possibility of market making in general, but rather deprives it of economic
significance. The main activity of firms, it contends, is to produce valuable
goods and services. The way those are procured in the market, and the activ-
ities involved in such a procurement, are peripheral and incidental to what the
“real” economy is about.
The two types of bias may seem barely related, or even opposed to each
other. However, in the history of economic analysis they have often gone
hand in hand, partly because they have both chosen to ignore the institu-
tional aspects of markets and market making. Ever since Adam Smith wrote
about the pin factory and about the natural laws of supply and demand in The
Wealth of Nations (1977 [1776]), most economists have assumed that firms are
about the organization of production and that markets, for better or worse, are
self-organizing. The coexistence of the two biases was predicated on the
division of labor that produced a mutual lack of interest in each other’s
models. A theorist enthralled by the idea of spontaneous, automatic competi-
tive markets will in principle have little interest in the specifics of organiza-
tional activity, yet would still be likely to see production as the core concern of
the firm and market making as at best an imperfection and at worst an attempt
to tamper with the invisible hand of the market.2 Similarly, a theorist who
sees the economy as a system of production will have little interest in explor-
ing the details of the “distribution realm” and will probably accept that in
complex modern economies markets are effective, if not necessarily perfect,
mechanisms for the distribution of goods and services.3
Even when the two biases were at odds with each other, this only strength-
ened their prejudice against market making. For instance, a relatively strong
belief by some productionist theorists that the market system is an inefficient
mechanism of distribution, to be supplanted by some version of a “planned”
economy, zeroes in on market-making activities such as pricing and advertis-
ing as the best example of everything that is wrong with markets. On the
equilibrium side, transaction-cost theorists reject the view of the firm as a
production function, preferring to represent it instead as an alternative and
complement to the market system; yet this market-and-hierarchy approach
never broaches the issue of firms as market makers.
Both types of bias, thus, render market making irrelevant if not outright
harmful: a market imperfection or market tampering in equilibrium theories;
33
an appendage to or wastage of production in productionist ones. We will

discuss these biases throughout this chapter as an alternative to the market-
making viewpoint.4
Mass Production and Mass Selling:

The Origins of the Productionist Bias
It is an open question which of the two aspects of the creation of the modern
economy is more important: mass production or mass selling.5 One thing is
certain, however; each depends on the existence of the other, and for this
reason, they both developed concurrently. However, a lot more has been
written about mass production than about mass selling. In the initial burst
of industrialization in the nineteenth century, the factory system was so new
and so instrumental in changing the organization of work that mass produc-
tion got the lion’s share of the attention. When Karl Marx joined Friedrich
Engels to write The Communist Manifesto (1849), the smoke stacks of England’s
factories were what seemed to be the most important part of capitalism, and so
they wrote about the emergence of new forms of production and labor, which
resulted, they believed, in vastly cheaper prices of goods that people every-
where, if they had those products in front of them, would obviously want to
buy. But Marx and Engels did not discuss the selling part of the equation; that
was assumed to be unproblematic. Later, when Marx wrote his tome Das
Kapital (1867), he did not talk about selling there either. In the “Preface” to
the first German edition, Marx said he studied the factory system in England
because that is where the “iron laws” of capitalism were being worked out, but
he did not go to Latin America or India or South East Asia to see how English
textiles were being peddled aggressively by British, Indian, and Chinese mer-
chants. Obviously, for Marx the laws of capitalism were laws about the orga-
nization of mass production and not of mass selling.
Marx and Engels were not the only ones to concentrate on making rather
than selling goods, for most other writers have done the same. Factory pro-
duction, however, was only half of the matter. With new forms of production
in the nineteenth century came the necessity to remake existing markets and
to find new markets, both of which in turn fostered more production. But
which came first, markets or factories? This is a chicken-and-egg question. It is
clear, however, that British colonialism was in full bloom before the textile
factories in England’s heartland reinvented themselves through mechaniza-
tion and expanded their production to meet the merchants’ demand for more
and more goods. And for many years, well into the nineteenth century,
the markets for English textiles and other English products expanded. From
the very beginning, the markets for selling those products were vastly more
34
developed and more complexly organized than the factories making them,6
but, in the eyes of nineteenth-century observers, the more tangible factory
production seemed far more amazing and more revolutionary in every way
than selling goods.
The productionist view of the economy became even more dominant by the
end of the nineteenth century.7 In the second half of the nineteenth century,
large industrial enterprises emerged in nearly every sector of production and
played a central role in the expansion of national economies. These enter-
prises were at the forefront of capital formation and productivity growth. They
were the leaders in the utilization of science and technology, and the electrical
and internal-combustion machines that these firms invented, used, and sold
captured people’s imagination. These machines, marveled worldly wise Henry
Adams (1973 [1918]) in the opening years of the twentieth century, were
“dynamos,” “symbols of infinity,” signs of a limitless future.
To be sure, the techniques employed in mass selling even if less dramatic
were no less elaborate. Most of the selling that occurred in the early years of
European and American capitalism made use of organizational forms that
preceded the development of large mechanized factories. English and Scottish
trading companies and merchant houses (Chapman 1992; Jones 2000), ethnic
merchant groups (such as those organized by Chinese (Hao 1986; Suehiro
1989) and Indians (Markovits 2000, 2008), who followed British colonialism
around the world), and various types of specialized wholesalers organized
much of the selling to general stores and specialty shops, which in turn sold
to final consumers.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, a major new market format,
the department store, emerged in the European and American urban centers,
attracting enormous crowds and capturing the imagination of that genera-
tion of urban dwellers, many of them recent migrants from the countryside
(see Petrovic, Chapter 3 this volume). For those who could not access depart-
ment stores on a regular basis, mail-order businesses, some operated by
department stores, and some, especially in the United States, as independent
operations, brought the new world of modern, mass-produced consumer
goods straight to the home through their detailed, lavishly illustrated cata-
logs. By the early twentieth century, department stores such as Bon Marché,
Macy’s, and Harrods, and mail-order catalogs such as those for Sears and
Montgomery Ward’s, rivaled in size and organizational complexity the big-
gest manufacturing operations of the time, and were certainly more visible to
the masses of urban residents. The pervasive productionist bias, however,
made most economic observers of the time downplay the innovativeness
and importance of these mass retailers. The selling activities of mass manu-
facturers, and their innovations in advertising, marketing, pricing, franchis-
ing, and so on, also received little attention.
35
While we cannot survey in detail the entire history of market organization

in this volume, the important point is that the markets for buying and selling
goods and services have always been organized in some way by innovative,
entrepreneurial, and most often large-size market makers. The growth and
changes in these markets are essential aspects of the development of global
capitalism as we know it today, but they are rarely analyzed in this context.
The market-making perspective is a way to pay close attention to the changing
organization of mass buying and selling and the actors that effect such a
change. This perspective targets the institutional contexts in which transac-
tions take place and the strategies the chief players in those markets use to
attempt to structure the opportunities for buying and selling. The institutions,
strategies, and players themselves all co-evolve, and it is this co-evolving mix
that is the primary subject matter of the market-making perspective. The
perspective, therefore, complements, but also expands beyond, the preoccu-
pation with analyzing the organization of industrial enterprises. The evolu-
tion of mass production has been described in detail by a generation of
business historians, following A. D. Chandler’s pioneering work on The Visible
Hand (1977).8 However, without understanding the organization of mass
selling, this preoccupation with mass production is the sound of one hand
clapping.
The Idea of Market Making
Market making is a concept rarely used in general economic analysis. It is,

however, a specialized term used to analyze the role of traders (a brokerage
firm, a bank) in organized financial markets (O’Hara 1995; Abolafia 1996). The
trader, the so-called “market maker,” is the intermediary between those who
want to sell and those who want to buy specific stocks or commodities. The
trader provides the necessary connections and liquidity to “make the market.”
As their assigned duty, market makers maintain both sides of the market and
prevent the market from stalling because of insufficient supply or demand at
any given moment. Without this institutionalized role in such an institution-
alized setting as the stock market, large numbers of transactions would be
difficult, if not impossible, to arrange. Market makers, intermediaries in an
institutionalized setting, make these exchanges possible.
Daniel Spulber (1996, 1998) extended the use of this idea of intermediaries
and market making to formulate a more general theory of economic activity.
Using transaction-cost theory, Spulber sees market making as a process of
intermediation that is ubiquitous in the larger economy. In all kinds of
settings, market makers reduce the cost of exchange between potential buyers
and sellers by creating market structures: “Intermediaries seek out suppliers,
36
find and encourage buyers, select buy and sell prices, define the terms of
transactions, manage the payments and record keeping for transactions and
hold inventories to provide liquidity or availability of goods and services”
(Spulber 1996: 135).
According to Spulber, intermediation encompasses most activities in retail-
ing, wholesaling, and financial sectors, as well as a substantial proportion of
those in business service and manufacturing sectors. He calculates that inter-
mediation accounts for somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the
US gross domestic product.9
Clower and Howitt (1996: 24), approaching the issue from a post-Keynesian
perspective, describe market making in even broader terms:10
Trading opportunities are given not randomly by nature, or forced upon agents by
“authority,” but are given instead by business firms: wholesalers, retailers, brokers,
jobbers, manufacturers, banks, commodity exchanges, auction houses, employ-
ment agencies, mail order businesses, shopping malls, newspaper publishers,
accountants, doctors, lawyers . . . [These types of firms] find it profitable to organize
markets in such a way as to make trading relatively convenient and inexpensive
for other transactors.
Most of this previous conceptual work on market making aims to broaden

the economist’s concept of markets, but still keep the resulting conceptualiza-
tion within a conventional economic framework. With the market-making
perspective that we propose, this same idea of market making is expanded yet
further in order to examine categories of economic activities that the more
standard approaches do not adequately analyze, including global retailing and
the economic changes that have resulted from these activities.
Market making refers, thus, quite literally, to the activity of creating and
maintaining markets (that is, trading opportunities) for oneself and one’s
trading partners. Market making includes a number of routine business activ-
ities, such as pricing and contracting, finding and retaining trading partners,
and getting products into and through the market. But it also involves an
element of institutional entrepreneurship, of finding and implementing novel
ways of facilitating trade through intermediation, and this is what distin-
guishes market making from the standard notion of marketing.11
Retailers as market makers

The claim that retailers are market makers may sound all too obvious, since
one of the most visible functions of retailing is to create and maintain market-
places. Retailers choose store locations, display and advertise goods, set prices
and provide transaction facilities, and perform many other tasks directed
toward creating convenient trading opportunities for consumers. By and
37
large, however, mainstream economic analysis has ignored such market-

making activities, preferring instead to describe markets as abstract spaces
where supply meets the demand, and where trading opportunities, along
with the rules and mechanisms of trading, emerge spontaneously out of the
necessity for exchange.
In the modern economy, markets neither emerge spontaneously, nor equil-
ibrate automatically. Marketing and market making are difficult, costly, and
time-consuming activities that most firms, of whatever type, have to do. This
includes the so-called industrial, or manufacturing, firms, as US automobile
manufacturers have learned time and again. Retailers, however, not only
create and maintain markets, but also intermediate amongst multiple and
quite diverse markets. In their role of integrating many supplier and consumer
markets, for a large array of diverse products and services, they become market
integration specialists, and it is in this role, as increasingly all encompassing
and efficient market integrators, that retailers have transformed the global
economy.
To understand this role, it is useful to contrast the more conventional
productionist view of retailers with their role in the market-making perspec-
tive. Many analysts view retailers, not as market makers, but rather as conduits
for goods being passed from manufacturers to consumers. Normally called
marketing or distribution channels, these conduits depict the organization of
the economy from the viewpoint of manufacturers. A number of years ago,
Hollander (1964: 18) described these conduits as follows:
We often think of a marketing channel as a sort of “bucket brigade” that passes

goods from manufacturers to consumers. Moreover, we can easily come to think of
that brigade as if it were composed of a limited number of institutional types who
perform relatively standardized duties and who are represented by little boxes
bearing the conventional letters “M,” “W,” “R,” and “C” for manufacturer, whole-
saler, retailer, and consumer.
Although highly stylized, this depiction captures the essence of the conven-
tional view of retailers. The retailers’ position in this linear progression always
comes later in time and in importance to the “fundamental” process of
actually making goods. More importantly, in this orderly flow of goods,
there is an implicit theory of markets as being functional to the operation of
the chain, with markets occurring at points where goods supposedly change
hands. Manufacturers buy inputs, make a product, and sell that product to
wholesalers, who in turn sell the product to retailers, who then “clear” the
channel when they sell those products to final consumers. In this portrayal,
manufacturers play the pivotal role of being the buyers of inputs who crea-
tively combine those inputs to make a product that is in turn sold to final
consumers. Market making is an unimportant activity along the chain, and
38
instead represents primarily the final consumers’ demand for the manufac-
turers’ products.
If we conceptualize the economy in this fashion, then marketing and
market making become synonymous and largely the responsibility of manu-
facturers who make products and of brand-name merchandisers (for example,
Nike) who promote them.12 Distribution channels and supply chains become,
conceptually, the same thing. The role of retailer is reduced to that of service
provider, the supplier of locations where particular goods can be purchased,
the last link in a long chain of transfers that ends with the final buyer. This
portrayal assumes that the primary transaction in this lineal chain continues
to be the exchange between manufacturer and final consumer; all the rest are
merely transfers with a suitable mark-up for costs incurred (for example,
transportation costs) plus a suitable profit. This assumption maintains the
fiction that the overall chain can be represented conceptually and parsimoni-
ously by a supply and demand curve.
This is a productionist narrative of how economies work. Within this narra-
tive, there is an implicit critique of merchants and retailers as sometimes less
than honest and often greedy purveyors of products. This characterization
suggests that retailers’ organizations are less than efficient and, at times,
obstruct “normal” market forces through promoting cut-throat competition
and then selling goods at levels above or even below their “true price” merely
to drive out competition.13 Considering the pervasiveness of this account and
of the distrust of retailers implicit in it, we should not be surprised that
retailing has received scant interest from most economic observers of what-
ever discipline who are interested only in the “real” foundations of the
economy.
The market-making perspective provides another account of the same set of
activities told from the point of view of selling rather than making products.
The productionist version divides market players into singular functional roles
that efficiently link the supply (that is, the manufacturer) with the demand
(that is, the final consumer) for a good. By contrast, the market-making
perspective recognizes that markets and market making come in a remarkable
variety of types and levels of complexity; that market-making activities occur
at numerous points along the chain; that nearly every market player engages
in multiple roles; and that the link between supply and demand is a function
of market making and market makers, a link that is not well represented by a
supply and demand curve and equilibrating markets.
The multiplicity and complexity of markets and market roles

A firm’s primary business classification is often misleading. Although most
manufacturers do not sell directly to final consumers, they still engage in
39
advertising and other sales promotions, and most of them have marketing
departments. Most large retailers typically engage in wholesaling activities,
and occasionally also in product development and manufacturing. Brand-
name merchandisers (for example, Nike) are typically listed as manufacturers
when what they do is to specialize in product development and marketing,
but not in manufacturing or retailing. Other firms develop core competence in
managing and marketing portfolios of brands, without entering product
development and manufacturing activities. Still others, such as McDonald’s
and Starbucks, operate primarily as “replicators” of business formats (Winter
and Szulanski 2001). In order to analyze market making, therefore, we must
replace the standard distinction between manufacturing, wholesale, and retail
firms by a series of distinctions based on the complexity of markets in which
firms sell their products, as well as on their specific capacities and competences
in making those markets.
The first, and most basic, distinction is between two types of markets in
which firms buy and sell. On the one hand, there are inter-firm markets, often
called supplier or industrial markets, in which firms (for example, DuPont) sell
goods or services only to other firms, but not to individual consumers. On the
other hand, there are consumer markets in which firms also, or exclusively,
sell directly to final consumers (for example, Wal-Mart). The latter category,
which includes retailing firms, deals on average with more complex markets,
since consumer markets involve a larger number of trading partners (their
customers) whose demand is less rationalized, less predictable, and harder to
ascertain.
The second distinction is between firms that market their products to final
consumers only in limited ways—for instance, through media advertising and
sales promotions—and those firms that mount “full package” selling opera-
tions in consumer markets, such as retail stores, restaurants, and hotels. There
are many examples of firms (for example, Intel, Kraft Foods) in the former
category that are able to create and maintain consumer markets, even though
they do not sell directly to consumers.
The third distinction refers to the breadth of products sold, separating firms
that sell only a limited range of products defined by production or consump-
tion complementarities, from those that sell a broad range and variety of
products. The former category includes some specialty retailers, but also
firms such as Microsoft, Dell, and Nike, as well as car dealerships, gasoline
stations, retail banks, personal service providers, and so on. The latter category
contains general retailers, such as supermarkets, hypermarkets, and depart-
ment stores, but also many “category killers” whose merchandise assortment,
although somewhat specialized, still typically includes thousands of different
products (e.g., Best Buy).
40
Finally, a distinction can be made between firms that buy from few suppli-
ers, typically from large wholesalers, and those that deal with a large number
and variety of suppliers. Unlike the previous distinctions, this last one refers
strictly to inter-firm (supplier) markets, rather than consumer markets, and
captures the tendency of large general retailers to bypass traditional whole-
salers in favor of dealing directly with other types of suppliers.
How Retailers Make Markets
In addition to these distinctions based on the complexity of markets in which

a firm operates, we can also distinguish between market makers and market
takers—that is, between those firms that assume the primary responsibility for
making one or more of the markets in which they trade, and those that mostly
accept exchange institutions created by someone else. Retailers always play a
role of intermediaries and market integrators; they connect both supplier and
consumer markets, typically for a large number of different products. That fact
alone, however, does not make them market makers.
Before the twentieth century, with few exceptions, most retailers were
modestly sized, locally owned stores that received most of their inventory
from much larger wholesalers.14 These retail stores were market takers; they
operated within the framework that other powerful actors established. These
actors included, by the standards of the day, large industrial firms making
consumer products and an array of well-connected and territorially ambitious
wholesalers that sold many of these and other products to small stores.
Although these retail stores may have held, in remote locations, something
close to a monopoly position in relation to consumers, in relation to suppliers,
they were strictly market takers.
Such a structure persisted in most supplier markets for consumer goods until
recently. In the USA, where we find the earliest examples of the growth of
mass retailers, by the Second World War we can already distinguish two
parallel systems of selling consumer goods, one linking large “producers”
with small sellers, the other linking large sellers (such as Sears and A&P) to
small producers. By 1940, both accounted for about one-third of the total sales
of consumer goods in the USA. The domination of manufacturers and whole-
salers still persists, however, in many other economies, including Japan, the
world’s second largest retail market.
On the global level, however, the large retail chains of today, such as Wal-
Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, and Home Depot, are major market makers in both
their supplier and their consumer markets. Through their intermediary roles,
these retail chains connect thousands of suppliers with millions of consumers.
These retail chains are, however, not conduits; they are not passive vessels
41
used to pass goods along to consumers. They are, instead, the main players in
the game, several times larger than any consumer goods manufacturers, and
they earn their prominence by being specialists in connecting supplier and
consumer markets. These mass retailers use their leverage (that is, market
power) in one market to enhance their leverage in other markets. They use
their connections with suppliers to deliver just the right products at the right
price for their customers. They use their access to a huge number of customers
and potential customers to select and specify the products they sell and to
extract the best deals from the suppliers of those products. This leverage from
intermediation and market integration augments their capacity to make both
consumer and supplier markets. However, the ability to make these two types
of markets calls for very different market-making strategies in each market.
Consumer markets
Retailers of all types compete for consumers, and one of the ways that they
compete is in their ability to create a particular kind of marketplace where
particular kinds of products are sold. Retailers offer consumers ready-made
market mechanisms that facilitate exchange. These mechanisms come in
bundles or packages or formats that represent institutionalized market struc-
tures. A supermarket, a fast-food restaurant, a warehouse club, and a conve-
nience store are all examples of such standardized formats for obtaining food.
Retailers in each of these categories are market makers who assemble together
market mechanisms (pricing, advertising, product assortment) that match
their own competences with a perceived consumer environment.
In consumer markets, market making is, in the first instance, a competition
amongst and within market formats. Such market-making activities may include
competition within a well-recognized market category, such as price or service
competition between two supermarkets, or competition between different
market formats, such as the competition between, say, supermarkets, ware-
house clubs, and convenience stores. As Schumpeter (1950: 85) put it, refer-
ring to early twentieth-century retailing: “In the case of retail trade the
competition that matters arises not from additional shops of the same type,
but from the department stores, the chain store, the mail order house and the
supermarket.”
The competition “that matters,” then, is not about varying a few attributes
at the time, but rather is about devising “new ways of organizing things, new
sales–cost relationships, new methods of selling” (Bliss 1960: 72). This variety
of competing marketplace formats has resulted in big waves of innovation and
“creative destruction,” but, at any one point in time, multiple competing
formats coexist simply because the basis of competition is not, strictly
speaking, just about price. Warehouse clubs (Costco, Sam’s Club) and
42
convenience stores (7-Eleven, AmPm) sell some of the same products, but do
not compete with each other in terms of price for those products. 7-Eleven, for
example, taps a market of people looking for convenience or, perhaps, of
people needing a place to “hang out.”
Price competition is less important between than within formats. But, even
within formats, competition is primarily between retailers (that is, market
makers) and not products. For example, price competition between super-
markets commonly takes the form of some offering “everyday low price”
and others subscribing to a “hi–low” pricing strategy involving low margins
on sales items and high margins on other goods.15 Although couched in terms
of prices, this, in reality, is a competition that applies less to products individ-
ually than to the retailers themselves.
The competition within market formats may also emphasize the range of
products being sold, or the level of service, rather than price, as the main
competitive tool. This kind of “horizontal” competition also exists between
very different types of markets. For example, a large supermarket, such as
Whole Foods, which offers a wide selection of organic products, may be
competing with a small grocery store, with a large chain like Wal-Mart, but
also with a neighborhood restaurant or an antique shop. Although it does not
sell similar products and services as the latter two, Whole Foods may, for
example, draw consumers away from other locations, or it may even capture
a larger portion of the consumer’s budget, thus shifting the structure of
preferences for specific goods and services.
Another very significant strategy in making consumer markets arises
between manufacturers (or merchandisers) of branded consumer goods and
retailers who sell these goods. The former typically advertise their goods
directly to the consumer and thus engage in market-making activities in
consumer markets. The latter may prefer to stock a different brand, including
their own store brand,16 but are compelled, at the same time, to offer those
brands for which consumers may have developed preferences based on mer-
chandisers’ advertisements. By offering their private-label goods at a slightly
lower price, retailers hope to create a multiple-product market for their own
brand, as well as to place a ceiling on the price that manufacturers and
merchandisers want for the brand-name goods that they sell to retailers.
While retailers try to create a marketplace that is in some sense unique, they
also share many market mechanisms that retailers commonly use. This mix of
unique and common elements is what creates the condition for competition.
Each seller tries to persuade consumers—by its pricing, product assortment,
store location, service, and many other elements—to shop in a specific way
that best suits the seller’s competence in selling. Because sellers are likely to
adopt organizational innovations from each other, they are also likely to
emulate each other’s market-making strategies. The most common forms of
43
competition, then, include a large degree of emulation combined with strate-

gic differentiation on just a few dimensions. As a consequence, stores within
the same format that compete directly with each other typically resemble each
other.
Consumer markets are extremely competitive, more so today than ever
before. The range of formats and the range of selling strategies within formats
have increasingly made market making into highly specialized sets of activ-
ities that have grown ever more sophisticated and complex. In whatever
formats they use, retailers must continually adapt to constantly changing
technological environments and consumer trends. They are persistently
challenged to make new markets, as well as to retain existing markets. More
importantly, to compete effectively in consumer markets, all large and even
modestly large retailers must also be concerned with making supplier markets
as well.
Supplier markets
Unlike the horizontal competition in consumer markets, the competition in
supplier markets is typically referred to as being “vertical.” Competition in
supplier markets is a struggle amongst trading partners to define a market
structure for mutual exchange, a struggle to locate and refine the terms for
cooperation. This is competition amongst firms having different positions in a
supply chain, between, say, a manufacturer, a trading company, and a retailer.
The idea of verticality (for example, upstream and downstream) derives from a
production-centered image of the economy and does not capture the complex
firm and inter-firm structures that emerge in supplier markets and that we
discuss in Part Three of this book. Although rejecting the specific notion of
verticality, we shall nonetheless retain the label of vertical competition in
order to emphasize that such competitive relations often generate power
inequality amongst trading partners. In horizontal competition, since they
do not interact directly with each other, competitors do not have a position of
authority in relation to each other. In vertical competition between, for
instance, a retailer and its suppliers, one party in an exchange can directly
assert its market power to define the contractual foundations for exchange.
Economists conventionally define market power in terms of the firm’s
relative share of the market and its concomitant ability to influence the
market price for the product it is buying or selling. As noted above, this
definition makes market power into a market imperfection, a distortion from
the ideal type of perfectly competitive market where no market player, by
definition, can have (more than an infinitesimally small amount of ) market
power. In distorted markets, firms having high market power can exert various
types of price and non-price pressures on their suppliers and customers, and
44
can also easily enter collusive agreements, tacit or explicit, with other such
firms, thus forming a cartel.
Such a definition not only presumes that, in the absence of market power,
markets would be “naturally” balanced between manufacturer’s supply and
consumer’s demand, but also misses the type of market power intrinsic in
market making. Only when market power is defined more broadly as the
ability to shape the exchange structure—that is, as market-making power—
does the notion of vertical competition become subsumed under a more
coherent framework of market-making competition. The competition within
supply chains is rarely limited to bargaining over the price of a predefined
homogenous good. In fact, price may be relatively unimportant. The struggle
also typically involves bargaining over issues such as how and when the
product will be delivered, who will take the responsibility for packaging and
presentation, advertising and warranty provisions, and even what the product
itself should consist of. Given this complexity, it should not be surprising that
trading partners compete not only to determine the outcomes of market
negotiations, but also over the right to set the rules and mechanisms by
which these outcomes are typically determined.
Market-making power, then, can be defined as the power to impose organi-
zation on the market, the power to define the shape of the market for oneself
and one’s trading partners. This outcome of market making can be thought of
more generally as “market organization.” Market organization is typically
more complex than simply the organization of one’s supply or distribution
channels. Even in the same industry, supply chains vary in many ways, and at
each link there are usually multiple players that can deliver comparable goods
or services. For instance, on the one hand, large retailers, as well as brand-
name merchandisers, typically line up many manufacturers to make such
products as apparel or footwear. By being able to pick and choose amongst a
number of manufacturers, trading companies, and logistic firms for particular
goods or services, large retailers and merchandisers are able to influence, if not
set, the terms (including price) for market exchanges, not only for themselves,
but also potentially for other players in the market as well. On the other hand,
manufacturers typically try to negotiate with multiple retailers, thereby diver-
sifying market outlets for their products.
Market institutions
Competition and cooperation between various firms in inter-firm markets, as
well as between retailers in consumer markets, result in the creation of a
highly sophisticated and complex institutional framework within which buy-
ing and selling of consumer goods occurs in the modern economy. Various
elements of such an institutional framework define and stabilize expectations
45
of market participants and structure market transactions. Market makers,

however innovative and powerful, always operate within these structures,
even as they strive to shape and change them to suit their own organizational
competences.
We can distinguish amongst the elements of the institutional structure of
consumer goods markets by identifying their connections and closeness to
market transactions. Some institutions are directly related to market transac-
tions: money, credit, and other institutions related to exchange; location,
shape, facilities, and other elements of marketplaces (stores, shopping centers)
where transactions occur; standardized goods and services, their combination
into product lines and types, branding, advertising, and other institutions
related to products being sold. Typical ways of combining these market in-
stitutions lead to institutionalization of retail market formats (for example,
supermarket, department store) and categories (for example, grocery retailers,
general merchandisers, fashion retailers) that can be emulated and replicated.
All these institutions are made and reproduced by actions of many market
makers; yet they also provide the essential context in which market makers’
capacities and strategies evolve, and in which they compete with each other
for market-making power.
Other types of institutions, while not related directly and exclusively to
market transactions, are essential in enabling market making to occur and
market institutions to function. These include technologies involved in pro-
ducing, transporting, and delivering goods to stores as well as those that
enable stores to operate efficiently, and consumers to have access to those
stores. As Abernathy and Volpe (Chapter 2 this volume) demonstrate, such
technological inventions that we take for granted today were often developed
for purposes other than retailing, and then adapted with great success to
retailing. The post-1980s transformation of the global economy, led by
major retailers, is based on major technological advances we can see today
in most stores, such as bar codes, scanning devices, and computerized inven-
tory systems, but also, as described in Chapter 7, by the development of
distant ports, containerized shipping, and other elements of global logistics.
Of equal importance are institutions that shape consumer motivations and
behavior. The retailing rule of thumb is that people rationally buy what they
socially desire. Social desirability is directly related to highly localized dimen-
sions of social class, status, and lifestyle, which are in turn directly shaped by
various institutions, from the family and local community to mass media,
education, and politics. Consumers become competent market participants
mainly by participating in the market, but they also bring to the market many
other traits. Retailers and brand-name merchandisers, through analyzing POS
information, have increasingly been able to tap into these dimensions and
thereby to establish market-making feedback loops between themselves and
46
their customers. Manufacturers increasingly find themselves outside these

feedback loops and, therefore, find it necessary to connect themselves to
consumers through the organization of retailing, which often involves rede-
fining themselves as “vendors,” as participants in retailers’ supplier markets.
Increasingly, the primary form of producing consumer goods, contract
manufacturing, is, by definition, outside the loop.
Various institutions related to business organization and management, as
well as to inter-firm relations, are another major aspect of the institutional
environment of the markets. The evolution of firms is to a great degree shaped
by their participation in markets and their ability to act as market makers. Yet
firms also need to develop competences in many other realms, from research
and development to technologies of production, to management of human
resources, to dealing with legal, political, and other environments. In this
regard, we side with the growing literature on evolutionary and competence
approaches to the firm (Nelson and Winter 1982; Prahalad and Hamel 1990).
Although these approaches rarely recognize the strategic significance of com-
petence in market making, we see them as complementary to the market-
making perspective, as they illuminate other key aspects of firms’ performance
and evolution.
Finally, market institutions are embedded in legal and political institu-
tions, on several different levels, from local to state levels, and beyond, to
international contexts. While most contemporary economic theories, given
their equilibrium bias, tend to ignore both market organization and market
institutions, they do allow for the crucial role of the state in creating a legal
framework that ensures property rights and enforces contracts, regulating
certain less-than-rational behavior in markets and ensuring fair competition,
and promoting trade amongst nations—all this, in theory, in order to encour-
age entrepreneurial initiative and to allow open and competitive markets to
flourish spontaneously. Similarly, in productionist models, the state is the
primary institution that supports and coordinates strategic industries, deve-
lops and controls human capital (including managing the demands of labor),
and provides the necessary infrastructure for competitiveness, innovation,
and economic growth.
The market-making perspective acknowledges the importance of the state
and its policies, yet sees it as only one of the market-making organizations.
The state often acts directly as a market maker, by controlling major enterprises
or whole strategic sectors, and thus structuring market transactions within a
large part of the economy. At other times, its influence on market institutions is
less direct, if not less consequential. As discussed in Part Two, government
regulations, or the lack thereof, shape the development of specific retailing
formats and facilities, and often define the relations between retailers and
their suppliers. However, according to the market-making perspective, the
47
state’s power to make markets and influence market makers is always limited by
the institutional complexity of markets and the degree of entrepreneurship and
competence needed for market-making success. The more complex the mar-
kets, the more limited the state capacity to make them “from above.” This
complexity is why direct state control or ownership of the retail sector almost
always fails to deliver, especially when compared to the state’s role in purely
“industrial” sectors such as resource extraction (oil, mining) or the provision of
basic infrastructure (power, telecommunications).
Conclusion: Institutional Changes and the Co-Evolution

of Market Players
As they create market institutions out of the tools available to them in their
time and place, and in order to suit their organizational capacities, market
makers impose new organization on markets. The development and spread of
market institutions continually reconstruct the relationship between buyers
and sellers and thereby redefine the extent of the market.
In the following chapters, we examine such a co-evolution of market in-
stitutions, marketable products, market participants and market-making stra-
tegies. In Part Two, we address the evolution of consumer markets; in Part
Three, we trace the evolution of supplier markets; and in Part Four, we present
case studies combining both types of markets. By co-evolution, we mean that
institutions, products, participants, and strategies are all linked in a framework
of mutual causation. This framework of mutual causation is not obvious in the
abstract world of modern equilibrium economics, where homo economicus has
a constant presence across time and space, where firms are seen as production
functions or contract structures and not as actors, and where all markets,
whenever and wherever found, differ only in how close they approach the
“perfect” model of pure competition. Nor is this framework of mutual causa-
tion relevant for the productionist narratives, where production, and the
forces that shape production, are the only true factors in the evolution of
the economy. In contrast to these conventional approaches, we view all these
aspects of markets and market making as being in a constant process of
invention and re-invention.
For example, as Petrovic makes clear in Chapter 3, the institutionalization of
the supermarket format in the first half of the twentieth century necessitated
that manufacturers and retailers alike develop new strategies for selling pro-
ducts, that these products be reimagined and redesigned, and that consumers
start seeing themselves and the act of shopping in a different light. The co-
evolution of all these aspects of self-service shopping created an institution-
alized package that entrepreneurs could move across the retailing spectrum,
48
from food to clothes, to hardware, to consumer electronics, to scrambled

merchandising. This same institutionalized package, in turn, allowed a few
of the most successful firms to impose a new organization on, and create new
boundaries for, capitalist supplier and consumer markets for all types of goods.
Usually, such changes are incremental and remain that way, but occasion-
ally these incremental changes are so transformative that they fundamentally
alter the organization of national economies. The global development of
modern retail markets and of giant retailers that make those markets, in the
post-Second World War era, has been one of those transformative processes
that led to the emergence of the contemporary global economy.
Large multinational retailers arrived at the global scene late. This should not
be surprising, given that the complexity of markets they operate delayed their
growth and is still placing limits on their expansion. We can hardly imagine a
Wal-Mart, Tesco, or Carrefour that would command the same share of the
global retail market for groceries and general merchandise as Toyota, Exxon
Mobil, or even Dell Computers do in their respective sectors. Likewise, many
types of industrial and financial markets are far more integrated and more
globalized than retail markets.
However, the recent transformation of retailing worldwide has been pro-
found, as it has led to the rapid spread of the main retail formats and the
emergence of the first global retailers. Since the 1980s, retail market makers
have also exerted an unprecedented influence on the organization of many
other industries, becoming thus the leading force in structuring global supply
chains and other inter-firm relations. Moreover, the globalization of retailing
represents the main link through which consumers worldwide are increas-
ingly drawn into participating in the modern economy and its ever evolving
world of goods and services. All of this, we believe, indicates a new phase in
the evolution of the global economy, one that we may be justified in calling
“the age of global retailers.”
49
2
Technology and Public Policy: The

Preconditions for the Retail Revolution
Introduction
Many people living in Boston, Massachusetts, visit the Mall at Chestnut Hill
for their upmarket shopping. The Mall is located at the crossroads of Route 9
and Hammond Pond Parkway in Newton, one of the many upscale western
suburbs of Boston. The Mall follows the merchants’ dictum of locating stores
where it is easy for customers to drive to and park, with attractive merchandise
to make their visit a pleasant experience.
The Mall at Chestnut Hill is the present-day embodiment of the nineteenth
and early twentieth-century department store updated with ample parking for
today’s suburban shoppers. Richard Woodward (2007) of the New York Times
suggests that the present-day mall is but a modernized version of the Paris
arcades of the 1820s and 1830s, which he describes as follows:
Diminutive cathedrals to commerce and leisure, the arcades offered unheard of

amenities to the emerging class of bourgeois consumers. Gas lighting, heated
shelter from rain and mud, a panoply of goods and services in a contained space,
cafes and restaurants where you could rest and observe fellow lingerers—these
were a decided plus over the shopping experience of hunting and gathering all
around town.
The Mall at Chestnut Hill has the conventional two large anchor stores at
either end; in this case both anchors are Bloomingdale’s stores specializing in
different products at opposite ends of the two-storey enclosed atrium. Parking
spaces surround the Mall, and additional spaces are provided in a multi-storey
parking structure with a convenient covered bridge to the Mall. Beyond the
Bloomingdale anchors there are fifty-five other individual stores ranging from
Technology and Public Policy
Brooks Brothers, Coach, Ann Taylor, Barneys New York, Sur La Table, and
Apple Inc., to banks, three restaurants, and many small specialty shops.
Shoppers might have done pre-shopping on the Internet before coming to
the mall, some might have come in response to an advertisement sent to them
by mail, while others come just to have a good time enjoying the eye candy
and having lunch with a friend to cap off the outing. A few simply come and
sit in the overstuffed chairs in the lobby and watch the other shoppers.
Almost all shoppers come to the Mall with just a credit card—avoiding
carrying large amounts of cash—so that they can purchase whatever they
fancy, provided it is within their credit limit. When they enter the Mall,
they are probably unaware of the amount of technology and its sophistication
needed to keep the Mall and the stores running. Most of the technology is
hidden from view by careful design—the stores are providing an enticing
atmosphere with attractively displayed merchandise, not their back-office
technology. Technology is certainly visible in the Apple store, selling Apple
computers, iPhones, and iPods, along with the peripherals that make the iPod
the world’s most widely used MP3 player. But even here the WiFi system
connecting the displayed items to the Internet is happily running quietly in
the background throughout the store. Almost all of the technology necessary
for modern retailing was invented or developed outside the retail industry for
other applications or purposes. Over time, forward-looking merchants saw in
various technological advances an opportunity to enhance the retail shopping
experience, create new retail channels, and provide efficiently new and more
varied products. They adapted these technologies for use in their stores and
operations, forever altering the retail environment. In this way, technology
has become critical to modern retail market making.
Retail market makers who have exploited technology have done so in two
distinct ways. First, technology has been the basis for developing new retail
channels that are both pleasing and convenient for customers. This includes
enhancing traditional brick-and-mortar stores, as well as new channels such as
e-commerce, and Internet boutiques. Second, market makers have used new
technology to create more efficient supply channels expanding products for
retail selections, and to improve their organizational function. The technol-
ogy has put new products from around the world into retail stores and
expanded consumer choices at reasonable prices. This chapter will examine
the most prominent technologies responsible for today’s retail marketplace.
In later sections of this chapter we will trace the development of several
early disruptive technologies that have changed the face of American retailing
and manufacturing. We will start with the push of the railroad into the West
in the 1860s and the birth of mail-order market making by Montgomery
Ward’s in 1872. Then we will look at the effect of that most disruptive
transportation technology—the automobile—on big city retailing and the
51
beginning of suburban shopping, lead first by Sears, Roebuck and Co. in the
1920s. In 1956 two other important disruptive technologies were introduced,
one quietly and the other with all of the fanfare of an Act of Congress pushed
by the then President Dwight Eisenhower. The first of these two technologies
was the shipping container, as well as the container ships that transport
material around the world very economically; the other is the US interstate
highway system, which was so important in providing Wal-Mart, as well as
other big-box retailers, with locations for stores during their rapid expansion
during the 1960s and 1970s. By being amongst the first in the 1980s to use bar-
code identifiers and the Internet for ordering, Wal-Mart revolutionized supply
chains and subsequently expanded its stores to become the world largest
retailer. Ports for container ships, railroads, and interstate highway connec-
tions are the basic triad of modern intermodal transportation of global com-
merce. But first we will review some of the important contemporary
technologies, working partially in the background, that make modern retail
shopping so attractive to customers and so transformative to the global
economy.
Technology and Retail Channels

Stores
Much of the ease of use and general pleasantness of current retail channels
can be attributed to technology and the creative merchants who found novel
ways to employ it. The most obvious retail channels are the physical store
fronts reached from sidewalks, plazas, and shopping malls. The Mall at Chest-
nut Hill is just such an example; this type of marketplace leverages technology
to create the most enjoyable customer experience possible. Consider the
heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems that keep the air
fresh and free of unpleasant odors, and maintain the humidity at acceptable
levels, and the temperature at an ideal value for the season. HVAC was
invented by Willis Carrier in 1902. His motivation was to control the humid-
ity of a printing plant where he worked. Paper and cardboard change their
dimensions as they gain or lose moisture. Carrier realized that controlling the
humidity would stabilize the dimensions of paper, so that different colors
applied sequentially at different times would dry quickly and would register
properly.
It was a long time before air conditioning was widely used. One of the
authors of this chapter (FHA) still remembers vividly the first time he experi-
enced air conditioning; it was the unexpected and unexplained physical shock
at going from inside an air-conditioned restaurant out onto the very hot
St Louis railroad station platform in the summer of 1936. Nowadays we
52
would all be shocked if we were to go into a store in the summertime and find
there was no air conditioning; it would probably be our last visit. In fifty or
sixty years the disruptive technology of air conditioning has gone from a
memorable experience to ubiquity. And that is the nature of most disruptive
technologies that are part of the standard retail environment.
Some technologies diffuse more rapidly—electric lighting, for example.
Edison first commercialized distributed electrical lighting in 1882. Less than
fifty years later, the construction of new power plants, fixtures, and bulbs had
led to electricity replacing gas and oil lighting in US cities and suburbs. John
Wanamaker, an important market-maker innovator in US retailing, installed
electrical lighting in his department store in Philadelphia in 1879 (Gibbons
1926: i. 218–19), having already installed arc lighting in outside window
displays in 1878. Soon after Edison’s demonstration of the system of electrical
lighting, Wanamaker went to Menlo Park, New Jersey, to visit Edison at his
research and development laboratory, and arranged for DC motors to power
ventilation fans in his stores, long before air was “conditioned.”
Along the way, it was necessary for public policy to provide enabling
legislation creating local and state building codes to ensure human safety
when electrical power was installed and used. We will see this time and time
again: public policy—national, local, or both—is necessary for the broad
diffusion of a new technology. We allow one electric power company to
have a monopoly of the means of distributing power to our homes. Imagine
the mess if there were multiple sets of power poles belonging to different
companies competing for our business. Some standards are set by an industry;
the typical standard screw base of an incandescent bulb—called the Edison
base—is just one example. It is true that there are several different light-bulb
bases, but most are for special lighting fixtures. It would be a household
nightmare if every manufacturer of lighting fixtures required a special bulb
base.1
In addition to lighting and air conditioning the elevator and the escalator
are two other common electrical devices in every modern multi-storey retail
building. Both were invented for other purposes: Elisha Otis invented a steam-
powered elevator with safety features in 1853 to move freight; modern eleva-
tors are now powered by electricity and controlled by elaborate computer
systems along with greatly enhanced safety features from those possible in
the 1853 patent for the elevator.2
Jesse Reno invented the escalator in 1892 as an electrically powered con-
veyor belt for moving people at Coney Island, New York. Harrods installed an
escalator in their already famous store in London amid great fanfare just two
years later. People movers were and are always important for retailers trying to
make it as painless as possible for customers to reach the upper floors without
the arduous climb of stairs. By 1900, department stores of ten storeys became
53
common in the big cities of the USA, because growing land prices and increas-
ing population made large vertical retail spaces economically viable. Structural
steel, electric lighting, electric elevators, and electrically powered ventilation
made tall buildings possible. John Wanamaker, the famous merchant of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a three-storey auditorium seat-
ing 1,300 people built into his new New York store in 1907 (Gibbons 1926:
ii. 109–10). In 1911 he topped all that had gone before by installing the
world’s “finest organ in the world” in the lavishly decorated marble-clad
149-foot-high Grand Court of his new 1911 building in Center City, Philadel-
phia. Macy’s now owns the store, and the organ has been refurbished and
expanded to 28,543 tubes (Whitney 2007). The store manager, James Kenny,
reports: “Every lunch time, people hear the organ and feel good—and people
are in a mind to shop when they’re feeling good. It is the ultimate feel-good
experience.” Visionary merchants such as Wanamaker quickly adopted new
technology to make the shopping experience inviting: concerts, restaurants,
and tearooms were added for shoppers’ convenience and enjoyment.
Charge cards and credit

Besides providing a more comfortable marketplace, technology has been
adopted to change retail channels in other ways. In particular, the emergence
of credit cards has provided consumers with cash-less convenience, means for
greater impulse buying, increased buying power, and opportunities to shop in
new retail markets, including catalogs, e-commerce stores, such as Amazon,
and more.
American retailers have been making new markets around issuing credit
since this nation’s founding. By 1924, consumers relied on financing for about
75 percent of their vehicle purchases (Calder 1999: 158). Large mail-order
stores and catalog companies, most notably Montgomery Ward’s and Sears,
Roebuck and Co., provided a variety of exotic “buy-now, pay-later” schemes
that played a prominent role in the early success of these retail giants (Calder
1999: 200). While the concepts of credit and revolving debt unquestionably
drove important new markets and retail channels, the physical credit card has
been creatively leveraged in market making as well. The impressive new retail
formats and merchandising possibilities afforded by plastic were made possi-
ble only after an impressive array of technological advances had been bor-
rowed from a variety of industries.
In 1914, Western Union offered its preferred business customers metal
charge cards to be used in lieu of cash (MacDonald and Gastmann 2001:
227). Payment was expected upon invoicing, so the initial attraction was
convenience rather than credit. A number of travel and entertainment chains
followed suit. In an effort to consolidate the number of charge cards required
54
by a business traveler, Frank McNamara and two friends in 1950 started a

credit organization, the Diners Club, that issued 200 cards (paper, not plastic),
which could be used in twenty-seven restaurants throughout New York; the
card was gradually accepted by retailers nationwide, becoming Diners Club
International (Evans 2005: 53). This general-purpose card, which came to
signify membership in Diners Club International, grew nationwide.
In 1959, San Francisco-based Bank of America (BOA) put its own spin on the
charge card by offering card-holders immediate, pre-approved credit. The
BankAmericard became the first nationally recognized bank card and spawned
the credit-card industry, as we know it. Merchants funded the nationwide
network by paying a fee for each transaction, a practice that took some getting
used to. Customers were permitted to pay for their purchases in monthly
installments, incurring a finance charge on the outstanding balance. This
type of agreement provided card-holders with an enhancement beyond the
simple convenience of a charge card; it gave them purchasing power beyond
their immediate means. This is a critical element in today’s retail market.
BankAmericard eventually grew into Visa by 1976, while MasterCharge, the
forerunner to Mastercard, began as a competing network in 1967. The exis-
tence of distinct, unconnected networks, high interchange fees, and a general
lack of standards continued to hamper merchant acceptance. In turn, con-
sumer adoption was also slow, and a vicious circle would have to be overcome.
The most significant step toward improving credit cards for both merchants
and buyers would come from reducing the overall time and cost to approve a
purchase and conduct the corresponding transactions between the various
agents. In 1970, it could take over five minutes for a merchant to gain an
authorization code by telephoning the issuing bank and reading the account
and purchase information. At closing, the merchant would capture the day’s
sales only by submitting to his acquiring bank the paper sales drafts, each with
recorded authorization and signature. These would ultimately have to be
settled with the appropriate issuing banks. Naturally, this caused enormous
workloads for banks, which charged high fees back to the merchant, and
errors were frequent.
The overall approval and transaction process was significantly aided in the
next three decades by merging a series of new technologies. First, in 1960, the
London Transit Authority began encoding data on cards via magnetic
strip. Then, in a separate development early that same decade, Bell Labs
created touch-tone dialing. This made long-distance calling faster and
cheaper. Equally important, touch tone opened the door for automated tele-
phoning via computer systems, which would come nearly twenty years later.
This critical advance could take place only after early generation data modems
invented for US air defense systems in the 1950s evolved into the “smart
modems” of today. Released in 1981 by Hayes Communications, “smart
55
modems” could transmit at 300 digital bits per second, and for the first time
serve as a dialer by translating digital computer commands directly into the
analog telephone network. It should be noted that the adoption of interna-
tional standards to ensure accurate data exchange between modems was
crucial in advancing this technology.
The credit industry, led by National BankAmericard, Inc. (NBI),3 leveraged
these technologies to automate the data-exchange process by developing a
fully electronic authorization system, which they called Base I (Mandell
1990: 62). An electronic card reader/dial terminal at the point of sale (POS)
could pull critical information from the “Magstripe,” including the issuing
bank’s phone number, the account number, and the expiration date; then
place a call answered by a computer; pass purchase information via touch
tone; and accept an authorization code—all in less than a minute. On the
receiving end, increasingly efficient databases could compare the queried
purchase amount to the customer’s available credit balance, and, if the
charge was approved, place immediate holds on the account. NBI’s success
with Base I in automating the authorization process led to the development
of Base II. This complementary touch-tone system allowed merchants to
capture sales electronically at the day’s end, eliminating the need to deposit
mountains of paper for processing at the acquiring bank. Acquiring fees were
reduced and accuracy was improved throughout the credit system. As a
result, merchant acceptance of credit cards continued to grow.
Beyond these benefits, electronic transaction networks also opened the door
to 24/7 credit-card use and Internet retailing. No longer constrained by bank-
ing hours, merchants were able to secure authorizations around the clock.
From the consumer’s perspective, plastic became a preferred substitute for
cash, day and night, on both weekdays and weekends. Encryption techniques
allow secure credit-card transactions online, and electronic signature has
become widely accepted. The result has been exciting new markets and retail
channels.
Next-generation POS systems are already being used in novel retail applica-
tions. Broadband lines and the Internet are permitting more real-time fraud
detection routines at the POS, without a noticeable increase in transaction
time. A growing number of chains use electronic signature pads to facilitate
credit-card use, eliminating the need for cashier identification. These rely on
LCD touch-screen technology. Symbol Technologies, now a subsidiary of
Motorola, is well known for its handheld POS terminals. Associates at Apple
Stores use these wireless devices to process customer credit-card purchases on
the spot, using IEEE 802.11 wireless protocols for speed and security. Never
needing to enter a checkout line enhances shoppers’ overall store experience.
Rental car companies use the same technology to close agreements within
56
moments of a customer returning a vehicle. Not only is a credit card preferred;

it is expected.
Not surprisingly, legislation has been and will remain crucial in the mar-
riage of retail market making and credit cards. To date it has been most pivotal
in protecting card-holding consumers. The landmark 1968 Consumer Credit
Protection Act, which included the Truth in Lending Act, dictates that all
terms be clearly disclosed to card applicants in a common language. It also
limits a cardholder’s liability to $50 per unauthorized charge in cases of loss
and theft, provided such events are reported within two days (15 U.S.C. } 1643
(a)(1)(B)). A host of other legislation is constantly being updated to protect
consumers from unfair practices of credit-card issuers. Laws meant to protect
merchants, particularly small businesses, have received considerable atten-
tion. These tend to focus on controlling the merchant fees, which are nego-
tiable between a merchant and its acquiring bank. Finally, standardization
continues to bolster modern credit-card use, which is so pivotal in today’s
evolving retail environment. Because of the prevalence of POS scanning, card
dimensions are governed by the International Standards Organization (ISO)
7810 guideline. Smart-chip technology used in many newer cards follows
ISO 7816, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips are governed by
ISO 14443.
Total credit-card purchases reached $2.2 trillion in 2007 in the USA alone.4
Essentially, all Internet commerce is transacted with credit cards or their
derivatives. While this impressive volume has been driven partially by conve-
nience and purchasing power, it can also be attributed to an ever-expanding
set of global markets accessed through a wider array of retail channels.
Bar codes and product identification

A final contemporary technology that dramatically improves physical retail-
ing in several ways is the bar code printed on every retail item. While this
breakthrough has enabled faster checkout, more reliable pricing, and more
dynamic markdown and promotion strategies, it was developed by the retail
food market industry and their suppliers simply to increase the efficiency of
the checkout at the front end of food stores.
In the early 1970s, at the dawning of the new computer and robotics age,
people in manufacturing and retailing were aware of the need for electronic
systems that could recognize a machine part for manufacturing assembly or
assist in checkout in food stores. Each group approached the problem in a
different way. The manufacturers’ approach was first to capture a digital photo
as a step in recognizing a desired part. One of this chapter’s authors (FHA) was
on a review panel at the National Bureau of Standards (now called the
National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST)) viewing attempts
57
being made to solve this recognition problem. The researchers had selected a
box of cornflakes of a particular size as a representative target object. By
scanning laser beams onto the box in several directions and looking at the
scattered signal, they hoped to determine the size of the box. Other techni-
ques were being explored to recognize the name of the manufacturer; in this
case it was Kellogg. It is not easy to teach a computer system to find the name
of the manufacturer amongst all the writing on a breakfast food carton. So
their first attempts were just to recognize the K of the name, which is always
positioned prominently on the carton.
At the time, no one on the review panel was aware that the food market
retailers and their suppliers were already solving this problem in a beautifully
simple way, and without direct help from government of any level. Their work
resulted in the Universal Product Code (UPC), and its twelve numerical digit
bar code symbol that identifies the manufacturer and allows an exact descrip-
tion of the item. The focus of the group was solely on improving the efficiency
of supermarket checkout. It did not anticipate that it was about to create the
tool that would allow the entire retail supply chain to be rationalized. Alfred
D. Chandler Jr, writing on the jacket of the definitive book on the history of
the development of the bar code and the supermarket scanners systems,
Revolution at the Checkout Counter: The Explosion of the Bar Code, said:
This book tells in intriguing detail the almost unknown history of the coming of
the Universal Product Code (UPC)—an innovation that has transformed the
process of distribution and production as profoundly as the coming of the railroad
and the telegraph did more than a century ago. The book is essential reading for an
understanding of the evolution and impact of today’s information revolution.
(Brown 1997)
The bar code in the form that we all know, and the Universal Code Council
that administers the allocation of codes to manufacturers, were the product of
an initial meeting in 1969 of the Administrative Systems Committee of the
Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) and their counterparts in the food
market industry, the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC), to discuss a
product code for the food market industries. There was a general belief that a
machine-readable product code would increase substantially the productivity
of the front end of supermarkets. It was envisioned that each item offered for
sale would be marked with a code identifying the manufacturer and uniquely
describing the product. The code would be read by a scan system at the
checkout; the computer system would then rapidly look up from internal
files the name of the manufacturer, the product description, and the price.
Individual tagging of each item (item pricing) would no longer be needed for
checkout, and the labor cost saving from eliminating item pricing would be
available to finance the scanning equipment.
58
The motivation of grocery firms for such a system is obvious, while that of
the grocery manufacturers was equally pressing, if not as direct. There was talk
in Europe and in the USA that several high-tech firms were developing prod-
uct codes and scanning systems. The grocery manufacturers were worried that,
if a “universal code” were not developed and implemented across the indus-
try, some of the larger chains would select an identification code for their
products and then pressure their suppliers to use it on all the products shipped
to their stores. Such requirements would introduce huge inefficiencies in
suppliers’ product inventories and might result in Federal Trade Commission
objections that a manufacturer was providing services to one retailer not
available to others—something not allowed under the law.5 The way forward
then was clear: develop one product identification symbol and encourage all
food product manufacturers to provide it on their products. A reasonable code
for the retailer was one that could be scanned at the checkout counter or read
by a wand or entered in a register system by a clerk at a store without the
necessary technology. Naturally the scanning equipment would have to be
priced so that the hard saving from using the system would pay for the
equipment in a few years.
John T. Dunlop and Jan Rivkin (1997) describe the general economic and
technology conditions in the USA when the Universal Product Code (UPC)
was being developed. During the time of the UPC development, Dunlop had
been the Director of the Cost of Living Council appointed by President Nixon
to attempt to rein in the then raging national inflationary increases in the cost
of living. At that time the food industry was anxious to gain control of costs,
and product codes were one step in that direction. Their book also documents
the penetration of UPC bar codes into almost every product category in the
retail sector. By 1994, Food & Beverage had gone from being 100 percent of
all registrations to only about 28 percent of registrations; the remaining
registrations were in twenty-one different sectors, from Audio & Video to
Health & Beauty Aids. This diffusion into the overall retail sector was not
anticipated in 1969 at the first meeting of the principals of food manufacturers
and chain-store grocery operators; nor was it foreseen as late as June 1974,
when the first item bearing the UPC code, a package of Wrigley’s gum, passed
through the checkout scanner of the Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
From the beginning the groups sponsoring the development of the UPC
aimed for a symbol code that would be in the public domain. They finally came
up with a twelve-digit bar code, which grew to fourteen digits in 2005 and can
now be found on virtually everything that we buy. Today the decision to
choose a series of bars surrounded by a white border to represent a series of
digits may seem an obvious one—obvious because it is simple and has been so
successful. Frozen-food products with small ice crystals on the package can be
scanned as well as a crumpled bag of pretzels or potato chips. We see how
59
easily the bar symbols can be machine scanned when we do it ourselves at the
self-checkout counters at the local food and home improvement stores.
Clerks at big-box stores can now easily scan bags of lawn fertilizer with
portable wands that automatically sweep a red laser diode light beam across
the bars. The light reflected back to the wand creates a corresponding bright
and dark pattern on its receiver element, allowing internal deduction of the
numerical code that is printed on the base of the symbol. From the sophisti-
cated fundamental structure of the light and dark bars of the code, it is possible
for scan systems to distinguish the first digits—the manufacturer code—from
the last digits allocated to the item description, even when the code is scanned
backwards.
We have to admire the courage of the group from the GMA and NAFC
meeting in 1969: they set out to devise a product code and scanning system
for the food market industry by engaging the attention of the US electronic
industry. At the time they must have been encouraged by the 1969 moon
landing to believe that something seemingly as simple as codes and scanning
systems could be developed. The 1960s was after all the era of the laser, the
third generation of computers, and integrated circuits (H. B. O. Davis 1985:
140–5). The committee used its knowledge of the food industry wisely to insist
that detailed requirements for printing code labels be drawn up and tested on
actual products. Scanning trials were insisted on for assurance that the codes
could be successfully read 999 times out of 1,000 under normal conditions at
food markets. In the competition between the bull’s eye code of RCA and the
rectangular code of IBM, the winner was the latter’s rectangular bar code with
its specified clear surround.
It is hard to imagine now that the adoption of UPC at the checkout counter
was initially rather slow. The necessary scanning and computer equipment
then available was deemed very costly. Some food chains were worried that
not all food store product manufacturers would voluntarily adopt the UPC
code, making some item pricing of products necessary and thereby diminish-
ing labor cost saving and making scanning systems uneconomical. In fact
some states had consumer laws requiring individual price markings on each
item in the store, as Massachusetts still does.
By 1984, ten years after the first package of gum had passed a scanner in
March’s supermarket, only 33 percent of supermarkets had scanners (Haber-
man 2001: 27). But a tipping point was soon reached, and bar-code scanners
appeared in nearly every store. In the 1992 presidential campaign, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, and many other national publications ran
stories about President George H. W. Bush’s apparent wonderment upon
seeing a new supermarket scanner operating at a National Grocers’ Association
convention in Orlando, Florida (Brinkley 1992). Whether the President was
really seeing a scanner for the first time is not the point of the story for us now.
60
It is, rather, that by 1992 almost all newspaper readers were familiar with bar
codes and scanners in food stores; hence the President’s reaction suggested
that he was out of touch with everyday life in the country. Today bar codes
and scanners are near universal in mass retailing, not only in the USA, but
around the world. As consumers, we typically see only a few aspects of the use
of bar codes. For example, the item description that accompanies the sales
price on the printed sales receipts for every retail purchase comes from bar-
code look-up tables. Later in this chapter we will address the role of bar codes
in improving the efficiency of product supply chains and the prominent role
Wal-Mart has played in driving this process.
A succession of disruptive technologies has transformed retailing from the
general stores away from the city supplied by manufacturers in the cities to the
multiple overlapping forms of retailing we have today. First we begin by
visiting the history of early disruptive technologies, the railroad that gave us
mail-order retailing, and then the automobile that led to suburban mall
retailing. We will then explain how the disruptive technologies of bar codes
and the Internet, coupled with containers and container shipping, railroads,
and trucking, have helped to revolutionize worldwide product sourcing. In
1956, when container shipping started and Congress passed and President
Eisenhower signed the bill starting the Interstate highway system, no one saw
how these two events would change where goods would be manufactured.
These events allowed electronic and other manufacturers to create new mar-
kets for parts and assembly that would never have existed without these
disruptive shipping technologies.
Early Disruptive Technologies

Railroad expansion to the West and mail order
We are all aware that railroads bring merchandise from factories and ports to
freight yards and then to trucks that deliver the merchandise to the retail
stores. While the role of the railroad in allowing the West to be settled is well
known, the railroad’s role in the introduction of mail-order merchandising is
perhaps just as important to retailing yet less widely recognized. In 1850 the
railroads in the USA were principally located on the East Coast; by 1860 they
were branching out to the Midwest and connecting the manufacturing centers
in upper New York State with large markets along the East Coast. In 1850 there
were already over 9,000 miles of railroads, and within the next decade this
network had expanded by a factor of three (Solomon 2001: 29). This westward
expansion made Chicago the focal point of the intercontinental rail system
and, consequently, an important merchandising center. By 1860 more than a
dozen rail lines connected Chicago with the East and with points in Indiana,
61
Illinois, Ohio, and further west (Soloman 2001: 40). Because of the railroad
and the corresponding westward expansion of the US population, Chicago
became a dynamic and important city, growing from an estimated population
of only 100 in 1830, to 29,963 in 1850, to 298, 977 in 1870, to 503,185 in
1880, and to 1,099,850 in 1890.6 By 1872, Chicago had many retail establish-
ments catering to the local demand for clothing and practical items of every-
day use. In 1872, a young clerk with an entrepreneurial spirit named
Montgomery Ward was working for the prominent and expanding store
Field, Palmer, and Leiter (FPL). The “Field” partner of FPL was the Marshall
Field whose fame in Chicago as a merchant grew to allow him to open the
then largest department store in the world on State Street in Chicago in 1907.
As a clerk for FPL, Montgomery Ward traveled by train and horse and buggy to
service the country stores that were the major clients of FPL.
He found that the country store, with its pot-bellied stove and cracker barrel, was a
snug place for farmers to sit and swap gossip on stormy days. But it was not so
comfortable for the farmer when he went to the counter to buy goods. Prices were
high and the choice of goods small. When the farmer complained, the storekeeper
pointed out that he had to buy what the wholesaler offered at the prices set by the
wholesaler. The farmer could take it or leave it and, since the storekeeper usually
was the only merchant in the area, the farmer had to take it. (Latham 1972: 3)
Ward understood the farmers’ and the shop owners’ dilemma. The long
chain from manufacturer to wholesaler, to jobber, and finally to the retailer at
the crossroad store had too many steps in the supply chain, each step marking
up the product to cover its costs. He conceived of direct mail-order sales. He
would be located in Chicago close to manufacturers and wholesalers; and by
combining many mail orders together he could buy in bulk at a discount and
sell directly to the farmers. He would write a catalog with detailed listing of the
items for sale, at a fixed price, with a money-back guarantee if the customers
were not satisfied with the merchandise. Ward began with two partners and
just $1,600 in August 1872. An early catalog listed 163 items, ranging from
yard goods of flannel and jeans fabric to an ostrich plume. In time, the
catalogue expanded to contain more than 130,000 items in 1967 (Latham
1972: 91).
There is always a problem of locating potential customers, and the early
mail-order company was no exception. There was certainly no easy way to
find listings of people in the farming communities in the rural west. Ward
solved this problem by sending his catalog—in the beginning really just a list
of items offered with their price—to the local Granges. The first local Granges,
founded as the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry in 1867, were
established as social and educational organizations but rapidly became politi-
cal organizations for the voice of the Western farmers to protest against the
62
abuses of the day. Ward was familiar with Granges from his sales trips in the
farm communities for FLT. Ward encouraged the local Granges to aggregate
their members’ orders and send a single order to Montgomery Ward, who
would ship the order to the nearest rail station c/o the Grange. Since the
minimum rail shipping order then was 100 pounds, this aggregation of indi-
vidual orders minimized the shipping cost to the farmers. The high cost of rail
shipments was always a concern to the farmers, both for the things they
purchased and for shipping their farm products to markets. The railroads at
this time had monopoly control of shipping to and from the rural farms. The
farmers, through their Granges, lobbied successfully in 1887 for a federal law
establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to regulate railroad
shipping rates.
At that time postal mail was delivered only to the nearest post office.
Direct rural delivery to the home was years off; free city delivery of mail
would come only in 1863. The consumers’ cost of mail-ordered items is the
sum of the merchants’ selling price and the cost of delivery. Even after the
ICC had regulated freight rates, farmers complained that they were poorly
and expensively served. Merchandise could be shipped by freight at a cost by
weight and distance, with a 100-pound minimum charge; by express with
one of the many express companies with unregulated rates; and by US Post,
with a 4-pound limit. Post was by far the cheapest, but not many orders
could meet the low weight limit. And for all three modes of shipment the
package was delivered only to the post office or train station. In many
communities the rail station was the post office and often the general store
as well. If a farmer bought from Ward’s, his local merchant and postmaster
would know. But farmers often needed credit at the general store to buy
essential items before the harvest, and they had reason to worry that buying
from Ward’s might jeopardize their credit.
The local merchants in the rural communities did not take kindly to their
customers going around them to Ward’s for dry goods and other staples of
farm life, but they could not match the prices offered by Ward. As Ward’s
volume of business expanded, prices would fall because of Ward’s volume
discounts from manufacturers. Ward’s prices in 1878 were lower than they
had been in 1872 (Latham 1972: 10). Every few years the volume of business
expanded, forcing Ward to move to ever-larger quarters along with expanded
catalog offerings. Ward offered almost everything: from farm machinery,
saddles and harnesses, to fine fashions for the ladies. Business grew, and by
1908 Ward’s mail-order house in Chicago contained more than 2 million
square feet of space, with other service centers in other Western cities.
While Ward’s was expanding, competition grew. Sears, Roebuck and Co.
grew from Richard Sears’s small operation of selling watches to other rail
station agents in 1886 into a firm with a large general catalog in 1896. This
63
was also the year that rural free delivery (RFD) was first tried in a few regions of
the country on a very limited experimental basis. The sales of both Ward’s
and Sears were constrained because of the inflated expense of shipping orders
to rural customers. John Wanamaker, the famous Philadelphia merchant,
appointed Post Master General in 1889 in the Benjamin Harrison administra-
tion, tried without success to obtain Congress’s approval in 1891 for an
expanded RFD. In 1890, 1891, and 1892 Wanamaker (Gibbons 1926:
i. 282–3) also sought permission for the Postal Service to offer parcel post,
without success.7 When he was asked: “Mr. Wanamaker, why can you not
inaugurate parcels post?” He answered: “There are five insurmountable ob-
stacles: first is the American Express Company; second, the United States
Express Company; third, the Adams Express Company; fourth, the Wells-
Fargo Express Company; fifth, the Southern Express Company” (Gibbons
1926: i. 283).
Parcels Post became an official activity of the Postal Service only in 1913,
with approximately 300 million parcels handled in the first six months. The
weight limit was upped from the original 4 to 11 pounds, with increases to
20 pounds soon after (National Postal Museum 2008). The Parcel Post weight
limit in 2010 is 70 pounds, but other delivery systems such as UPS allow
heavier and larger packages.
The coming of suburban living

With most mail-order delivery problems solved and the US population ex-
panding, the future appeared bright for Ward’s and Sears, Roebuck and Co.,
the two biggest mail-order firms, but a new disruptive technology was already
on its way. It was the internal combustion engine and the widespread use of
automobiles. Henry Ford alone sold more than 15,000,000 Model T cars
between 1908 and 1927, when their production stopped, with most sales
going to the home market of 106 million citizens in 1920 to a bit over 123
million in 1930. Few in retailing saw the implications of the automobile and
the massive building of local roads. General Robert Wood was one of the
exceptions. He joined Ward’s in 1919 and quickly was promoted from his
initial position of merchandising manager to that of vice president. He was a
West Point graduate who had served in the US army quartermaster corps in
the First World War and had been promoted to Brigadier General by the war’s
end. From then on he was called General Wood. He thought strategically
about the future of mail-order retailing, observing that, with increases in
farm productivity, people were moving to the cities and the suburbs, and
that their automobiles enabled them to live in the suburbs and drive to
downtown department stores. He believed that people in the cities and sub-
urbs would prefer to shop in retail stores rather than buying by mail. In a retail
64
store they could actually touch the fabric and try on apparel before purchas-
ing, or get the feel of a hammer or wrench. This was not possible in a mail-
order-only business.
General Wood was unable to convince Ward’s management of the validity
of his vision for retail merchandising—Ward’s probably believed that it
should stick to its core competencies—mail-order retailing. Wood left Ward’s
in 1924 and went to Sears, first as head of factory operations. Sears’s first retail
store experiment followed in 1925 and was a huge success, leading to a
dramatic expansion of retail stores. By 1928 Sears had opened 192 retail stores,
and General Wood was promoted to president. General Wood imagined Sears
retail stores would carry both hard and soft goods and be located not in the
center of the city but near its perimeter, with easy access by car. He believed
that people in the suburbs would always need shoes and hammers. By 1931
Sears had more than 350 retail establishments in addition to its thriving mail-
order business. Ward’s soon followed the Sears retailing approach and opened
its own stores, generally in small towns, but it was never able to catch up with
Sears and closed for good in 2001.
Modern Disruptive Technologies
The years of the Great Depression and the Second World War saw a few major
changes in retailing technology, linked to the rise of supermarkets and the
completely new world of packaged consumer goods and retail hardware these
new self-service stores required (see Petrovic, Chapter 3 this volume). But in
1956 two seemingly disconnected events occurred that were to have profound
effects on modern retailing and global sourcing of retail products: the inter-
state highway system and the shipping container.
The interstate highway system

Certainly, when Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, no
one could have foreseen clearly the future economic impact of the program
that was designed to build 41,000 miles of broad and wide interstate high-
ways. Perhaps President Eisenhower, the strongest backer of the Act, came
closest when saying of the highway-building program in his memoirs:
“More than any single action by the government . . . this one would change
the face of America . . . Its impact on the American economy—the jobs it
would open up—was beyond calculation” (McNichol 2006: 107). It is now
difficult to realize that as recently as 1953 only 53 percent of the 3,000,000
miles of US highways—many just two lanes at best—were paved (McNichol
2006: 103).
65
President Eisenhower came by his understanding of the importance of

paved highways from his long military career. First, in 1919 he was part of a
three-mile-long convoy of US Army vehicles—cargo trucks, ambulances, four
kitchen trailers, and so on. It was undertaken in July 1919, just after the First
World War, to highlight the need for better highways for defense. It took the
convoy two months to make the 3,000-mile trip across the country, over half
the distance on unpaved roads. Then again in the Second World War, General
Eisenhower saw at first hand the value of the Autobahn to the German army.
When he became president, he proposed building the interstate highway
system as necessary for national defense, a very significant public policy
undertaking.
The US Interstate Highway system opened the Midwest and South to road
transportation. The original system plan was to link all the state capitals by
interstate highways, and in time most were. The interstate highways
improved local and state highways, and the expansion of the US fleet of
cars and light trucks allowed people living in America to have great mobility.
Sam Walton understood this and built his stores on the inexpensive land
near local crossroads. He turned rural and suburban locations to his advan-
tage. Governments paid for the roads that brought customers to his doors,
and allowed trailer-loads of goods from US and overseas factories to be
brought quickly and easily, first to the distribution centers and then on to
his stores.
Montgomery Ward in the nineteenth century used the then new disrup-
tive technology of railroads to introduce mail-order retailing and achieve a
comparative advantage with the local merchants located at rural crossroads.
Then Sears, Roebuck and Co. combined mail-order retailing with urban
stores for suburban customers with cars in the 1920s and achieved a com-
petitive advantage over Wards. Sam Walton, after beginning his retailing
empire in small rural communities, used the disruptive technology of the US
modern highway system to provide low-cost locations that encouraged a
range of urban, suburban, and rural customers to drive their cars and light
trucks to his stores. Great locations in combination with forward-looking
supply-chain practices, advanced technology of distribution centers, main-
frame computers, bar codes, and tight inventory control through technology
allowed Wal-Mart to grow to be the largest US retailer by 1990. Naturally
other factors and business practices were important to the growth of Wal-
Mart; we have mentioned only a few of the technological contributors to
Walton’s success.
66
Shipping containers
The second great disruptive innovation of 1956 was the birth of shipping with
ocean-going containers. There have been articles in our newspapers for dec-
ades about the importance of intermodal transportation hubs bringing sub-
way, rail, and surface bus service together at city centers. For the global flow of
manufactured goods and produce, the ocean link with rail and trucking has
been the most difficult to achieve, and it took most of the post-Second World
War era to succeed.
Ocean-going containers, like most technological innovations important to
retailing, did not begin with the goal of improving the way goods are shipped
across the oceans. Rather, it all began when Malcom McLean, the owner of
one of the largest trucking firms in the US in the early 1950s, attempted to find
a cheaper way to ship products to New York from the South. Because the
Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) set trucking rates for all firms, a
persistent focus on reducing operating costs was a primary path to higher
profits and further expansion. In 1953 McLean had the revolutionary idea of
sending his trailer trucks from North Carolina to New York and Boston by
putting them on old Second World War cargo ships. The ICC had jurisdiction
over costal shipping and had allowed shipping rates to be significantly lower
than highway trailer shipping because water way shipping was slower.
McLean was the only person who saw the value of this rate discrepancy, and
he moved to take advantage of it. The Port of New York Authority was looking
to expand its activities and welcomed McLean to create a terminal at the
Newark docks. McLean first thought to send trailers onto the ships, then
trailers without their wheels, and finally special containers designed to allow
them to be stacked and lifted from and onto trailers at each end of the sea
trip. The first test of this final concept was held in April 1956 with the sailing
of a converted Second World War tanker, the Ideal-X.
The first voyage was from Port Newark to Houston with fifty-eight contain-
ers on board. Special extra-large dockside cranes had to be placed on shore to
load and unload the 33-foot containers, but the trip was a great success. And,
as Levinson (2006: 52) wrote:
For McLean, though, the real triumph came only when the costs were tallied.
Loading loose cargo on a medium-size cargo ship cost $5.83 per ton in 1956.
McLean’s experts pegged the cost of loading the Ideal-X at 15.8 cents per ton.
With numbers like that, the container seemed to have a future.
The entrepreneurial energy, drive, and skill required by McLean to make this
into a successful venture is described in detail in Marc Levinson’s marvelous,
insightful, and heavily documented book, The Box (2006).
67
In 1956 few might have been willing to bet that McLean and others would
be able to overcome the objections of the International Longshoremen’s and
Warehousemen’s Union, the various port authorities, the ICC, the railroads,
and the local communities that had to allow the huge areas needed for current
intermodal port facilities. But succeed they did, and now the biggest ports in
the world are no longer London or New York. Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong
Kong are the top three in terms of containers handled per year. According to
the list of busiest container ports, in 2007 Singapore was reported to have
handled 27,000,000 TEUs (20-foot equivalent units).8
The two largest US ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach, were numbers 13 and
15 on the list of the busiest container ports in 2007; New York/New Jersey was
number 19 with less than 20 percent of the volume of Singapore. The port
facilities to handle millions of containers per year can only be called gigantic.
The cranes that lift the containers from the ship one at a time must be able to
lift the 30,480 kg of a fully loaded container and place it on a trailer that drives
on the roadway between the legs of the crane.
In 2008 the largest ship in the worldwide container fleet was the Emma
Maersk, a part of the Maersk Line fleet.9 The ship is 397 meters long and
56 meters wide. It can carry 10,500 TEUs, according to the company, but
others list the capacity as 15,200 TEUs. The weight of the ship is about 1.5
times the weight of a modern USA aircraft carrier. The ship has 1,000 plugs for
refrigerated containers, making it possible to ship vast quantities of meat and
produce around the world. This class of vessel expends just 1 kWh of energy to
transport one ton a distance of 66 kilometers; a jumbo jet, in comparison,
could transport only one ton of cargo 0.5 kilometers on 1 kWh of energy. In
other words, the largest and newest ocean-going container vessel is 132 times
as efficient in using energy to transport cargo as a modern airplane carrying
freight. The ship requires a crew of only thirteen, making the operating cost
very low. Worldwide shipment by container continued to expand, rising from
137.2 million TEUs in 1995 to 417 million TEUs in 2006, while the share
of shipping to and from the US ports fell from 16.3 percent in 1995 to only
11.1 percent in 2006 (US Department of Transportation 2008).
Railroads, trailer trucks, shipping containers, and standardization

The shipping revolution caused by containers has allowed a corresponding
revolution in retail sourcing. The impact on retailing would have been greatly
diminished if it were not for the intermodal transportation facilities at major
US ports. McLean recognized this at the very beginning of the container
revolution in 1956. Port Newark/Elizabeth has rail and road connections,
and a part of his original plan was to take his trailers off the ships at the port
and put them on the New Jersey Turnpike, at its nearby ramp. Rail
68
connections to Port Newark predated McLean’s container activity. In 1953,

when McLean was planning at first to ship truck trailers to Newark, he did not
consider the Port of New York. Connections to highways from New York City
are poor and it takes time to get out of the city, and time is money for shippers
using any mode of transportation. For that reason, container shipping is done
at Port Newark and at the adjacent Elizabeth Marine Terminal in New Jersey.
From the Port, containers can be sent by trucks on the highway or put on
special railcars that can carry ISO containers double stacked.
Having containers that meet international standards requires dimensional,
strength, openings, and capacity standards. Perhaps the most important stan-
dards for container shipping are the details of corner posts, with their special
block at each end with holes at specified locations allowing the crane to
connect with the container. The ISO corner blocks mean that cranes at con-
tainer ports anywhere in the world can lower a frame over the container and
engage the container after the operator has flipped a switch. Only internation-
ally agreed upon standards make it possible to have ISO containers loaded and
unloaded with a standard fixture on the crane. ISO containers can be stacked
one upon another with the load properly supported, and shipped double
stacked on special low-slung rail cars.
There are other ISO features that allow special forklifts to move containers
around in the storage area and to stack them on rail cars. The electrical
connections on a refrigerated container must be in the same specified place
to allow electrical connection on board ship and on ground transportation.
Global transportation requires that containers must be essentially inter-
changeable in all important features except for the name and identification
code painted on the outside. Getting agreement on all these container features
took decades of discussion and persuasion. Some firms surrendered patent
rights to make it possible for the “best” design to be adopted as the standard.
Without standards of both hardware and documentation, the current smooth
international flow of goods would not be possible.
Without standards for containers and for communications, the present
intensity of international sourcing of products would be unlikely. The inter-
national trade agreement worked out under the auspices of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) has removed many of the import quotas on entire cate-
gories of manufactured products. For example, the WTO trade agreement
removed quotas on apparel and textile imports from all WTO member
countries on January 1, 2005. With the ISO standards in place for containers,
imports into the USA have expanded, despite remaining import tariffs. Ex-
ports of textiles and apparel from South Asia flow into the USA on container
ships and then move onto railcars or trucks at large intermodal ports. They are
carried on trucks to their final destination, most likely on interstate highways.
For long-distance shipping, the containers are generally stacked two high on
69
trains. This shipping of goods of all kinds happens without the product being
touched by human hands from the factory in South Asia or the farm in Chile
to the nearby retail store. The present volume of global product sourcing has
been made possible in large part because of international standards of all sorts
of systems: hardware, software, electronics, commercial laws, and clear com-
munications back and forth along the entire sourcing channel. International
trade benefits from vast prior investments in multi-purpose infrastructures.
Technology and Supply Channels

Bar codes, Internet, lean retailing
We have just described how products can be efficiently shipped from any-
where in the world to retail stores in the USA, but we have not mentioned how
the stores are able to manage inventory efficiently and to order products from
remote suppliers. The primary tools for modern supply-chain management
are products’ bar codes, electronic data interchange (EDI), and the Internet
coupled with modern computer networks. Again, most of these technologies
were not developed for market-making purposes.
The Internet, now an indispensable part of all our lives, was begun in 1969
by the Department of Defense’s office of Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) as a project for researchers at one place to communicate with compu-
ters at another place. This led to the development of a communication net-
work called ARPAnet. Soon after interconnection was achieved, researchers
realized that messages could be sent, resulting in the creation of email. Then,
in the span of a few years, methods and standards for transferring files elec-
tronically were created and called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and before that
IP (Internet Protocol) and TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). These initials
are still with us, and many more have since been added. Researchers created all
this to send messages to colleagues who had access to the ARPAnet. In 1986
the National Science Foundation created a high-speed network, first connect-
ing just supercomputers and university sites. In December 2007, there were
383,702,883 Internet users in all of the Americas and 1,408 million users
worldwide (Internet World Stats 2008). The Internet became an essential
tool of everyday communication in just a decade; now few would willingly
give up the Internet.
The development of bar codes has been discussed earlier in this chapter. In
this section the focus is not on the role of bar codes at the checkout counter
but rather on their unique role in inventory and supply-chain management.
As mentioned before, bar codes were slow to diffuse into general retailing for a
number of reasons. Chief amongst them were: (1) scanner systems were
expensive and suited only for the checkout at supermarkets; (2) there was no
70
incentive for non-food product manufacturers to purchase code identifica-

tions and to put the code on each item they made; and (3) general retailers did
not at first see any hard savings from adopting bar codes and scanners. These
objections were overcome by the willingness of the food product manufac-
turers, which were a part of the original industrial group, to affix bar codes on
their entire product lines. Initially it was Heinz Company’s leadership, under
the direction of its CEO R. Burt Gookin, who was the chairman of the Ad Hoc
Committee that led the development of Universal Product Codes, that assured
the cooperation of other food product manufacturers (Brown 1997: 42).
Food markets developed bar codes and scanners to increase the efficiency at
the front end of their stores—the checkout counters—and reap hard saving
from eliminating the item pricing in the states and communities that allowed
simply shelf pricing. Department stores and boutiques did not have checkout
counters, but mass merchants such as Kmart and Wal-Mart did. Moreover,
mass merchants and department stores faced more daunting inventory tasks
than did food stores, because of the low rate of yearly turnover of their
inventory. Trying to gain additional control over their inventories, the two
Marts were the first to try using bar codes. Their successful adoption and
continued advancement of this technology prompted other retailers to
follow suit.10
The mass merchants had another far-reaching plan to recover the capital
cost of the bar-code scanner systems, and that was to shift some of their
inventory risk to their suppliers. First Kmart in 1983, and soon after Wal-
Mart in 1987, began to demand that their apparel suppliers affix bar codes on
each item of apparel they supplied. Naturally, apparel manufacturers objected,
saying that they did not need to do it for all of their customers and asking why
they should do it for Kmart or Wal-Mart alone. There was the question as to
who was going to pay for this new service. The Marts told their apparel
suppliers that they, the manufacturers, were going to bear the cost; they
must treat it simply as a cost of doing business with them. The Marts were
very important and highly valued customers, even though the manufacturers’
margins were smaller with them than with their other customers. Manufac-
turers of branded merchandise and private-label products reluctantly com-
plied, and so mandatory bar coding came first to the apparel retail trade,
expanding to other types of goods after that.
Bar codes and retailers’ POS data from electronic cash registers made it
possible to have accurate real-time inventory status. Inventory control is
important for any retailer, but especially for department stores. Food stores
might have 40,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs), while department stores might
have 500,000 to several million. Macy’s on New York City’s 34th Street might
have two or three million SKUs. The scale of the inventory problem is
immense. Great university research libraries might have several million
71
different books or SKUs on their shelves, but for a store it is important to know
how many units they have of each SKU. A single volume of a given book is
generally enough for a library, but more than one T-shirt of a given size is
absolutely essential for the store. To meet expected demand with an adequate
number of units across an entire apparel collection is a staggering task. Over
10 percent of material in the classic book on retailing used at the Harvard
Business School in the late 1930s is devoted to Merchandise Control (McNair,
Gragg, and Teele 1937: 211–62), the term used then for inventory control. If a
food store has sold all its cans of a particular kind of soup, it can often get more
in the next-day delivery from a chain’s warehouse/distribution center, where
the necessary inventory of high turnover items is carried for next-day delivery.
Most food stores’ items outside of produce are, in fact, replenishable items.
That is not the case for department stores: only a fraction of their items are
replenishable. Before bar codes and lean retailing, a department store might
need to carry a substantial inventory of popular basic items such as jeans and
underwear on the shelves of the store, in the back room, and in the central
warehouse/distribution center. This is no longer the case.
Modern lean retailing requires detailed and complex relationships between
a retailer and each of his suppliers of basic items (Abernathy et al. 1999). The
retailer’s central computer places orders with a supplier’s computers on Sun-
day evening for a specified number of units of each SKU for each store in the
area served by that retailer’s distribution center. The manufacturer must pick
and pack the order for each store, placing the items in a carton for each store,
with the correct bar-coded shipping label. The code on the shipping container
is a scannable bar code but not in the UPC format. The code on the carton
designates the particular store for which it is intended. All the cartons for the
many stores are loaded onto a trailer for delivery to the retailer’s distribution
center. Each distribution center might service 100 or more individual stores.
A trailer backs into a specified loading dock of the distribution center at a
time prespecified, to the minute. A portion of the distribution center’s power-
driven conveyor system extends into the manufacturer’s trailer, and the driver
unloads the cartons onto the conveyor. As a given carton moves along the
power-driven conveyors, laser beams scan the five visible surfaces of the
carton looking for the bar code containing the precise code to allow automatic
sorting. Gates automatically switch the carton onto the trailer designated for
that store. More automated paperwork is actually done than has been just
described; for example, there must be an open-to-buy order from the retailer to
the manufacturer, etc., before any shipment will be accepted. The checking,
verifying, and recording that at one time was all hand paper work is now
accomplished with bar codes, laser scans, and computers. Cartons go from the
manufacturer’s distribution center to the designated store’s trailer without
human intervention except for loading on and off the conveyor on opposite
72
sides of the distribution center. Products are not stored in a distribution

center; rather they are automatically transferred from the supplier trailers to
the retailer trailers. A distribution center might have 100 or more docks on
each side of a long narrow building; suppliers’ trailers on one side of the
building and retailers’ delivery trailers on the other. Such distribution centers
allow supplies to be “cross docked”—to go from the manufacturer’s trailer to
the appropriate merchant’s trailers without human intervention.
Lean retailing and weekly replenishment of the basic items sold during the
past week has shifted the risk of carrying inventory that did not sell from the
retailer to the manufacturer of basic apparel. Manufacturers in turn minimize
their inventory risk by maintaining short supply lines. Consequently most
T-shirts, undergarments, and jeans sold in the USA are reorders and assembled
in North America, while most fashion garments represent single orders and
come from Asia. Communication in this global industry is rarely by surface
mail; rather it is done electronically as electronic data interchange (EDI), a vast
system of formats for interchanging data electronically.11 EDI documents
generally contain the same information that would normally be found in
the paper documents that were used for the same organizational function.
For example, an EDI 940 ship-from-warehouse order is used by a manufacturer
to tell its warehouse to ship products to a designated retailer. It typically has a
“ship to” address, “bill to” address, a list of product numbers (usually UPC
codes), and quantities. It may have other information if the parties agree to
include it.
EDI and UPC codes avoid the ambiguity and misunderstanding that
plagued supply and retail industries before there were codes and electronic
communication standards. Although there is one EDI standard in the USA and
another internationally, the adoption of standards in general has increased
the efficiency of the industry enormously. The old days, before bar codes, are
described in the book celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the develop-
ment of the UPC called Twenty Five Years behind Bars (Haberman 2001).
A chapter titled “Scanning’s Silver Celebration” by John E. Nelson (Haberman
2001: 26–7) describes what it was like for food retailers and manufacturers:
The retailers do have memories. They remember the armies of stock clerks stamp-
ing prices on every candy bar, and then restamping them when the next sale came
along—every one of them! They remember the checkout clerks trying to read the
handwritten pricing on those packages of T-bone steak, and reading $1.45 instead
of $4.45, and losing three dollars on every sale. And they remember taking endless
inventories; filling out paper reorder pads so that they’d know how much to
reorder; and the huge amount of counting that went on as merchandise was
received in the stores. All that tedious effort! . . . And the manufacturers remember.
They remember receiving all those paper orders through the mail. Processing the
returns and reductions when we didn’t ship exactly what the customer had asked
73
for because we couldn’t keep track of all customers’ numbering schemes, and we
transcribed those orders incorrectly as they came in the door. And remember how
difficult it was to track all of the inventory in our warehouses as it was picked and
loaded onto our customer’s trucks?
New tools for the market makers

At the beginning of the Second World War the federal government encour-
aged manufacturers to disperse their factory plants as a defense strategy. For
strategic reasons, after the war, the US government expanded quotas for
textile and apparel products from the low-wage countries of South Korea,
Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong (but not China.) As described in Chapter 6,
business people in these countries took advantage of this opportunity, and in
collaboration with retailers they developed the capability of designing and
sewing fashion garments for the US market. These countries combined low
factory wages with reduced costs of container shipping to create a comparative
cost advantage in textiles and apparel. Visionary entrepreneurs of these
countries became the new suppliers for buyers from US department and
discount stores. They became what are now called “full package dealers.”
They began by offering to find desired fabric and sewing factories to produce
fashion designed in the USA. With the Internet, the details of the complete
design with photographs and parts layout were sent instantaneously from the
USA to South Asia’s full package dealers. The emailed information contained
not only pictures of model garments, but also the details of the layout of the
individual pattern pieces ready for cutting. The Internet and its associated
software created a fully integrated information supply channel (see Abernathy
et al.1999: ch. 14, “Suppliers in a Lean World: Firm and Industry Performance
in an Integrated Channel,” 263–80).
The last piece of information technology integrating the ultimate customers
to worldwide markets, and linking manufacturers together with all their
vendors, is the World Wide Web. Like most of the technologies mentioned
in this chapter, the Web was not invented to help retailers or other market
makers. Rather it was invented by Sir (now) J. Timothy Berners-Lee, an English
researcher at the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva (CERN).
This Internet-based tool was invented to allow researchers at CERN to share
complex files, including hypermedia—that is, text, graphics, video, and so on.
Berners-Lee did not file for a patent, making his invention available to all, and
this spirit of openness has no doubt contributed to the explosive growth of the
Web. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of England for his invention, and
in 2007 he received the highest US award for technology, the Charles Stark
Draper Prize of the American National Academy of Engineering.
74
The Internet, along with high-speed broadband communication networks,

fast microprocessors, and the software search engines the Internet has
spawned—such as Google and Yahoo—allow Internet-users to find very
detailed product information before making a purchase. Many websites
allow consumers, at their computers, to price-shop branded merchandise at
retail, mail-order, and e-commerce stores. Consumers can now look on the
Web at manufacturers catalogues, find lost product instruction manuals, and
become nearly the economists’ old ideal of “the informed consumer.”
Most corporations and other organizations worldwide maintain websites to
provide information to the public and to allow authorized personnel easy
access to proprietary information. The size of the Web is growing with explo-
sive speed, as new uses continue to be developed. You can search the Web to
discover the current number of individual websites and find several estimates
putting the number over 100 million and the number of individual pages to be
several billion. Certainly the market makers described in later chapters all find
their activities enhanced by ready access from their computers and cell phones
to the ever-expanding Web. Our shopping opportunities have been expanded
by the nearly limitless offerings of items, old and new, on eBay or from
Amazon.
It is impossible to anticipate what new technology will be developed that
will impact retailing, but this chapter gives example after example of technol-
ogies developed for one purpose that were later incorporated into retailing.
We can, however, confidently assume that new technology will be invented
that will change retailing in important ways. New laws will be passed from
time to time that impact on retailing in one form or another, and retailers will
respond, just as they have in the past. New paradigms of market making will
be developed that, like the market makers described in this book, were not on
the horizon just a few decades ago. We can be certain only that changes will
come.
75
Part Two
Making Consumer Markets
3
US Retailing and its Global Diffusion

Misha Petrovic
Introduction
In 1953, the Italian business consultant Ezio Diotallevi described to his Amer-
ican colleagues the main reason why the concept of self-service could not
succeed in Italy:
How would our public react to the mute coldness of a [self-service] store in which
there is a complete lack of the cordial incentive to buy and the exciting stimulus of
discussion and where the psycho-economic aspect of buying and selling is reduced
to a dialogue—and a silent one at that—between the buyer and the inanimate
goods. (Report on the A.T. 45/157 USA Mission, Sept.–Oct. 1953, 29, quoted in
R. T. Davis 1959: 44)
His opinion, apart from its rhetorical flourish, was not unusual amongst
West European businessmen and policy experts. The European housewife,
they reasoned, would neither put up with the impersonal shopping environ-
ment of the American-style supermarket, nor accept standardized, pre-pack-
aged, canned, and frozen items in place of the variety of fresh products
available in traditional European stores and open markets (Dunn 1962).
Moreover, even if she did want to convert to such an unfamiliar method of
buying, this would have had little practical consequence: the lack of the
supporting infrastructure, the limited size of retail stores and of living quar-
ters, the low rate of ownership of cars and refrigerators, and the absence of a
sizable middle class, all conspired against adopting an American style of
consumption.
Only a few years later, in the late 1950s, a “self-service revolution” swept
through most of Western Europe. Between 1953 and 1959, the number of self-
service stores increased from 229 to 1,663 in France, from 119 to 1,785 in the
Netherlands, and from 203 to 17,132 in West Germany (Henksmeier 1960).
Misha Petrovic
Even in Italy, where the adoption of self-service did not take off until the late
1960s, its slow spread could be traced to highly restrictive municipal regula-
tions and the lobbying efforts of small retailers rather than to the alleged lack
of acceptance by consumers (Sternquist and Kacker 1994).
The self-service revolution of the 1950s was not the first time that a marketing
concept that originated in the USA spread to Europe. By the beginning of the
twentieth century the USA lead in advertising, selling, and other mass-marketing
techniques was already obvious to many European observers, and since that time
the flow of marketing innovations across the Atlantic has been mostly unidirec-
tional. The elements of American consumer markets were at the same time envied
and celebrated, detested and reviled, but most of them eventually found their
place in the evolving European consumer society. Only in the years after the
Second World War, however, did the US model of consumer society become the
obvious and most visible standard of global modernity. The “American way of
life,” with its emphasis on the mass ownership of cars and appliances and mass
consumption of standardized and affordable goods, emerged as the immediate
target of modernization efforts for West European nations, and, a decade later, for
Japan as well. It also became a major weapon in the Cold-War propaganda, where
the deficiencies of the Soviet system were most plainly visible in its failure to
deliver attractive consumer goods to its own population, let alone export them
to the rest of the world. (M. I. Goldman 1960; De Grazia 2005)
Driven by economic and political reasons, and promoted by a set of govern-

ment agencies, productivity missions, NGOs, trade associations, and entrepre-
neurial businessmen, the diffusion of marketing innovations from the USA
intensified rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s, transforming Western Europe
and Japan into economies of mass consumption and setting tangible stan-
dards of development and modernity for developing economies. Along with
the new techniques of corporate advertising, brand promotions, direct selling,
marketing research, and so on, also came innovations in retail formats. With
the exception of the department store, whose early forms developed indepen-
dently on both sides of the Atlantic, all other major formats that characterize
contemporary retailing, from supermarkets, shopping malls, and big-box
stores to gas stations, convenience stores, and fast-food restaurants, originated
in the USA.1
The process of “Americanization” that transformed Western European and
Japanese retailing continues even today with the adoption of new waves of
retail innovation, the most recent example being e-retailing. It has also spread
beyond the small number of developed economies, reaching Latin America,
Southern Europe, and the Asian tigers in the 1980s and rapidly becoming
global in the 1990s. Indeed, the recent transformation of retailing in China,
Russia, South East Asia, and, to a lesser extent, India signifies a whole new
stage in the evolution of consumption, since for the first time the majority of
80
the world population has access, though still limited, to the world of modern
goods and services.
While the processes of globalization of modern retailing and of the spread of
the “American model” have largely been one and the same, they have rarely
involved, at least until very recently, direct internationalization efforts by
American retailers. Compared to most other sectors, retailing shows a
surprising lack of concentration and of the global reach typical of most
major multinational firms. Out of the top forty largest retailers in the world,
each with annual sales of over $20 billion in 2008, over half operate only in
their headquarters’ country, or in a small number of neighboring countries
(Deloitte 2009). This limited reach is particularly characteristic for US retailers.
Fifteen out of the top forty global retailers are headquartered in the USA, but
only three of those have operations outside North America.2 The globalization
of retailing, insofar as it involves direct investment and the concomitant
replication of stores and concepts by large multinational retailers, is still in
its early stages. The story presented in this chapter, accordingly, follows two
parallel strands. One of them deals with the global spread of modern, “Amer-
icanized” formats of consumer goods markets; the other, with the somewhat
limited role that major multinational retailers have played in making and
replicating those markets across national and regional borders.
Today, there exists a considerable literature on the globalization of retailing,
but most of it is focused either on the internationalization strategies of retail
firms or on changes and reactions within national retail sectors. This chapter
has a different focus: on how the market-making efforts of retailers trans-
formed consumer goods markets around the world.3 In line with the rest of
the book, it examines those market makers that are commonly described as
retailers—that is, those that sell goods and services directly to consumers
through owned or franchised outlets. These retailers are the “full package”
market makers of consumer goods markets, compared to those engaging in
consumer marketing but not operating retail stores, such as many consumer
goods manufacturers and brand-name managers, or those selling consumer
services but not goods, such as retail banks, hotels, airlines, and amusement
parks. The two latter groups are obviously highly visible in the contemporary
global economy, contain many of the world’s largest firms, and have played a
major role in the development of global consumer markets. Despite following
only one thread of the overall complex process of making, maintaining,
emulating, and replicating consumer markets, limiting one’s attention to
retailers has a distinct advantage of focusing on the most complex type of
such markets, in which selling a wide variety of goods and services is com-
bined with the direct contact with the consumer.
The first part of the chapter describes the emergence and evolution of the
standardized “packages” of market mechanisms in the USA. Replication and
81
Misha Petrovic
diffusion of these packages, or retail formats—from the early twentieth-cen-

tury department store and variety store to the modern shopping centers,
superstores and e-retailers—played a major role in creating and organizing
the world’s most developed system of consumer goods markets. The second
part describes four successive waves of the diffusion of those formats outside
the USA. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential future
trajectories of retail globalization.
American Retail Formats

Department stores: the first modern retail format
Modern retailing emerged in the major urban centers of Europe and the USA
in the second half of the nineteenth century. The story of its development is
inextricably linked to one of the most influential institutions of nineteenth-
century capitalism: the department store (Barth 1980; Crossick and Jaumain
1999). Department stores were amongst the largest businesses of the nine-
teenth century in terms of employment, capitalization, and sales, and cer-
tainly the most visible ones, with millions of consumers visiting their
downtown stores every day. They were on the forefront of innovation in the
use of new technologies, logistics, and management, and their organizational
complexity rivaled and often exceeded that of manufacturing enterprises. By
their drive to “eliminate the middlemen” and source their merchandise from a
broad range of suppliers, department stores effected a substantial reorganiza-
tion of supplier markets in their main lines of trade, and generated new
challenges and opportunities for the small shopkeeper. Yet perhaps their
biggest impact was in creating a distinctly modern culture of consumption
through putting together a set of new, innovative techniques of selling to the
consumer (Hower 1943; M. B. Miller 1981).
DEPARTMENT STORES AS MARKET MAKERS

Amongst those innovations, the most obvious and most frequently noted by
contemporaries were new ways of attracting customers. Monumental stores
with beautiful window displays, located in central urban districts, invited the
consumer to participate in the new spectacle of consumption (Leach 1993).
The principle of free entrance, with no obligation to buy, was by itself a major
attraction, and was supplemented by aggressive advertising and ostentatious
publicity. Once inside the store, the spectacle continued, with marble floors
and pillars, archways, rotundas and grand staircases, chandeliers, ornate car-
pets and decorations, all framing displays of goods meticulously arranged on
glass shelves and showcases. Department stores typically spread over several
82
floors, each divided into numerous departments, and had well-appointed

salons, writing and smoking rooms, restrooms and restaurants. They offered,
and indeed defined, the setting for respectable middle-class sociability, their
leisure and rest facilities inviting a new, relaxed approach to shopping. In
contrast to traditional shops, department stores made it possible for a wide
range of customers to spend hours browsing goods and comparing prices
without having to engage in direct communication with sales clerks or to
feel a pressure to buy. This was particularly welcomed by women, who now
had a safe and socially approved public space of their own (Rappaport 2000),
aptly described as “the ladies paradise” in Émile Zola’s eponymous novel Au
bonheur des dames (1992 [1883]), the first and still the most famous literary
celebration of the world of the department store.
The grandeur of the department store’s architecture and interiors was
matched by the breadth and quality of its merchandise. The second set of
distinctly modern mechanisms of selling consumer goods deployed by the
department stores dealt with the world of goods, their organization, and their
presentation.4 Most department stores started as drapery stores and gradually
expanded their lines to include ready-to-wear clothing, housewares, toiletries,
books and stationery, sporting goods, furniture and appliances, fine foods,
and so on, until they covered most of the types of consumer goods available at
the time. Even in smaller department stores, the breadth and depth of mer-
chandise lines were much higher than in any other type of shop, ranging from
handcrafted and imported goods to mass-produced and standardized ones,
which were, unlike in traditional bazaars and general stores, systematically
organized and displayed in separate departments. Clearly posted prices and
accessible merchandise displays allowed shoppers to learn about different
goods and judge their value, including a large number of new fashions and
new lines of merchandise. Some of the largest department stores supplemen-
ted their in-store merchandising with a thriving mail-order business, their
catalogs serving as guides to fashion and encyclopedias of modern goods.5
Finally, if and when the consumer decided to buy, department stores offered
a set of market mechanisms specially geared toward facilitating the transac-
tion. Fixed and posted prices not only reduced the transaction costs associated
with bargaining, but also minimized price discrimination and the potential
for embarrassment in asking. At the same time, they encouraged budgeting
and planning of purchases and eased the comparison between goods. Depart-
ment stores pioneered modern pricing and price promotion techniques, such
as odd number pricing, bargain and clearance sales, multiproduct pricing, and
the use of “loss leaders.” They had liberal policies of returns and refunds, and
often provided services such as wrapping of parcels and home delivery, free of
charge (Hower 1943; Pasdermadjian 1954).
83
Misha Petrovic
Put together, the innovations in these three basic categories of market

mechanisms—dealing, respectively, with attracting customers, managing pro-
ducts, and effecting a transaction—defined the department store as the first
modern retail format. The debate amongst historians as to who should be
credited with creating the first exemplars of such a format has been a long and
involved one. Boucicaut’s Bon Marché store in Paris, which by the end of the
1850s sold a wide range of goods in separate departments, has often been
identified as the first department store (e.g., Nystrom 1917; Pasdermadjian
1954); some American historians have claimed primacy for the New York
City’s Macy’s (Hower 1943) and Stewart’s (Resseguie 1965); and others have
pointed out to even earlier similar developments in Britain and Japan (Fukami
1953; Hughes 1958). As with most other types of retail formats, the defining
features of the department store are a matter of convention, rather than of a
clear-cut empirical type, and it has been easy to trace examples of some such
features back to the retail environments of the early nineteenth and even the
eighteenth centuries (Walsh 1999). At the same time, through the process of
mutual borrowing and emulation of successful policies, several typical features
of department stores did converge by the late nineteenth century to create the
well-defined and recognizable retail format described above.
French department stores, most prominently the Bon Marché whose name
was used for numerous stores throughout Europe (as well as in Seattle, USA),
but also the Louvre, Samaritaine, and Le Printemps, defined the format for
Europeans in the late nineteenth, and often well into the twentieth centuries.
American department stores, already the biggest and most successful in the
world by the turn of the century, were also often emulated on the other side of
the Atlantic and in Japan. After the First World War, in line with the spread of
the new American model of organizing business, they also became the main
source of innovation in “scientific” selling, personnel training, and manage-
ment (Chessel 1999). In comparison, British stores were late developers and
somewhat less inclined to use the most modern marketing methods, and
German, Swiss, and Belgian stores lagged further behind in terms of merchan-
dise assortment and management.6 But national differences amongst the
largest department stores were secondary to their similarities, and the flow
of marketing innovations had not yet become as concentrated and unidirec-
tional as it would in the years after the Second World War.
Unlike the supermarket, the gas station, the shopping mall, and the fast-
food restaurant, the department store never exemplified the peculiarly Ameri-
can model of making consumer markets. Its role in establishing this model,
however, was crucial, as it defined the essential principles as well as major
dilemmas of twentieth-century retailing. American retailers applied these
principles and tackled these dilemmas faster and more effectively than Euro-
pean ones, and, as a result, the somewhat similar national retailing structures
84
of the early 1900s came to be widely different by the end of the Second World
War. Department stores based their success on selling a wide range of goods
to a wide range of consumers and making the buying process streamlined
and easy. They utilized economies of scale in purchasing, and were ready
to experiment with new methods of marketing and management. These
features placed them at the center of the movement to create new mass
markets for consumption goods and would continue to define such a move-
ment throughout the twentieth century, long after department stores them-
selves had lost their central position to supermarkets, shopping malls, and
big-box stores.
As they evolved from drapery stores to fashion houses to true general
merchandisers, department stores managed to redefine the world of goods
for their customers. Even if they never truly democratized the world of con-
sumption, as most of their wares were priced out of the reach of most people
most of the time, they did democratize the access to the world of goods,
through creating new habits of browsing and shopping. In the market based
on specialized small shops, where the process of buying was highly interac-
tional, and thus embedded in social custom and status distinctions, the world
of goods remained highly segmented. The department store managed to
reorganize large parts of this world, putting an ever broader range of goods
on the single continuum of affordability. Consumers who would have never
dared to enter a piano store or inquire about a price of a cashmere shawl in an
upscale specialty shop, could now see pianos and cashmere shawls alongside
thousands of other products in the department store, each with a clear and
posted price, and contemplate saving for one, especially if they could find
them on one of the seasonal sales or clearance events.
THE LIMITS OF THE DEPARTMENT STORE FORMAT

The department store of the early twentieth century, however, also faced
two major limits to further expansion. First, not even the largest depart-
ment store could keep up with the rapidly expanding world of mass-pro-
duced and mass-advertised goods. The largest downtown stores of the early
twentieth century already had up to one million square feet of selling space,
several times as much as today’s hypermarkets and only a few percent less
than the biggest department stores of today. Urban congestion, the increas-
ing value of downtown property, the unwillingness of customers to go
beyond a certain number of floors, all combined to limit further physical
expansion. The department store had to become increasingly selective
about its merchandise mix, even while trying to maintain its reputation as
the general merchandiser. In the process, many department stores, espe-
cially the ones that were well established in major urban centers, became
increasingly focused on displaying fashion and novelty items and competed
85
Misha Petrovic
with each other less on price and more through offering an ever-expanding
range of free services. They took the “high road” that would gradually
transform them into high-margin high-service specialty stores, often with
many leased departments selling branded goods. This type of retail format
would survive throughout the twentieth century, with well-known names
such as Macy’s and Nordstrom’s, Harrods and Debenhams, Galeries Lafay-
ette and Le Printemps, Isetan and Takashimaya still active today, but it will
never again play such a central role in consumer goods markets as it did at
the beginning of the twentieth century.
The other, “low road,” which consisted of selecting a smaller range of
cheaper, standardized goods and selling them at low margins but with a
high turnover, might have looked much less promising to the established
department store operators at the time. Yet, it gradually became established
as the core of all developed retailing systems and remains so today, repre-
sented by retail giants such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour, and Tesco. In the USA, this
path was initially taken by variety stores, such as Woolworth’s, Grant’s, and
Kresge’s, and small grocery stores selling packaged goods such as A&P, Kroger,
and Safeway; it was then successfully emulated and expanded by “junior”
department stores such as J. C. Penney’s, and mail-order catalogs turned into
store operators such as Sears and Montgomery Ward’s.
The secret of these retailers’ success was not in their focus on a range of
merchandise that was somehow more central and more representative of
consumer taste than that of upscale department stores. In fact, such a
merchandise mix evolved only gradually and was defined by the main
operators’ success as much as being the precondition of such a success.
Rather, the main advantage of these retailers was in their ability to address
the second major limit of the department store expansion: standardizing the
market and bringing it closer to the consumer through a rapid replication of
outlets. The early twentieth-century US department store was too large, too
idiosyncratic, and too embedded in its downtown surroundings to be easily
replicated. A few large downtown stores tried to overcome these limits by
opening smaller suburban branches. Others financed or acquired depart-
ment stores in smaller towns. Yet the real success of department store
replication had to await the maturation of planned shopping centers in
the 1960s, and by that time department stores had already been relegated
to a peripheral role in the American landscape of consumer goods markets.
In contrast, the ability of the variety and grocery-store operators to replicate
rapidly their more modest stores, and thus bring their market format to a
much broader range of consumers, enabled them to assume a central place
in making consumer goods markets, first in the USA, and then around the
world.
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Replicating markets: the chain-store revolution

The origins of the chain-store format in American retailing can be traced back
to the early 1860s, when A&P (originally The Great American Tea Company,
from 1869 The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) opened a number of
stores in New York (Lebhar 1963).7 In 1900, A&P already operated 200 stores,
and by 1910 it had 372. The only other US chain-store operator that reached a
substantial size before 1910 was Woolworth’s, which operated a large chain of
five-and-dime (variety) stores.8 Between 1910 and 1930, however, the number
of chain stores grew at a rapid pace. The 1929 Census of Business reports
almost 160,000 chain stores in operation, accounting for almost 11 percent
of all retail outlets and 22 percent of sales.9 These stores had, on average,
two to three times larger revenues than their independent counterparts, and
5–10 percent lower prices (Barger 1955). More than 15,000 were managed by
A&P alone, which by then had become the world’s largest retailer, with more
than $1 billion in sales. Other giant chains had developed in variety, grocery,
and general-merchandise retailing, but the penetration of the chain-store
format was not limited to these sectors. A substantial proportion of sales of
apparel stores (28.2 percent), shoe stores (45.6 percent), and home-appliance
stores (32.3 percent) was also captured by chain-store operators, which,
although not matching the absolute size of industry leaders, were based on
the same organizational and marketing principles.
GROCERY CHAIN STORES

In the grocery sector the chain-store format spread early and to a greater
extent. In 1929, there were more than 53,000 grocery stores operated by
chains in the USA, about 17 percent of the total number of grocery stores in
the country, and they captured 39 percent of grocery sales. The chain-store
revolution in the grocery sector did not generate as dramatic changes in the
context and experience of shopping as the department store had done in the
nineteenth century. A typical A&P or Kroger grocery store was cleaner, better
lit, slightly larger, more orderly and attractive than its non-chain counterpart,
but it was not radically different in its pricing, location, advertising, and
product-management policies (Nystrom 1930).10 Its prices were usually
lower than those of its competitors, but it also offered fewer services such as
delivery, credit, and telephone orders, and had a more narrow—if well-
planned and properly stocked—merchandise assortment. The importance of
chain stores for making markets for consumer goods was not in providing
brand new types of market mechanisms, but rather in standardizing the
existing ones. Chain grocery stores were centrally located, standardized in
appearance, merchandise assortment, and selling policies, and able to secure
good locations and high coverage density. In 1934, when the total number of
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grocery chain stores had already somewhat declined from its 1930 peak, there
were still 417 A&P stores in Buffalo, NY, 300 in Cleveland, 289 in Newark, NJ,
and 104 in Providence, RI, in addition to 695 stores in Chicago and 370 in
Detroit. In the same year, Safeway operated 504 stores in Los Angeles, 262 in
San Francisco, and 107 in Denver, while American Stores had 721 stores in
Philadelphia alone (Zimmerman 1939).
The standardization of chain-store elements and policies was achieved
through the weeding-out of unprofitable and badly managed stores as well
as through strict operating instructions and manuals and frequent inspection.
The importance of standardization can be understood only in relation to the
high turnover rates of retail stores in general, and grocery stores in particular.
Lebow (1948: 13) estimated that:
In the first 39 years of this century, some 16 million businesses opened their doors
and in the same 39 years, over 14 million closed up. All but a small fraction of
these were small businesses and all but a tiny percentage were engaged in distribu-
tion. For the past 50 years only seven out of ten grocers have reached their second
year and only four out of ten reach their fourth year.
In such a context, the standardization of store appearance and policies of

chain stores suggested strength and stability, not only because these stores
failed less often, but also because, when they did, they were soon replaced by
identical stores in nearby locations.
GENERAL-MERCHANDISE CHAINS
Variety chains evolved from the humble beginnings of small-town five-and-
dime stores of the late nineteeneth century. In these stores every item cost
either 5 or 10 cents, and the assortment depended on whatever bargains the
store owner could secure from wholesalers. Catering to the small-town resi-
dents and immigrant masses in large port cities, five-and-dime stores became
known in the 1880s as the poor person’s department stores (Raucher 1991). By
the turn of the century, a few of these stores had expanded rapidly by adopting
the chain-store format. Woolworth’s, the largest such chain, operated more
than 600 stores in 1910, and was the second biggest retailer in the nation after
Sears. By 1920, most five-and-dime stores (but not Woolworth’s) adopted the
moniker of “limited price variety stores” as they sold an increasing proportion
of higher priced articles. In 1929, 89 percent of the variety-store sales was
captured by chain-store operators, with more than half of this accounted for
by just two major operators, Woolworth’s and S. S. Kresge. Variety stores had a
large impact on the reorganization of the world of products. They pushed
further the logic of selling “affordables,” not just by selling cheap articles but
by helping mass consumers recognize an increasing variety of products as
affordable and comparable in price. The marketing strategy of the limited
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price range encouraged frequent shopping, assisted planning and budgeting

of purchases, and further streamlined mechanisms of transaction.
Similar to variety chains, but with a distinct assortment of merchandise that
emphasized cheap “soft” goods, was J. C. Penney’s. James Cash Penney, the
founder of the store, opened his first cash-only dry goods store named Golden
Rule in 1902 in Kemmerer, WY, a mining town of 1,000 residents (Mahoney
and Sloane 1966). The company changed its name to Penney’s in 1912, and
rapidly expanded throughout Western mining and agricultural towns. In
1929, there were 1,395 Penney stores with combined sales of $210 million,
yet the chain retained its small-town orientation—more than half of its stores
were in towns of 5,000 or fewer people (Raucher 1991).
The variety store, and the “junior department store” such as Penney’s,
successfully combined a relatively broad range of general merchandise with
quick replication of markets. Their experience certainly helped two retail
giants of the time—Sears and Montgomery Ward’s—to branch out from a
mail-order catalog business into store retailing. They were forced to do so by
the limited expansion opportunities in the shrinking rural markets they ca-
tered to. Sears started opening several categories of general-merchandise stores
in 1925, some almost as large as a department store, some as small as a typical
variety store; Ward’s followed in 1926 (Hoge 1988). The efficient purchasing
operations, warehousing, and logistics system serving their existing mail-
order operations, and the well-established brand name, eased the transition
to store-based retailing, and by 1930 Sears derived a majority of sales revenue
from its 350 stores (Emmet and Jeuck 1950). The merchandise mix, however,
was difficult to establish and manage, and both companies spent the best part
of the interwar period honing their store retailing skills.
CAR DEALERS AND GAS STATIONS

While the impact of the chain-store revolution on grocery and general-
merchandise sectors is well established, its impact on the buying of cars and
gasoline, the two main new consumer products of the first half of the twenti-
eth century, is rarely addressed in the same vein. Yet the problems facing
market makers in markets for cars and gasoline were quite similar to those
facing market makers in markets for groceries, apparel, and appliances
(T. G. Marx 1985; Dicke 1992). Mass manufacturers of cars faced an inefficient,
traditional distribution system, dominated by wholesalers, and attempted to
reorganize it through integrating forward into distribution and marketing.
They needed a large number of marketing outlets, and the rapid expansion
of these outlets created major financial, organizational, and logistics pro-
blems. The number of car dealerships expanded quickly in the 1920s, peaked
around 1930, and then gradually declined. A few major operators controlled
most of these dealerships and were responsible for the standardization of their
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features. A similar process can be observed in the gasoline industry, with an

exception that the peak in the number of outlets was not reached until the late
1930s.
Despite the legal differences that separate the franchise system, such as
Ford’s or Shell’s, from the chain-store system of fully owned outlets, such as
Sears’s or A&P’s, the similarities in their organizational development are
obvious, and the simultaneity of this development striking. Moreover, the
fully owned retail chains and the franchised dealership systems were more
similar during the 1920s than ever before or since, since the former had rather
less control over their outlets, and the latter rather more, than in the later
period. The main distinction between the two types of “chain systems” was not
so much in the organization of their operations, as in their basic merchandising
strategies. The chains controlled by mass retailers were inherently multi-prod-
uct markets, and the increase in the average number and breadth of products
they carried continues to the present day. The mass-manufacturer-controlled
chains, on the other hand, emphasized only a narrow line of technologically
similar or purchase-complementary products, and the general tendency has
been toward standardizing this line around a single major brand.
THE FRANCHISE BOOM: CONVENIENCE STORES,

FAST-FOOD RESTAURANTS, AND MOTELS
While manufacturer-organized franchises dominated the early years of fran-
chising, the 1930s saw a rapid spread of the business model into retailing and
food service. From Rexall drugstores and Ben Franklin variety stores to Howard
Johnson and Dairy Queen ice-cream parlors, franchised outlets were becom-
ing increasingly common in America’s pre-Second World War consumer
markets. However, the real franchising boom occurred in the early post-war
period, with Dairy Queen (1945), McDonald’s (1954), KFC (1954), Best West-
ern (1946), Holiday Inn (1952), and similar franchisors transforming the food
service and hospitality industries (Jakle, Sculle, and Rogers 1996; Jakle and
Sculle 1999). Their strategy was similar to the one that drove the earlier
franchise efforts: combining a narrow line of products (goods and/or services),
tightly controlled through branding and standardizing, with a rapid replica-
tion of consumer markets.
Franchising was also the key to the success of the Southland Corporation,
with its chain of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Southland began experiment-
ing with franchising in 1963, rapidly expanding from a regional chain of
1,000 stores to a national network of more than 3,500 stores in 1969. It also
played a major role in bundling the convenience store and the gas station in
the late 1960s, thus developing another major format of the US retail land-
scape (Sparks 1996).
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THE CHAIN-STORE AGE

By 1930, it was clear that American retailing had entered the “chain-store age”
and that its future lay in the hands of big corporations (Lebhar 1963). The big
retailers benefited from the economies of scale in management, distribution, and
retail services and were best positioned to implement organizational innovations
that drove down operating expenses. Their massive buying power enabled them
to obtain discounts on quantity buying, as well as tax breaks and the financial
backing of Wall Street. For manufacturers, especially smaller ones that did not
attempt to integrate forward into wholesaling (or direct selling), these large
retailers represented efficient and predictable channels of distribution. The prev-
alence of chain-store operators in large sectors of consumer markets also meant
that marketing innovations could be adopted and diffused quickly, thus unifying
and standardizing previously segmented markets.
Many firms that developed a successful strategy of replication in this early
period remained dominant in US retailing throughout the rest of the century.
Three of these, Kroger, Safeway, and Acme Markets (American Stores, Albert-
sons) are large grocery chains, and another two, Sears and J. C. Penney, were
amongst the first chain-store operators in the general-merchandise sector.
Kmart traces it origins to Kresge, another major variety chain of the early
part of the century. The main new entrants between 1930 and 1990 on this
exclusive list were department store chains, Federated, Allied, May, and Day-
ton Hudson (the parent of Target), indicating the somewhat later develop-
ment of the chain-store format in this sector. Perhaps even more striking than
the longevity of large retail chain-store operators is the fact that today five out
of the ten largest US companies (and eight out of the top ten global ones) are
car makers and oil companies, just as they were in the 1920s, when they
adopted their own franchised version of the chain format.11
The American model: supermarkets, shopping malls, and big-box stores

From the consumer’s perspective, the chain stores of the 1930s remained quite
different from the chain stores the US consumer patronizes today. They were
small, with a somewhat haphazard and narrow assortment of products, and
they allowed the consumer only a limited access to merchandise, which was
displayed behind the counters and handled by store clerks. As long as the
merchandise assortment remained limited and purchasing habits and inter-
actions standardized by local customs, this was rarely seen as a problem. Yet
the next transformation of consumer goods markets depended on successfully
combining the principles of large size and easy access to a broad range of
products, as pioneered by the department store, with fast replication and
centralized control skills of the chain-store operators.
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By the early 1960s, the main elements of this transformation had been
established in American retailing, creating a set of retail formats that, in
most aspects, would be recognizable today. Small chain grocery stores were
replaced by large, self-service supermarkets. Large planned shopping centers
offered a proper home to both general merchandise and specialty chain-store
operators, and gave a new lease on life to the department store. And, some of
the most successful general merchandisers and specialty-store operators that
did not participate in the shopping-center boom developed the free-standing
big-box store format. Apart from their differences, all three formats were based
on combining strategies of scrambled merchandising, a dramatic increase in
size, and simplification and standardization of the selling process, most nota-
bly through “self-service.” All of them were also highly replicable and, as they
spread throughout the American landscape, they for the first time crossed that
critical threshold at which there were enough modern retailers in contact with
each other to assure rapid adoption of innovations.
THE RISE OF THE SUPERMARKET

In 1930, the average chain grocery store in the USA was three times larger than
an independent one. In 1960, the ratio increased to ten to one. Throughout
this period, A&P remained the world’s biggest retailer, and one of the world’s
biggest companies of any kind. A typical A&P store of 1960, however, bore
little resemblance to its 1930 ancestor. The number of A&P stores declined
during this period from almost 16,000 to 4,400, while the sales per store
increased ten times in constant dollars (Zimmerman 1955). The force behind
this transformation was the new retailing format that emerged during the
early 1930s: the supermarket.
While the first grocery stores that arguably could qualify as “supermarkets”
were opened in the 1920s in California and Texas, by operators such as
Ralph’s, Alpha Beta Food, and Weingarten’s, it was the phenomenal success
of the New York-based King Cullen (1930) and Big Bear (1932) stores that
started the national supermarket revolution (Zimmerman 1955; Longstreth
1999). Their success paved the way for other independent supermarkets, and
between 1932 and 1937 their number grew from 300 to more than 3,000, and
their presence from 6 to 47 states. At this time, large grocery chain operators,
such as A&P, Safeway, and Kroger, started converting their stores into super-
markets, and by 1953 supermarkets had become the dominant force in grocery
retailing. A survey in this year found 17,500 supermarkets, about 6 percent of
the total number of grocery stores in the USA, capturing 48 percent of total
grocery sales (Zimmerman 1955). By 1960, the number of supermarkets
was reaching its saturation point of about 30,000, as they captured almost
70 percent of all grocery sales. Within thirty years, the format went from a few
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independent suburban stores to capturing most of the sales in the biggest

retail sector (Bucklin 1967).
The supermarket format spread faster and more intensely than any type of
consumer goods market did before. One of the secrets of its success was in its
high replicability. Once big chain-store operators entered the field, it became
clear that, despite the relatively high set-up costs of opening a supermarket,
the format was fairly easy to replicate, to a large extent because of its self-
service character. Despite the common preconception, supermarkets did not
employ significantly fewer employees than regular grocery stores, controlling,
of course, for difference in size. The main reason was that the new technology
of self-service, while requiring less labor directly employed in sales, initially
demanded more labor for stocking, pricing, arranging displays, and so on.
These functions, however, could be more easily rationalized than the diffuse
competences of a grocery clerk, and their performance depended less on
acquired skills and experience. Finding thousands of competent store man-
agers was a daunting task for large chain-store operators, and making them
follow the company’s policies was even more difficult (Adelman 1966). The
transition to the supermarket format reduced the number of stores, and
greatly rationalized and standardized their operating procedures.
THE DEPARTMENT STORE FOR FOOD

From the consumer’s perspective, the attraction of the supermarket was easy
to understand. The typical 1950s supermarket was a very large, well-organized,
brightly lit store, in a convenient location and with ample parking space,
which carried a broad selection of various merchandise at fairly low prices.
In this sense it represented, rather directly, an application of the early depart-
ment store format to grocery retailing, offering one-stop shopping for neces-
sities. Just as department stores did in the late nineteenth century, the
supermarket of the late 1930s provided a novel context of consumption,
with open display shelves, large open refrigerated cases, standardized price
tags, clear and broad walkways, shopping carts, and cash registers. Most of the
equipment used by supermarkets was new and designed specifically for self-
service selling. This also required a new store layout. Ideally, the supermarket
operator wanted customers to pass all displays before they reached the cash
register. Early marketing research in supermarkets revealed the importance of
“impulse buying”—that is, of various types of purchases on which the cus-
tomer decides while in the store.12 This opened up a whole new realm of
marketing efforts that, not unlike those in the department store, relied on
displays, signs and cues, merchandise arrangement, and store layout to induce
the consumer to buy a greater variety of goods and in greater quantities than
ever before.
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Misha Petrovic
Given their self-service nature, supermarkets provided a particularly fitting

laboratory for observing consumer behavior. An early study, for example,
noticed the shoppers’ tendency to move along the periphery of the market,
“like mice scurrying along the walls;” another observed that most customers
gravitate toward the right side of the market (Zimmerman 1955). Different
layout plans, from radically arranged aisles to placing promotions and “pure-
impulse” items in the front of the store, were designed to respond to, as well as
to modify, observed consumer behavior.
Supermarkets were also amongst the biggest advertisers of this period. The
low price appeal of the first supermarkets was supported by their heavy
emphasis on price advertising in local newspapers. By the early 1950s super-
markets were not only by far the largest category of retail advertisers, but their
total advertising outlays exceeded those of all national food manufacturers—
themselves the heaviest brand advertisers of all industries—combined (Zim-
merman 1955). The parallel between early supermarkets and early department
stores could also easily be drawn in regard to their promotion strategies. On a
smaller scale than the department store, but with the same intent and often
with the same zeal, supermarkets organized contests and promotions, free
giveaways, and public events such as parades and concerts; some of them
even housed art exhibitions and public-library branches on the premises.
SCRAMBLED MERCHANDISING AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

The organization of the supermarket also had a major influence on the nature
of the products stocked. Self-service shopping required products that are
properly and attractively packaged and clearly labeled. Such products—mostly
canned, bottled, and packaged groceries but also increasingly toiletries and
household goods—had been available from manufacturers and sold in grocery
stores since the early years of the twentieth century (Tedlow 1990; Strasser
1995). Many of them, however, had to be adapted for self-service selling—
packaged in different sizes and with more attractive labels including more
information and advertising on the packaging. Moreover, since supermarkets
included a much wider range of products than other grocery stores (typically
meat, produce, dairy, and frozen foods departments, but also drugs, house-
wares, bakery and delicatessen, magazines, toys, and stationery), they exerted
pressure on a broad range of consumer goods industries to create new products
that were ready for the self-service-style selling.
Early independent supermarkets often sold a variety of non-food mer-
chandise, typically in leased departments. Big Bear, for instance, sold auto
accessories, paints, radios, hardware, drugs and cosmetics, and operated a
soda fountain and a small restaurant. Large chains generally eschewed such
a haphazard strategy of scrambled merchandising, and refused to rely on
concessionaire or leasing arrangements. Nevertheless, they also pursued
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expansion into non-food lines, if much more cautiously. Health and beauty
aids, magazines, books and stationery, toys, soft goods, housewares, and
cleaning products, all found their way into supermarkets in the 1930s and
1940s, and in 1954 a study of non-food merchandising found the majority
of supermarkets carrying extensive lines of these products (Super Market
Merchandising 1954).
SELF-SERVICE AS SELF-SELLING
In addition to size, location, and store appeal, and the breadth of the mer-
chandise mix, the supermarket’s other major draw for the consumer was its
emphasis on self-service. The idea of a self-service grocery store had been tried
to some degree many times before, most famously in Clarence H. Saunders’s
franchised Piggly Wiggly stores.13 The synergies achieved by combining the
self-service format with store size and a broad merchandise assortment sur-
prised even the most enthusiastic early operators of supermarkets, let alone
the more conservative chain-store operators. The less sales service they were
offered, and the greater the variety of merchandise, the more consumers
bought on each trip to the supermarket. And this rule held for non-food as
much as for food items, for packaged articles as much as for produce, and even,
as A&P and Safeway were soon to find out, for store brands as for nationally
advertised ones. At the beginning of the supermarket development it was
often assumed that the success of self-service represented little more than
the trade-off consumers were willing to make between retail service and low
prices. Only gradually did it become clear that, for most customers, self-service
meant better service. Early surveys of consumer behavior show that the free-
dom from high-pressure selling and the “leisure of choice” figured quite
prominently in consumers’ preference for shopping at supermarkets (Regan
1963; Bucklin 1972). Shorter queues were another major advantage of the
supermarket. Although initially viewed with suspicion, by the late 1930s self-
service was already considered a convenience, rather than a matter of neces-
sity, and was featured prominently in supermarkets’ advertising (Zimmerman
1955).
The adoption of self-service signified the transition from the focus on
interactional aspects of selling, defined as a diffuse set of retail services
provided by store clerks, to a focus on creating and improving the features of
the marketplace. Now to a large extent it was the consumer who performed
traditional “selling services” for herself, searching for products, and compar-
ing their prices, quality, and characteristics; yet these activities were per-
formed in a new type of market structure defined and controlled more than
ever by the retailer. The commitment to the self-service format also led super-
markets to reorganize the physical aspect of the store—the architecture, signs,
entrances, fixtures, displays, shopping carts, checkout points, and so on—in a
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Misha Petrovic
way that would be emulated by most “discount” retailers. In this context, the
rise of general-merchandise discounters in the USA, from the early leaders
such as Korvette and Vornado, to the 1960s creations such as Kmart, Target,
Woolco, and Wal-Mart, represented little more than an adaptation of super-
markets’ retailing strategies to an assortment of products—apparel, luggage,
home furnishings, toys—traditionally sold in department stores (McNair and
May 1976).
THE MALL
Shopping centers may be the most ubiquitous aspect of the contemporary
retail landscape in the USA. Loosely defined as clusters of retail stores,
planned, owned, and managed as a unit, they capture more than half of all
non-automotive retail sales and employ one in every fifteen Americans
(Cohen 2002). Depending on the definition, there were anywhere between
60,000 and 100,000 shopping centers in the USA in 2008, ranging from small-
scale neighborhood centers (strip malls) to super-regional malls often exceed-
ing a million square feet of retail space. Although the history of planned retail
centers in the USA goes back to the late 1920s, the shopping center boom that
would transform American retailing started only in the mid-1950s, and was
closely related to the government tax policy (the Accelerated Depreciation Act
of 1954), making development of large centers a particularly attractive busi-
ness proposition for real-estate developers, including the financial giants such
as Prudential and Equitable (Hanchett 1996, 2000). In 1955, there were still
only about twenty large regional shopping centers in the USA, all of them of
the open-air variety. In 1956, Victor Gruen built the first fully enclosed
shopping mall, Southdale near Minneapolis, which featured what was to
become the classic mall format with two department stores as anchors and a
two-level parking space (see Hardwick 2004). By the end of that year the
number of large centers in operation had more than doubled. Ten years
later, there were nearly 400 such shopping malls in the USA, and “the mall”
as the largest, most visible, and, arguably, most innovative shopping-center
format had become not only the favorite leisure destination for most Amer-
icans but also a new form of community center for suburbs and small towns.
The interaction between large institutional investors, enterprising develo-
pers, and major chain-store operators brought about the standardization of
the development process as well as of the shape of America’s new market-
places. For enterprising retailers in all major sectors, this offered vast oppor-
tunities for expansion with advantages of modern infrastructure, on favorable
lease terms, and in environments more hospitable than traditional downtown
shopping districts. At the same time, the growth opportunities created by new
shopping centers were clearly stacked in favor of large stores over the smaller
ones, and chain-store operators over the independents.
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In terms of the structure and performance of the American retailing sector,

the rise of the shopping mall had three major effects. First, it gave a new
lease on life to the declining department store sector of the 1950s, and led to
a major organizational transformation and growth of chain department
store operators such as Allied, Federated, and May Department Stores. Sec-
ond, it led to the rapid growth and merchandise assortment upgrading of the
so-called mass merchandisers, Sears and Penney’s and, with somewhat less
success, Ward’s. These two categories of general-merchandise retailers be-
came major innovators in customer service, including store organization
and displays, advertising, and consumer credit; as well as in inventory
management and organization of supply chains. They also played an instru-
mental role in shaping the discount sector after 1960, both as entrepreneurs
(for example, Dayton Hudson’s Target, J. C. Penney’s Treasure Island) and as
organizational models. Moreover, they became the pioneers in the creation
of global supply chains, by opening a number of purchasing offices in East
and South East Asia, starting from the late 1960s (Hollander 1970; Gereffi
1994b). Finally, the expansion of the shopping mall also provided a major
opportunity, mainly from the mid-1970s, for the rapid expansion of inno-
vative apparel retailers such as Gap and The Limited, and for many other
types of specialty chain retailers.
On the consumer side, shopping malls provided new marketplaces where
one could enjoy the convenience of easy access, ample parking space, and
comparison shopping. The ultimate triumph of scrambled merchandising,
shopping malls represented an expansion of the traditional downtown
department store, with a similar emphasis on fashion and home furnishings
combined with various services. Yet they had major advantages over the
chaotic and often rapidly declining downtown areas. The mall was a con-
trolled, secure, climatized, and clean shopping environment. Parking and
store access was easy, the interior design unified and full of visual clues,
from lighting to store signs, that encouraged spending. Grouping similar
stores together facilitated comparison shopping, and various entertainment,
food, and services venues made the shopping trip more enjoyable.
THE BIG-BOX STORE

Large “regional” shopping malls were the most visible and attractive parts of
the new retail landscape, but they captured only about one-third of the
shopping center sales. The rest went to smaller neighborhood and community
shopping centers. The former were typically anchored by a supermarket or a
drugstore, the latter by a junior, or discount department store. Discount
department stores, such as Kmart, were a format that evolved from the
1950s hard-good discounters, such as Korvette and Vornado, that sold a
limited line of national brands merchandise below the manufacturer
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Misha Petrovic
recommended list price. During the early 1960s, many major chains, most of
them department or variety store operators, entered the ranks of discounters.
In 1962 alone, more than twenty retail chains started discount operations,
prompting Fortune magazine to publish a comprehensive study of the new
trend, spanning four issues of the magazine and titled “The Distribution
Upheaval” (Lebhar 1963). As the leaders in cost-cutting and labor-saving
innovations that passed a considerable share of those savings on to the
consumer, discounters were a highly undesirable competition to established
department stores, and the latter often used their clout to ban the “price
cutters” from shopping malls. This led to the development of the standard
free-standing big-box store, oftentimes loosely incorporated into a roadside
shopping center, along with a few smaller service and retail shops.
On the consumer side, the format itself was hardly new; in fact, it
represented little more than the application of the supermarket model to
non-grocery retailing. What was new, however, and what paralleled the
other two massive transformations of American consumer markets brought
about by supermarkets and shopping centers, was how rapidly the discount-
ing format was adopted in the broadly defined general-merchandise sector
and also how rapidly, once the adoption had reached critical mass in the
early 1970s, those new discounters emerged as the leaders in technological
and market-making innovation. By 1990, the Big Three of the general-mer-
chandise discounters, Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target, had joined the exclusive
list of the top ten US retailers. The following year, Wal-Mart surpassed Sears as
the largest American retailer, only the third retailer in eighty years to occupy
that spot.
By the late 1960s, the American system of consumer goods markets was
beginning to approach the degree of concentration of major chain-store
operators that would make the rapid diffusion of market innovations possible.
At the same time, the absolute size of the market ensured that few chains had
nationwide presence and that there was little direct competition between
major operators. In 1991, when it became the biggest retailer in the world,
Wal-Mart still operated in only twenty-eight US states, and almost exclusively
in small towns (Vance and Scott 1994). Major supermarket operators also
remained mostly regional, the revenue share of the top twenty firms in
grocery retailing approaching 50 percent only by the end of the century.
This situation created little pressure on American retailers to pursue interna-
tional expansion; it also enabled the most efficient retailers to grow very fast,
as they wrestled the sales out of the hands of the least efficient competition
first. In 1967, chain stores captured just under 50 percent of the total retail
sales in general merchandise and food. By 2002, this figure had risen to nearly
80 percent. Yet the sales share of the ten largest US retailers rose only slightly
in the same period, most of this increase being due to the phenomenal growth
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of Wal-Mart, thus indicating that a fairly large number of chain retailers

managed to grow at the expense of traditional stores.
US consumer goods markets, 1970–2010

The post-1960s trends in making mass markets for consumer goods in the USA
could be seen as the continuation and maturation of retail format innovations
from the previous period, rather than as radically new developments.14 The
elements of the big-box, self-service marketplace developed by supermarkets
and big-box discounters, had, by the early 1980s, diffused into most categories
of merchandising. Discounters established themselves as the dominant type
of retailing format, in fact so successfully that by the late 1980s the notion of
discounting lost any distinct meaning and was replaced by notions such as
“everyday low price,” on the one hand, and “off-price” and “deep discount-
ing,” on the other. New discounting formats such as off-price retailers, ware-
house clubs, and limited price (dollar) stores joined the general-merchandise
discounters of the 1960s (DSN Retailing Today 2002). The big-box retailing
concept was successfully applied to specialty retailing, first in clothing, toys,
and electronics, and then in office products (including computers), home
improvement stores, sporting goods, and other categories. At the same time,
the general trend toward scrambled merchandising in what was increasingly
referred to as “fast-moving consumer goods” led to further blurring of retail
categories. Supermarkets and drugstores, warehouse clubs and general mass
merchandisers all developed overlapping merchandise assortments geared
toward one-stop shopping and convenience.
Shopping centers continued to expand their presence, got even bigger,
moved back to long-neglected downtown retail cores, and added an increasing
number of side attractions. By the late 1980s, the emergence of outlet malls
and power centers indicated further convergence between the big-box store
and shopping center concepts. The introduction of self-service in gasoline
retailing in the late 1960s started a new trend of integrating convenience
stores and gas station formats. In such outlets, gasoline retailing provided
minimal margins but major drawing power, and the real profits were derived
from the sales of convenience goods.
In the most recent decades, perhaps the biggest transformation of the US
consumer market landscape was effected by the emergence of Wal-Mart’s
supercenters in the 1990s. Those giant stores for the first time successfully
combined retailing of groceries and general merchandise. Such a late adoption
of this integrated format, compared to the European-style hypermarkets, was,
somewhat paradoxically, due to the higher level of development of American
consumer markets. Many original hard-good discounters of the 1950s had
leased grocery departments; a few supermarkets experimented with an
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extensive range of non-food products as early as the 1930s. Various “combo”

stores, some even larger than today’s Wal-Mart supercenters, had been tried
throughout the postwar decades, but few of them survived, Portland’s Fred
Meyer (merged in 1998 with Kroger) being one of the most successful ones.
The size of the world of consumer products in the USA, and the high level of
development of various retail formats, made it extremely difficult to find a
proper merchandise mix that would encourage one-stop shopping and yet
would not appear too narrow and too random.
Wal-Mart succeeded where most of its predecessors failed, partly because it
could already count on customer loyalty, being the biggest retailer in the USA,
and partly because of its strategy of placing its stores in smaller towns and
suburbs, where the competition was weaker. In only fifteen years, between
1991 and 2006, the number of Wal-Mart supercenters went from 6 to almost
2,000, and they captured over 10 percent of all non-automotive retail sales in
the USA. The rapid ascendance of Wal-Mart supercenters, as well as of similar
stores by Target, and warehouse clubs by Costco and Sam’s Club (operated by
Wal-Mart) brought about the integration of the general-merchandise, spe-
cialty retailing, grocery and drugs sectors, changing the nature of retail com-
petition in the USA. The consolidation in these sectors left only a handful of
major competitors with a lion’s share of the market.
American Retail Formats: The Waves of Diffusion
American retail formats developed in the context of the overall system of

consumer markets and marketing, and, even more broadly, in the context of
the evolution of the American consumer society. While this process was, to a
great degree, independent from retail developments elsewhere, it was also
shaped by the general evolution of the American economy and its position
in the world economy. In retrospect, the adoption of American retail formats
around the world, in different socioeconomic contexts and with little direct
internationalization effort of American retailers, has been quite remarkable.
Whether this process should be described as one of Americanization or mod-
ernization seems less important than the fact that it was typically not a
consequence of other elements of the economy and society achieving a
certain level of development, and then, in turn, providing the basis for retail
innovations. Rather, new consumer goods markets were often introduced
directly into the traditional fabric of the economy. They had major disruptive
effects on such a fabric and, at the same time, played a catalytic role for the
development of other modern economic institutions.
While the consequences were revolutionary, the process itself has been
quite gradual. Until just two decades ago, only a minority of the world
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population had access to modern consumer markets, and even today there
are few retailers that have a truly global reach. The reasons for this relate to
the complexity of consumer goods markets. In general, the more complex
markets, in terms of numbers and diversity of products (goods and services,
and the ways to combine them), trading partners, and transaction mechan-
isms, are more difficult to emulate and replicate. Consumer goods markets,
given that they involve complex packages of goods and services, many
diverse trading partners, and disparate transactions, are typically more diffi-
cult to replicate than business-to-business markets, those for services only,
and those where transactions are few and highly standardized.
Within the overall process of the global diffusion of modern retailing prac-
tices, there are several distinct types. The diffusion of separate market mechan-
isms or marketing techniques is the most common one, and the easiest to
achieve. The departmental organization of a large store, the concept of self-
service, centralized checkouts and cash registers, and online browsing for
consumer goods, are all examples of some elements of consumer goods mar-
kets that have traveled exceptionally well. The diffusion of full retail formats
has also been widespread, but until recently limited to simpler markets,
such as those for fast food, cars and gasoline, or luxury items. Within these
categories of goods, the firms that tightly control product management in
supply markets, through branding, design, and even through performing
manufacturing activities, are typically in a better position to replicate con-
sumer markets for their products than the firms that engage exclusively in
retailing. Yet their growth is also limited by the scope of their merchandise
assortment. On the other hand, the firms that sell many different types of
products not only cannot afford to organize the production and design of all
such products, but are also limited by the difficulties of replicating retail
outlets. The process of the international adoption of the supermarket format,
described in the following sections, provides a good example of the difficulties
and obstacles related to emulation, let alone replication, of more complex
market formats.
The process of internationalization, understood as the replication of outlets
in another country, is another type of diffusion of modern retailing, and it
presents additional problems to the retailer. Amongst those, the differences
between national “consumer cultures,” while often highly visible, might not
be the most significant factor. Regulatory contexts, organization of supplier
markets, and the increased complexity of organizational structure and man-
agement are typically more important.
The aggregate result of the diffusion and replication of market mechan-
isms and formats by many individual retailers is the emergence of local
systems of consumer goods markets. Such systems do not always, or even
commonly, emerge at the national level, although governments’ regulatory
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efforts and the way in which official statistics are generated, suggest that this
is the case. More commonly, the diffusion, replication, and competition
processes are local, or subnational, and sometimes they are transnational
or even global in character. The process of forming such systems of con-
sumer goods markets is initially limited to the emergence of a few modern
firms that deploy and promote modern retailing methods. Once these firms
reach a certain critical size and visibility, the recognition and subsequent
diffusion of best practices between firms is accelerated and the formats
standardized. Center–periphery structures emerge to channel the flow of
innovation to other areas and less innovative firms. Direct competition
between leading retailers usually develops quite late, but has major conse-
quences in terms of the integration of the market system. Competitive
threats, whether actual or potential, lead not only to the further standardi-
zation of most successful formats, but also to the proliferation of comple-
mentary formats—that is, to formats that support and co-evolve with each
other. Thus the rise of large suburban supermarkets may encourage the
development of a dense network of small convenience stores, one-stop
shopping co-evolves with fast-food chains, and so on.
The first wave, 1900–1945: limited diffusion

By the opening decades of the twentieth century, the USA had already estab-
lished itself as the economic role model for the rest of the world. While
European and Asian observers were initially fascinated mostly by American
techniques of mass production and scientific management, the methods of
what was increasingly referred to as “distribution” were also observed and
emulated. Before the Second World War, the spread of knowledge about the
US retailing models went mainly through informal channels, from the indi-
vidual entrepreneurs’ visits to the USA to transatlantic networks of depart-
ment stores operators. Occasionally, an accomplished American retailer would
move to Europe, bringing about new marketing methods. Perhaps the most
famous example of this was that of Gordon Selfridge, who was the leading
man of Chicago’s Marshall Fields, the largest department store in the world,
when in 1906 he decided to move to London. There he opened an American-
style department store, introducing modern advertising and merchandising
methods, which were then rapidly adopted by his more established West End
competitors (Honeycombe 1984; Rappaport 1995). Even more exceptional
were direct attempts to replicate American retail formats abroad, the only
prominent example being Woolworth’s variety stores in the UK (from 1909),
and Germany (1927).
During this period the adoption of American retailing methods was typi-
cally limited to separate market mechanisms and techniques within the
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general department store format. By the end of this period, department

stores were present in most of Western and Central Europe, in Japan,
China, and Australia (MacPherson 1998; Coles 1999; Crossick and Jaumain
1999; Miller and Merrilees 2004). The Soviet Union also had its GUM depart-
ment stores from 1921 on, and there were many outposts and emulations of
metropolitan department stores, catering to colonial elites in far-reaching
corners of colonial empires, from South Africa to Iraq to Singapore (Hollan-
der 1970). Diffusion and borrowing were ubiquitous: Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi
store was modeled on Philadelphia’s Wannamakers, Hong Kong and Shang-
hai department stores owned by Chinese entrepreneurs were based on British
stores in China and American in Hawaii (Moeran 1998; Yen 1998). In many
non-Western stores, most of the merchandise originally came from the West.
However, as one of the dominant symbols of modernity of that era, the
department store lent itself well to appropriation by diverse modernization
projects, including anti-Western ones. Sun Yat Sen saw Chinese department
stores as an important part of the project of national renewal (Young 1998),
and Soviet GUMs were expected to assist the goals of socialist revolution
(Hilton 2004). Department stores everywhere showcased the world of mod-
ern consumer goods. In many places, they also acted as major agents of
change in the broader system of consumer goods markets. Such a role,
however, was always limited to major urban centers by the difficulties of
replicating the department store format.
At the same time, the typical chain store of the time, just as in the pre-
supermarket era in the USA, remained small and unexceptional from the
consumer standpoint, despite having a major role in reorganizing and mod-
ernizing supply chains. Chain grocery stores were quite common in Britain in
the late nineteenth century, and the development of “multiple shops” there
was, in fact, ahead of the USA (Jefferys 1954). However, one particular type of
the chain store, the “limited-price” (five-and-dime) variety store, was recog-
nized everywhere as an American invention and was consciously emulated in
Europe. Variety stores spread quickly to Britain, where Woolworth’s operated
after 1909 and Marks and Spencer had “penny bazaars” from the 1880s. In
continental Europe they were introduced much later, by Tietz (1926) and
Woolworth’s (1927) in Germany, and by Audiberts, as a direct imitation of
Woolworth’s, in 1927 in France, and the following year in Belgium (De Grazia
2005). Unlike in the USA and Britain, major department store operators often
took the lead in starting the chains of this new retail format. This pattern was
to be typical in many other countries and in later stages of the global diffusion
of various American retail formats. While the original innovation might have
come from small firms, the large modern retailers often took the lead in
exploiting its potential.
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The second wave, 1945–1970: big-box retailing comes to Europe and Japan
In contrast to the first wave of diffusion of American retail formats, the second
wave was generated by a more concerted effort by various organizations, most
notably US productivity missions and assistance agencies, but also private
organizations such as Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation
(IBEC) (see Broehl 1968), firms such as National Cash Registry, trade associa-
tions, and enterprising retailers.
In the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe, most of the effort under
the US-organized Economic Recovery Program (ERP), better known as the
Marshall Plan, was initially focused on distributing American-made staple
goods and rebuilding the infrastructure in order to alleviate “hunger, poverty,
desperation and chaos.”15 With the intensification of the Cold War, especially
from 1950 on, the productivity aspect became paramount, and a part of
enhancing productivity concerned the dismal state of “distribution” (Schröter
2005).
SUPERMARKETS
The initial attempts to modernize European distribution by using the Ameri-
can model focused on the introduction of separate market mechanisms, most
notably self-service (Henksmeier 1960; Dawson 1981). The supermarket was
the first US retail format to be systematically introduced, and the slow spread
of supermarkets shows how complex and often difficult was the process of
adoption of full retail formats (see A. Goldman 1981; Goldman, Ramaswami,
and Krider 2002; Shaw, Curth, and Alexander 2004). The supermarket, just as
the planned shopping center and the big-box store, evolved in a context
characterized by widespread ownership of automobiles, cheap suburban
land made available for retail stores and amenities, as well as large storage
and refrigeration facilities at consumers’ homes. None of these conditions was
particularly well satisfied in the Western European urban centers of the 1950s,
and even less so in Japan. Supermarkets also required a large number of well-
established and marketed brands of pre-packaged, standardized consumer
products, and a broad range of new technologies of packaging, display, and
delivery. For an entrepreneur, starting a supermarket entailed a high capital
investment in the store and its fixtures, from refrigerated cabinets to check-
outs. It also necessitated a change in mindset, since it involved training and
supervising a different type of labor, and engaging in different marketing and
selling techniques. Licensing restrictions, government regulations, high taxes,
and the animosity of small retailers all presented further obstacles, making the
required investment for opening a supermarket three times higher in Europe
than in the USA (Schröter 2004).
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As a result, the main appeal of the supermarket format as it was introduced

in the USA—that is, offering low prices for staple branded goods—was not
present in Europe, where supermarket prices were often higher than in small
shops and open markets and the merchandise mix unfamiliar. The fact that
the supermarket succeeded at all was due to persistent efforts of major market
innovators, only some of which were established retail chains. It was also due
to the fact that it was a distinctly American type of market, and thus it
symbolized modernity and a high standard of living for a generation of
European consumers. The traditional shopping and consuming habits of
European consumers, initially considered the main obstacle in adopting the
format, have thus proven to be much less significant, as they changed quickly
in response to the presence of new types of markets.
Despite the trade statistics showing the supermarket revolution of the early
1960s in Western Europe and Japan, the American-style supermarket format
was adopted only gradually and partially. The adoption of the self-service
principle was generally easy and quick, but the pricing, store size, and mer-
chandise mix aspects were adopted only much later and to a lesser degree.
While the first supermarkets emerged in Europe in the late 1950s, the size and
product assortment of American supermarkets have not been approached even
today. A typical American supermarket of the 1960s sold up to 5,000 different
products using a selling space of more than 1,500 square meters; by 2000, the
average floor space had tripled and the number of products had increased to
45,000. An average German or French supermarket in 1960 sold no more than
1,000 items, and by 2000 it had reached 800–1,000 square meters with an
assortment of up to 7,000 items. The introduction of self-service, packaging,
and preprocessing in the meat and produce departments also represented a
major problem, and was not standardized until the 1970s (Schröter 2005).
These trends were even more pronounced in Japan. Although a few large
size (400–600 square meters) self-service grocery stores emerged in Japan in
the late 1950s, the introduction of open refrigerator consoles and the selling of
pre-packaged meats and produce did not take off until the early 1980s. As a
result, the number of small specialty stores in Japan continued to increase
until 1985, and the 1950s and 1960s supermarket pioneers soon shifted their
operations toward the “superstore” format, which, similar to European hyper-
markets, sold extensive lines of non-grocery items (Meyer-Ohle 2003; Takaoka
and Kikkawa 2004).
The difficulties of matching the American supermarket format in size, mer-
chandise assortment, and pricing policies gave rise to several adaptations of
the format. One was the development of the hypermarket, a combination
store selling a large proportion of non-groceries. The latter commanded higher
margins than grocery products, and thus compensated for the inefficiencies of
the grocery departments.16 In Europe, with a rapidly emerging middle class
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Misha Petrovic
starved of modern consumer goods, the standard merchandise assortment in

such stores was much easier to establish than in the USA. Another variation on
the supermarket format, particularly successful in Germany, was the so-called
hard-discount store, which gave up the size and merchandise assortment for
the strict emphasis on self-service and low prices. The first examples of such a
format emerged in Germany between 1954 and 1956, as a direct emulation of
the US “box” discount store. The format was later perfected independently by
Aldi (Schröter 2005; Wortmann, Chapter 4 this volume) and then copied by
other German operators such as Lidl.
SHOPPING CENTERS
In comparison to the development of the supermarket, the spread of the
shopping center in Europe involved fewer problems and modifications. This
was the result of the much larger size of such undertakings, which were often
actively supported by local governments, developed by established archi-
tectural and construction firms, and underwritten by major institutional
investors, all of which had substantial access to the skills and knowledge
accumulated by their American counterparts. The first such planned shopping
centers in Europe were developed in the 1960s, including the first examples of
large-scale “regional” shopping malls of American style and size, such as
Elephant and Castle in London (1965), Europa Center in Berlin (1965), and
Parly II near Versailles (1969). Unlike in the USA, many of these shopping
centers were built within the existing urban area, rather than on its outskirts,
as a part of the effort to revitalize urban neighborhoods. In the UK and France,
the activity peaked in the 1970s, and by the end of that decade, the best
European shopping-center developers were matching the US ones in sophisti-
cation if not in size.
By 1970, then, the retail landscape in Europe started to resemble that of the
USA, although only in isolated pockets. Modern gas stations became ubiqui-
tous, as did smaller self-service stores. Large supermarkets and hypermarkets
were dotted around new suburban areas, while planned shopping centers and
revamped department stores provided shopping attractions within urban
cores. Perhaps more importantly, the most successful European operators
had developed skills and capacities to operate stores that nearly matched US
size, assortment, and operational efficiency, and those operators would
become one of the major forces in the globalization of retailing in the follow-
ing period.
LOW LEVELS OF INTERNATIONALIZATION

Throughout this period, the successful, if limited, international diffusion of
US retail formats stood in sharp contrast to the lack of internationalization of
retail operations. Woolworth’s maintained and expanded its prewar variety
106
store network, and in 1965 operated 1,100 stores in Britain, 277 in Canada,
112 in West Germany, and 10 in Mexico. The world’s largest retailer, Sears,
operated 41 retail stores in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela.
Safeway, the largest of the US supermarket operators, entered the UK in 1962,
Australia in 1963, and Germany in 1964. Yet these isolated examples only
underscore the relative lack of internationalization efforts in the period. Then,
as much as today, large US retailers of food and general merchandise rarely
looked for expansion opportunities abroad because of the virtually unlimited
opportunities for growth in the domestic market. European retailers, on the
other hand, had much more limited growth opportunities at home; but they
had not yet developed the critical size and organizational competence for
international expansion.
The third wave, 1970–1990: internationalizing and modernizing

RAPID INTERNATIONALIZATION
While the first two periods of the diffusion of the US retail models had
established a regular channel for the flow of retail innovations between best
practices in the USA and leading operators in Europe, it was only in the 1970s
that the spread of retail innovations was bolstered by the direct international-
ization actions of leading retailers. US franchise operations were the first and
most successful in this drive. Operating relatively small markets, in terms of
product assortment and store size, and capitalizing on a strong product brand
name, fast-food operators, motel chains, and car rental and automotive service
companies were amongst the pioneers, rapidly entering new countries and
replicating outlets.17 KFC entered Britain in 1965, the first US fast-food opera-
tor in Europe. McDonald’s followed in 1971, entering the Netherlands and
Germany, and also Japan and Australia in the same year. 7-Eleven’s decision to
enter Japan in 1973, by franchising its convenience stores to the domestic
retailer Ito Yokado, resulted in one of the most fascinating cases of retail
internationalization. The Japanese operator expanded and perfected the for-
mat while adapting it to the local conditions, and in a rare case of “reciprocal
internationalization” bought the controlling stake in the parent corporation
in 1995 (Sparks 1996). By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the
Seven-I Holdings Company became not only the biggest operator of conve-
nience stores in the world, with over 34,000 owned and franchised outlets, but
also one of the largest, most global, and most innovative world retailers.
Amongst the retailers with more general assortments, the European ones
were the pioneers in crossing borders, most commonly within the emerging
European common market, but also in the USA, Latin America, and East Asia.
This was a result of several “push” factors, such as restrictive regulation in their
home countries, the limited size of the home market (especially in smaller
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Misha Petrovic
economies such as the Netherlands and Belgium), increased local competi-

tion, and the negative economic environment of the late 1970s (Sternquist
and Kacker 1994). While their expansion abroad was a mark of their growing
organizational size and capabilities, many of the early expansion efforts were
unsuccessful and resulted in quick retreats. Carrefour entered seven European
countries in the 1970s but succeeded in only one, Spain; however, its entries
in Brazil (1975) and Argentina (1982) were more successful, even if initial
growth was slow and cautious (S. Burt 1994; Dupuis, Choi, and Larke 2006).
The expansion of European retailers into the US market was particularly
impressive, so much so that at one point almost 20 percent of the US grocery
sales on the East Coast were controlled by operators headquartered in Europe.
However, many of these operations have been divested in the meantime.
Specialty retailers also joined the internationalization effort. Amongst the
first were fashion and luxury items retailers operating relatively small outlets
with limited assortments and strong brand names. Laura Ashley, Benetton,
and Gap successfully managed to internationalize the merchandise assort-
ment based on private-label merchandise, as did IKEA, perhaps the first suc-
cessful specialty big-box retailer (Prime 1999). Amongst the specialty retailers
selling manufacturer advertised brands, Toys “R” Us has been a particularly
visible example of internationalization.
MODERN FORMS OF RETAILING

While the internationalization of retailing proceeded only slowly between
1970 and 1990, there was a more intense trend of the integration of consumer
goods markets in developed countries. Everywhere within Western Europe the
proportion of retail sales controlled by large chain stores increased substan-
tially, and American-style retail formats, from supermarkets to big-box stores
and shopping centers, established a firm foothold. This trend has been more
observable in smaller economies than in larger ones. At the same time, the
integration of the US domestic market, across various regions, has been faster
than the integration of the similar-sized “common” European market, where
cultural and regulatory barriers slowed down the expansion of major opera-
tors. The reduction of the role of independent retailers (small shop owners)
proceeded the furthest in the two biggest European economies, Germany and
the UK. At the same time, Italy and Spain remained dominated by traditional
retailing, and Eastern Europe, still behind the Iron Curtain, remained
untouched by modern marketing methods.
The adoption of American retail formats was not limited to Western Europe.
It was also happening in Japan, although more gradually, as well as in a few
major urban centers in Latin America. In Japan, while the official statistics
show the rapid development of “general superstores” and “food superstores”
in this period, those stores rarely resembled Western-style supermarkets and
108
general discounters in their size, assortment of goods, or operational effi-

ciency. The best operators, such as Kansai supermarkets, closely emulated
American selling techniques, yet the combination of the seller’s market, due
to the rapidly expanding purchasing power of Japanese consumers, the highly
restrictive regulations, and the power of wholesalers stalled the modernization
of Japanese retail (Meyer-Ohle 2003).
One peculiarity of Japanese consumer markets was the rapid adoption and
further development of the convenience store format. After Ito Yokado had
introduced 7-Eleven stores in Japan in 1973, as the franchisor of the US
Southland Corporation, other major Japanese retailers soon followed suit,
Daiei with Lawson, and the Seibu Group with Family Mart. The format
evolved rapidly in Japan, establishing a dense network of city center locations,
as opposed to the US roadside ones, offering a more extensive assortment of
fresh merchandise and prepared food, and often assuming price leadership. An
extensive range of services was added in the 1980s, and today convenience
stores remain the most modern and efficient retail operators in Japan.
The fourth wave, 1990–2010: making global markets

GLOBALIZATION OF FORMATS
Only in the period since 1990 has the true globalization of American retail
formats taken place worldwide. To a great degree this has been a result of the
actions of major retail firms, most of them from Europe and Japan, which
have, since the early 1990s, undertaken a more focused and successful
project of global expansion. Perhaps the most visible form of such an
expansion was the spread of supermarkets in the developing world. The
successive waves of supermarket diffusion are well documented (Senauer
and Reardon, Chapter 10 this volume). In a very short period, sometimes
in less than ten years, the percentage of food sales through supermarkets and
hypermarkets went from 10–20 percent to more than 50 percent in countries
as diverse as the Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Taiwan, South Korea,
Thailand, the Philippines, Costa Rica, and South Africa. In China, the largest
developing market, the first supermarkets emerged only in 1990. In 2007,
there were more than 50,000 supermarkets in operation, and, while they still
captured only 20 percent of total food sales nationwide, they approached a
50 percent share in major urban centers.
At the same time, there was a boom in the development of shopping
centers. Planned shopping centers, and in particular large regional malls,
became a standard feature of many urban centers, and not just in developed
countries. Indeed, out of the world’s ten largest shopping centers today,
eight are in Asia, and all but two of them opened since 2004.18 Many large
shopping centers in developing countries have major discounters and
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Misha Petrovic
hypermarkets, rather than department stores, as anchor tenants, and others

dispense with the very idea of anchor tenants, reflecting the drawing power
of major fashion and other specialty chain outlets. They are also often
located close to city centers, and house major big-box specialty retailers,
such as electronics and home improvement chains.
At the other end of the scale, convenience stores have spread through a large
part of East Asia, capturing 12–14 percent of food retailing in Japan, Hong
Kong, and Singapore, over 20 percent in Taiwan and rapidly growing in
importance in China. The landscape of supermarkets and hypermarkets,
shopping centers and big-box stores, gas stations and fast-food restaurants, is
becoming increasingly standardized everywhere in developed countries and
in most major urban centers in the developing world. South Asia, as well as
large portions of sub-Saharan Africa, remain the last large frontiers for the
spread of modern forms of retailing.
The latest wave of expansion of retail formats concerns e-commerce or
Internet-based retailing. US firms were the early leaders, and the gap between
Western Europe and the USA in 2000 was still quite large and seemingly
expanding. The EU’s investment in infrastructure closed this gap considerably
in the next nine years (European Commission 2009), and the rapid spread of
online retailing in East Asia and elsewhere in the developing world (see
Rouibah, Khalil, and Hassanien 2009) is a good indicator of the decreasing
time lag between the adoption of retail formats in the USA and then in the rest
of the world in each subsequent wave of consumer market innovation.
MARKET MAKERS
After 1989, the understored, drab retail landscapes of Eastern Europe be-
came major expansion targets of Western European retailers. By 2000, they
were dominated by supermarkets and hypermarkets operated by Metro,
Casino, Carrefour, Auchan, Tesco, Aldi, Lidl, and other leading Western
chains, including a few local power players such as Slovenian Merkator.
Southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were all fully incorporated into
the EU retail market during this period, and significant modernization
occurred in smaller markets such as Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro.
The two large economies on the periphery of Europe, Turkey and Russia,
managed to develop major domestic retail operators even while opening up
their retail sector to foreign entry. The giant Russian retail market attracted
retailers such as Metro, Auchan, and Spar Coop, but the domestic discount
chains such as Pyaterochka and Kopeika, and supermarket/hypermarket
operators such as Seventh Continent and Perekrestok, have so far been
able to compete. In 2006, the merger of Perekrestok and Pyaterochka cre-
ated the first Russian food retail giant, the X5 Retail group, with over
$5 billion in revenues.
110
The consolidation of the European market for consumer goods remains

largely an intra-European affair, since no general-merchandise retailer from
the USA or Asia is, in 2010, operating in continental Europe. The same holds
to a large degree for the other two major regional developed markets, the USA
and East Asia. A few European retailers still have a strong presence in the
retailing sector in the USA, most notably Belgian Delhaize and Dutch Royal
Ahold, which derive a majority of their revenues from the supermarkets they
acquired in the USA, as well as the German Aldi, which operates hard-discount
stores as well as upscale supermarkets under the Trader Joe’s name. However,
other European-based retailers, including Carrefour, have pulled out of the US
market, just as Wal-Mart did from Germany. In Japan, the presence of foreign
general retailers is very low, Wal-Mart-owned Seiyu being the only case
amongst the fifty largest operators. In South Korea and Taiwan, the two
other major developed retail markets in Asia, Tesco (in partnership with
Samsung) and Carrefour, respectively, do play a significant role, but other
major operators are domestic.
The largest retailers in the world still operate almost exclusively in their
home regions. Out of the top twenty world retailers, eleven do not operate at
all outside their home region, and only five derive more than 10 percent of
their sales from outside the region. The most global of these, Seven-I Holdings,
headquartered in Japan, operates as an umbrella company for owned and
franchised outlets around the world, and has a strong presence throughout
Asia and in North America, but few stores in the European market. Carrefour,
one of the most global general-merchandise retailers, derives 16 percent of
revenues from its Latin American and Asian operations, and Tesco 13 percent
from Asia and less than 1 percent from North America. Wal-Mart generates
over $90 billion of sales and 26 percent of revenues from its international
operations, but most of those are in Canada, Mexico, and the UK. The propor-
tion of revenues from its extensive Latin American, and smaller, but rapidly
expanding East Asian, operations is perhaps closer to 12 percent. Aldi has a
strong presence in the USA, with 1,400 of its 9,000 stores, but operates no
stores in Asia or Latin America.
The lack of truly global reach amongst the largest retailers does not show
their lack of organizational capacities. After all, they are amongst the largest
and most profitable companies in the world. They excel at operational effi-
ciency and supply-chain management. Rather, it shows the difficulties inher-
ent in the global replication of very complex markets. Moreover, their limited
scope of operations is not the only indicator of these difficulties. Many of the
large retailers that achieved considerable internationalization operate many
formats under many retail store names, without true integration in branding,
merchandise mix, pricing, and store image. At best, they achieve integration
of the supply chain, and of organizational strategy, but rarely of market
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Misha Petrovic
mechanisms in consumer goods markets. This is especially true for European

retailers, which were typically pushed by their economic and regulatory envi-
ronment to favor rapid expansion through acquisitions over organic growth.
The weakness of such organizational strategy gets exposed only when they
start competing with more focused and integrated rivals, and until recently
the degree of such direct competition was quite low.
Big-box specialty stores do not fare much better in this respect. Two of the
three largest US big-box specialty stores, Home Depot and Best Buy, are
starting to expand beyond the North American market, by opening their
first stores in China, while the third one, Lowe’s, is satisfied with growth
opportunities within North America. Ikea and Kingfisher, the two top Euro-
pean big-box specialty retailers, have more of a global presence, but still
derive 82 percent and 78 percent of their sales, respectively, from the Euro-
pean market. An early example of a successful big-box store globalization is
Toys “R” Us, which, despite its financial troubles in its home US market,
maintains a strong presence in all major regions. Similar, more recent exam-
ples are the world’s biggest retailer of video and computer games, the Game-
Stop, and the largest retailer of office products, Staples.
The ability to replicate market formats in diverse environments is often
achieved more easily by specialist retailers that operate small to medium-size
stores. Most of them tightly control their supply chains by integrating back
into design and manufacturing. Inditex, the owner of Zara, Bershka and a
number of other brands and store concepts, Hennes and Mauritz, Gap (Old
Navy, Banana Republic, and so on) and Limited Brands (Victoria’s Secret, Bath
and Body Works) are the largest firms in this category. Even more successful
are leading managers of branded luxury items, such as jewelry, watches, haute
couture, and spirits. The Dior-LVHM group, PPR, Richemont, and the eyewear
specialist Luxottica all own large stables of brands and operate retail stores,
concession stands, and licensed outlets around the world, most of them in
major shopping centers and on the Main Street. The fact that operating retail
stores hampers one’s replication efforts becomes clear when comparing these
companies with Nike and Adidas, which have similar organizational struc-
tures, supply-chain management and marketing features, with the major
difference that they sell mostly through independent retail accounts. Nike
operates nearly 700 retail outlets (50 percent of which are outside the USA),
and Adidas almost 2,000, but they also distribute to tens of thousands of
external retail firms. Both firms have achieved nearly global presence of their
products.
Another category are the Internet retailers, such as Amazon and eBay,
which, unhampered by the needs for physical retail outlets, can easily repli-
cate their retail websites and thus enjoy access to the consumer limited only
by the infrastructure and consumer interest. It is important to note, though,
112
that even the most successful Internet retailers have not yet been able to
achieve the consumer traffic of large general-merchandise retailers, let alone
their revenues. Amazon.com and eBay, the two leading e-retailers, had over
fifty million unique users in November 2008, during the peak of the shopping
season. But Wal-Mart and Target websites attracted thirty-nine million and
thirty-six million shoppers in the same period, and their physical stores
several times as many. In general, almost half of the sales of the 100 largest
e-retailers is captured by large retail chains’ websites, and the rest is split
between manufacturer and brand-name managers and the “pure” e-retailers.
Ten of the top fifteen US e-retailing sites in 2008 were online outposts of major
mass retailers.
Toward the Integration of Global Consumer Markets
The 250 largest world retailers captured over $3.6 trillion in retail sales in
2007, or more than one-third of the estimated world’s total, and the top ten
alone accounted for more than $1 trillion (Deloitte 2009). Nine of the top ten
and almost 40 percent of the top 250 largest retailers operated markets that
combined food and general-merchandise assortments, indicating an increas-
ing integration of market formats around the cluster of supermarket, hyper-
market, superstore, warehouse, and similar big-box, scrambled merchandising
formats. While these large retailers still rarely compete directly with each other
outside their home markets, they play a major role in making consumer and
supplier markets around the world, and thus represent a key organizing force
in today’s global economy.
The global market for consumer goods should not be seen as a set of
segmented, separate national markets, despite the regulatory attempts of
many governments to limit the expansion of large retailers and, in particular,
foreign ones, within their jurisdiction. Rather, the system of global consumer
markets is being increasingly organized as an integrated center–periphery
structure, where there is a steady flow of innovations from retailers in the
core countries toward less-developed economies. The core economies’ retailers
are not only the most modern and efficient; they also collectively control the
major share of consumer goods markets, thus enabling very rapid diffusion
and replication of innovations and best practices.
Large retailers are often uniquely positioned to test new market mechanisms
and store formats. While market innovations often start from small retail
firms, once they achieve some success, they can be quickly adopted by large
chains. The adoption of supermarkets by small-store grocery chains and the
role European department stores played in starting single-price variety stores
are some early examples of such a process. The adoption of online retailing by
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Misha Petrovic
major general merchandisers and of health and organic foods by grocery

retailers are amongst more recent examples. While most large retailers have
the advantage of organizational size and complexity in trying out new market
mechanisms, those that are also well integrated in organizational terms, and
have effective control of supply chains and retail formats (from pricing to
merchandise assortment to store image), can generally react to market
changes and adopt innovations most quickly.
The emerging global system of consumer goods markets is not organized
just as a center–periphery structure, radiating from the large and most inno-
vative retailers outwards, but also along the lines of functional differentiation.
In functional terms, the center of the retailing world is increasingly organized
along the retail format of large stores that sell “fast-moving consumer goods,”
or “general merchandise and food” lines at low prices. The composition of the
merchandise assortment within this category is constantly changing as it
defines the world of necessary, affordable, and, increasingly, disposable,
goods in the developing world. Apart from groceries, drugs and cosmetics,
home furnishings and apparel, this can now include some furniture, appli-
ances, electronics, multimedia, books, sporting goods, toys, tools, hardware,
and auto parts, and even basic services, gasoline, and fast food.
Functional differentiation means not only that different stores sell different
types of goods (indeed, this might be much less the case in contemporary
integrated markets than before), but also that retail formats develop comple-
mentary features. Along the core, “one-stop-shopping” formats arise specialty
retailers for fashion and apparel, often grouped together in shopping malls:
home improvement, electronics, and furniture specialists; bookstores, sport-
ing goods and outdoor gear stores, and so on. In the areas underserved by
hypermarkets and supercenters, superettes and convenience stores provide a
narrower, highly selective version of the basic goods and services assortment,
but increasingly with the same level of operational efficiency and marketing
competence as the big stores. Around the core of price leadership, usually
defined as a “low price format,” arise complementary promotional pricing
techniques.
On the global level, we still see a few major areas that are not being reached
and transformed by modern retailing practices. However, since the beginning
of the new century, most of the world markets for consumer goods are being
organized and integrated by large, modern retailers. As we have seen on the
more circumscribed, regional scale, the presence of such retailers is the first
phase in the transformation of local markets for consumer goods. The second
step is reaching a threshold market revenue share of modern retailers, often no
more than 10–20 percent, at which the diffusion of practices and replication
of modern markets becomes faster and more routine. Direct competition
between major market makers presents the next transformative step, as it
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encourages integration and functional differentiation of consumer goods

markets.
These steps have been achieved within the centers of the three major
regions, in North America, the EU, and Japan (with South Korea), but not
between those regions. In China, for instance, only a few major urban centers
have crossed the threshold of the adoption of modern retail formats, and there
the expansion of consumer markets and the entrance of new players have
been as rapid as regulatory authorities allow. The vast world of several million
small-town and rural stores is only now slowly being transformed by modern
retailing. In India, the process has barely started, even in urban centers.
Within the next twenty years, India is poised to become one of the five largest
consumer markets in the world. The retailing transformation this process
requires will be enormous, on an even grander scale than what is currently
happening in China.
In the USA, the processes of diffusion and replication of successful types of
market formats within each major retail sector, and, then, the integration of
different retail sectors took the larger part of the twentieth century. The
diffusion of those formats to the rest of the world has initially been quite
slow, yet the pace has increased in each subsequent wave. Moreover, different
elements of the American model have been adopted in different regions at a
different pace, without the need to replicate the evolutionary path of the US
system of consumer goods markets. We have seen this in the case of Western
Europe, where several modern formats were adopted concurrently after the
Second World War, and even more clearly in some recent transformations,
such as in South Korea in the 1990s and in China a decade later.
Will the further evolution of consumer goods markets around the world
follow the American model? The answer to this question must remain ambiv-
alent, and not only because of the author’s reluctance to talk about the future
of a rapidly evolving institutional realm. On the one hand, it is likely that the
spread of standard American formats, from the supermarket and shopping
center, to the fast-food outlet and convenience store, will continue for at least
several more decades. A large proportion of the global population is still
without access to such market formats, which remain powerful symbols of
modernity; at the same time, the financial and organizational requirements of
replicating large retail outlets on a global scale are enormous, and thus such a
process will necessarily be gradual.
On the other hand, if we focus on the character of innovations and the best
retailing practices, those are likely to become increasingly less “American.”
This does not mean that the USA will decline as one of the centers, perhaps
even the major center, of retail innovations. After all, it is well poised to
capitalize on having only minimal regulatory obstacles, efficient markets for
investment capital, the most developed consumer society, and so on. Yet, as
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Misha Petrovic
the largest market makers of consumer goods markets increasingly globalize

their operations, they will be able to source for innovations and deploy them
globally. Those innovations are therefore likely to bear very little sign of their
national origin and socioeconomic context. And, with the rise of substantial
middle-income consumer classes in developing countries, the spread of such
innovations will be increasingly dependent less on the general level of
national economic development, and more on other factors such as market
opportunities and regulatory frameworks. In this sense, then, the emerging
global system of consumer goods markets, created and organized by large
global market makers, is bound to move beyond the domination of American
retailing formats.
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4
Globalization of European Retailing

Michael Wortmann
Introduction
Most of the technological developments and market formats described in

other chapters of this book have also been adopted in Europe during the
fifty years after the Second World War. Bar codes and scanner checkouts
have been introduced; the size of stores has become larger and larger, big
boxes at newly constructed greenfield sites have appeared, and so have shop-
ping centers; market power is increasingly concentrated in a few companies,
amongst them Carrefour, Aldi, Metro, and Tesco.
This is not astonishing: living standards in most West European countries
had caught up with those in the United States during the first three post-
Second World War decades. More and more families owned cars to drive to the
stores of their preference, and they had refrigerators to store their purchases.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, at least some of the Central and East
European countries are also catching up, although their development departs
from a different starting point.
Even though it is debatable whether US and European consumption pat-
terns are becoming increasingly similar, many US branded products can be
found in European supermarkets: Kellogg’s corn flakes, Mars candy bars, Heinz
ketchup, Colgate toothpaste, P&G’s Pampers, or 3M’s Scotch tapes. All these
products are produced at the European factories of US consumer goods man-
ufacturers. Other products like Mattel’s Barbie dolls are being sourced from
Asia—just like Nike or Timberland shoes, which might even be manufactured
by the same factories as those of their European competitors like Adidas or
Puma.
Obviously, several elements of retail development follow global trends, and
many of them have been pioneered in the USA as the most advanced
Michael Wortmann
economy of the world, where—which is important, as we shall see shortly—

retail development was only marginally restricted by government regulation.
European development has frequently followed the American lead. The
spread of supermarkets using self-service (and shopping carts) in Western
Europe gained momentum only in the 1950s.1 European retail entrepreneurs
frequently traveled to the USA in order to learn more about the latest retail
innovations (Schröter 2005). Amongst them was the German Hugo Mann,
who set up one of the first German big out-of-town variety stores in 1958,
which started the Wertkauf chain and which later, in 1997, was taken over by
Wal-Mart. Also amongst those traveling to the USA were the founders of
Carrefour, Tesco, and Metro and many other founders and leading managers
of today’s biggest European retailers.
Compared to the spread of retail innovation through cross-border learning
and copying (Alexander, Shaw, and Curth 2005), the impact of US retail
chains expanding their store operations into Europe was more limited. Wool-
worth’s had entered the UK in 1909, where it had developed into the biggest
chain store until the 1950s; it later (1927) also entered Germany. Safeway
opened its first store in the UK in 1962 and quickly developed into one of the
UK’s leading grocery chains. Another US company, Gem International, had
opened two stores in the 1950s—one of them with premises of 70,000 square
feet, a dimension unknown in Europe at that time. These stores were taken
over by a (then) small supermarket chain, Asda, in 1965, which concentrated
its further growth on larger stores (Whysall 2005), until it was taken over by
Wal-Mart in 1999.
In the 1970s, when supermarkets had become the dominant form of grocery
retailing in most of Western Europe, new technologies, especially ICT (infor-
mation and communication technology) but also container shipping, started
to have an impact on retailing. Introducing these new technologies, European
retailers again followed those in the USA—but this time much faster. An
agreement between US and European transport organizations on the standar-
dization of inter-modal containers was reached in 1970. The American Uni-
versal Product Code (UPC) from 1973 was adopted into the European Article
Number (EAN) system only five years later; and the first European scanner
checkout was introduced by the Austrian retailer Billa in 1979.
While many basic developmental trends in retailing are global, there are at
the same time striking differences between single European countries. In
many respects Europe still has a highly fragmented retail market. This is due
not only to differences in consumer taste, but also to very different retail
traditions and different forms of retail-specific regulation, which are part of
distinct national business systems. These differences relate to store formats,
ownership structures, and the types and sizes of companies and groups. This
again has implications for retailers’ market-making capabilities and strategies
118
of internationalization—the internationalization of store operations as well as

the globalization of sourcing.
The biggest European retailers of today, such as Carrefour, Metro, Tesco, and
Aldi, started their modern big-box, self-service operations in the 1960s, just
like their US counterparts (Wal-Mart, Kmart). Operating in smaller and less-
specialized markets, they tended to fill their big-box stores with a more diverse
mix of goods (hypermarkets), or to keep the merchandise mix limited and the
stores small, and to emphasize rapid turnover (hard discounters). Some of
them, such as Metro, avoided restrictive regulations by adopting the “cash
and carry” wholesaling format. As a result, even today, most large European
retailers exhibit a greater variety of formats and retail fascias (store brand
names) than their US counterparts. While this enabled the top operators to
acquire a wide range of market-making capabilities, it also led to occasional
problems of formulating integrated company strategies and promoting the
company image. More generally, the degree of retail specialization within the
EU remains lower than in the USA, with top European specialty retailers
(fashion, electronics, DIY) only recently starting to match the size and mar-
ket-making capabilities of their US counterparts.
The absence of the large-scale involvement of US retailers in European
markets meant that European market makers took the responsibility of mod-
ernizing and integrating their domestic markets. While adopting major
market-making innovations in direct contact with US agencies and retail
operators, European retailers adapted those to local conditions and created
distinct versions of retail formats that they were later able to export to other
parts of the world. In the major economies of the north-west, from the
Scandinavian countries and the UK to France and Germany, this process was
mostly endogenous. The retail markets of Southern (Italy, Portugal, Spain,
Greece) and Eastern Europe, in contrast, were developed mostly by the French,
German, and British retail operators. The degree of fragmentation still present
within the EU provides a good example of the difficulties of integrating
complex (retail) markets for consumer goods, especially in the presence of
restrictive local regulations.
The limited size of domestic markets and strict retail regulations also led
large European retailers to pursue internationalization earlier and in a more
sustained manner. While many of the early attempts at internationalization,
even when limited to cross-border expansion, ended up as failures (see, for
instance, the section on Carrefour below), the early internationalization lead-
ers acquired the valuable experience of making markets in different eco-
nomic and social contexts, which enabled them to seize opportunities
during the global retail internationalization wave of the 1990s. With a few
exceptions, European retailers’ forays into North American markets failed; yet
their expansion into Latin America was often quite successful, and the more
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Michael Wortmann
recent wave of entering major Asian markets showcases the advantages of

accumulated internationalization experience.
This chapter starts with an analysis of retail development in the four biggest
West European economies: the UK, France, Germany, and Italy. These econo-
mies are well suited to exemplify the different retail structures that have
developed within Western Europe. The following sections present case studies
of the internationalization of four of the largest European grocery retailers,
Carrefour, Aldi, Metro, and Tesco. The chapter concludes with a more general
analysis of internationalization patterns of large European grocery retailers.
Grocery Retailing in the UK, France, Germany, and Italy
The various retail innovations and new retail formats, most of them originat-
ing in the United States, met very different environments when US multi-
nationals tried to transfer them to their affiliates in Europe or when European
retail entrepreneurs tried to implement them in their home countries. Retail
structures were quite different to start with, and established retailers, espe-
cially small traditional retailers, had a very different position in the market
and were differently organized and differently embedded in their country-
specific social and political environments. Thus, the reactions of established
retailers, but also of consumers, city planners, and politicians, toward change
and modernization in the retail industry, and especially toward big-box retail-
ing, differed significantly. This led to different patterns of retail modernization
and to quite different structures of the retail industries in the single European
countries.
The UK in the 1950s was still Europe’s most advanced economy, and, thus,
the UK led the supermarket revolution in Europe, introducing self-service and
increasing the size of stores, which became increasingly organized as chains.
In addition, the UK economy traditionally had a liberal regulatory environ-
ment, and the development of new retail formats went relatively unre-
stricted.2 Increased competition was supported by the difficulties of
enforcement and finally the abolishment of resale price maintenance in
1964, increasing the pressure on retailers to modernize store formats and
ownership structures (Guy 2007). Supermarket chains quickly developed,
amongst them Sainsbury’s and Tesco. In addition, the UK was most open to
foreign investment, which—because of cultural and language proximity—
came especially from the USA (Godley and Fletcher 2001). The US supermar-
ket chain Safeway was one of the first entrants into the UK market in 1962
(Shaw and Alexander 2006).
In France, retail change started somewhat more slowly than in the UK, but
eventually became more of a true retail revolution. This began in 1963, when
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Carrefour set up the first hypermarché at a road intersection (literally: carrefour)

in the outskirts of Paris. It had a total sales area of 2,500 square meters, 12
checkout counters, and 400 parking spaces. At that time it was considered
huge. But Carrefour’s third store in 1966 was 9,500 square meters, carried
20,000 SKUs, and had 2,000 parking spaces (Lhermie 2003). These hypermar-
kets were designed for one-stop shopping of car-borne customers, combining
the assortments of a grocery and a variety store (about 50:50).3 In a situation
where supermarkets were not yet well established, the hypermarkets of Carre-
four, Auchan, and others did not face much competition in the French market.
In contrast to the UK and France, Italy has a long tradition of ‘social
protectionism’ for small shopkeepers (J. Morris 1999). Restrictive retail regula-
tion had been introduced in 1926, and was in place, with a slight modification
in 1971, until the late 1990s. Special licenses (quotas), issued by the local
authorities specifically for different food as well as non-food retail categories,
limited the amount and type of retail space for every store. This regulation
effectively protected the holders of such licenses: independent shopkeepers,
which were sometimes organized in buying groups or voluntary chains. The
development of supermarkets or other larger and more modern retail formats,
as well as concentration processes and the formation of chain stores, were
considerably hampered. Amongst those few retailers that were able to intro-
duce self-service stores were the consumer cooperatives, which had formed a
national association in 1947 that later became Coop Italia.
Germany too has a strong tradition of social protection of all kinds of small
(Mittelstand) entrepreneurs, including shopkeepers. The economic crisis of the
early 1930s in particular led to measures protecting shopkeepers from compe-
tition. These measures were extended by the Nazi government through the
1933 Retail Protection Law (Einzelhandelsschutzgesetz), which restricted the
opening of new shops. Consumer cooperatives, single-price or penny stores,
and department stores were declared ‘undesirable’ formats. Several of these
restrictions were in place until the mid-1950s; other restrictions following
similar intentions were in place until 1965 (Berekoven 1986; Winkler 1991;
Scheybani 1996). The strong position of independent shopkeepers in the
German retail market as well as in the political arena was also supported by
their organization into retailers’ cooperatives. The two largest, Edeka and
Rewe, had been founded in 1907 and 1926 respectively. Originally, their
combined buying power was directed against wholesalers, which, at that
time, were able to appropriate a large share of the profit along the value chain.
In the mid-1960s, when independent retailers as well as downtown depart-
ment stores perceived new competition from large out-of-town stores, a new
kind of protective regulation was established. The revised spatial planning
(zoning) legislation of 19684 limited the construction of shopping centers and
single large stores to city centers or special zones, which had to go through a
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Michael Wortmann
complicated planning procedure, involving local as well as regional authori-

ties. Further revisions of spatial planning legislation in 1977 and 1986 defined
exact store sizes, finally effectively limiting the maximum sales area to about
800 square meters for most stores in most locations.5 This regulation, on the
one hand, gave established retailers some protection and, on the other, since it
was much more flexible than the Italian regulation, allowed for retail modern-
ization, while channeling it in a certain direction. It allowed smaller super-
markets as well as other new small retail formats, such as hard-discount stores,
to develop (Wortmann 2004). The first hard-discount store was opened by
Aldi in 1962. It combined a post-war-style store focusing on a very limited
assortment presented in a no-frills environment with the self-service concept,
which was becoming increasingly common at that time. Another store type
favored by German special-planning legislation was large cash and carry
(C&C) markets focused on business customers buying in bulk, like those of
Metro, because they were legally defined as wholesalers rather than retailers.
The different patterns of retail regulation that were established during the
first retail revolution—that is, the spread of self-service stores and the appear-
ance of large formats—in the four countries analysed had a long-lasting
impact on the subsequent development of their retail structures.
In the UK, supermarkets gradually grew larger and larger. In the late 1960s,
the largest supermarkets were called superstores. Today, these are between
3,000 and 8,000 square meters, have parking lots, and are usually located
outside city centers. Their assortment is—like that of supermarkets—concen-
trated in grocery products. Usually they carry only a very limited range of
non-food products. Chains of superstores today are the dominant format in
grocery retailing. Independent shopkeepers found it very difficult to respond
to the new competition. Even though the number of those organized in
voluntary chains increased from only 2 percent of all independent retailers
in 1958 to 29 percent in 1968 (Hall 1971: 44), their market share remained
marginal.
Besides supermarkets and superstores, formats similar to French hypermar-
kets combining food and non-food assortments developed very late. The Asda
stores came closest to this format. In 1965 Asda had taken over two large out-
of-town stores that had been opened by the US company Gem International
in the late 1950s (Whysall 2005). From that time on Asda concentrated its
further growth on big out-of-town stores, low prices, and a relatively large
non-food assortment. This made it one of the UK’s largest retailers. These
characteristics of Asda’s stores were quite similar to those of Wal-Mart’s super-
centers, which contributed to the ease of their acquisition by Wal-Mart in
1999. Other UK retailers entered the hypermarket segment relatively late.
Tesco introduced its Tesco Extra store in 1997, after it had gained experience
with large non-food assortments at its acquired Czech subsidiary (see below).
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Despite the appearance of foreign hard discounters as well as Wal-Mart,

superstores are the dominant form of grocery retailing in the UK today.
Ownership of stores became more and more concentrated, partly because of
mergers and acquisitions. In 1987 Argyll acquired the UK subsidiary of Safe-
way Inc., and in 2004 Argyll/Safeway was acquired by Morrisons, creating the
UK’s fourth largest grocery retailer, next to Tesco, Asda/Wal-Mart, and Sains-
bury’s. (See Table 4.1 for the top five retailers in selected countries.)
In France, supermarkets and especially hypermarkets have been gaining
market share since the 1960s. A law, the Loi Royer, was passed in 1973 with
the intention of restricting the establishment of new larger retail outlets
requiring approval of special regional commissions for new larger stores
(S. Burt 1984).6 A further regulation, Loi Raffarin, was passed in 1996, requiring
an authorization for all new stores of more than 300 square meters.
The suspicion was that this was especially directed against the expansion of
German hard discounters in France (Colla 2003: 47). But the effects of both
laws remained very limited.7 Associations of independent retailers, like in the
UK, emerged only after the 1960s, but in France they became more important:
E. Leclerc now organizes independent hypermarket owners, while Inter-
marché (ITM), separated from E. Leclerc in 1969 and also known as Les
Mousquetaires, organizes smaller retailers running supermarkets of various
sizes. Both groups are amongst France’s biggest retailers today.
Table 4.1. Top-five national grocery retailers, four European countries, 2007
United Kingdom Germany
Store Sales (€bn)a No. of outlets Store Sales (€bn)a No of outlets
Tesco 51.0 2,115 Edeka 35.8 9,602

Sainsbury’s 28.2 823 Rewe 31.6 9,492
Asda 24.4 352 Metro 26.3 1,259
Morrisons 19.0 375 Schwarz 25.1 3,405
M&S 12.2 622 Aldi 21.5 4,232
France Italyb
Store Sales (€bn) No. of outlets Store Sales (€bn) No of outlets
Carrefour 37.6 1,699 CoopItalia 11.8 1,331

E. Leclerc 28.2 561 Conad 7.7 2,789
Intermarché 26.9 3,103 Interdis 7.1 3,712
Auchan 18.4 533 Selex 7.0 2,781
Casino 17.9 8,397 Carrefour 6.3 1,533
a
Local food and non-food sales.
b
Italian data for 2006.
Note: figures sometimes refer to gross or net sales.
Source: EHI Retail Institute (2008).
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Michael Wortmann
Ultimately, hypermarkets have become the dominant retail format, with a

market share, in 2010, of over 50 percent in French grocery retailing. The
largest groups in this segment are Carrefour, which merged with Promodès in
1999 (see below), and Auchan, which acquired Docks de France in 1996, as
well as the voluntary group E. Leclerc. The supermarket segment has become
dominated by Casino and the buying association ITM.
In Italy, because of the very restrictive regulation, the traditional small-scale
retail structure has been preserved to a great extent (Pellegrini 1996; Zander-
ighi 2003; see Figure 4.1). The level of concentration is still very low today.
Several buying groups, such as Conad, Selex, Interdis, Sisa, and Despar, run-
ning mainly small and mid-sized supermarkets, are amongst the ten largest
Italian grocery retailers. The first place is held by the consumer cooperative
Coop Italia, which had been a pioneer in the development of supermarkets,
and today also runs hypermarkets.
In 1998, a new law, the legge Bersani, abolished the product-specific sales
area quota, giving more power to the regional level urban planning author-
ities. New stores now need a permit only if they are over 1,500 square meters,
and permits are no longer limited by quota, but have to be based on regional
zoning plans (Potz 2002). This liberalization has enabled the further growth of
hypermarkets in Italy, whose number has nearly doubled since 2000. Two of
the dominant players in this segment are the French companies Carrefour and
Auchan.
The most striking characteristic of German retail development has been the
success of hard discounters. This format had been pioneered by Aldi in the
UK <400 m2
400–1,000 m2
1,000–2,500 m2
>2,500 m2
France
Germany
Italy
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
%
Figure 4.1. Grocery market share according to store size, four European countries, 2006
Source: Nielsen Company (2007); own careful estimates for small stores (<400 m²) in France,
because original data omitted traditional stores.
124
1960s, but its overwhelming expansion began only in the 1970s, when Rewe,
Tengelmann, the Schwarz Group (Lidl), and some other companies also devel-
oped their own hard-discount formats (Wortmann 2004). All these companies
profited from the retail regulation that limited store size, and left other
aspects, such as assortments, distribution centers, or ownership, unregulated.
They were also supported by the abolishment of retail price maintenance in
1974. Since the 1980s, the hard discounters have slightly broadened their
assortments, introducing dairy products, fresh produce, and meat. Even with
a very limited assortment (between 600 and 1,600 SKUs), hard discounters
have conquered over 40 percent of the German grocery market.
But, the two largest grocery retailers in Germany are still the buying groups
Edeka and Rewe. Both have some thousand members, each which runs its own
stores, usually supermarkets of various sizes. These groups increasingly operate
as integrated systems, with a growing centralized steering capacity for assort-
ments, prices, and store appearance. In addition, these groups run more and
more stores that are owned by the groups’ central headquarters. Rewe has
invested considerably in the development and expansion of new retail for-
mats, especially its hard-discount chain Penny. Edeka has grown recently
through the takeover of the German voluntary chain Spar (then number
seven in the German market) from the French ITM, which had been unable
to run it successfully.
Another format that has developed quite successfully in Germany is the
cash and carry (C&C) markets, where Metro is clearly the market leader.
Through the takeover of the German stores from Wal-Mart, which had tried
to enter the German market through two acquisitions in 1998–9, and the
merger of these with its own chain of Real stores, Metro has become the
biggest operator of large grocery stores in Germany. But stores with more
than 5,000 square meters have a market share of only 13.5 percent in German
grocery retailing, while stores with less than 800 square meters still capture
over 50 percent; within this group, discounters with a total market share of
over 40 percent have pushed all other kinds of small stores aside.
After having analyzed how the different patterns of retail development in
the four biggest West European countries have been shaped by different
general and retail-specific institutional legacies, we will now look more closely
at how the different types of retailers that have developed under the different
conditions in these countries have internationalized their operations.8
Carrefour
When Carrefour, then France’s number two retailer, and Promodès, also
amongst the top five, merged in 1999, they created the world’s second largest
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Michael Wortmann
retailer with a combined turnover of €54 billion. With this merger, Carrefour
had become a truly multiple format retailer. While Carrefour had been the
pioneer of the hypermarket and had realized 78 percent of its sales in these
very large stores that combine food and non-food assortments, Promodès,
originally a wholesale company, was stronger in supermarkets (37 percent),
but also operated hypermarkets (42 percent) and other formats including
hard-discount stores (7 percent). Both companies operated more than 9,000
stores in 26 countries.
Carrefour had been founded in 1959 by two entrepreneurs, Marcel Fournier
and Louis Defforey, in Annecy in eastern France, where they opened a first
supermarket at a crossroads (literally carrefour) in 1960.9 At a time when there
were only a very few self-service stores in France, this store became an imme-
diate success; and its next supermarket already had a large parking lot. Follow-
ing a trip to the United States, visits to several stores, and participation in
seminars by the retail guru Trujillo in Dayton, Ohio, the two entrepreneurs
invented a new store concept. The first hypermarket (hypermarché) was opened
in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, in 1963. This store had
a sales area of 2,500 square meters, 12 checkouts, and 400 parking spaces. Its
assortment was concentrated in food, but it also carried a large range of non-
food items. Carrefour’s hypermarkets quickly became larger and larger. In the
early 1970s the average store size was 10,000 square meters. The hypermarket
that opened in 1972 south of Toulouse, with its 23,000 square meters, is still,
in 2010, the largest hypermarket in Europe.10 The additional floor space was
increasingly used for an extended non-food assortment. Cheap land in com-
mercial areas, accessible by highways, and a simple architecture reduced
construction costs per square meter to one third of traditional supermarkets
(Bell et al. 2004). Hypermarkets were to become the backbone of Carrefour’s
rapid growth. But Carrefour did not only establish its own outlets; the com-
pany also entered into partnerships and licensing agreements with several
other companies, which set up hypermarkets under the Carrefour brand,
amongst them Docks de France, Docks du Nord-Mielle (later Cora),11 as well
as Comptoirs Modernes and Promodès, which all operated their own hyper-
market brands a few years later. The latter were to be merged into the new
Carrefour more than two decades later (Lhermie 2003).
Internationalization began in 1969, one year before Carrefour was intro-
duced at the Paris stock exchange. The first hypermarket abroad was opened in
Belgium, in cooperation with Delhaize le Lion (which had a 70 percent share
in the store).12 Three stores were opened before Carrefour withdrew in 1978.
The next country it entered was Switzerland: Carrefour held 25 percent in two
hypermarkets; but sold its share in 1991. Great Britain followed in 1971,
where four Carrefour hypermarkets were set up in cooperation with Dee
(90 percent); here Carrefour withdrew in 1983.13 In 1972 Carrefour entered
126
Italy; but, after opening two stores, it again withdrew. In Austria Carrefour
opened a hypermarket (100 percent owned) at Shopping City Süd near Vienna
in 1976, then Austria’s largest food store; two years later Carrefour sold 51
percent and withdrew completely in 1990. The first Carrefour hypermarket in
Germany was set up in cooperation with the German Stüssgen Group (60
percent) and the Belgian Delhaize le Lion (20 percent) in Mainz in 1977. Since
further expansion failed, because of restrictive zoning policies, Carrefour with-
drew less than two years later.
Only one of seven European market entries in the 1970s was to become
successful: Spain. In a joint venture with Grupo Radar, which held 50 percent,
the first hypermarket was opened in El Prat de Llobregat near Barcelona in
1973. In 1986, Carrefour took 100 percent in the company, which now
operated under the name of Pryca ( precio y calidad, price and quality). Shortly
after Carrefour had introduced the new format into Spain, other French
chains (amongst them Promodès (see below)) as well as Spanish companies
followed (Cuesta 2004).
Carrefour’s plans for internationalization were not limited to Europe. Car-
refour was the first international grocery retailer to enter the Latin American
market. In 1975 it set up its first hypermarket in Brazil. The first hypermarket
in Argentina followed in 1982. Expansion in Latin America was very slow at
first, as Carrefour experimented with the layout and the organization of its
first stores (Bell et al. 2004); in 1985 there were still only ten stores. The
operations in both countries were eventually to become very successful. Mar-
ket entry into further Latin-American countries came much later. In Mexico
Carrefour set up a joint venture with the local retail group Gigante, starting
hypermarket operations in 1994. Four years later, Carrefour hypermarkets
were also opened in Colombia, Chile, and, as a franchise, the Dominican
Republic.
Carrefour also tried to enter the United States, opening its first outlet in
1988 in Philadelphia: a huge hypermarket, very similar to those it operated in
France. At that time, Wal-Mart had already experimented with its own hyper-
market format called Hypermart, which was very much a copy of Carrefour’s
French hypermarket outlets; and in the same year, 1988, Wal-Mart opened its
first supercenter. A little later, Carrefour reacted by opening its second hyper-
market in the United States, in Voorhees (NJ), this time somewhat smaller
(and looking more like a warehouse club). Both stores were closed down in
1993, probably because of competition from nearby Wal-Mart stores.
At about the same time, Carrefour also turned to Asia and opened its first
hypermarket in 1989 in Taiwan, in a joint venture with President Group,
Taiwan’s largest food manufacturer, which held 40 percent.14 After Carrefour
had set up a first hypermarket in Malaysia in 1994, also in cooperation with a
local partner, other Asian countries quickly followed. In China, Carrefour
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Michael Wortmann
began operations in 1995; and in 1996, it entered Thailand, South Korea, and
Hong Kong; Singapore followed in 1997, and Indonesia in 1998. Within just
five years, Carrefour had entered seven new Asian markets.
Parallel to this intercontinental expansion, Carrefour strengthened its posi-
tion in its domestic and other European markets. An important step had been
the creation in 1976 of a private “brand-free” or “no-name” label (produits
libre) for a limited range of low-priced basic foods, offered in simple white
packages. In 1978, after Aldi and others had firmly established the hard-
discount format in Germany, Carrefour launched its own chain of hard-
discount stores in France, called Ed. Attempts to enter the UK, Denmark,
and Italy failed. A further step consolidating Carrefour’s number one position
in the French hypermarket segment was the acquisition of its smaller compe-
titors, Euromarché and Montlaur, in 1991.
New attempts, after the failures in the 1970s, to enter European markets
beyond France and Spain were made in 1993. Carrefour opened its first own
hypermarket in Italy and also acquired Al Gran Sole, which owned four
hypermarkets in the country. The same year, Carrefour set up its first hyper-
market in Turkey in a joint venture with the second largest Turkish firm, the
conglomerate Sabanci, which was also involved in joint ventures with food-
processing firms such as Philip Morris Kraft and Danone (Tokatli and Eldener
2002). Finally, Carrefour’s expansion into Eastern Europe began relatively late,
when it opened its first hypermarket in Lodz, Poland, in 1997.
Paul-Auguste Halley, one of the founders of Promodès, the multinational
retailer that merged with Carrefour in 1999, had been amongst the pioneers of
the self-service concept in France when he opened some of the first super-
markets in the 1950s. Promodès itself was established through the merger
of two wholesale companies in 1961. This tradition of wholesaling is also
reflected in the operations of Promocash cash and carry markets, which
started in 1965, and still operate today. In 1969, Promodès also began
operating its supermarkets under the Champion banner; by the end of 1970
there were already 43 Champion supermarkets, and in 1990 there were over
350, most of them being franchised. Promodès had operated hypermarkets
under a franchise agreement with Carrefour under the Carrefour banner since
1970, but the first hypermarket branded Continent was set up two years later,
and Promodès’s hypermarket sales grew at about the same speed as supermar-
ket sales. Promodès also expanded its wholesale activities with neighborhood
stores and convenience stores, which were franchised under the Shopi (1973)
and 8 à Huit (1977) brands. Several acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s also
added to Promodès’s domestic growth—amongst them 128 supermarkets
from Primistères in 1988, Codec and Félix Potin convenience stores in 1990
and 1996, as well as Cattau from Tesco consisting of 7 hypermarkets, 73 super-
markets, and a few neighborhood stores in 1997 (see below).
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Promodès undertook its first steps toward internationalization in 1975. It

started to internationalize its hypermarket operations to two neighboring
countries, Germany and Spain. In Germany, Promodès set up a joint venture
with the German group Schaper, which held 60 percent. When Schaper
merged with another German retailer, Asko, in 1988, the two partners split
up. Some Continent hypermarkets were now rebranded by Asko as Real and
later became part of Metro (see below), while some others were now owned
100 percent by Promodès. In 1990, Promodès in addition bought 47 Plaza
hypermarkets from bankrupt Coop. But Promodès’s hypermarket operations
in Germany, which accounted for less than 5 percent of Promodès’s total sales,
never managed to achieve the size necessary to compete with its larger Ger-
man competitors. After running into losses, Promodès withdrew from Ger-
many in 1996, selling its Plaza hypermarkets to German Spar. In 1998 they
were taken over by Wal-Mart and finally, in 2006, by Metro (see below).
Operations in Spain also started in 1975, and developed much better. Here
Promodès also operated in a joint venture, but held a majority. The first
Continent hypermarket was opened in Valencia in 1975—only two years
after Carrefour had come to Barcelona. Some Champion supermarkets fol-
lowed later. The Spanish base was also used in 1981 to enter neighboring
Portugal, where Promodès opened hypermarkets in a joint venture with Sonae
(Modelo-Continente).
Spain—and not its home country France—was also the place where Pro-
modès started its own hard-discount chain in 1979, one year after Carrefour
had started Ed discount in France. The discount concept of Día was not as
“hard” as that of Aldi or Lidl: the stores, despite being significantly smaller,
carried at least 1,600 SKUs, but, as the first hard-discount chain in Spain, it was
to gain a dominant position in this growing segment of Spanish retailing. In
the first half of the 1990s, the Día format was also transferred to several other
countries. These attempts did not succeed in Italy and Promodès’s own home
country France, which Día left in 1996. But it was very successful in Portugal,
where operations began in 1993 and were expanded in 1998 through the
acquisition of the Portuguese discount chain Minipreço from French retailer
Auchan, increasing the number of Promodès’s hard-discount stores in Portu-
gal by 125 to 300. In Greece, where Promodès had opened Continent hyper-
markets since 1991, as well as in Turkey, where Día had started in 1999,
Promodès also became the market leader in the discount segment. Día dis-
count stores were also introduced into Argentina (1997), Brazil (2001), and
China (2003).
Promodès also tried to enter the United States. In 1979–80 it acquired
twenty-three supermarkets from Red Food Stores and tried to convert them
into a more hypermarket-like format with a 50 percent non-food assortment.
In 1983 it added forty supermarkets from Houchens. Later, Promodès also
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Michael Wortmann
started several wholesale activities. But about ten years later Promodès left the
United States, and sold its Red Food holdings to the Dutch retailer Ahold
(1994).
Before the merger with Carrefour, the operations of Promodès were highly
concentrated in France (63 percent of sales in 1987) and Spain (28.5 percent).
Further European activities were concentrated in Italy, where Promodès had
bought the supermarket chain GS (6 percent) (see below) and Greece
(1.6 percent). In Taiwan, where a Continent hypermarket had opened in
1995, Promodès sold out to its local partner in 1998. Hypermarket operations
in Indonesia, in cooperation with local partner Sinar Mas, were just about to
start in 1998. Compared with Promodès, Carrefour, despite the fact that its
two main markets were also France (57 percent of sales in 1998) and Spain
(over 10 percent), was much more global, with operations in several Latin-
American (23 percent) and Asian (6 percent) countries. But its business was
concentrated in hypermarkets, while Promodès was much more diversified as
regards formats.
In 1999, three years after French hypermarket giant Auchan had merged
with Docks de France (Mammouth), and Metro had established itself as Eur-
ope’s biggest retailer, and two years after Wal-Mart had entered the European
stage, Carrefour and Promodès merged their activities. This new Carrefour was
now Europe’s largest and the world’s second largest retailer. In addition to the
merger, a large number of other companies in France and abroad were
acquired between 1998 and 2000.
The most important was the acquisition of Comptoirs Modernes, a very old
family business that had started a self-service store in France as early as 1949,
and now consisted of 16 Carrefour branded hypermarkets, a chain of over 400
supermarkets (Stoc), and about 300 convenience stores (Comod; Marché Plus).
Comptoirs Modernes had also been operating in Spain since 1988, where it
had developed a group of over 100 supermarkets under various, frequently
acquired brands, such as Maxor and Supeco. Promodès had also recently
(1987) expanded its Spanish operations when it acquired a chain of 61 Simago
supermarkets.
In addition to the strengthening of the new Carrefour’s position in its two
core markets, France and Spain, the group also expanded its activities into
other European countries. In 2000 Carrefour bought Italian Gruppo GS, with
which Promodès had cooperated since 1997, and which owned more than 20
hypermarkets, as well as networks of almost 300 supermarkets (two-thirds
franchised) and over 500 convenience stores (DìperDì; mostly franchised).
Carrefour was now operating 31 hypermarkets in Italy. Also in 2000 Carrefour
re-entered the Belgian market, acquiring GB (Grand Basar) the country’s
leading retailer, in which Promodès had taken a minority share in 1998. GB
operated 60 hypermarkets, as well as 73 integrated and 350 franchised
130
supermarkets. In Greece, Carrefour set up a 50:50 joint venture with Marino-

poulos, managed by Carrefour (in 2000). The company, operating 10 hyper-
markets and 133 supermarkets, was the biggest retailer in Greece. The
discounter Día was not integrated in this joint venture and expanded its
business independently to 190 stores in 2000. In 2001 Carrefour took
40 percent in a joint venture with Maus Group in Switzerland; 11 Jumbo
stores were converted to Carrefour hypermarkets.
This wave of acquisitions, which all occurred at about the same time as the
merger of Carrefour and Promodès, gave the company a strong position in
France and Spain, as well as in Belgium, Italy, and Greece. Because of its mix of
formats, ranging from huge hypermarkets, supermarkets, to small (frequently
franchised) convenience stores, operating in all countries, in some countries
flanked by discount stores, Carrefour was able to react flexibly to customer
needs as well as to regulatory demands, utilizing several cross-format syner-
gies—for example, in sourcing and private-label development, or in logistics
and distribution. From now on, a multi-format strategy was used not only in
European core countries but also in transition and developing countries.
Market entries and growth in many of these countries were again accelerated.
But, based on its strategy to become the number one grocery retailer in every
country where it operated, or at least to be amongst the top three, Carrefour—
as in earlier decades—also retreated from a large number of countries where it
was not possible to achieve this goal. In Europe, Carrefour withdrew—again—
from Switzerland, and sold its hypermarkets in Portugal.
When Carrefour acquired Belgian GB in 2000, this company also operated
27 Globi supermarkets in Poland, which considerably strengthened the so far
very weak position of Carrefour’s hypermarkets in that country. Carrefour
then opened many new outlets, including convenience stores and also
so-called mini-hypermarkets. Finally, in 2007 it became the country’s number
one mass food retailer, when it took over 183 supermarkets and 15 hypermar-
kets from Dutch Ahold. Carrefour also entered the Czech Republic (1998) and
Slovakia (2000) by setting up new hypermarkets. But it was unable to grow
successfully, and thus it decided to withdraw from the market. The Czech
hypermarkets were sold to Tesco (see below).15 A further Eastern European
country that Carrefour entered was Romania. Here a French franchisee had
first opened some hypermarkets (Hyparlo) in 1999. Five years later, Carrefour
took control. The number one hypermarket group in the country finally
broadened its activities by adding 21 supermarkets of the local chain Artima
to its 11 hypermarkets at the end of 2007. In Turkey, Carrefour strengthened
its position as number two retailer by buying Gima, the country’s third largest
supermarket chain, with 81 stores, as well as a chain of 45 discount stores in
2005.
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Michael Wortmann
Parallel to its merger with Promodès and the various European acquisitions,
in Latin America Carrefour now added more supermarkets to its hypermarket
business—also by acquisitions. In Brazil in 1998–9, it bought 6 local super-
market chains with a total of 85 stores, amongst them 23 stores of Lojas
Americanas—the company that had been the joint-venture partner of Wal-
Mart when it entered Brazil in 1994. Since 2001 Día discount stores have also
operated in Brazil. In 2007, by acquiring 34 hypermarkets from Atacadao,
Carrefour became Brazil’s number one food retailer. In Argentina, Carrefour
started Día operations in 1999, and by adding over 130 supermarkets of the
leading local chain Norte to its 21 hypermarkets two years later became the
number one grocery retailer in Argentina, too.
In contrast to these two countries, in Colombia, where Carrefour had set up
its first hypermarket in 1998, the company grew only internally and, as of
2010, still operates only hypermarkets, which it has partly adapted to different
kinds of neighborhoods. Here Carrefour is only the number two, far behind
Casino. In two other Latin-American countries, Carrefour decided to leave: it
sold its seven hypermarkets in Chile in 2004, and in 2005 a further twenty-
nine hypermarkets in Mexico.
In Asia, Carrefour further expanded its hypermarket activities. In Taiwan
the number of outlets was doubled from twenty-four (2000) to forty-eight
(2007), which was only partly due to an agreement with Tesco, by which
Carrefour traded its Czech hypermarkets for six hypermarkets in Taiwan. In
Indonesia where Carrefour had opened its first hypermarket in 1998, in the
middle of the Asian financial crisis, it has recently speeded up expansion,
opening seventeen outlets in 2006–7 and buying a 75 percent stake in the
local retailer Alfa Retailindo, which operated twenty-nine supermarkets of
various sizes, in early 2008. These were the only acquisitions Carrefour made
in Asia, where most of the growth so far had been generated internally.
In China in the beginning of the 2000s, Carrefour had serious problems
with government authorities, resulting from the way it had operated its first
hypermarkets. Carrefour’s Chinese retail operations had been owned by joint-
venture companies with different local partners in which Carrefour held only
a minority, but these operating companies were linked by management con-
tracts with additional joint-venture companies in which Carrefour owned a
majority. This allowed Carrefour effectively to control its retail operations in
China, bypassing restrictive legislation that did not allow majority ownership.
Following some legal wrangling, public apologies by Carrefour, and—at the
same time—a loosening of tight regulation, 89 hypermarkets were set up after
2002. By May 2008 Carrefour operated 113 hypermarkets all over the country,
form Shenzhen to Harbin and from Shanghai to Urumqi. Attempts to add
supermarkets to its Chinese stores were halted after two years. But the Día
132
discount chain that started operations in 2003 has already grown to nearly
300 stores, concentrated in Shanghai and Beijing.
While Carrefour has managed to become the leading foreign retailer in
Taiwan, Indonesia, and—at least for a time—China,16 as well as in Singapore,
where it operates two hypermarkets, it has been much less successful in
Malaysia (twelve outlets) and Thailand, where its twenty-seven hypermarkets
bring it only to fifth place amongst Thailand’s grocery retailers. In Hong Kong,
South Korea, and Japan, where again Carrefour was unable to become one of
the leading retailers, it withdrew from the markets, by selling its stores to local
companies or, in Japan, by franchising the stores out to Aeon, Japan’s largest
retailer.
By 2008 Carrefour was the second biggest retailer of the world; it was
number one not only in Europe and its home country France but also in
Spain, Belgium, and Greece, in Brazil and Argentina, in Taiwan and Indonesia;
and number two in Italy, Poland, and Turkey, as well as being the second
largest foreign-owned retailer in China. France accounted for 43.4 percent
of total net sales of €108.6 billion; other European countries accounted for
39.1 percent, Latin-America for 11.1 percent, and Asia for 6.4 percent.
In 2008, 1,302 ( in 2007: 1247) hypermarkets accounted for 59.0 percent of
the group’s total sales. The vast majority of these hypermarkets were located
outside France (228): in Western Europe, Carrefour operated hypermarkets in
Spain (168), Italy (69), Belgium (57), Greece and Cyprus (31), and Turkey (22).
In Eastern Europe Carrefour’s hypermarkets were located in Poland (78) and
Romania (21). Its presence in Latin America was concentrated in Brazil (162),
Argentina (67), and Colombia (59). And in East and South East Asia it was
focused on China (134), Taiwan (59), Indonesia (37), Thailand (27), Malaysia
(12), and Singapore (2). In addition, franchised outlets operated in Japan (7),
nine Arab countries (27), and the Dominican Republic (1), as well as in French
overseas departments and territories.
Supermarkets accounted for 23.6 percent of total sales, mostly under the
Champion banner. This business is relatively less internationalized and still
concentrated in Europe. In countries outside Europe, supermarkets have fol-
lowed the expansion of hypermarkets. Out of 2,919 supermarkets, 1,001 were
in France, 508 in Italy, 444 in Belgium, many operated by franchisees and
licensees; others were in Greece and Cyprus (229), and in Poland (225), Turkey
(125), and Spain (98). The few supermarkets outside Europe were concentrated
in Argentina (112) and Brazil (39). Convenience stores, which are mostly
franchised, are the least internationalized store type: of the 4,813 stores,
over two-thirds were in France and most others in Italy (1,016), Belgium
(191), and Greece and Cyprus (256).
Discount stores, accounting for 10.2 percent of the group’s sales, are a very
special case. While the discount business of Carrefour under the Ed banner,
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Michael Wortmann
started in France in 1978, it has never been internationally successful, Promo-

dès’s Día format, which has been developed since 1979 in Spain, where
Carrefour’s discount division is headquartered, has been transferred to other
Mediterranean countries and even to Latin America and China—adding on to
the already established hypermarkets. In 2008 there were 22,796 Día stores in
Spain, 914 Ed stores in France, 498 Minipreço stores in Portugal, 613 Día stores
in Turkey, and 372 in Greece and Cyprus. Further Día stores are in Argentina
(410), Brazil (327), and China (322).
Aldi
The brothers Karl and Theodor Albrecht ran their first shop, originally owned
by their mother, in Essen in the Ruhr area from 1946.17 Like many others in
the early post-war period, this little store sold a very limited range of products.
By 1950 the Albrechts had expanded and owned thirteen shops. It was in this
period that they developed some central elements of their hard-discount
retailing strategy. When the German economy recovered and an increasingly
diversified range of products became available on the wholesale market, the
Albrechts discovered that they could make a good business by sticking to
the limited product range, since this allowed them to keep their costs low.
In the early 1950s their shops concentrated on the fastest-moving articles and
offered only one product of each kind. In total, only between 250 and 280
different products were offered. Besides helping to reduce purchase prices,
since products could be bought in larger quantities, this improved the effi-
ciency of sales work, since the lack of choice encouraged customers to decide
quickly what to buy. As Karl Albrecht explained in 1953, the company
“adhered to the principles of low prices as well as that of limited selection . . .
we went so far as to exclude whole product categories. The reason? Turnover.”
There were no decorations, counters and shelves were kept very simple, and all
products were visibly displayed for the customers. This helped to keep total
sales costs down to 11 percent and personnel costs to between 3.1 percent and
3.7 percent of turnover. Advertising expenditure was less than 0.1 percent,
since “all our promotions are put into discount prices.”18
This concept allowed the Albrechts to expand dramatically. By 1960, the
number of outlets had increased to 300. The following year, the two Albrecht
brothers divided their business into two clearly separated areas, Nord and Süd,
with Theo in the north and Karl in the south; this division was later extended
to an agreed segmentation of foreign markets as well. The first “real” Aldi
(Albrecht Discount) store opened in 1962 in the Ruhr-area city of Dortmund.
It combined the principles described above with the new concept of self-
service, which had slowly started to spread in Germany in the mid-1950s
134
(Henksmeier 1988). The first Aldi outlets had an average sales area of some-
where above 200 square meters and sold only a small assortment of 400 fast-
moving packaged grocery products that could be easily (and cheaply) handled
and stored. By 1974 there were already 1,000 Aldi stores in Germany.
Up to the present, Aldi has remained true to its original principles of
concentrating on a limited number of high-sale, fast-moving goods, keeping
in-store presentation of goods as simple as possible (products are left in their
cardboard boxes or even on the palette), and reducing service to the mini-
mum. The high turnover/space ratio and low store and personnel costs, which
allow low sales margins, combined with the low cost of sourcing made possi-
ble by large-scale buying, enable Aldi to offer its products at very low prices.
Almost all products sold at Aldi stores are private labels with fancy names
made up like branded products. They are frequently sourced from mid-sized
manufacturers that, while typically able to maintain reliable long-term sup-
plier relationships, remain highly dependent on Aldi.
Aldi Nord and Süd are, in 2010, still family owned. They do not publish
annual reports or any similar information and do not have public-relations
departments. The internal ownership and management structures of the
group are complex and inscrutable. Distribution and sales activities are
organized in local companies consisting of forty or fifty stores grouped around
their distribution center. This unit size also defines the minimum size for
international activities (except for intra-EU border regions).
The international expansion of Aldi (Süd) started as early as 1967, when the
company took over the small Austrian retail chain Hofer. Aldi transformed the
stores to its own concept and used the Hofer stores as a platform for further
growth. Austria is the only country where Aldi discount stores do not operate
under the Aldi banner. Other neighboring countries were entered by Aldi
Nord: the Netherlands in 1973 and Belgium in 1976, again by acquiring
small local firms as starting platforms. The first stores in Denmark (1977)
concluded the first phase of market entries into neighboring European
countries. In all these countries Aldi was the first company to introduce the
hard-discount concept. In Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium Aldi was able
to grow quickly, while in Denmark it was soon confronted with competition
from Dansk Supermarked’s own discount chain Netto, started in 1981.19
In 1976 Aldi Süd entered the United States. It acquired some fifty stores from
Benner Tea of Iowa and remolded the stores to its own hard-discount concept,
even though US stores are a bit larger and carry more products (about 1,400
regular SKUs) than the German original.20 Since then, operations have spread
continuously from Kansas to the East Coast, recently even down to Florida.
Today, Aldi owns over 1,000 stores in 29 states. In 1979 Theo Albrecht from
Aldi Nord made an investment that was very untypical for the company. He
acquired the California-based retailer Trader Joe’s. In stores of 1,500 square
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Michael Wortmann
meters, it sold about 2,500–3,000 quality food items, many of them specialties
with a gourmet touch. As in Aldi stores, about 80 percent of the items are
private labels. Even though this company is managed quite independently
from Aldi’s hard-discount operations, there are certainly synergies, especially
in sourcing European-style food products. Trader Joe’s has developed
extremely well and by 2009 operated over 300 stores in 23 states.
During the 1980s, partly in reaction to the emergence of competitors in
Germany’s discount segment, Aldi introduced some changes to its business
model. It started to broaden its regular assortment, which until then had been
limited to canned and dry foods, with new products: in particular, dairy
products were introduced as well as fresh produce. The number of SKUs
increased to over 600 at Aldi Nord and 700 at Aldi Süd. But the still limited
range of products allowed Aldi to avoid costly investments in IT systems and
scanner checkouts for a long time. These were installed only in the early
2000s. With this wider assortment Aldi competed not only with newly
emerging discounters, such as Penny, Plus, and Lidl, which were all somewhat
“softer,” but also with traditional supermarkets.21 In addition, Aldi, like other
discounters, began to sell various non-food products, such as kitchenware,
textiles, toys, or stationery products, and even TV sets and computers. Since
Aldi stores, because of German regulations, cannot expand their store size, it is
not possible to keep all these products in stock at the same time. Instead, they
are sold as one-off special offers, which change once or twice a week. All these
products are manufactured exclusively for Aldi, and are usually sourced
through specialized importers. At Aldi, these products account for over
20 percent of total sales, making the company one of the top ten apparel
retailers in Germany. Its special-offer computers have also become quite pop-
ular since the mid-1990s.
In 1988–90, in a second phase of internationalization, Aldi Nord entered
France and Luxembourg, while Aldi Süd turned to the UK. In France, Aldi
faced competition not only from local companies like Ed (Carrefour) or Leader
Price (Casino) but also from Aldi’s German arch rival Lidl, which entered
France as its first foreign market in 1989 and has since become the number
one discounter in the country. Faced with this situation, Aldi bought 74 Día
stores from Promodès in 1996, an unusual step for Aldi, which usually prefers
to grow internally. The UK also proved to be a difficult environment for Aldi—
as for hard discounters in general, which have been unable to overcome their
poor image in an environment of high brand awareness. Generally, the 1990s
were characterized by the addition of further stores in those countries that
Aldi had already entered, and by the expansion of Aldi Nord into Eastern
Germany.
By the end of the 1990s, a third phase of internationalization began. In 1999
Aldi Süd expanded from the UK to Ireland, and in 2001 it turned to Australia,
136
where its entry raised furious public debates. But Aldi was able to do well, even
without acquiring a starting base in this faraway market. In 2002 Aldi Nord set
up its first stores in Spain, where it had to struggle with Día as well as Lidl,
which had already entered the market. A few stores were opened in Portugal,
supplied from distribution centers in Spain. In 2005 Aldi Süd entered Switzer-
land, a non-EU market dominated by local supermarket chains and character-
ized by relatively high retail prices. In 2008 Aldi Süd entered Greece, where it
was able to operate thirty-five stores.
Amongst the larger German discounters, Aldi was the last to enter Eastern
Europe. In 2005 the first stores were opened in Slovenia, operating under the
Hofer banner and managed from Austria. Austria was also used as a spring-
board to enter Hungary, where it proceeded to operate over fifty stores. Aldi
Nord has also turned to Eastern Europe, opening a distribution center and
some forty stores since 2008 in Poland.
By 2008 Aldi was operating about 8,500 stores worldwide, of which over
7,000 were in Europe, including 4,200 in Germany. About 80 percent of all
Germans live within walking distance of an Aldi store, and at least 70 percent
of all households use one of these stores at least ‘occasionally’. In its home
country, Aldi is the fifth biggest grocery retailer. And the company has a
similarly strong position in Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands. However,
in other countries, such as the UK or Spain, it is not even amongst the top ten
grocery retailers. In the USA Aldi, including Trader Joe’s, ranks only at about
the twentieth place. But this—seemingly—weak position in several host
countries is no problem for Aldi and other hard discounters, as they can
generate high cross-border synergies (see below).
Metro
The German retail conglomerate Metro AG was Europe’s largest retailer until
the 1999 merger between Carrefour and Promodès. Metro is active in a broad
range of retail and trading activities, including food retailing in large stores
under various brands, Galeria Kaufhof and Horten department stores, various
specialized retail chains such as Media-Markt and Saturn (trading consumer
electronics and home appliances), as well as a broad range of other activities,
many of which have been divested since 1998.
The most important division were cash and carry outlets operating under
the Metro and Makro brands in Germany as well as in seventeen other
countries, contributing 40 percent to total sales at that time. The company
Metro SB-Großmarkt was founded in 1963 by two established wholesale
businessmen. One year later, Otto Beisheim became managing director and
the company established its first self-service wholesale outlet in Mühlheim, in
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Michael Wortmann
the heart of the Ruhr area. This self-service wholesale outlet operated on an
area of 14,000 square meters catering to small retailers and other businesses.
Even though the cash and carry concept, which had originated in the USA,
had been introduced to Germany before, Metro, because of its financial re-
sources, became by far the most successful company in this field. After 1967
the company was owned in equal parts by the families of Schmidt-Ruthen-
beck, the co-founder, and Haniel, the owner of the huge trading company
Franz Haniel & Cie., as well as its general manager Otto Beisheim. By 1970
there were already thirteen Metro cash and carry outlets in Germany. Their
status as a wholesaler leaves C&C big boxes unaffected by restrictive German
special planning regulation, which was to restrict other large retail formats.
Internationalization also started quite early. In 1968 Metro and the Dutch
family-owned conglomerate Steenkolen Handelsvereniging (SHV) struck a
partnership agreement to combine their forces on international markets. In
some countries SHV would hold 60 percent and Metro 40 percent in opera-
tions under the Makro brand, while in other countries Metro would hold
60 percent and SHV 40 percent, and operations were to be branded Metro.
The first outlet was opened the same year in Amsterdam. In 1970–1 further
Makro stores followed in Belgium and the UK, while Metro stores were opened
in Austria, Denmark, and France. With the opening of a Metro store in Italy
and a Makro store in Spain in 1972, the first phase of foreign-market entries
was completed. Only eight years after its first German cash and carry outlet,
Metro operated outlets in nine European countries.
During the 1980s a long period of acquisitions and diversifications as well as
corporate restructurings began, which ended only in 1998. By 1986 Metro
gained a controlling interest in Kaufhof, one of four big German department
store chains originating from the end of the nineteenth century, which also
owned a chain of around 100 Kaufhalle variety stores. In 1994, Kaufhof
acquired Horten department stores.22 In the late 1980s, Kaufhof had also
expanded into specialized non-food retailing; it acquired two chains of larger
stores specializing in consumer electronics and household appliances, Media-
Markt and Saturn, which were merged to form Media-Saturn-Holding in 1990.
Other diversifications of Metro and Kaufhof turned to shoe stores (Reno),
office equipment (Sigma), and a computer store franchise system (Vobis).
By 1993 Metro had step by step gained majority control in another big
German retail conglomerate, the Asko group. Asko had started as a regional
consumers’ cooperative in the late nineteenth century, which was trans-
formed into a stock-listed corporation in 1972 and had since grown through
specializing in larger food stores (under the Basaar banner) while abandoning
smaller ones. It had also acquired several grocery retail groups, which were
themselves frequently the results of merger processes amongst smaller retail
companies that had started to set up larger out-of-town stores in the 1960s, at
138
a time when restrictive retail legislation had not yet been introduced. The
large grocery store format developed in Germany is called SB-Warenhaus—
literally: self-service warehouse. These stores are frequently referred to
as hypermarkets, as we will do in this chapter, even though they are
usually somewhat smaller than their French counterparts and carry only
about 25–40 percent non-food products.23
One of the groups acquired by Asko was Schaper, which owned some cash
and carry outlets, Extra supermarkets, as well as several hypermarket chains,
such as Real, Esbella, and Continent (in cooperation with Promodès (see
above)). Another group acquired in 1990 was Deutsche SB-Kauf. This com-
pany consisted of what was left over from another company, which until
recently had been known as Coop AG and which still owned a large number
of stores of various formats, sizes, and brands (Comet, Tip, and so on). Coop
had developed from the merger of around a hundred local consumer coopera-
tives during the 1970s and 1980s, and had a very complicated and opaque
ownership structure, including various trade unions as well as its own man-
agers, frequently former trade unionists. Coop was dissolved in 1988, follow-
ing one of Germany’s greatest business scandals. Asko also engaged in a
partnership with Massa Group, which like Asko was amongst the top ten
German grocery retailers at that time. But Asko also ventured into new busi-
nesses: it established the DIY chain Praktiker, bought the apparel retailer
Adler, which owned apparel factories in Germany, Sri Lanka, and South
Korea, and took 50 percent in a chain of furniture stores.
In 1996 Metro merged its German cash and carry business, together with
the various activities of Kaufhof and Asko, into the newly founded stock-listed
Metro AG, which immediately became Europe’s number one retailer. Former
Metro general manager Beisheim, who had retired from active management in
1994, and the Schmidt-Ruthenbeck and Haniel families still owned the major-
ity of this company through Metro Holding AG, which had been founded in
Baar, Switzerland, several years previously—probably for tax reasons. The
Metro and Makro cash and carry operations outside Germany were still held
directly by this Swiss holding, together with the Dutch company SHV. In
1998, Metro bought all the shares of SHV in the joint European operations,
and transferred their ownership to Metro AG. At that time, Metro had already
started to set up its own (100 percent owned) cash and carry stores in China
and Romania in 1996 (see below).
SHV kept its activities under the Makro cash and carry brand in Latin
America and Asia. By 2009 SHV ran 72 outlets in Brazil, 19 in Argentina, 29
in Venezuela, and 13 in Colombia. In Asia, SHV had been active in Thailand,
Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and South Korea. South Korean
stores were sold to Wal-Mart in 1999, stores in Malaysia were sold to Tesco in
2007, while stores in the Philippines, China, and Indonesia were sold to local
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Michael Wortmann
partners. In Thailand, by 2009, SHV was running about forty Makro cash and
carry outlets; and a joint venture in Pakistan, started in 2006, operates another
four stores.
Parallel to the integration of these various activities of Kaufhof and Asko,
Metro also tried to get rid of several businesses defined as non-core: the apparel
manufacturing and retailing activities of Adler, the variety stores of Kaufhalle,
and some unprofitable department stores of Kaufhof, the participation in a
furniture store chain, the grocery discount chain Tip, the computer store
franchise Vobis, the shoe stores Reno, the office equipment stores Sigma,
and several other companies, combining sales of nearly $10 billion, were
transferred to a special holding company in which Metro held only 49 per-
cent, and were to be sold whenever possible. The Sigma office equipment
stores were, for example, sold to Staples. In 2005 Metro also divested its
chain of Praktiker DIY stores, originally started by Asko in the 1970s. Praktiker
had become the number four European DIY retailer, which had also entered
Greece, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Romania, and finally Bulgaria.
From 1998 on, Metro concentrated on four core businesses, integrated in
four divisions: cash and carry (Metro, Makro), food retail (Real, Extra), non-
food specialty stores (especially Media-Saturn), and department stores (Galeria
Kaufhof). In these four business areas, brand integration and internationaliza-
tion were pushed forward from the early 1990s. The department stores of
Kaufhof and Horten were integrated under the Galeria Kaufhof concept and
brand, while smaller and unprofitable stores were sold. In 2001, fifteen depart-
ment stores of Inno in Belgium were added and subsequently also refurbished.
Even though this seems a small step of internationalization, it is remarkable in
the department-store business, where European companies rarely have left
their home market.
The former Kaufhof subsidiary Media-Saturn-Holding became a true cate-
gory killer in the fields of consumer electronics, information and telecommu-
nication products, office equipment, as well as small and large electric
appliances. It carried traditional European manufacturer brands, low-profile
brands of specialized German importers as well as most international com-
puter brands, and also Chinese Haier appliances; but there were no private
labels. Store managers usually owned a participation of around 10 percent in
the single stores and had some degree of autonomy concerning assortment,
pricing, and even advertising. By the mid-1990s there were already 150 Media-
Markt and Saturn stores in Germany, as well as a few stores in France (from
1989), Austria (1990), and Switzerland (1994). Hungary, Poland, and Spain
followed soon after, and in 1999 Media World, a group with twenty-three
stores, was acquired in Italy. Since 2000 the company has entered the Nether-
lands, Portugal, Greece, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, and Luxembourg. At the end
of 2008, there were 768 Media-Markt and Saturn stores, about half of them in
140
Germany (367), 315 in Western Europe, and 86 in Eastern Europe. Stores also
became much larger over time: average size grew from 2,500 square meters in
1998 to 3,100 square meters in 2007.
The various food retail chains that Metro had acquired through Asko were
restructured from the early 1990s on. This ultimately led to the divestment of
over 250 supermarkets to the German group Rewe in 2008, while the larger
162 hypermarkets, with an average size of 7,068 square meters, were consoli-
dated under the Real banner chain, which was further expanded in 1998 with
the acquisition of 94 Allkauf and 20 Kriegbaum stores. The Real chain was also
internationalized. The first four stores abroad were opened in Poland in 1997,
and the first Turkish store followed just one year later. After 2005 stores were
also opened in Romania and Russia. In 2006 Metro also acquired nineteen
Géant hypermarkets from the French retailer Casino in Poland. In the same
year, Metro also acquired all eighty-five German Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart
had entered the German market in 1997–8 when it took over the stores of
Wertkauf and Eurospar. The reasons for its failure are probably manifold and
cannot be discussed here, but it should be noted that the combined sales of
Wal-Mart in Germany were only a fraction (little more than 10 percent in
2005) of Wal-Mart/Asda sales in the UK, stores—though large by German
standards—were small for Wal-Mart, and the buying organizations of the
two acquired chains were highly fragmented. In 2009, Real operated around
340 hypermarkets in Germany, 54 in Poland, 21 in Romania, 14 in Russia, 13
in Turkey, and 1 in Ukraine.
Amongst the four business divisions of Metro, cash and carry has always
been the core and also the most internationalized. In Germany, most of the
cash and carry markets that had been operated by various acquired companies
were converted to the Metro cash and carry brand. By 2008, Metro had
increased the number of cash and carry markets in Germany to 126, from
about 50 in 1986.
By 1972, Metro, together with its Dutch Partner SHV, had set up outlets in
eight European countries. The two partners then started a second round of
internationalization, beginning in the Mediterranean in the early 1990s.
Metro cash and carry markets were opened in Turkey, and Makro markets in
Portugal, Morocco, and Greece, by 1992. In 1994 expansion turned toward
Eastern Europe: the first stores were opened in Hungary (Metro) and Poland
(Makro); the Czech Republic (Makro) followed in 1997. In 1996 Metro had
also started fully owned operations in Romania.
Another country that Metro entered on its own was China. Here it partnered
with Shanghai-based conglomerate Jinjiang Group, which took 40 percent in
the operations. A first store was opened in Shanghai in 1996. This was a risky
investment, because the Shanghai government licensed such new retail opera-
tions, knowing all the while that at that time the Chinese central government
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Michael Wortmann
had not allowed foreign companies to hold a majority stake in retail compan-
ies (Wang and Zhang 2005). It did so only in 1998, and Metro received the first
license for the operation of cash and carry outlets throughout China in 1999.
This was welcomed by Metro as a breakthrough for accelerated expansion over
the coming years. Metro has since expanded in the Shanghai area, but also all
over Eastern and Central China. In China, Metro took some innovative mea-
sures. For example, it established training kitchens at its Shanghai and Beijing
stores, whose mission—according to its website—is, on the one hand, to raise
the level of service to professionals by increasing the product knowledge of
Metro staff, “and on the other, through the training of cooking skills, [to]
influence professionals and raise the awareness of Metro’s profile” in China.24
In 2006, Metro raised its stake in the Chinese operation to 90 percent.
After 1998 Metro entered a large number of Eastern European countries:
Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Serbia. Besides
China, selected Asian countries were also entered: Japan and Vietnam in
2002, India in 2003, Pakistan in 2007, and Kazakhstan in 2009. In Japan,
Metro joined forces with the huge conglomerate Marubeni, which holds 20
percent in the new company.
Metro’s most important division is also its most internationalized. In 2008,
655 Metro cash and carry outlets accounted for sales of €33 billion, just about
half of total Metro group sales; only 17 percent thereof was realized by its 126
German outlets. Metro is the market leader in the cash and carry business, not
only in Germany, but also in the UK (33 stores), France (91), and Italy (48), as
well as in several other countries, such as Belgium (11), the Netherlands (17),
Poland (29), Romania (24), Russia (48), Slovakia (5), Turkey (13), the Czech
Republic (12), and in China (38).
Metro’s food retailing business, with total sales of €11.6 billion, is much less
internationalized. In Germany, in 2009, Metro’s 343 Real stores were number
two in the hypermarket business, behind Schwarz Group’s Kaufland chain,
while in Poland, Metro’s 50 stores make it also number two, behind Tesco. The
category specialist Media-Markt/Saturn, with its 768 stores and total sales of
€19 billion is highly internationalized. It is the European market leader, ahead
of British DSG International, former Dixons.
Today, Metro is the world’s fourth biggest retailer, with total sales of over
€68 billion. With 39 percent of these sales in Germany, nearly 35 percent in
other Western European countries,25 and nearly 25 percent in Eastern Europe,
Metro is—despite its high degree of internationalization—a very European
company; only 3 percent of its sales are outside Europe, in five Asian countries,
including China, and Morocco.
142
Tesco
Jack Cohen started as a grocery market stall holder in London and opened his
first store in 1929. By the end of the 1930s, there were already 100 Tesco stores,
grouped around a modern food warehouse. During two trips to the United
States before and after the Second World War, Cohen learned about the self-
service concept.26 After some experiments with this innovation in the UK, he
opened a first self-service supermarket in 1956. Tesco was soon expanding by
setting up new stores, but also through a large number of acquisitions, adding
several hundred stores to its portfolio. By the late 1960s, the supermarket
chain consisted of about 800 stores. Its supermarkets had also become larger
and larger. In 1968, the first store was opened that was labeled a superstore; it
extended over 4,000 square meters.
In the 1970s Tesco abolished trading stamps and started its “Operation
Checkout” campaign, reducing prices to undercut those of its main competi-
tors. The company also decided to close some 500 small stores and prioritized
the development of large out-of-town superstores where parking was conve-
nient and a higher volume of business could be generated. The 1980s saw the
introduction of computerized checkouts as well as Tesco’s own private labels
for high-quality products, supplemented somewhat later—in reaction to for-
eign hard discounters entering the UK market—by the low-priced Tesco Value
brand. In 2009 more than 10,000 Tesco branded SKUs account for 48 percent
of total sales, the highest share of any full-assortment retailer in the European
Union.
In the early 1980s Tesco had tried to establish its own chain of discount
stores; but the forty-five outlets that had been established were sold after only
four years of trial and error. Tesco, in cooperation with Marks & Spencer, also
began to invest in greenfield shopping centers that held Tesco superstores as
anchor stores. The first of these out-of-town shopping centers had a 6,100-
square-meter Tesco superstore with 900 employees and 42 computerized
checkout counters. By the beginning of the 1990s, Tesco had reduced the
number of its stores to 371, 150 of which were superstores, which generated
most of the company’s sales and profits. And by 1994, after an acquisition of
fifty-seven stores in Scotland and northern England, Tesco had become the
number one grocery retailer in the UK. In the same year Tesco also started
operating a new store format, the Tesco Express convenience stores.
Tesco’s first steps toward internationalization came quite late in comparison
to its main competitors. It started with Ireland in 1979; but the majority share
taken in a local retail chain was divested seven years later. When Tesco took a
majority in a regional retail chain in northern France in 1992, it was unable to
use this as a springboard for further expansion; Tesco withdrew from France in
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Michael Wortmann
1997, selling its activities to Promodès. While these first two foreign invest-
ments directed toward neighboring mature retail markets had failed, Tesco’s
further expansion into the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Asia were
to become successful (Dawson, Larke, and Choi 2006).
In 1994 Tesco entered Hungary, acquiring the local Global supermarket
chain with forty-three small stores for £15 million, and, one year later,
it acquired Savia, a chain of thirty-six small supermarkets in Poland, for
£8 million. In both cases Tesco used these companies to acquire some know-
ledge of the local markets including a pool of experienced managers that Tesco
would later use for establishing its own large stores, while closing down the
acquired ones.
The next countries to be entered were the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Here, Kmart from the USA had acquired thirteen department and variety
stores from the former Czechoslovak government in 1992. Kmart’s problems
in the United States prompted the company to sell the six Kmart stores in the
Czech Republic and the seven stores in Slovakia, most of which were quite
profitable, to Tesco in 1996. With these acquisitions, Tesco was dealing for the
first time with a broad range of non-food merchandise lines, and the company
used the experience that it made with these stores as a starting point to depart
radically from its established superstore format in the UK (Palmer 2005). Tesco
had decided to develop its own hypermarket stores. This new format devel-
oped conjointly in the UK home market and in the distant markets of Eastern
Europe. After a short period of experimentation, hypermarkets became the
main driver of Tesco’s growth in the new century.
In the UK, Tesco opened its first hypermarket in 1997 under the new banner
of Tesco Extra. This store covered over 9,300 square meters, with one-quarter
of the sales area occupied with non-food assortments. By the end of 1999
Tesco operated five hypermarkets in the UK. By the end of 2007 there were
166. The average size of Tesco’s hypermarkets is now about 6,500 square
meters, but at several of these stores non-food accounts for some 40 percent
of sales space. Tesco’s share in the UK non-food market has grown from about
1 percent to over 8 percent since 2000.27
In 1997 Tesco entered the Irish market for the second time, this time
acquiring the supermarket businesses of Associated British Food (ABF),
which had been the market leader both in the Republic of Ireland with
seventy-five supermarkets and in Northern Ireland with thirty-four supermar-
kets. Since then store assortments have been expanded so that they now
include clothing, household, entertainment, and other non-food ranges. A
first Tesco Extra was opened in 2005. In 2003 Tesco entered Turkey, acquiring
the local operator of five hypermarkets, Kipa, which had started operations ten
years previously. Additional openings have increased the number of hyper-
markets to twenty-six. Express convenience stores have also been added.
144
From the late 1990s, Tesco speeded up expansion in Eastern Europe. After it
had acquired small companies in Hungary and Poland as local platforms, it
focused its expansion on the hypermarket format, which it was just develop-
ing. In 1998 it opened its first own hypermarkets in Poland, and then in 2002
acquired thirteen hypermarkets (of 5,600–14,200 square meters) from Dohle.
The German company had been the first to introduce hypermarkets into
Poland in 1994. Then, in 2006, Tesco bought 146 soft discount stores from
French Casino. In Hungary, Tesco mainly expanded by setting up new hyper-
markets. Similarly, in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, the acquired Kmart
stores were transformed and additional hypermarkets were added. In the
Czech Republic Tesco acquired eleven hypermarkets from Carrefour in
2005—in exchange for its outlets in Taiwan. In 2006, Tesco added twenty-
seven supermarkets, bought from German Edeka, to its network.
Internationalization into Asia started in 1998 and right from the start con-
centrated mostly on hypermarkets. Thailand was the first country it entered;
there it acquired a controlling interest in Lotus, then a chain of thirteen
hypermarkets, part of the huge conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group.28
From this base, Tesco Lotus has built a very strong position made up of 420
stores trading across four formats, including 81 hypermarkets, 307 Express
stores, and 32 supermarkets. In 1999, Tesco formed a joint venture with the
South Korean conglomerate Samsung, which started with two Homeplus
hypermarkets; several new stores have been opened every year since. In
2005, Tesco also acquired twelve hypermarkets from the Korean company
Aram-Mart, and in 2008 Tesco bought thirty-six Homever stores, many of
which were formerly Carrefour hypermarkets. The third Asian market entered
was Taiwan, but here Tesco was unable to grow against strong competitors
that had entered the market before, and thus it handed its six hypermarkets
over to Carrefour in 2006.
In 2002, a joint venture with Malaysia’s conglomerate Sime Darby—with
Tesco holding 70 percent—opened its first three hypermarkets and slowly
added more stores. In 2007, Tesco acquired eight Makro cash and carry stores
from Dutch SHV, which retreated from the market. In 2004, Tesco entered the
Chinese market by founding a 50:50 partnership with Ting Hsin International
Group, which at that time operated twenty-five Hymall hypermarkets in the
Shanghai area. Tesco soon increased its stake to 90 percent, and also opened
further stores in the Beijing and Guangzhou regions. The first Tesco-branded
store, called Tesco Legou, opened in Beijing in February 2007.
While market entry and initial growth in the four Asian emerging markets
of Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and China were concentrated on hyper-
markets, Tesco later added convenience Express stores to its networks. The
latest country was China, where the first Express store was opened in Shanghai
in 2008. In Japan, where Tesco acquired several smaller chains in 2003–5, the
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Michael Wortmann
company concentrates on small stores, of a discount as well as convenience

type. In its home market, too, Tesco has expanded the convenience store
business, including the acquisition of over 800 T&S stores in 2003. Most
recent internationalization plans are directed toward the United States. Since
2007 Tesco has built a few distribution centers and has opened over 100 stores
in California, Arizona, and Nevada. This newly developed formula, called
Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, combines discount and convenience
elements (Lowe and Wrigley 2009).
Traditionally focused on supermarkets and superstores, Tesco has become a
multi-format retailer. In particular, its hypermarket outlets, developed since
the late 1990s in the UK and abroad, have allowed the company to triple its
sales since 2000. Hypermarkets have allowed the company to expand its
assortment into non-food, where growth rates far above the average have
been achieved; hypermarkets have also been the central vehicle for expansion
into emerging markets. In stark contrast to Carrefour, Tesco has concentrated
its expansion abroad on a relatively small number of countries, and, after
some failures in earlier decades, in recent years has withdrawn from only
one country, Taiwan. Domestic sales still accounted for 70 percent of the
2008 total £59.4 million; in Ireland they add another 4 percent. But, taking
into account that Tesco began internationalization quite late, it is remarkable
that 64 percent of its sales space is abroad, most of which is in the four
emerging markets in Asia as well as in five emerging markets in Eastern Europe
and Turkey.
Internationalization of the Largest European Grocery Retailers
The sixteen leading European grocery retailers, as listed in Table 4.2, come
from five European countries: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Morrisons from the UK;
Carrefour, Casino, Auchan, Leclerc, and Intermarché from France; Metro,
Rewe, Schwarz Group, Aldi, Edeka, and Tengelmann from Germany; Ahold
from the Netherlands, and the Delhaize Group from Belgium. Amongst these
sixteen companies, only two do not have international store operations; these
are the British superstore chains Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. Three other
groups show a very limited level of internationalization; these are all buying
groups: the French voluntary group of independent hypermarkets Leclerc, the
voluntary group of supermarkets Intermarché, and the German cooperative of
supermarket owners Edeka. Intermarché had taken over the German volun-
tary group Spar, then Germany’s seventh biggest grocery retail group,29 with
about 4,000 supermarkets; but in 2005 Spar was sold to Edeka. Edeka, too, has
recently given up most of its international operations, which had been quite
small anyway. The German Rewe is the only buying group amongst the top
146
Table 4.2. Top sixteen European grocery retailers, store count, 2007, and sales, 2008
Store count Home West East Other Latin Asian Africa Gross sales 2008 (€bn)
country Europe Europe DCs America LDCs
Total
Carrefour 14,991 5,515 7,359 360 7 1,097 535 8 109.4

hypermarkets 1,163 218 323 83 7 256 260 5
supermarkets 2,708 1,021 1,226 277 — 141 — 3
convenience 4,800 3,245 1,491 — — — — —
discount 6,166 897 4,299 — — 695 275 —
C&C 154 134 20 — — — — —
Metro 2,221 1,259 598 305 3 0 49 7 79.2
hypermarkets 434 349 11 74 — — — —
C&C 615 122 276 158 3 — 49 7
others 1,172 788 311 73 — — — —
Tescoa 3,729 2,115 167 580 178 — 689 — 74.5
hypermarkets 659 166 32 223 — — 238 —
others 3,017 1,949 135 357 125 — 451 —
Schwarz Groupb 7,980 3,360 3,850 770 — — — — 59.0
hypermarkets 720 520 — 200 — — — —
discount 7,260 2,840 3,850 570 — — — —
Rewe 12,719 9,492 2,264 862 — — — — 54.5
hypermarkets 27 — 22 5
supermarkets 8,633 7,052 1,195 386 — — — —
discount 2,934 2,008 490 436 — — — —
C&C 98 45 22 31 — — — —
others 1027 389 635 3 — — — —
Aldi 8,550 4,200 2,850 50 1,450 — — — 50.3
discount 8,250 4,200 2,850 50 1,150 — — —
Trader Joe’s 300 — — — 300 — — —
(continued)
Table 4.2. (Continued)
Store count Home West East Other Latin Asian Africa Gross sales 2008 (€bn)
country Europe Europe DCs America LDCs
Total
Auchan 2,480 545 1,721 90 — — 124 — 50.0

hypermarkets 435 128 119 64 — — 124 —
supermarkets 2,045 417 1,602 26 — — — —
Casino 9,556 8,119 315 — — 959 114 49 46.2
hypermarkets 386 129 — — — 174 72 11
supermarkets 1,416 709 315 — — 342 25 25
discount 718 489 — — — 225 4 —
convenience, others 7,036 6,792 — — — 218 13 13
Ahold 3,225 2,199 — 321 705 — — — 44.5
hypermarkets 96 25 — 71 — — — —
supermarkets 2,125 1,170 — 250 705 — — —
others (Etos, Gall) 1,004 1,004 — — — — — —
Edeka 9,711 9,711 — — — — — — 38.3
hypermarkets 186 186 — — — — — —
supermarkets 8,135 8,135 — — — — — —
discount 1,279 1,279 — — — — — —
C&C 111 111 — — — — — —
Leclercc 609 540 50 19 — — — — 35.1
hypermarkets 460 391 39 18 — — — —
supermarkets 131 131 — — — — — —
Intermarché 3,942 3,464 310 168 — — — — 32.8
supermarkets 2,168 1,795 245 128 — — — —
convenience 305 305 — — — — — —
discount 410 407 3 — — — — —
non-food 1,059 957 62 40 — — — —
Tengelmann 7,707 5,990 678 633 406 — — — 25.6
supermarkets 1,109 703 — — 406 — — —
discount 3,819 2,912 361 546 — — — —
non-food 2,779 2,375 317 87 — — — —
Sainsbury’s 788 788 — — — — — — 25.6
supermarkets/superstores 490 490 — — — — — —
convenience 298 298 — — — — — —
Delhaize Group 2,539 738 153 22 1,570 — 56 — 20.0
supermarkets 2,539 738 153 22 1,570 — 56 —
Morrisons 375 375 — — — — — — 20.0
superstores 222 222 — — — — — —
supermarkets, others 153 153 — — — — — —
a
Feb. 23, 2008.
b
early 2007.
c
2006/7 (estimates).
Note: Europe here is defined as Western Europe plus all new EU member states.
Sources: Store count: company information from annual reports, websites, and private communication. Gross sales: own calculations and estimates; Planet Retail.
Michael Wortmann
sixteen with relevant international activities: these are concentrated in neigh-

boring Austria, where it bought the market leader, the supermarket chain Billa,
which is expanding into other neighboring countries; Rewe’s discount chain
Penny is also expanding abroad.
Three international grocery retailers amongst Europe’s top sixteen are
operating mainly with the supermarket format: Dutch Ahold, German Ten-
gelmann, and Belgian Delhaize Group have concentrated much of their inter-
national growth in the United States, where they bought large supermarket
chains in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 Tengelmann had bought a majority
share in the then biggest supermarket chain of the USA, Great Atlantic and
Pacific (A&P); attempts to internationalize the supermarket business in Europe
through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s failed; and in 2007 its share in
A&P was reduced to a minority when A&P merged with Pathmark. In 2008–9
Tengelmann also sold most of its discount operations (Plus); stores in Ger-
many were sold to Edeka, and those in other European countries to various
other companies; this left only a few stores in Austria and Romania in Ten-
gelmann’s possession. Ahold had acquired several supermarket chains in the
USA, such as Bi-Lo (1977), Giant-Carlisle (1981), Tops Markets (1991), Stop &
Shop (1996), or Giant Food (1998), and also expanded its supermarket
activities—mostly by acquisitions—to Spain in 1976, and in the 1990s to
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, China,
Brazil, and another eight Latin-American countries (Burt, Dawson, and Larke
2006). Since the late 1990s and especially after 2003, when the company was
hit by a financial scandal, Ahold sold all these activities except its supermarket
chains in the United States and its business in the Czech Republic and in
Slovakia, which mainly consists of hypermarkets. Ahold, similar to Tesco, had
introduced the hypermarket format to its home country, the Netherlands,
only after it had operated hypermarkets abroad. The Belgian Delhaize Group
had since 1974 acquired several supermarket chains in the United States, later
renamed Food Lion; the company also expanded into Greece, buying Alfa-
Beta (1992) and Trofo (2001), and also operates a few stores in Romania and
Indonesia. Finally, besides Ahold, Delhaize Group, and Tengelmann, British
Sainsbury’s had also entered the United States, acquiring a controlling interest
in Shaw’s Supermarkets step by step between 1983 and 1987, but it withdrew
in 2004. The expansion of European supermarkets outside the United States
has been quite limited,30 and concentrated in neighboring countries, such as
Tesco in Ireland, Carrefour in Belgium, or Rewe in Austria; in emerging
markets supermarkets are usually operated in addition to already existing
hypermarkets (see below). Generally, the internationalization of the super-
market format has been achieved primarily through acquisitions.
In contrast to supermarket chains, discount chains, as well as operators of
cash and carry markets, and—to a somewhat lesser extent—hypermarkets
150
have internationalized primarily through internal expansion, opening up

new outlets abroad (Zentes 1998). These companies possessed knowledge
about operating a retail format that did not exist in the countries to which it
was transferred; they had a competitive ownership-specific advantage (Dun-
ning 1979, 2000)—that is, competencies developed in their home country
environment that they could exploit through foreign direct investment.
Hard discounters such as Aldi and Schwarz Group’s Lidl have concentrated
their internationalization in Western Europe, although they later began to
expand into Eastern Europe. Lidl’s expansion abroad began much later than
that of Aldi, when it opened its first stores in France in 1988, where it has
1,300 stores today and is the clear leader in grocery discount. In total, Lidl runs
about 3,850 discount stores in sixteen West European countries, and about
600 in seven East European countries. The internationalization of the other
German discounters, such as Plus (see above) and Penny (Rewe), have been
much less advanced and are also concentrated in Western and Eastern Europe.
A somewhat different pattern is being followed by Carrefour’s discount
formula Día, which was developed in Spain and has been transferred mainly
in the Mediterranean region but also to Brazil and Argentina, and even to
China, where discount stores were added to already existing Carrefour hyper-
markets. Aldi’s discount stores in the United States and Australia are the only
stand-alone discount operations outside Europe.
Discounters follow a uniform internationalization strategy using an identi-
cal shop formula and even selling the same products—mainly private label—
in different national markets. In the case of Aldi, there is an overlap of
70 percent between the products offered in Spain and those sold in Germany
(Gurdjian et al. 2000), which is very high, given a still fragmented European
food market. This strategy has strong cost-saving effects, for example, in
sourcing from suppliers, which improves the discounter’s competitiveness in
all countries, including the domestic German market. High cross-border
synergies allow discounters to act in niches of their host countries and to
operate profitably without being amongst the largest retailers in every country
they enter. The high degree of cross-border integration and standardization
can best be realized through internal growth abroad—that is, through setting
up new clone-like operations rather than through big takeovers; subsidiaries
abroad are usually 100 percent owned, allowing corporate headquarters full
control of their foreign operations.
Unlike supermarket and discount retailers, hypermarket chains have con-
centrated their international expansion not in other industrialized countries,
but in emerging markets (for Eastern Europe, see Table 4.3). Carrefour, the
inventor of the hypermarket, has clearly also been the leader in its interna-
tionalization. While attempts to enter several developed retail markets in
Europe and North America failed, expansion in less-developed retail markets
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Michael Wortmann
Table 4.3. The biggest grocery retailers, five Eastern European countries, 2006
Poland Hungary Czech Republic Slovakia Romania
Metro (DE) Tesco (UK) Schwarz (DE) Coop Jednota (SK) Metro (DE)
Jerónimo Martins (PO) CBA (HU) Ahold (NL) Tesco (UK) Rewe (DE)
Tesco (UK) Metroa (DE) Tesco (UK) Metro (DE) Carrefour (FR)
Carrefour (FR) Co-op (HU) Metro (DE) Schwarz (DE) CBA (HU)
Auchan (FR) Reál (HU) Rewe (DE) Rewe (DE) L. Delhaize (BE)
a
In a joint venture, Metspa, with Spar Austria.
Source: EHI Retail Institute (2008).
has been very successful, first to Spain and Latin America, and later to Asia,
Eastern Europe, and some other South European countries. Auchan has con-
centrated more on Southern Europe (Spain, Italy, and Portugal) as well as five
Eastern European countries; it was only later that it started expansion into
China (1999) and Taiwan. Casino, the leading supermarket chain in France,
has concentrated its internationalization on hypermarkets (Géant) and runs
over 250 hypermarkets in the emerging markets of Latin America (174) and
Asia (72). Another French hypermarket chain, Cora, owned by Belgian Louis
Delhaize,31 has expanded into Hungary and Romania.
Tesco, the only internationalized British grocery retailer, has also concen-
trated its internationalization on hypermarkets, a format that was unknown
to British retailing before Tesco’s internationalization began. The two leading
German hypermarket chains, Kaufland belonging to the Schwarz Group and
Real belonging to Metro, are much less internationalized and have transferred
their hypermarket formats to some East European countries. It is remarkable
that over 75 percent of all non-domestic hypermarkets owned by the top
sixteen companies (in 2007) are located in the emerging markets of Latin
America (18 percent), Asia (28 percent), and Eastern Europe (30 percent);
and, of those hypermarkets operating in other European countries, the major-
ity is located in the less developed retail markets of Southern Europe.
Operators of hypermarkets usually aim to be amongst the top three or so
retailers in each country they enter. In countries where they were unable
to reach this goal after a few years of operation, they often sold their activities
to local companies or, more frequently, to other European hypermarket com-
panies (on international retail divestment, see Burt, Dawson, and Sparks
2004). Operators of hypermarkets can realize relatively few cross-border sy-
nergies and thus need to consolidate their activities in each country they
enter. This is due to the fact that they have to adapt their operations and
their assortment to different national environments—ranging from specific
legal regulations to different consumer tastes.32 Since, for their food depart-
ments, hypermarkets source a large share locally—according to companies’
websites, over 80 percent or even 90 percent—these retailers have to gain
152
market share in order to gain buying power vis-à-vis their suppliers and to be
competitive. At the same time they are increasingly rationalizing their local
supply chains.33 In the business literature, such an international strategy is
frequently called multinational or multi-domestic, while a strategy that stan-
dardizes and integrates across borders neglecting national particularities, as do
grocery hard discounters, is labeled global (see Porter 1986; for the retail
industry, see Salmon and Tordjman 1989).
However, for the non-food assortments of hypermarkets, which are to a
large extent private-label ranges, the situation is somewhat different. While
here ultimate buying decisions are made by central buyers working for the
different subsidiaries in the single countries who know the different national
consumer preferences, these buyers are supported by globally operating buy-
ing organizations. These usually have their head office in Hong Kong and
branch offices in a large number of mostly Asian countries. Metro’s Real
hypermarkets are linked to Metro Group Buying, whose antecedents have
operated in Hong Kong since the 1970s. Schwarz Group’s Kaufland had been
a member of the buying group Markant, whose subsidiary Markant Trading
Organization Ltd operates in Hong Kong and Asia; in 2005, the company also
set up its own Kaufland Hong Kong Ltd. Carrefour had set up its Hong Kong
office in 1995; and the other French operators of hypermarkets, Auchan,
Casino and Leclerc (Siplec), also have their own Hong Kong-based buying
organizations in Asia. Tesco moved the headquarter of Tesco International
Sourcing to Hong Kong in 2004; by 2009 “more than 60 percent of all clothing
and 40 percent of other non-food products sold in Tesco’s UK stores, as well as
most of the non-food items sold in the 12 other countries Tesco operates in,
are procured via the retailer’s global sourcing office.”34 Thus while hypermar-
kets source most of their foods locally, their equally important non-food
assortments are increasingly sourced on a global scale, allowing for some
cross-border synergies—for example, when choosing, monitoring, and bar-
gaining with suppliers.35
Hypermarkets seem to have been the ideal grocery retail format to enter the
emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia, as well as the
less-developed retail markets of Southern Europe.36 One reason for hypermar-
kets being so suitable is that they can operate as stand-alone sites. Because of
their size, hypermarkets do not need the support of distribution centers. These
were usually set up only after a company had established at least a handful of
hypermarket outlets in a certain country. In a third step, the established
distribution infrastructures were then sometimes used to serve smaller stores,
such as supermarkets, convenience stores, and also discount stores, which
cannot operate standing alone.37
Internationalization patterns of retail companies from the four biggest
Western European countries depend highly on the formats these companies
153
Michael Wortmann
operate. As we have seen, the development of retail formats has been shaped
by retail regulations embedded in national general and retail-specific institu-
tional traditions. In Italy, tight retail regulations did not allow the develop-
ment of modern retail companies, and no internationally competitive retailers
have developed there. Instead, Italy became a host country for foreign retai-
lers, especially for hypermarket chains from France. In Germany, retail regula-
tions limiting store size, originally intended to protect small independent
retailers, have helped (as an unintended consequence) limited-assortment
hard discounters to become the leading retail format in this country—a retail
format that could also grow in niches in other developed retail markets. In the
UK, where early and unrestricted retail modernization led to the gradual
transformation of supermarkets into superstores, a format not fit for interna-
tionalization, Tesco remained the only British multinational retail company;
it developed the hypermarket format only in the context of its internationali-
zation. Finally, in France, the invention of the hypermarket at a time when
supermarkets had not yet fully developed, as well as ineffective regulations,
have made France home for the strong operators of hypermarkets, the format
most appropriate for internationalization in the emerging markets of Eastern
Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
154
5
Amazon and eBay: Online Retailers

as Market Makers
Introduction
Rapid technological change and the emergence of the World Wide Web
(WWW) have enabled many new firms to rewrite the rules of doing business
in different retail sectors of the US economy. Since the advent of the Netscape
Corporation’s browser software, Navigator, in December 1994, online retail
sales have grown steadily. In 2007 the US Commerce Department indicated
that online retail sales amounted to $108.7 billion in 2006, representing an
increase of 23.5 percent over 2005. In contrast, US total retail sales in 2006
increased 5.8 percent from 2005 to reach a total of $3.9 trillion. In 2006,
online retail sales accounted for 2.8 percent of total US retail sales, and were
expected to double over the next few years.
There is now a large body of knowledge that highlights and discusses the
Internet’s growing universality, and its impact on society in general, and
commerce in particular. It is oft-noted that the Internet signals a fundamental
shift in the nature of competition in certain, if not all, industries (Armstrong
and Hagel 1996; Grove 1996; Evans and Wurster 1997). To many observers,
the Internet presents both an opportunity and a threat for commerce. On the
one hand, it is perceived as a threat because it enables people and businesses to
connect directly, thereby sidestepping intermediaries such as distributors and
retailers (Gates 1995; Lohr 1997). Also, since the Internet has the potential
fundamentally to alter the “economics of information” (Evan and Wurster,
1997), and the way information is communicated, it threatens incumbents in
many retail sectors such as music retailing, travel, and book retailing, to name
a few. Prior to the Internet, many firms in such retail sectors exploited the
information asymmetries between buyers and sellers to make profits. The
growing popularity of the Internet as a universal communications medium

has reduced such information asymmetries between buyers and sellers,
thereby greatly increasing market efficiency. More specifically, as early as
1997, Evans and Wurster (1997: 74) argued:
The rapid emergence of universal technical standards for communication, allow-

ing everybody to communicate with everybody else at essentially zero cost, is a sea
change . . . Those emerging open standards and the explosion in the number of
people and organizations connected by networks are freeing information from the
channels that have been required to exchange it, making those channels unne-
cessary or uneconomical.
In other words, falling “transaction costs” (Williamson 1979) and the avail-
ability of information via the Internet are eroding the profit margins and the
competitive advantages of businesses in many retail sectors.
On the other hand, the Internet provides new entrants, in numerous in-
dustries, with opportunities to alter the dynamics of competition. Many new
ventures that did not exist prior to commercialization of the Internet have
now become household names. They include firms such as eBay, Amazon.
com, Yahoo, Google, RealNetworks, ETrade, and Expedia, to name a few.
Interestingly, the same technology that was once perceived as a disruptive
threat is now enabling existing brick-and-mortar retailers such as Barnes &
Noble, Borders Books and Music, Best Buy, Circuit City, and Wal-Mart,
amongst others, to become multi-channel players and compete in physical
as well as online markets. In other words, over time brick-and-mortar retailers
have found ways to leverage and complement their brick-and-mortar experi-
ence and skills to compete effectively online.
Early online retailers (for example, Amazon.com) had the task of “making
the market” to ensure their own sustainability and profitability in the
emerging online retail sectors. For a business, making a market involves the
execution of a series of interrelated activities designed to get important stake-
holders to buy into its “new” business model (Dedrick and Kraemer, Chapter
11 this volume). Therefore, market-making activities often have outcomes
that not only benefit the firm initiating these activities, but extend to all
incumbents and even future entrants in the particular industry. As discussed
in detail later, these outcomes involve the transfer of market power to incum-
bents from other players in the particular retail sector’s value chain.
The purpose of this chapter is (1) to illustrate how online goliaths such as
Amazon.com and eBay have become market makers over a short time period
(less than a decade) using new Internet technologies and the emerging online
medium for interaction (that is, the cyber marketplace); and (2) to describe
how online retailers continue to be market makers as Internet technologies
evolve and change.
156
Amazon and eBay
To address these issues, we first discuss the emergence of online retailing,

using Amazon.com and eBay as prototypical online retailers, and highlight
the pioneering role they have played in establishing online retail commerce.
We chose to highlight these two firms, Amazon.com and eBay, because they
are revelatory cases largely responsible for establishing business and revenue
models for online retailing as we understand them today. From being mere
start-ups a little over decade ago, they now rank amongst the top specialty
retailers on the Fortune magazine list of retailers. Currently, they represent
multi-billion dollar businesses that continue to influence and shape online
retail commerce as this sector grows and draws sales away from some estab-
lished brick-and-mortar retailers (see Table 5.1).
Amazon.com and eBay represent fundamentally different approaches to
retailing. Amazon.com took the “traditional” direct-retailing format and
adapted it online. The company uses Internet-based technologies to impact
significantly on the traditional value chain of the book publishing industry,
Table 5.1. Online retailers vs top ten specialty retailers and general merchandisers
Company Fortune rank 2006 % 2006 % No. of

(based on revenues change profits change employees
revenues) ($ mn) from ($ mn) from (2006)
2005 2005
Online retailers
Amazon.com 237 10,711 26 190 47 13,900
eBay 383 5,970 31 1,126 4 12,900
Top ten specialty retailing firms
1 Home Depot 17 90,837 11 5,761 1 305,760
2 Costco 32 60,151 14 1,103 4 99,000
3 Lowe’s 45 46,927 9 3,105 12 157,349
4 Best Buy 72 30,848 12 1,140 16 128,000
5 Staples 125 18,161 13 974 17 56,542
6 TJX 133 17,516 9 738 7 125,000
7 Gap 144 15,943 0 778 30 154,000
8 Office Depot 156 15,011 5 516 89 38,000
9 Toy “R” Us 202 12,206 8 28 — 59,000
10 Circuit City 215 11,598 11 140 127 46,007
Top ten general merchandisers

1 Wal-Mart 1 351,139 11 11,284 0 1,900,000
2 Target 33 59,490 13 2,787 16 352,000
3 Sears 38 53,012, 8 1,490 74 352,000
4 Federated 76 28,711 23 995 29 188,000
5 J. C. Penney 116 19,903 5 1,153 6 155,000
6 Kohl’s 152 15,544 16 1,109 32 68,500
7 Dollar General 273 9,170 7 138 61 69,500
8 Nordstrom 286 8,561 11 678 23 52,900
9 Dillard’s 307 7,849 2 246 102 52,056
10 Family Dollar 359 6,395 10 195 –10 34,000
Stores
157
and has over time expanded beyond books. In less than a decade, it has
become an important market maker in its own right by connecting thousands
of smaller online and brick-and-mortar retailers to a vast group of online retail
customers that it has managed to attract and retain on its website. In contrast,
eBay.com brings together millions of buyers and sellers in an online market-
place daily, and has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right (The
Economist 2005). eBay is a “pure” online intermediary that connects millions
of buyer and sellers worldwide without taking control of or carrying inven-
tory. In doing so, it has created a marketplace that spans many retail sectors
and geographical locations around the world. Using the power of many, the
company delivers the efficiency of a global market to buyers and sellers,
irrespective of their size or location (The Economist 2005).
Using these two examples, we discuss how the presence of these online
retailers has impacted incumbents or brick-and-mortar retailers such as Barnes
& Noble, and others. Many established brick-and-mortar retailers have reacted
to moves from online retailers such as Amazon.com and eBay by entering the
online retailing sector themselves, and finding innovative ways to leverage
their physical assets online. We conclude this chapter by highlighting some
trends in online retailing and how online retailers are enabling further market-
making activity as they continue to evolve and change.
Amazon.com as a Market Maker

Early history and growth
In 1994, Jeffrey Bezos, a senior vice-president in a Wall Street-based invest-
ment bank, D. E., Shaw noticed a statistic about the Internet: usage was
growing at 2,300 percent a year. Bezos, a computer science and electrical
engineering graduate by education, left his job and drew up a list of twenty
possible products that could be sold on the Internet. He quickly narrowed the
prospects to books, since there were far too many book titles for any single
brick-and-mortar store to stock (Wall Street Journal 1996). He moved to Seattle
and started Amazon.com in July 1995 and soon after attracted $8 million from
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, a venture-capital firm based in the Silicon
Valley.
In early 1997, Amazon.com had 250 employees. A significant majority of
them developed software tools for operating on the Internet, signaling that
Amazon.com was first and foremost a technology company and not another
traditional book retailer. At this time, Amazon was advertising itself as “Earth’s
largest bookstore—with a selection of over 1.1 million titles.” The company,
however, differentiated itself from traditional bookstores with aggressive
158
Amazon and eBay
promotion and marketing (Kotha 1998). Amazon served its millionth cus-
tomer in the autumn of 1997, after which its customer base quickly grew to
ten million by the spring of 1999—less than four years since the company’s
inception. By 2006, the company’s sales revenues reached over $10.7 billion
(a figure that was higher than Nordstrom, another well-known Seattle-based
retailer), and profits were $190 million.
Amazon.com as an information intermediary

As noted earlier, Bezos took the “traditional” direct-retailing format and
adapted it online. Analysts refer to Amazon.com’s approach as a “one-to-
many” model of online retailing, where Amazon.com as the seller caters to
millions of buyers. The company receives customer orders online and then
ships products directly to them from company-operated warehouses (Kotha
1998). Its approach to maintaining and shipping merchandise to end cus-
tomers does not differ significantly from other direct merchants such as
L. L. Bean or Land’s End. Moreover, the company offers a fixed-price format
that is the prevalent pricing mode in most US retailing.
However, Amazon.com competes not just as another retailer, but as an
“information broker.” Over the years, it has found a way successfully to
leverage the emerging electronic medium to offer services that a physical
bookstore cannot match. For instance, the company offers a database of
books in the millions, many times more than the selection the largest brick-
and-mortar Barnes & Noble superstore might offer. It provides numerous
technology-based services such as email services, online recommendations,
online reviews, and the ability to pre-order a book online, amongst others. As
discussed later, the company’s technological platform can support other small
retail businesses to operate on its website, an approach that is easier to accom-
plish online than in a traditional brick-and-mortar retail setting.
Amazon.com as a market maker

“Making” a retail market involves bringing together customers and suppliers
and getting both these groups interested in transacting in a novel and unfa-
miliar way for products that they wish to buy and sell respectively. As noted,
firms make markets by executing a series of interrelated activities designed to
get these important stakeholders to buy into relatively new business models.
For a new entrant, this might involve transforming an industry’s value chain
in a manner favorable to it. Therefore, market-making activities can often
have outcomes that benefit all incumbents in the same stage of a value
chain in an industry.
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As noted, Amazon.com first used Internet-based technologies to alter the

value chain of the book publishing industry, and then over time it expanded
to other retailing sectors. To illustrate Amazon.com’s impact on the book-
retailing industry, we provide details about the functioning of this industry
prior to Amazon.com’s entry into online book retailing and then describe
Amazon’s role in transforming this industry before discussing Amazon.
com’s other market-making activities.
AMAZON.COM’S IMPACT ON THE BOOK RETAILING VALUE CHAIN

The US book-retailing industry, one of the oldest in the USA, has traditionally
been fragmented, with over 2,500 publishers and thousands of bookstores (US
Bureau of the Census 1992). The industry sells a variety of books that include
trade, professional, mass market, elementary, high school and college text-
books, and others. Each of these categories has varied in terms of sales,
competition, profitability, and volatility.1 At the time of Amazon.com’s
entry into books in 1995, retail book sales in the USA accounted for about
$25.5 billion.
Figure 5.1 shows the structure of the US publishing and retailing industry
prior to the entry of online retailers into this industry. As the figure indicates,
there are thousands, if not millions, of aspiring writers (authors), who for the
most part work with publishers to get their books published. If they are
successful in attracting an interested publisher, they receive a small royalty
(about 5–15 percent) for their work when books are published and marketed
successfully. With regards to book retailing, books are distributed by whole-
salers, who take orders from independent booksellers and chains and consoli-
date them into lot-orders for publishers. Publishers supply wholesalers, who in
Chains
Independents
Authors Publishers Wholesalers
Superstores
Numerous Majors and Two Players

Independents
Book Clubs
Figure 5.1. Book industry value chain prior to online stores
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Amazon and eBay
turn supply the hundreds of retail bookstores located throughout the country.
According to industry estimates in 1996, wholesalers accounted for almost
30 percent of publishers’ sales. In contrast to publishing and book retailing,
wholesalers are highly concentrated, with firms such as Ingram Book Co.
commanding the major share (50 percent in 1995) of the market. Competi-
tion in the wholesale sector revolves around the speed of delivery and the
number of titles stocked. Ingram, for instance, receives more than 70 percent
of its orders electronically and offers one-day delivery to about 82 percent of
its US customers. In 1994, the average net profit for wholesalers was less than
1.5 percent. This figure was down from the traditional margins of about
2 percent a few years earlier (Publishers Weekly 1996a).
At the time of Amazon.com’s entry into the industry in 1995, bookstore
chains sold more books than independents for the first time (Philadelphia
Business Journal 1996). Retail bookstores, independents, and general retailers
accounted for 35–40 percent of industry revenues. From 1975 to 1995, the
number of bookstores in the USA increased from 11,990 to 17,340, and these
bookstores accounted for about 21 percent of the total retail book sales. The
superstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders Books and Music, accounted
for about 15 percent of all retail sales. Estimates suggest that from 1992
through 1995, superstore bookstore sales grew at a compounded rate of
71 percent while non-superstore sales grew at a rate of 4 percent.
During the mid-1990s, industry experts were cautioning that a shakeout
was inevitable in smaller markets. Superstores, originally confined to big
metropolitan areas, were increasingly entering markets with populations of
150,000 or less. Industry estimates indicated that superstores had to make
around $200 a square foot to turn a profit. A typical Barnes & Noble superstore
needed, for example, $3 million to $4 million in sales revenues to break even.
Some industry observers questioned whether smaller cities could support one
or more of these mammoth stores and whether superstores in these locations
could sell enough books to turn a profit (Publishers Weekly 1996b). Mr Vlahos,
a spokesperson for the American Booksellers’ Association, noted (as quoted
in New York Times 1996): “In the three years from 1993 to 1995, 150 to 200
independent-owned bookstores went out of business—50 to 60 in 1996
alone . . . By contrast in the same period, approximately 450 retail superstore
outlets opened, led by Barnes & Noble and the Borders Group, with 348
openings.” It was under these conditions, when Barnes & Noble (the industry
leader in book retailing) was in the midst of one of its biggest rollouts, that
Bezos launched Amazon.com as an online bookstore.
As Figure 5.2 illustrates, all of the participants in the book-retailing value
chain could, in theory, directly reach end customers using Internet technolo-
gies. In 1997, the largest US distributor of books, Ingram, attempted to enter
the “retailing” segment. It tested a service to create new online retailers to
161
Chains
Independents
Consumers
Authors Publishers Wholesalers
Superstores
Majors
Numerous Independents Two Players
Book Clubs
Online Stores
Figure 5.2. Book industry value chain after the entry of online book stores such as
Amazon.com
mitigate the growing power of Amazon.com. All the would-be retailers had to
do was lure the shoppers to their respective website. Ingram handled every-
thing else, from maintaining the would-be-retailers’ website to taking orders,
processing credit-card billings, and shipping the books directly from Ingram’s
warehouses. In effect, the virtual bookshops became little more than a retail
façade of Ingram. However, after six months of test marketing, it quietly
pulled the plug (Bianco 1997). Ingram’s experimental foray into online retail-
ing failed in part because many of the new online entrants were unable to
attract enough customers to their websites. Thus, the possibility that all the
industry players could reach end-customers directly in book retailing failed to
materialize.
With the emergence of online retailing, however, independent brick-and-
mortar bookstores continue to go out of business. Additionally, as customers
migrate to online bookstores, established book chains (for example, Dalton
books) are finding it difficult to compete, and book clubs are no longer in a
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Amazon and eBay
position to sustain themselves in their traditional form. Since Amazon.com’s

entry, Barnes & Noble and others (for example, Borders Books and Music) have
tabled their expansion plans and are now focused on competing with Ama-
zon.com and others to adapt and potentially to grow. In sum, with Amazon’s
entry into the book-retailing industry, “value” has migrated from increasingly
outmoded business designs such as book clubs, chain stores, and independent
bookstores to online retailers such as Amazon.com.2 This, however, raises the
question, how did Amazon.com become the most important beneficiary of
this value migration?
To address this question, one has not only to examine how book retailing
has been transformed but also look at Amazon.com’s market-making actions.
It would not be an exaggeration to note that Amazon.com single-handedly
helped migrate value from the physical space to the online marketplace. In
doing so, it has been largely responsible for creating online markets first for
books and then later for other products.
ATTRACTING AND CONVERTING ONLINE CUSTOMERS

To persuade customers to visit its website, Amazon.com had to focus on
“value” creation that traditional brick-and-mortar retailers could not. From
its inception Amazon.com’s value proposition focused on four related factors:
convenience, a large selection, customer service, and lower prices. First, the
Internet made it possible to order books (or other products) from the comfort
and convenience of one’s home or office, thus making time and location less
relevant for online purchases. Customers, irrespective of their geographical
location, were now able to order products at any time of the day. Second, by
positioning Amazon.com as the “earth’s biggest bookstore” (and later on as
the “earth’s biggest store”), Bezos made virtual size synonymous with physical
size. From the continued growth and expansion of Barnes & Noble’s super-
stores, during the early 1990s, it was apparent that customers enjoyed the
larger selection offered by such large stores. He promptly highlighted in press
releases and in the media that his company’s database of 1.1 million books (in
1996) was many times larger than any Barnes & Noble superstore could carry
(a typical Barnes & Noble superstore carried about 150,000 titles).
Third, as early as 1998, Bezos defined Amazon.com’s mission as being the
most “customer-centric organization in the world” (Amazon.com 1998). On
the Internet, attracting users to websites is only part of the process of complet-
ing a sale. Converting web traffic into paying customers is a much more
challenging task. It is perhaps here that offering superior online customer
service plays a substantial role in influencing the ultimate sale (Kotha, Rajgo-
pal, and Venkatachalam 2004). As part of its customer-service approach,
Amazon.com used personalization techniques to leverage the advantages of
the Internet technologies. Customers visiting the company’s website could
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subscribe to email notification services and every registered customer could

maintain his or her own personalized site. Providing these individualized
personalized stores for each customer was the result of innovations spawned
with the advent of the commercial Internet technologies, and Amazon.com
was at the forefront of such innovations.
The Internet offered two natural advantages over physical retail: the relative
ease of searching for products and storing information on users’ activity.
Amazon.com, to benefit from these advantages, began using collaborative-
filtering techniques to generate recommendations for its customers. These
recommendations were based on customers’ past purchases, and what other
customers of the same book or product purchased on its website. In addition
to emphasizing customer service, Bezos spent a large percentage of the com-
pany’s revenues on marketing and branding (Kotha 1998; Rindova, Petkova,
and Kotha 2007). This was done in order to sustain the company’s competitive
advantage over rivals, many of whom were just beginning to imitate its
market-making actions and benefiting from Bezos’ pioneering efforts online.
Finally, as a new entrant into book retailing, Amazon.com used lower prices
(vis-à-vis brick-and-mortar stores) to increase the attractiveness of shopping
online. The company routinely used (and still continues to use) price cuts as a
strategy for gaining dominance in online retailing. Lowering prices and
providing greater transparency attracted shoppers to try online purchasing,
and at the same time pressured incumbents to find ways to respond to modify
their business models in order to adapt to this new development.
As the company effectively exploited the advantages of the Internet, it also
ensured that some of the perceived disadvantages of online retail were miti-
gated. One such “dissatisfier” for many early Internet users was the perceived
complexity of transacting on the Internet, especially during its early days.
Amazon.com’s revolutionary 1-click technology set a new standard for ease of
purchasing on the Internet and served to overcome much of this concern.
Despite providing an enhanced shopping experience for shoppers on its
website, the company recognized the importance of generating traffic. As an
early initiative to direct more online users to its website, Amazon launched the
“Associates” program in 1996. This program allowed associates to build links
to Amazon’s content and receive a fee on Amazon’s products purchased via
their websites. Within two years, the program had 30,000 members and has
been evolving ever since. The strength of its “Associates” program has been
recognized as one of the primary reasons for Amazon’s durability as an online
retailer and has been widely imitated by other retailers, but with limited
success.
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Amazon and eBay
CREATING NEW CATEGORIES AND EXPANDING GEOGRAPHICALLY

Amazon realized that its online capabilities could be applied to make markets
in retail sectors other than books. For example, in 1998, it launched an
ambitious music store and a year later toys and electronics stores. By early
2000, Amazon’s customers could buy drugs, tools and equipment, health and
beauty products, and kitchen products from its website. Additionally, it
expanded into new geographical markets as well. Toward the end of 1998,
Amazon entered European markets such as the United Kingdom and Ger-
many, with dedicated websites, and toward the end of 2000 Amazon.jp was
launched to increase its Japanese market. Later that year, Amazon started a
new French website. In 2007, Amazon operated in forty-one product cate-
gories and in six other countries besides the United States. Growth in new
product categories and geographical markets has been largely responsible for
continued growth in Amazon.com’s revenues.
ATTRACTING EXISTING SUPPLIERS

As discussed above, Amazon.com was fast building capabilities of aggregating
online traffic to its website and converting these online visits to actual pur-
chases. Given its phenomenal growth, book publishers had no choice but to
strike deals to have their books listed by the company so that they would
benefit in turn from the firm’s increasing online retail activity in book retail-
ing. Moreover, publishers also benefited from the increased information avail-
able regarding customer search and purchase activity that they could use to
plan future projects as well as publication volumes. For example, the extent of
pre-ordering by Amazon’s customers yielded better forecasts of a book’s
“latent” demand to publishers. For example, Amazon.com’s customers pre-
ordered over two million copies of Deathly Hallows, the last book in the Harry
Potter book series when its publisher announced the forthcoming release of
this book. The ability to track and fulfill personalized orders on such a massive
scale is possible only through the use of computer- and Internet-based
technologies.
AGGREGATING A COMMUNITY OF SMALL MERCHANTS

In another innovative move and to the chagrin of book publishers, Amazon
introduced “The Marketplace” in 1999. Under this initiative, small merchants
(mostly independent bookstores) could sell used books (and later other pro-
ducts) along with new books (and other products) on the company’s website.
Customers could potentially benefit by being able to view both new and used
products simultaneously next to each other. Under this approach, product
prices were made more transparent, and the purchasing options for customers
increased dramatically. Ironically, the same technology that helped hasten the
demise of the independent bookstores in the mid-1990s, when Amazon.com
165
entered book retailing, is now helping merchants once again compete on

Amazon.com’s technology platform and benefit from the millions of registered
users the company has amassed.
In sum, Amazon.com first transformed book retailing and then followed
this up by entering into other retail sectors of the economy both in the USA
and abroad. The company, through its market-making actions, established
itself as a dominant player in online retailing within a short time because of
many of its market-making actions. Finally, once it had established itself, it
then opened up its online technology platform to other small merchants to
compete on its website, thus providing an opportunity for independent stores
to become viable competitors once again.
eBay as a Market Maker

Early history
On the Friday before Labor Day, September 1995, Pierre Omidyar began
building a computerized online-trading platform, which in its early stages
was no more than software running on a web server. He named his online
auction platform AuctionWeb. As buyers and sellers visited his website, the
company began to benefit from word-of-mouth publicity that would drive its
growth for years to come (Cohen 2002). As traffic grew, in 1996 Pierre re-
named his venture eBay to reflect the company’s business location in the
California Bay Area.
When he first launched his website, Omidyar created product categories
that occurred to him personally.3 However, by the end of 1996, collectors of
various categories were driving his company’s growth. For example, in late
1996, antiques and collectibles listings on the website increased about 350 per-
cent in just four months and the fastest-growing categories were collectibles
such as coins, stamps, and baseball cards. As the site morphed into a haven for
collectibles, it became a magnet for other collectors, because they could be
connected to individuals with a similar passion. Collectors, on eBay, were
individuals who bought and sold one-of-a-kind items that often came with a
story and encouraged dialogs amongst the collectors (Bradley and Porter
2000). Unlike other Internet companies at that time, eBay was profitable
immediately (Bradley and Porter 2000). As Omidyar reflected in 1998: “The
biggest clue [that eBay was going to a phenomenal success] was that so many
checks were piling up at my door, I had to hire part-time help to open them
all” (Hansell 1998).
In 1997, after raising $5 million in venture-capital funding, Omidyar hired
Meg Whitman, an experienced executive with “brand-building” experience,
to run eBay. Whitman initiated several strategic actions that built the “eBay”
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Amazon and eBay
brand. When it first opened, eBay offered 10 product categories, but by mid-
1998 it was offering 846 categories organized into 12 major categories, with
collectibles accounting for the majority of the listings. By 2002, automobiles
had become the single largest category traded on eBay (based on global
annualized gross merchandise sales), accounting for nearly four times the
revenues generated by collectibles. At the end of 2006, eBay had 222 million
registered users (more than the combined population of France, Spain, and
Britain), of which 82 million were considered as active users (users who had
bid for or listed items within the past year). At the time, the number of items
listed on the company’s website was 2.4 billion. eBay’s net revenues for the
year were $5.9 billion, and the net income was $1.12 billion.
eBay as a “pure” intermediary

eBay’s approach differs from Amazon’s in that it represents a many-to-many
model, where millions of buyers interact with millions of sellers on the
company’s website. Using the power of many, the company delivers the
efficiency of a global market to buyers and sellers, irrespective of their size
(The Economist 2005). During the initial phase, eBay departed from the fixed-
price format offered by brick-and-mortar retailers. The company chose to use
the auction pricing mechanism to enable users to trade items on its website. It
made money by charging customers listing and special fees, and final value
fees. The beauty of this business model is that users do most of the work:
photographing their products, composing their listing, communicating with
potential buyers, packing, and then shipping their sales (The Economist 2005).
eBay as the middleman earns a transaction fee for each trade, enjoying
operating margins of 35 percent in the process. In other words, eBay is a
classic “information” intermediary that enables buyers and sellers to transact
business, without necessarily taking control of the products involved in the
transactions consummated by the buyers and sellers on its website. By playing
the role of the classic middleman, eBay has put to rest the argument that the
Internet would kill all middlemen.
eBay’s market-making activities

In many ways, eBay represents the quintessential online market marker.
Through a series of actions, eBay has created, developed, and fostered online
marketplaces in the USA and numerous other countries. These online com-
munities that the company has been instrumental in creating are vibrant
marketplaces that continue to grow at a rapid pace, especially in international
markets such as China and India.
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REINVENTING MARKET CATEGORIES

Although the academics debate whether eBay truly created an entirely new
market or just reinvented existing market categories, it is fair to note that eBay
invented the consumer-to-consumer online auction model, and this market,
once a niche, has now expanded significantly to cover a variety of retail sectors
including auctions, collectibles, flea markets, garage sales, and classified adver-
tising. The company provides a technology platform (or multiple platforms)
that enables a global community of buyers and sellers to interact and trade
with each other. This technology platform is fully automated, and open
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, enabling users to browse through
listed items from any place in the world (eBay maintains localized websites in
twenty-six locations). In its December 2006 annual report, eBay claims that,
on any given day, there are more than 100 million items available through
auction-style and fixed-price trading on its website (eBay 2006).
CREATING ONLINE MARKETS AROUND THE WORLD

Since eBay is a technology platform that supports online retailing, it has been
able to scale up its online marketplaces rather rapidly. Its users (both buyers
and sellers) in the USA now number in the millions. Additionally, the com-
pany has undertaken rapid international expansion. eBay began its interna-
tional expansion in 1999 and has entered twenty-six locations around the
world since 2000. In 2006, about 47 percent of the company’s revenues
resulted from its international operations. In contrast, Wal-Mart, the largest
US physical retailer, operates in twelve nations, and it took Wal-Mart fifteen
years to achieve this level of international penetration, having started inter-
national expansion in 1992. (Wal-Mart as a company started its operations in
1945 and was incorporated in 1969.) As a global platform, eBay enables cross-
border trading, which accounted for over 15 percent of net revenues in 2005, a
task that was complicated prior to online retailing, but made easier with the
advent of the PayPal financial payment system (as discussed below).
The company focuses its effort on maintaining and expanding the func-
tionality of this technology platform so that trading through its website
continues to be safe and reliable. Its online community of users continues to
grow, as product categories are constantly added and upgraded. To help foster
continued growth, the company creates web tools (for example, feedback
programs) and adds support services (for example, escrow, and insurance
programs) to improve the reliability and safety of online trading. Many of
these services have been instrumental in building eBay’s ecosystem.
GROWING THE EBAY ECOSYSTEM

eBay’s ecosystem consists of its trading platform, and the tools and services
available on eBay’s website that facilitate online trading. They also include a
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Amazon and eBay
host of supporting businesses not directly operated by eBay, but businesses

that assist eBay’s buyers and sellers to ship their products to each other around
the world. Two important efforts in building this ecosystem are worth
highlighting.
The first involves an online payment system—PayPal—that eBay helped
foster and grow to facilitate more efficient online trading on eBay and now
on other retail websites throughout the Internet. Through PayPal, a company
that it acquired in 2002, eBay offers a financial payment system that online
shoppers employ to pay merchants without sharing sensitive financial infor-
mation. This payment system emerged during the early days of the Internet,
when established financial payment system providers (for example, Visa,
MasterCard, and American Express) were reluctant to promote credit-card
use online because of fraud and security concerns. To make payments, shop-
pers disclose only their email address to sellers. This system works on the
existing financial infrastructure of bank accounts and credit cards, and offers
online merchants a payment-processing solution that is less expensive than
traditional credit-card transactions.4
As of December 2006, eBay noted that there were 133 million PayPal
customer accounts in over 100 markets in over 190 countries and regions
around the world. PayPal offered local services in fourteen countries and
supported seven different foreign currencies. About 78 percent of marketplace
transactions on eBay were completed using PayPal.5
The second involves the growth of a number of businesses that have been
created to help eBay users trade more effectively. They include school districts
that make money offering classes on how to trade on eBay, the “drop-off”
stores for people who want their stuff sold for them on eBay (for example,
iSold it), and many businesses that help people sell wares on eBay such as pink
packing peanuts, and the emergence of commercial software designed to help
buyers win auctions at the lowest possible price (CNBC 2005; New York Times
2006). Additionally, there are a number of book publishers who offer “how to”
books describing trading approaches used on eBay’s website. For instance, a
search on Amazon.com’s books section for eBay returned over 10,000 results
in June 2007. In sum, eBay as market marker has enabled the emergence of a
cottage industry to grow and support its online trading platform. The gross
value of the merchandise traded on eBay was $52 billion in 2006, a number
that does not account for the value of merchandise traded through eBay’s
ecosystem not directly controlled by it.
EMERGENCE OF MOM-AND-POP ONLINE STORES

Another aspect of eBay’s market-making activity involves the cultivation of
small merchants on eBay’s website. eBay’s technology platform hosts a large
number of mom-and-pop stores. At the end of 2006, there were over 600,000
169
online store fronts established by eBay users in locations around the world
(eBay 2006). Using customized pages, operators of eBay stores are able to
showcase all their listings and describe their respective businesses.6 Also,
eBay provides a variety of tools to build such stores, manage operations,
promote products, and track performance.
eBay and Amazon.com have, through their market-making activities, trans-
formed retailing since 1995 and in doing so they have become household
names. Despite entering different retail sectors in the mid-1990s, their mar-
keting-making actions were more similar than different in many ways. First,
both companies transformed the retail sectors they entered: eBay transformed
the auctions market by moving such activity online, and Amazon.com trans-
formed book retailing by transforming this sector’s value chain before enter-
ing other retail sectors. Second, both companies through their market-making
actions have come to dominate their respective retail sectors. Both Amazon.
com and eBay pioneered many innovations (for example, 1-click ordering,
personalized websites, escrow and insurance) that were directed at creating an
“ecosystem” so that online retail could emerge, grow, and flourish. Third,
both firms rapidly expanded their product categories, thus affecting many
retail sectors of the economy. Further, they expanded their operations outside
the USA and thereby extended their market-making activities beyond the
US retail markets to help the emergence and growth of online markets
in other parts of the world. They have empowered customers around the
world through information, so that they can make better-informed retailing
decisions.
Finally, both have enabled smaller players to compete successfully alongside
large retailers by providing a technology platform out of which they could
operate. This has prompted some like Bob Kagle of Benchmark capital, a well-
known Silicon Valley venture-capital company, to note that “eBay is in a
position to give back to America what Wal-Mart took away—the notion of
the Main Street merchant. Mom and Pop running their little shop, doing
business with other people, making a living at it, and feeling good about it”
(quoted in Bradley and Porter 2000: 4). For these merchants, all or most of
their income comes from selling on eBay’s website (CNBC 2005). If eBay
employed the people who operated mom-and-pop stores on its website, it
would be the United States’ second largest employer after Wal-Mart. Amazon.
com too has made it possible for many small merchants to use its technology
platform to reach end customers. The company now derives over 25 percent of
its sales through the activity of such merchants. This emergence of such small
operators is an interesting counter-development to the trend highlighted in
Chapter 1, where it was argued that large retailers like Wal-Mart were captur-
ing a lion’s share of the retail sales globally, and thus consolidating the retail
industry.
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Amazon and eBay
Evolving Dynamics of Online Retailing
We now turn to describe trends in online retailing and how retailers continue
to be market makers, as Internet technologies and business models evolve in
retailing. We begin by examining how the online retailing landscape has
changed since 1995.
Online retailing: a changing landscape

In 1997, during the early days of online retailing, The Economist, using a two-
dimensional framework, predicted that certain businesses are better suited
than others for online commerce (see Figure 5.3). According to this frame-
work, since shopping for a mortgage can be difficult and tedious, a website
offering straight forward and easy-to-understand comparisons can prove to be
successful. In contrast, because buying an audio CD is relatively straightfor-
ward and easy, online merchants who sell CDs need to offer far more than a
physical music store to draw shoppers to their on-line stores. Based on this
framework, the authors of this article speculated that online alternatives are
more likely to attract customers if these alternatives are less tiresome than
conducting business in the physical world.
As noted earlier, the categories initially popular on eBay were antiques and
collectibles such as coins, stamps, and baseball cards. During the early days of
eBay, such collectibles dominated the items listed and traded on the site.
eBay’s website was considered a haven for such items, and it was hard to
envision other items dominating sales. However, by 2007 “Motors” ($16
billion) represented the largest single category of sales that were over a billion
Hard
Houses
Cars
Ease of transaction
Loans
Flights
Books
CDs
Easy
Less More
Value added by online services
Figure 5.3. Value added by online services
171
Table 5.2. Categories of goods over $1 bn traded on eBay Inc., 2007
Categories GMV ($100,000) March First quarter 2007 vs first

31, 2007a quarter 2006 (%)
1 Motors 16,508 11
2 Consumer Electronics 4,880 25
3 Clothing and Accessories 4,540 16
4 Computers 4,052 13
5 Home & Garden 3,584 24
6 Books/Movies/Music 3,124 4
7 Collectibles 2,684 6
8 Sports 2,584 11
9 Business and Industrial 2,232 19
10 Toys 2,136 10
11 Jewels & Watches 1,972 13
12 Cameras & Photo 1,524 6
13 Antiques & Art 1,352 12
14 Coins & Stamps 1,320 26
a
Worldwide annualized gross market value (GMV) for the three months ended Mar. 31, 2007.
Source: eBay (2007).
on eBay, a fact that surprised even its own management. Of the fourteen
categories that traded with over a $1 billion in gross market value, coin and
stamps ranked last, with annualized sales reaching $1.3 billion (see Table 5.2).
Collectibles and antiques had also fallen behind many other categories on
eBay’s website. However, in terms of change in growth from the previous year,
coins and stamps were still robust.
Forecasts of US online retail

Although, eBay represents an important barometer for what sells online, it is
also instructive to look at the overall US online retail market. According to
Forrester, a management consultancy, US online retail sales accounted for
about $155 billion in 2009, with the largest proportion of sales (over 50 per-
cent) resulting from computer hardware and software, apparel, accessories,
and footwear, and consumer electronics products. Forrester forecasts that US
online retail sales will grow at a compounded growth rate of about 10 percent
annually, and sales will reach $229 billion by 2013 (see Table 5.3 for fore-
casts). Of the categories listed in Table 5.3, apparel, accessories, and footwear;
computer hardware, software, and peripherals; appliances and home improve-
ment; and consumer electronics are expected to post the largest category sales
in terms of revenues. As the table indicates, apparel, accessories, and footwear,
followed by computer hardware, software, and peripherals, are expected to
post the greatest online penetrations by 2013. It is clear from this list of items
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Amazon and eBay
Table 5.3. Forrester’s forecast of US online retail sales, 2010–2013
2010 2011 2012 2013
Total US online sales ($bn) $176.9 $194.4 $211.7 $229.1

Growth (%) 13% 10% 9% 8%
Apparel, accessories, and footwear ($bn) $30.9 $34.1 $37.2 $40.3
Appliances and home improvement ($bn) $22.5 $25.2 $27.8 $30.3
Art and collectibles ($bn) $2.2 $2.5 $2.9 $3.2
Auto parts ($bn) $4.2 $4.7 $5.2 $5.8
Books ($bn) $5.9 $6.3 $6.7 $7.1
Computer hardware, software, and peripherals ($bn) $30.1 $32.4 $34.3 $36.0
Consumer electronics ($bn) $14.6 $16.3 $17.8 $19.2
Event tickets ($bn) $5.6 $6.0 $6.3 $6.7
Flowers ($bn) $2.7 $2.9 $3.1 $3.3
Food and beverage ($bn) $10.3 $11.9 $13.6 $15.4
Furniture ($bn) $2.3 $2.7 $3.2 $3.7
Jewelry ($bn) $4.0 $4.5 $5.0 $5.5
Movie tickets ($bn) $1.2 $1.3 $1.4 $1.5
Music/video ($bn) $7.1 $7.8 $8.4 $8.8
Office products ($bn) $6.0 $6.5 $6.9 $7.4
Over-the-counter medicines and personal care ($bn) $6.9 $7.8 $8.7 $9.6
Pets ($bn) $2.1 $2.5 $2.9 $3.3
Sporting goods ($bn) $3.2 $3.4 $3.6 $3.9
Toy and video games ($bn) $7.6 $8.0 $8.9 $10.4
Other ($bn) $7.5 $7.6 $7.7 $7.8
Source: Mulpuru (2009).
available online that many retail sectors have found the online space to be a
viable marketplace for their products.
Impact of broadband connectivity

This continued growth in online retailing is being helped by an external
development—the availability and diffusion of broadband connectivity into
US households. As broadband connectivity becomes widely available, it is
expected further to propel the growth of online retail sales around the
world. From just 10 percent in 2002, the number of US households that had
broadband connectons had grown to 25–30 percent by 2006 and had reached
65 percent by 2010 (Leichtman Research Group 2010). For retailers, broad-
band connectivity offers many interesting possibilities for further engaging
retail customers through multimedia interactive content such as online video,
community forums, price-comparison features, and click-to-call services. The
availability of such capabilities, made possible by broadband connectivity,
represents a continuation of retailers’ efforts to influence what customers see
and buy, thereby increasing their power over manufacturers and other players
of the value chain.
173
The role of information

The success of the online retail sector depends largely on the effective provi-
sion of information to the consumer and the exploitation of information to
meet consumers’ changing needs. As more and more customers actively par-
ticipate in online retail purchases, retailers have a greater ability to gather
information on online customer shopping behavior. The information col-
lected tends to be much more fine-tuned and much richer than what is
possible through point-of-sales (POS) systems installed in traditional brick-
and-mortar retail outlets. Since the early 2000s, the trend has been to find
ways to exploit this vast trough of information, using advanced data-mining
techniques, to serve customers better.
Exploiting such information is valuable, for it gives retailers added market
power vis-à-vis manufacturers. By selectively making such customer informa-
tion available to the manufacturers, retailers have a greater say over the
products that they want to sell, quantities they want to stock, and prices
they want to offer. In other words, this ability is a continuation of a power
shift to retailers that enables them to make markets well into the future.
However, there is a caveat: the availability of vast information available
online, the price transparency that the Internet enables, and the ease with
which comparison shopping can be done helps mitigate some of the power
retailers have been able to gain. The availability of greater information to
customers reduces the market power of any single retailer and increases the
rivalry amongst retailers.
Small niche players

During the early days of online retailing, retailers typically sold products that
were considered as the “long tail,” products that were either early in their
lifecycle and therefore not considered useful by mainstream customers, or past
their useful life and therefore considered of vintage value. These products were
often not easily available to potential customers through traditional brick-
and-mortar channels. Pioneers such as eBay were instrumental in creating a
market for such vintage products. However, with the growth of Internet-based
commerce, larger retailers appear to be moving away from a “long-tail” model
and toward providing one-stop shopping convenience to their customers.
This, in turn, has created opportunities for many small mom-and-pop retail
stores to offer niche products on the Internet.
Forrester estimates that 650,000 sole proprietors with eCommerce-functional
websites operate on the Internet, and together this group sells roughly about
$13 billion of merchandise (Mulpuru 2007). These firms focus on specific
niches (for example, Hammocks.com, BocceBallsets.com, detroitcoffee.com)
174
Amazon and eBay
and together provide a vast selection of items not found in big retail stores,
including Wal-Mart. For smaller players who target specific niche markets, ties
with search engines or traffic aggregators, such as Google, provide visibility
based on relevant online users’ searches (Morgan Stanley Report 2006). Ties
with aggregators, while helping aggregators diversify, also divert traffic from the
aggregators’ to the niche players’ websites.
However, according to Forrester, the movement toward one-stop shopping
convenience is also resulting in the consolidation of the industry, as larger
online retail companies acquire smaller players that sell niche products with
low-cost structures (Forrester Research Inc. 2007). However, it does not seem
likely that such consolidation will result in fewer niche players in the future.
This is because the relatively low level of barriers-to-entry is one of the most
alluring features of the Internet and continues to draw thousands of entrepre-
neurs to set up businesses on the Internet.
An age of partnerships and cooperation

Since collective information is valuable in estimating future trends and gain-
ing power over manufacturers, it appears that online retailers are not averse to
sharing or making publicly available customer-related information. At the
extreme end of the spectrum of partnerships and cooperation are large infor-
mation intermediaries such as eBay and Amazon. Both these companies, as
noted earlier, have prospered by creating a nexus of suppliers, small mer-
chants, and customers, and by positioning themselves at the center of this
vibrant network. Cooperation and partnerships with multiple players, small
and large, continue to form the core of their business models.
Even amongst other retailers, there is a trend toward cooperative relation-
ships where a retailer suggests a rival’s website if it does not offer a particular
product. For instance, such online retailers as Buy.com display a series of
sponsored websites for products that they do not sell and direct customers to
such sponsored websites. It appears that the potential loss of a customer to a
rival is viewed as a minor inconvenience when compared to the overall
benefits of providing an enriched shopping experience for customers.
Through all these relationships, smaller players, such as Buy.com, seek
increased traffic to their websites and then hope to convert this traffic into
revenues.
Physical retailers in the age of the Internet

The emergence and growth of the Internet was initially perceived as a threat
by many established brick-and-mortar retailers, and the media covering the
rapid growth of firms such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo often proclaimed
175
the demise of many established retail firms. However, since the mid-1990s,
many established brick-and-mortar retailers have adapted by pursuing multi-
channel strategies where online retail complements their physical presence
(Grosso, McPherson, and Shi 2005). For instance, brick-and-mortar retailers
are driving traffic to their physical stores by using techniques such as gift
cards, rich-media advertisements, and e-mail notifications via the Internet.
Their websites offer convenience, product information, and updates on pric-
ing and promotions, whereas their physical stores offer customers the ability
to touch and feel their goods before purchase. Some retailers, such as Best Buy,
are also allowing customers to order online, and then pick up their product at
their physical locations. Additionally, if a customer who ordered online is not
satisfied with the purchase, he or she can return the merchandise at the closest
brick-and-mortar location. In other words, companies are leveraging the com-
plementary advantages of both the physical and virtual channels better to
meet customer needs.7
The debate by the mid-2000s was no longer about whether “pure” online
retailers or brick-and-mortar retailers would dominate the Internet; rather,
since that time, the debate has centered more on how retailers in general are
finding innovative ways to employ available Internet technology to create
new, and to maintain existing, customer markets. In doing so, they continue
to dominate other members of their respective value chains.
Concluding Thoughts
Despite the extensive media coverage accorded to the emergence and growth
of online retailing, it still represents a small, although growing, sector of
overall retailing. The future penetration of online retailing is still expected to
be less than 10 percent of total US retail sales in the next few years. Although
this number might seem small, the major impact of online retailers lies not
in the displacement of physical incumbents but in transforming the ways that
these incumbents operate. Online retailers such Amazon.com and eBay,
through their market-making activities, have fundamentally altered the retail
landscape. Most importantly, Amazon.com and eBay have forced “tradi-
tional” brick-and-mortar retailers in many retail sectors around the world to
respond and adapt their business models to find innovative ways to compete
effectively. Today, the issue is not whether brick-and-mortar retailers will
survive vis-à-vis online players, but more about how retailers can continue
to amass market power using Internet technologies.
According to Forrester Research Inc. (2010), online retail in both the USA and
Western Europe remains “poised for a robust period of double-digit growth
176
Amazon and eBay
over the next five years. [ . . . ]. In the US, Web shopping will account for
8 percent of total retail sales by 2014,” up from 6 percent in 2009. However,
this trend in online shopping is not limited to the USA. As eBay and Amazon.
com continue to diffuse Internet technologies around the world, many shop-
pers around the world will eventually begin to experience the wonders of online
retailing. Moreover, as brick-and-mortar retailers co-opt Internet technology,
they will also help the growth of online retailing. As global Internet users begin
to exceed a billion, both brick-and-mortar retailer and online retailers as market
makers are poised to transform retailing, as we currently understand it.
177
Part Three
Making Supplier Markets
6
The Asian Miracle and the Rise

of Demand-Responsive Economies
Introduction
Since the 1970s, the world’s most globally engaged economies have become
increasingly demand-responsive economies. By demand-responsive economies,
we mean that such economies are organized “backwards” from demand to
production, instead of “forward” from production to demand. In making this
claim, we are arguing that global retailers, generating intermediary demand in
anticipation of final demand, have superseded manufacturers as the driving
force that organizes, directly through supply chain contracts and indirectly
through their vast market power, whole sectors of the global economy.
On the surface, this change may not seem all that significant. Ever since
Adam Smith, economists have recognized that factors relating to demand are
prominent features of all advanced market economies. Without demand, so
the dictum goes, supply withers. The timelessness of this maxim, however,
masks the changes that have occurred in how supply and demand are config-
ured over time. Conceptualized in the abstract, supply and demand are merely
aggregations, respectively, of all sellers and all buyers relative to a good. Far
from being static, in reality, at different times and places, supply and demand
represent very differently organized groups of sellers and buyers. Since the
writing of Chamberlin (1962 [1933]) and Robinson (1969 [1933]) on “monop-
olistic competition,” economists have recognized that the organization of
sellers relative to buyers matters, but implications of monopolistic competi-
tion have seldom been applied to retailers, in large part because retailers have
been seen as merely conduits between manufacturers and final consumers.1
More importantly, the implications of monopolistic competition have not
been applied at the level of national economies. As we point out in this
chapter, global retailers, or “big buyers” as Gary Gereffi (1994b) calls them, are
not benign intermediaries. They are big enough to influence the internal
organization of entire economies. Big buyers not only create demand; they
also organize suppliers and develop supplier markets to fill that demand.
Through using advanced consumer research, point-of-sales (POS) informa-
tion, supply-line management, and sophisticated information technology,
retailers and merchandisers have restructured the relationship between buyers
and suppliers, making the latter a price-sensitive organizational extension of
the former. These forged links between the market-focused big buyers, on the
one hand, and globally dispersed and largely faceless manufacturers, on the
other hand, have had direct repercussions on economies around the world. In
general, the more globally involved the capitalist economy, the more demand
responsive that economy has become.
How do economies become demand responsive, and what empirically and
theoretically does that mean? This chapter gives a detailed answer to this ques-
tion by showing how the Taiwanese economy developed in response to orders
given by global retailers and brand-name merchandisers. In the first section, we
use disaggregated trade data to demonstrate that the globalization of supplier
markets for US-based retailers and brand-name merchandisers occurred first and
most pervasively in East Asia, especially in Taiwan and South Korea, and to show
the differential effects of these markets on structuring these Asian economies.
The establishment of these suppliers in East Asia created what is known as “the
Asian Miracle,” the extraordinarily rapid and ongoing industrialization that
occurred from 1965 through to the present day. A lot has been written about
Asian economic development, but what is less known is that, in response to the
retailers’ orders, Asian economies developed in very different ways.2
In the main section of the chapter, drawing on hundreds of interviews done
over a period of over twenty years, we show how these supplier markets
in Taiwan actually developed and how many of these suppliers, in turn,
responded to changing economic conditions by moving their businesses to
Mainland China. These interviews allow us to specify how the Taiwan econ-
omy became organized “backwards” from the development of consumer
markets in the USA to the development of suppliers markets for final and
intermediate goods in East Asia.
The Globalization of Supplier Markets after

the Second World War
Modern retailers are the “makers” of two types of markets, consumer markets
and supplier markets.3 In the last half of the twentieth century, both types of
markets grew tremendously, and became increasingly global and increasingly
182
The Asian Miracle and Demand-Responsive Economies
rationalized over time. It is important to see these dynamics in a historical

perspective, because the emergent qualities of these market dynamics create a
momentum that is difficult to alter short of a global economic catastrophe
(Feenstra and Hamilton 2006).
US supplier markets before 1965

Our point of departure is 1965. Before 1965, consumer goods suppliers for US
retailers were almost entirely US firms. After 1965, these suppliers increasingly
came from outside the USA. Before 1965, retailers had limited influence on
large US-based manufacturers, but, after 1965, retailers increasingly began to
create and organize supplier markets for the main consumer products they
sold.
In 1965, the “retail revolution” that Bluestone and his colleagues (1981)
identified was already well under way. At the end of the Second World War, US
manufacturers had emerged as the most prestigious in the world, and the
consumer products they offered represented the most extensive line-up of
such products anywhere. The European and the Japanese economies were
just in the process of recovering from the effects of the war, and some former
manufacturing giants in those economies (for example, Daimler Benz, Mitsu-
bishi) had re-established their prominence at home. In the previous decade,
in the 1950s, imports of consumer goods into the USA had hovered around
the levels they were at during the Great Depression. Most international trade
from the USA was outbound. Exports of automobiles as well as a considerable
range of consumer goods began to “Americanize” consumer desires in Europe
(de Grazia 2005) and other parts of the world.
In the midst of this parade of consumer goods, US retailers, led by Sears,
J. C. Penney’s, and Macy’s, began to expand their presence in US consumer
markets. During the long years of the Great Depression, fair-trade laws made
discount retailing illegal, and low demand had stymied the effort of retailers to
expand throughout the USA. But, after the war, with economies improved and
demand for consumer goods rising, department stores quickly began to
expand their consumer markets.
Other events pushed this expansion forward. As described in Petrovic
(Chapter 3 this volume), changes in the 1955 tax code reforms allowed rapid
depreciation of capital construction, and a shopping center boom ensued as a
direct consequence (Hanchett 1996). The Cold-War need for national defense
prompted the US Congress, in 1956, to pass legislation creating the interstate
highway system across the USA, linking all major US cities and creating ring
roads around them. At the same time, the desire to own a family home led the
parents of the baby-boom generation to move to newly created suburbs
surrounding most large US cities. The number of shopping centers in the
183
35
30
25
20
%
15
10
0
1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
Trade/GNP Trade in goods/GNP
Figure 6.1. US total foreign trade and trade in goods as a percentage of GNP, 1890–2000
USA jumped from about 500 in 1955 to 7,600 in 1964, an expansion in

shopping areas that accounted for about 30 percent of all retail sales in the
USA in 1964. Only forty years later, in 2004, the number of shopping centers
in the USA had reached nearly 50,000. As these new shopping centers devel-
oped, the same anchor stores and the same niche retailers began to appear in
most places across the country, a development that led to the expansion and
diversification of “chain stores.”
Before 1965, the products fueling this rapid expansion in retailing came
overwhelmingly from the US manufacturers. As seen in Figure 6.1, imports
into the USA remained very low from the time of the Great Depression
through the 1960s, with a brief upsurge during the Second World War, and,
as stated above, most trade in manufactured goods after the Second World
War until the late 1960s was as US exports. In 1965, the only Japanese import
constituting over 10 percent of total US consumption for a single product was
an intermediate good, steel, which was imported to compensate for a decline
in US steel production brought on by a strike in the steel mills.
From 1965 onward, however, that picture of limited foreign imports would
change rapidly and forever. As Figure 6.2 shows, starting in the late 1960s,
imports of manufactured consumer goods began to rise rapidly and across all
basic categories.
The rate of import growth as a percentage of total consumption is
surprising, but even more surprising is the increase of diversification of the
products being imported. As we will explain in more detail below, one of the
initial factors causing the globalization of supplier markets is the use of store
184
80
70
60
50
%
40
30
20
10
0
1965 1975 1985 1995
Electronics Shoes Luggage/leather Toys Sporting goods
Apparel Photo Appliances
Figure 6.2. Import penetration as a percentage of total US consumption of selected

consumer goods, 1965–1995
brands to get around fair-trade laws. As retailers expanded in the late 1950s
and 1960s, large department stores, such as Macy’s and Sears, began to use
private labels more extensively. Kenmore washers and Craftsman tools are two
examples of Sears’s in-house brands, but the use of in-house brands for cloth-
ing and shoes also became commonplace. This expansion of garment and
footwear production quickly exceeded the capacity (and willingness) of US
manufacturers to provide these goods and led to the increasing use of Asian
intermediaries (for example, Japanese trading companies) to fill the orders.
The growth of East Asian suppliers after 1965

Several aspects of these imports of consumer goods should be emphasized.
First, most of the imports in every category came from newly industrializing
countries (NICs) in East Asia. Even from the very first decade of growth,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan supplied most of the imported
goods. Although the large enterprises in Japan and South Korea are well
known throughout the world, Taiwan, with by far the smallest economy of
the three, supplied an extraordinary number of products in large quantities for
the US market. Figure 6.3 shows from which countries the consumer imports
came. As is apparent, the Chinese areas (Taiwan and Hong Kong) supplied a
large percentage of most types of consumer goods from the outset. Just com-
paring Taiwan and South Korea, Figure 6.4 displays the number of imported
185
90
80
70
% of total US Imports
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1975 1985 1995 1975 1985 1995 1975 1985 1995 1975 1985 1995 1975 1985 1995 1975 1985 1995
Apparel Electronics Footwear Leather goods Sporting goods Toys and dolls
China/Taiwan/Hongkong Japan/Korea
Figure 6.3. Imports from East Asia as a percentage of total US imports of consumer
goods 1975–1995
6,000
5,000
4,000
3,000
2,000
1,000
0
1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988
All items, S. Korea All items, Taiwan

F&G items, S. Korea F&G items, Taiwan
Figure 6.4. Number of seven-digit TSUSA categories of US imports from South Korea
and Taiwan, total and footwear + garments (F&G) combined, 1972–1988
Note: F+G: footwear and garments combined.
items at the most disaggregated seven-digit Tariff Schedule of the United

States Annotated (TSUSA) codes during the time (1972–88) that US customs
agents used this product classification. Over the entire period, Taiwan manu-
factured more and a wider range of products for export than did South Korea.
Not counting exports of automobiles, the Taiwanese and South Korean econo-
mies combined to send more exports to the USA than Japan from the 1970s on.
186
Most writers miss the significance of these US-bound exports. They typically
emphasize the large volume and rapid growth of exports, which they explain
through a “supply-side” narrative extolling the economic prowess of the
exporting country. Using aggregated trade data, typically supplied by the
exporting countries, they note the overall similarity in the exports, and as a
consequence the overall similarity amongst the NICs. The similarity is indeed
there—at the third digit TSUSA level. Feenstra and Hamilton (2006) show the
“export landscape” for both South Korea and Taiwan using TSUSA data ag-
gregated to three digits from 1972 to 1988. From these landscapes, it is
apparent that most of the export value from these economies is primarily in
just a handful of major categories and that, with a few exceptions, the export
landscapes of the two countries look very similar. Moreover, the principal
categories of exports from both South Korea and Taiwan are exactly those
categories of consumer goods that fueled the retail revolution in the United
States: garments, footwear, bicycles, toys, televisions, microwaves, computers,
thousands of plastic household and office items, and a large array of electronic
components that in turn became the building block of a vast and growing
number of other products.
If we survey the main items of exports throughout the period from 1972 to
1985, it becomes clear that products secured through contract manufacturing
form an extremely high percentage of the total exports. For instance, accord-
ing to a report on the Korean garment industry, “until 1988, approximately
95 percent of garment exports were produced under contract to foreign firms,
rather than under Korean-owned labels” (Lee and Song 1994: 148). According
to Levy’s analysis (1988: 46) of the footwear industry in South Korea and
Taiwan, “in the initial phases of export expansion, export business in both
nations was based overwhelmingly on the fulfillment of orders placed by
Japanese trading companies, and designed for the US market.” Japanese trad-
ing companies were soon supplanted as Western firms began to place their
orders directly. In both countries, Western brand-name merchandisers, such
as Nike and Reebok, controlled the export footwear industry (Levy 1988,
1991). Also, in his case study of the manufacture of personal computers in
the two countries, Levy (1988) cites figures from the trade associations for
electronic appliances showing that 84 percent of Korean-made personal com-
puters and 72 percent of Taiwan-made computers were sold under non-local
brand names. Taiwan was also the world’s largest exporter of bicycles during
the 1980s and early 1990s, and its export industry until the late 1980s was
largely OEM manufacturing (Cheng and Sato 1998). At one point in the late
1970s, Schwinn placed an order of 100 million bicycles with Giant, “which
was then only a small factory” (Cheng and Sato 1998: 7).
If we examine the lists of exported finished manufactured products in those
early years of economic growth, it is difficult to find any major product
187
category that was not dominated by contract manufacturing or any major

retailers that were not involved in contract manufacturing in East Asia. Gar-
ments, household appliances, electronic products, toys, bicycles—the major-
ity of all these finished exports were sold under foreign-owned brand names
and product labels. Many manufactured exports from both countries, but
especially from Taiwan, were component parts, and other types of intermedi-
ate goods, such as textiles. A sizable amount of other manufactured exports
were inexpensive unbranded products, such as kitchen items and tools of
various kinds, which were sold in a range of retail outlets, often in discount
stores, such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. As long as they were purchased from
South Korean and Taiwanese firms in contracted batches for assembly or sale
elsewhere, however, even the simplest and least expensive items were driven
by intermediary demand.
From the perspective of America’s total imports in the late 1960s and 1970s,
those imports from East Asia represented only a modest but steadily increasing
percentage, especially in comparison with growing imports of oil from the
Middle East. But from the perspective of Asia’s industrial expansion, these
US-bound exports accounted for a huge percentage of the total output of these
Asian economies and drove these economies forward into capitalism.
The emergence of divergent economies

The apparent similarities between US imports from South Korea and Taiwan,
however, mask the fundamental differences between these two Asian econo-
mies. As Feenstra and Hamilton (2006) have shown in some detail, these
economies become progressively organized in response to big-buyer orders.
These emergent differences are obvious from an examination of the disaggre-
gated seven-digit trade data. In the very early years when US buyers were
placing their first rounds of orders, buyers placed similar orders in different
locations. For example, before 1975, garment exports were amongst the high-
est categories of exports from both countries, with garments providing about a
third of the total value of Korea’s exports to the United States and a quarter of
Taiwan’s. Amongst the 263 and 345 types of garments that South Korea and
Taiwan, respectively, exported to the United States in 1972, the top five items
provided 42 percent of the total value of garments from Korea and 39 percent
from Taiwan. Three of the top five garment items are the same for both
countries—namely, specific types of sweaters, knit shirts, and trousers, all for
women and girls.
From about 1975 on, however, the buyers began to grow more sophisticated
in terms of both the consumer markets for their products and the supplier
markets for the relative capabilities of different manufacturers. Within the
next decade, 1975–85, the South Korean and Taiwanese economies developed
188
divergent specialties. The export segment of the Korean economy specialized

in vertically integrated Fordist mass-production systems. Led by chaebol, such
business groups as Hyundai and Samsung rapidly expanded in response to big-
buyer orders for large volumes of the same type of finished product. At the
time that the large South Korean firms grew larger, the export segment of the
Taiwanese economy became more intensively oriented toward the goods that
networks of small, medium, and modestly large firms could produce.
The trade data give evidence of this divergence. Footwear was a large export
for both South Korean and Taiwanese economies, but, very early on, firms in
the two economies specialized in a different system of shoe manufacturing
that led big buyers to order different types of shoes from each country.
Figure 6.5 shows these differences, and Brian Levy (1988: 47–8), who visited
shoe factories in both locations in the early 1980s, describes the differences as
follows:
Neither Nike nor Reebok had the organizational capacity . . . to meet . . . surges in
demand by subdividing . . . enormous orders amongst dozens of small, efficient
producers. Instead both companies turned to the giant Korean footwear factories,
which had inhouse operations in excess of forty production lines. Firms met
[these] orders by expanding their capacity even further. [A consequence of these
orders was] continued dependence of Korean footwear industry on a single foot-
wear item—non-rubber athletic shoes—which accounted in 1985 for an over-
whelming 71.3 percent of Korean footwear exports . . . By contrast to Korea,
footwear exports from Taiwan have become increasingly diversified over time . . .
[The] small size [of Taiwanese firms] affords Taiwanese producers the flexibility
necessary to fill rapidly shifting niches for small volume fashion items.
Divergence in the production between the two countries in rubber and

plastic products is more dramatic. In 1972, when the data begin, both South
Korea and Taiwan were exporting rubber and plastic raingear, but the large
Korean firms quickly specialized in producing tires for vehicles, while small
Taiwanese firms produced every manner of small plastic household products.
The same is true for household appliances. Whereas Korean factories
specialized in making microwave ovens, Taiwanese factories made small
appliances, such as irons, toaster ovens, hair dryers, and so forth. (See Feenstra
and Hamilton 2006: 246–9, for these data.)
In every industrial sector, the story is the same. Before 1985, Korean firms
“mass produced,” while Taiwanese firms “batch produced” goods, and both
systems of production grew in response to orders. In effect, globalizing retail-
ers and brand-name merchandisers patronized different supplier markets for
different products. South Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers competed
with each other in some of these supplier markets for specific goods, but, for
the most part, they specialized in different products.
189
2,500
2,000
South korea Taiwan

1,500
US$ mn
1,000
500
0
72 76 80 84 88 75 79 83 87
Work footwear, leather

Rubber and plastic footwear, women and misses
Rubber and plastic footwear, men and boys
Rubber and plastic footwear, children and infants
Leather shoes, casual and dress, women, girls,
children
Leather shoes, casuals and dress, men and boys
Athletic shoes, leather, women, girls, children
Athletic shoes, leather, men and boys
Figure 6.5. Categories of US imports of footwear from South Korea and Taiwan,
1972–1988
Now we will turn to the Taiwanese case in order to show the process by
which these supplier markets emerged and by which the entire economy
changed as a consequence.
The Rise of a Demand-Responsive Economy
It is hard to date the first moment when industrialization began, and perhaps
it is useless to do so. But it is certain that the new economic trend in Taiwan
began when the first big buyers arrived. We do not know who these buyers
were, because no one sufficiently noticed them to record their arrival. It is also
190
certain that the initial intermediaries were not the Taiwanese themselves. In
those early years, as far as the Taiwanese were concerned, Taiwan was a closed
island, and they and their resources were locked inside. Martial law was
enforced. The government strictly controlled both people and money. The
Taiwanese, therefore, simply did not know the foreign markets for which they
would soon be making products. And, of course, very few locals spoke any
English at all. The historical context makes it clear that the foreign buyers
came to Taiwan before the Taiwanese went to the buyers in the USA, Europe,
and Japan, as they would do with increasing frequency in the 1980s.
Japanese trading companies

It is very likely that the first buyers of Taiwan’s products were Japanese trading
companies. In our interviews from the late 1980s, factory owners across a wide
range of industries recalled getting their opening working with Japanese firms
in one way or another. In the late 1960s, as American retailers began to use
Japanese trading companies to fill orders for garments and footwear, these
trading companies encouraged a range of Japanese firms to relocate to areas
outside Japan, where cheaper labor could be found.4 Drawing on their exper-
tise in marketing, financing, and information gathering, as Kojima and Ozawa
(1984: 13) noted, the Japanese general trading companies “turned into over-
seas project organizers . . . and [played] a key role in helping Japanese manu-
facturers, and particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, set up shop in
labour-abundant developing countries to produce technologically mature,
labour-intensive products by investing jointly and providing needed infra-
structural services.” Two former Japanese colonies, Taiwan and South Korea,
were the two places Japanese firms placed sizable investments, first in Taiwan
in the late 1960s and then in South Korea in the early 1970s (Feenstra and
Hamilton 2006: 262–4).
Aside from our interviews and a few scattered references, however, it is
difficult to find much on the role played by the Japanese trading companies
in Taiwan’s first period of rapid growth, from about 1965 to 1975. If they
mention Japanese companies at all, most analysts (e.g., Gold 1986; Wade
1990) refer only to those notable cases of large Japanese manufacturing com-
panies establishing joint ventures in the area of consumer electronics, such as
Tatung’s 1964 joint venture with Toshiba for producing television sets.5 To
most observers in the era, Japanese trading companies seem almost invisible, a
presence about which little is known for sure. Our interviews, however, sug-
gest that they served as the brokers that got Taiwan’s industrialization under-
way, a crucial but unheralded role.
Several factors lead us to the conclusion. The first reason is the language. In
the 1960s, many ethnic Taiwanese older than 35 or so could speak some
191
Japanese. They had learned Japanese during their compulsory primary-school

education in the colonial period. Moreover, Japanese at this time was not only
the language of instruction, but was also the language of international busi-
ness, as well as the language of government. In the earliest years of growth,
therefore, Japanese business people and ethnic Taiwanese could speak to one
another with some level of understanding and cultural familiarity.6
Second, the Japanese trading companies in the 1960s began to expand their
operations outside Japan. In the immediate post-war period, Japanese trading
companies played an important role in rebuilding Japan’s domestic economy.
They coordinated and brokered exchanges amongst Japanese firms, especially
firms in the same groups of firms that had constituted the pre-war zaibatsu.
Having formed around family-owned holding companies, the zaibatsu were
disbanded by the US occupation government on the grounds of being illegiti-
mate monopolists. After the American occupation had ended, the firms
constituting the former zaibatsu regrouped, but without the family-owned
holding company at the top. In these reconstituted business groups, now
called keiretsu, the general trading company, along with the main banks,
served as one of the core firms that maintained the interrelatedness of group
firms. By the 1960s, the general trading companies, called sogoshosha, served
as the main import/export agents for firms in their respective business groups,
and in addition began increasingly to serve as independent agents in estab-
lishing sources for goods for which they had received orders, but that were not
supplied by member firms in the quantity, quality, or price desired by the
ordering firm.
It was their role as independent agents that was especially important for
Taiwan. In the early 1960s, after over a decade of rapid economic growth,
Japanese labor costs began to climb. For the years 1964–6, the average
monthly cost of labor in Japanese textile factories was three times higher
than in Taiwan’s, at $69 per month, as opposed to Taiwan’s $23 per month
(Duan 1992). In the same period, the average wage in US textile factories was
$333 per month. The rising wages in Japan encouraged the general trading
companies to begin to look at locations outside Japan as more profitable places
to perform the tasks that they had perfected in Japan—skills at market making,
infrastructure creation, and financial backing. In the same deal, the general
trading companies would make money in multiple ways. They would receive
orders from American and Japanese retailers, and then would arrange produc-
tion for the orders. In the early years, they had to create competent suppliers:
they would broker deals leading to joint ventures between a Japanese com-
pany and a local company and, if needed, would supply or otherwise arrange
for financing. Then they would import and sell the machine tools needed to
establish the factory, train the Taiwanese how to use the machinery, supply
192
the intermediate goods needed to make a product, and then coordinate the
delivery of the goods to retail markets in Japan or more frequently in the USA.
Third, during the late 1960s, Taiwan was the largest recipient of Japanese
foreign investment (Economist Intelligence Unit 1983). Records on foreign
direct investments in Taiwan show that the absolute total of US investments
exceeded investments from Japan, but Japanese investments involved over
three times as many individual investments than those from the USA (Duan
1992: 236). These figures point to a different investment strategy between the
US and Japanese businesses. On the US side, a few large US multinationals (for
example, RCA) set up stand-alone manufacturing plants in export-processing
zones producing consumer electronics, and on average these investments
were much larger than FDI (foreign direct investment) from Japan. In fact,
in 1975, nine of the ten largest companies in Taiwan by revenues were all
American companies; the other one, Philips Electronics Industries, was a
Dutch company (Chu and Amsden 2003: 28). By contrast, guided by the
general trading companies, Japanese companies usually established joint ven-
tures with Taiwanese firms. Some of these Japanese companies themselves
were modest-sized companies; others were subsidiaries of the large Japanese
business groups. In both cases, however, the firms established with Japanese
direct foreign investment were smaller and economically more diverse than
American firms. Typically, the Japanese firm controlled the technology and
supervised the manufacturing process, and a Japanese trading company
secured the order and then marketed the final product. In the 1960s, Hitachi,
Matsushita (Panasonic), Sanyo Electric, Ricoh, Mitsubishi Electric, Casio,
amongst many other Japanese firms, started operations in Taiwan.
Fourth, although the figures seem more like rough estimates than firm
assessments, a number of analysts (Olson 1970; Wade 1990; Fields 1995;
Feenstra and Hamilton 2006) state that Japanese general trading companies
served as the broker for over half of Taiwan’s exports from the late 1960s
through most of the 1970s. If this figure is accurate, then we must conclude
that the general trading companies were not just mere merchants, but were
rather active agents in financing, supervising, and supplying the Taiwanese
manufacturers. In effect, the Japanese trading companies initiated Taiwan’s
supplier markets.
This seminal role, however, did not last long, for very soon Western buyers
and Taiwanese trading companies began to play active roles in establishing
Taiwanese suppliers of goods ordered by Western retailers and brand-name
merchandisers. In the resulting mix, Japanese trading companies increasingly
began to specialize in a narrow, but still important segment of the overall
market economy—namely, in supplying Taiwanese manufacturers with capi-
tal goods and intermediate inputs required in the manufacturing process:
machine tools, the gear boxes for bicycles, and specialty metals and chemicals
193
needed in a wide range of products. Starting in the 1950s, Japanese exports to

Taiwan increased almost every year until the late 1990s (Taiwan Statistical
Data Book 1997: 194). If our interviews provide a sample of what was happen-
ing in the entire economy, it would seem that most of these Japanese exports
were the result of orders placed by Taiwanese business people through
Japanese trading companies. Through the 1990s, these trading companies
continued to source and supply the intermediate goods needed to manufac-
ture Taiwanese exports.
In those initial years of economic growth, however, Japanese trading com-
panies played all the crucial roles that got the Taiwanese business people
started. Moreover, they provided the Taiwanese with more than just access
to distant markets, advanced technologies, and manufacturing know-how.
Most importantly, they showed the Taiwanese how to make money from
the global economy. They showed them how to participate as suppliers, and
how to be reliable and trustworthy partners to firms that ordered goods from
them, but about which they had little additional knowledge.
American buyers and local trading companies

Japanese trading companies probably served as the first global brokers for the
Taiwanese. Their very success with sourcing goods in Asia, however, soon did
them out of business. Soon after the Japanese trading companies had come to
Taiwan, the American buyers arrived as well. They established buying offices
in Taipei, Seoul, and Hong Kong. Sears opened its Taiwan buying office in
1967, Kmart and J. C. Penney’s in 1971, and Associated Merchandising Cor-
poration (buyers for Dayton Hudson, Federated Department Stores, and Tar-
get) and Mast Industries (buyers for The Limited) in 1973 (Gereffi and Pan
1994). By eliminating the middle man, American buyers could reduce their
costs, but more importantly they could begin to work with the Taiwanese
manufacturers. They could help them be better suppliers, and as they became
better suppliers, the Western buyers began to order greater quantities of a
much wider range of goods.
Here the US trade statistics are revealing. As shown above in Figure 6.4, in
the very first year they were collected, 1972, the seven-digit US customs data
show that Taiwan was already exporting products to the United States in over
2,100 categories. By 1985, the number had risen to over 8,400 categories. This
increase represents an extraordinary growth in the variety of products Taiwan
made for export to the USA.
Most of the value of these exports, however, was quite concentrated, with
nearly 30 percent of the total value in only the top ten product categories and
nearly 80 percent of the total value in the top hundred categories. The top
twenty exports in 1972 were dominated by consumer electronics and items of
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clothing, most of which are probably the result of multinational

manufacturing and joint ventures.7 However, once outside the top twenty
or so items, then one begins to find a wide variety of products that were almost
certainly ordered by US retailers and made in Taiwanese-owned factories.
Amongst the next twenty items of export are types of umbrellas, luggage,
bicycles, toys, household utensils, handbags, Christmas tree lights, and cur-
tains. Going further down the list, the array of products is dazzling: types of
handbags, sewing machines, loudspeakers, religious articles made of plastic,
inflatable rubber toys, guitars, belt buckles, gloves, clocks, headwear, badmin-
ton sets, baseballs, bicycle tires, tennis rackets—all these, along with many
different kinds of garments and shoes.
The customs records show that, from 1972 to 1985, these second-tier pro-
ducts were shipped in greater and greater quantities and accounted for more
and more of the total value. This shift occurred at the same time as Taiwanese
manufacturers took increasing shares of the export production in consumer
electronics made in Taiwan.8 By the time our interviews start in 1987, Taiwan-
ese businesses, rather than foreign-owned firms, dominated every sector of the
Taiwan export economy.
As we interviewed factory owners from the late 1980s on, the question that
we always had in the back of our minds was “How did this particular factory
come to be making that particular product?” And, every time, the answer to
that question was that they had had an order from a buyer. Without the order,
they said, they would not have made whatever they were making. They
explained that the capital invested in the factory and in the inputs used to
make the goods had come out of their own pockets, or out of the pockets of a
small group of family and friends who were the primary investors; therefore,
they would not risk making something that had not already been ordered.
When we probed where the order came from, they typically told us that
American buyers had ordered the products, and, as proof, they would show
us the US brand names on the products that they were shipping.
But at this point the obscurity would start. How were the orders actually
arranged? Part of the obscurity was due to our failure to ask the crucial
questions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, we, along with most other observers,
focused more on how Taiwan business people put together their production
networks than on how they obtained their orders. We knew they had the
orders, we knew they depended on having the orders, and so we did not query
them on the intricacies of how the ordering system worked. However, part of
the obscurity also came from the fact that the orders had come from a variety
of sources. Some came directly from the retailers or brand-name merchandi-
sers, others were handled by Japanese trading companies, and yet others were
arranged by local trading groups.
195
Knowing the importance of local trading companies, we interviewed several

dozen different trading companies. We learned that, in the years of our inter-
views, mostly in the early 1990s, the owners of trading companies had to work
hard to get orders. They would take their case of samples to the USA or Europe,
and go from retailer to retailer looking for orders. These kinds of trading
companies were colloquially referred to as “suitcase companies” (pibao gongsi).
But suitcase companies became commonplace only after the Taiwanese were
able to travel overseas freely and after the foreign-exchange markets were
open, and this did not occur until the mid-1980s. The question that we did
not ask was how the ordering system worked during the crucial decade
between 1965 and 1975.
During that crucial decade, we also knew that the government did not
provide much, if any, assistance. In the early 1990s, a lot of export manufac-
turers obtained contracts by showing their wares at trade fairs and in fixed
stalls at the Taipei World Trade Center. But the Taipei World Trade Center did
not open until 1988. Before that, the China External Trade Development
Council handled most of the official matters involving trade. The Council
was established in 1970, but was continually short staffed and underfunded.
The government allowed only thirteen employees to be hired. The first general
secretary of the Council, Wu Kuan-hsiung, recalled being so frustrated with
the lack of government support that he quit after a few years and went to
Singapore. As early as 1973, he had recommended the government build a
trade center, but the plan was put off year after year. The government, he
complained, liked industry, but not commerce or trade.
Putting together bits and pieces of information from our interviews and
from other sources, we think it is likely that the American buyers and the local
trading companies began to collaborate in the early 1970s and built a momen-
tum that continued through the 1980s. One fact stands out for this period:
local trading companies grew in number at a pace even faster than the Taiwan-
ese economy in the same period. In 1973, official records show that there were
2,777 trading companies in operations in Taiwan,9 but, by 1985, that number
of trading companies had risen to 55,000. One out of every ten registered
companies was a trading company. The trading companies were uniformly
small, averaging less than ten employees each. Knowing the trading compa-
nies from our interviews in the early 1990s, we surmise that nearly every
category of export products was represented by many local trading companies
competing for orders. Although small, the local trading companies took on a
multitude of roles, chief amongst which was to work both sides of the
demand/supply equation. Their offices were usually in Taipei, near the buying
offices established by American retailers. They worked to identify products
that were salable to the big buyers and then worked to obtain orders for those
products, thereby generating demand. Then the owners of the trading
196
companies would help to arrange production networks to fill the order,

thereby generating supply. They were more than simply matchmakers; rather
they were instrumental in creating competent suppliers for American buyers.
In fact, they helped to create a market of suppliers, a sellers’ market, willing to
bid on and to make nearly any product imaginable.
Another fact equally stands out about these local trading companies. Once a
market of suppliers existed, once the trade fairs and the World Trade Center
were in operation, there no longer existed the same role for the local trading
companies. There basic role had been completed. From the late 1980s on, local
trading companies began to diminish in number.
Imitation and Innovation
Although we did not ask many questions about the process of obtaining
orders, we did ask again and again how factory owners were able to make
the products for which they had the orders. Many of products were extraordi-
narily complex or required very complex manufacturing procedures. It always
seemed remarkable to us that the Taiwanese manufacturers, often with very
limited education, had been able to figure out how to make the products that
they were, in fact, making. For instance, the Chairman of Thunder Tiger, a
firm making airplanes for the hobbyist market, had only an elementary school
education, and yet, amongst his many accomplishments, he had figured out
how to manufacture miniature drone jet airplanes. Chairman Tseng, the
manufacturer of plastic lawn chair furniture, who at the time of our interview
had huge contracts from both Wal-Mart and Kmart, had only the equivalent
of a junior high education, and yet he invented a one-step manufacturing
process to change raw plastic into finished products. Their stories are not
unusual. In fact, most factory owners in Taiwan’s first wave of industrializa-
tion not only did not have advanced degrees, but also had no training in
manufacturing in general or in making their specific product in particular.
The question that we asked repeatedly was how did they learn to make the
products. The answer that we received was always some form of imitation and
innovation based on an existing product. This process of imitation and
innovation is usually a very difficult and complex process. The term often
given to this process is “reverse engineering,” which makes the process sound
simple, but there is nothing easy or automatic about copying someone else’s
design. In the case of OEM production, the big buyers would often bring the
samples, sometimes amounting to nothing more than just an idea designed
on paper, with them to Taiwan, and ask the manufacturers, or more likely the
owners of trading companies, “Can you make it for such and such a price?”
Then, before they could obtain the order, they would have to deliver a
197
prototype, just to show that they could do it. The turnaround time on such a
query was often very short, because frequently the buyers would just sit in
their hotels waiting for the prototype to appear. With a very short lead time,
the Taiwanese manufacturers would have to produce their prototype.
This process of innovating based on an existing product design is a skill that
Taiwan manufacturers learned to perfect. In the first decade of rapid growth,
many of the OEM products were comparatively simple and were ordered in
fairly small batches. Taiwanese manufacturers learned how to produce these
products in a variety of ways, some from their experience in working in other
factories, some from instructions provided by Japanese trading companies and
suppliers of machine tools, and some from the big buyers themselves. How-
ever, once in business, they learned quickly from others in their production
network. In this context, learning was both singular and collaborative.
It was singular in the sense that one firm typically took the lead to produce
the prototype. The owner and key employees of this firm would design and
make a prototype. At this stage, very few people might be involved, but those
people would have to have a lot of knowledge about the product, and would
have to go to some lengths to acquire this knowledge. Factory owners fre-
quently told us that they would obtain this knowledge by going to trade
shows, by finding samples of similar products and taking them apart, by
closely reading trade journals where new developments were announced,
and by pursuing others who had knowledge about the product or materials
the products were made of. Wherever they obtained this knowledge, they
would then actively try to innovate on the design to come up with something
special that would give their goods a distinctive feel.
Learning was also collaborative in the sense that the process of production
was a function of the network and not simply of the firm. Therefore, learning
how to produce a given prototype required considerable cooperation amongst
a group of independent manufacturers. These manufacturers would have to
work together very closely on coordinating all aspects of production. In the
course of this collaboration, the division of labor amongst manufacturers had
to be cost effective, because any inefficiencies would cut into their collective
profits. The network of producers, therefore, would constantly learn how to
produce products with higher quality while achieving lower costs and how to
work together seamlessly. This process of manufacturing also led to improve-
ments in product design.
In another location, we show how this combination of individual imitative
by, and cooperation amongst, business people is anchored in distinctively
Chinese patterns of social organization (Kao and Hamilton 2009). We refer to
these patterns as an adaptation of “round-table etiquette” applied to eco-
nomic activity, with the result that Taiwanese business people could quickly
take advantage of money-making opportunities that began to appear in the
198
1970s. The constant interaction between the product and the process of
production, as well as between the firm and the networks of which the firms
are a part, created in Taiwan’s first wave of industrialization a particularly
dynamic approach to manufacturing. Some examples from our interviews
will illustrate these various levels of interaction.
Kai Hsiang: making jacks

The first time we interviewed Ling Wen-chuen, the general manager of Kai
Hsiang, a hydraulic jack manufacturing firm in Chiayi, was in 1990. Although
we would revisit him many times during the next fifteen years, that first visit
left a lasting impression. At the time, he was a youthful 34 years old and was
completely at ease with having us in his factory. A very jovial man, he kept us
there for the better part of a day, which ended with a banquet that he hosted
for the entire research team, for a total of twelve people. A close family friend
of one of Kao’s graduate students, Ling welcomed us warmly and answered all
of our questions in detail.
In 1990, Kai Hsiang was the second largest of the six major jack factories in
Chiayi. It employed about 200 people in the main factory and worked with a
large network of subcontractors consisting of over 100 small firms. Kai Hsiang
was one of a number of businesses owned by Ling Wen-chuen’s parents, and
his role as general manager was given added weight by the fact that it was a
family business, technically owned by his father, but in reality collectively
owned by the entire family.
The family businesses began with Ling Wen-chuen’s grandfather, who
owed a pharmacy in Chiayi. Having a taste for business, but not wanting to
take over the family store, Ling’s father, Ling Suen-yi, looked around for other
opportunities. In the early 1960s, responding to the growing export markets
in Japan for agricultural products (Feenstra and Hamilton 2006: 200–10),
farmers in southern Taiwan had begun to invest heavily in rearing a range of
animals commercially, including pigs, chickens, fish, and shrimp. Sensing an
opening, Ling Suen-yi started a factory producing feed for chicken and fish. As
a part of this business, he had to import the grains, such as corn, to make the
feed, and he had to go around the island of Taiwan to market the animal meal
to feed shops. Through his contacts in the feed business, Ling Suen-yi heard,
in the early 1970s, about a Japanese luggage company that wanted to locate a
contract manufacturer to make some low-end luggage. The Japanese were
willing to invest some capital in such a company. Ling Suen-yi quickly took
them up on the offer, and, investing some of his own money in the factory as
well, he started making luggage. While Ling Suen-yi worked fulltime to estab-
lish his luggage factory, his wife took over the agribusiness. Through working
199
with the Japanese company, he was able to upgrade the quality of his luggage
and then to land some additional OEM contracts.
In 1980, while running a successful luggage export business, Ling Suen-yi
was approached by a friend of a friend. This person owned a jack factory,
which he wanted to sell. The factory was not doing well, and the person
wanted to sell the factory to the Ling family at an attractive price. A few
years earlier another jack factory had opened in Chiayi called Hsinfu. The
owner of Hsinfu and Ling Suen-yi were friends, and, sensing an opportunity,
Ling Suen-yi hoped to collaborate with Hsinfu to produce a wider range and
larger quantity of hydraulic jacks. The year before they bought the jack
factory, the person we interviewed, the son, Ling Wen-chuen, had just
graduated from National Taiwan University in Taipei, with a BS degree in
Forestry. In the year after his graduation, he had worked for his father in the
luggage company, learning sales and marketing and making use of the English
he had learned in college. When Ling Suen-yi bought the jack factory in 1981
for NT$20 million, his son, Ling Wen-chuen, immediately became the general
manager.
In the late 1970s, in addition to Kai Hsiang and Hsinfu, four other jack
assembly factories started operation in Chiayi. Although each one was inde-
pendent and in competition with the other firms and although each had a
network of dedicated subcontractors, they also shared some subcontractors
who made specialized parts. As a function of being part of an extensive
network of assembly factories and overlapping parts suppliers, the entire
agglomeration of firms, although internally competitive, shared substantial
knowledge about how to manufacture products with hydraulic components.
As general manager of Kai Hsiang, Ling Wen-chuen made good use of this
information to improve the production facilities in his factory.
The agglomeration of jack factories in Chiayi created a large demand for
steel of a certain size and quality. Not far from Chiayi, near Kaohsiung, is the
state-owned steel mill, China Steel, as well as several large privately owned
steel mills. At first, the jack factories ordered steel from some of these factories,
but they soon switched their orders to a newly established local steel mill. This
firm had been established in the late 1970s by a local man who had worked as
an apprentice in one of the Kaohsiung mills. As the jack factories began to
receive substantial orders, this person was encouraged to open a mini-mill
dedicated to serving the specific needs of the jack manufacturers in Chiayi.
In the first years of operation, Kai Hsiang was a subcontract manufacturer
for Hsinfu, which was then on its way to becoming the world’s largest pro-
ducer of hydraulic jacks. Ling Wen-chuen told us that, in the first year of
operation, they made NT$200 million in total revenues, with profit margins
running at about 6 percent. After two years, they were able to turn a profit. As a
subcontract assembly firm for Hsinfu, however, Kai Hsiang depended on
200
Hsinfu’s ability to get OEM orders. Although the firm was quite successful,
Ling Wen-chuen wanted to expand his business. Using his English language
skills, he went to Taipei, and eventually to the USA, to meet American buyers.
When we asked him how he knew what firms to go to, he said that that was no
problem. What he had done was to go to the subcontracted firm in Chiayi that
was making the brand-name-labeled cardboard boxes used to package the
finished jacks and to see what American companies were ordering jacks. He
then went to those companies, and, as a result, he was able get substantial
OEM orders on his own behalf. These orders allowed him to expand his
network of subcontractors. By 1987, within six years of buying the jack
factory, Kai Hsiang became the second largest jack assembly firm in Chiayi.
Our first interview with Ling Wen-chuen was in 1990. Within five years of
that first interview, most of the jack assembly firms in Chiayi, including Kai
Hsiang, had moved operations to Mainland China. The Ling family luggage
business continues in full operation, with one large factory in Mainland China
and the small factory in Chiayi, where the high-end luggage continues to be
made. The factory making animal feed ended operations at about the time
that the farmers in southern Taiwan began to quit raising animals and seafood
so extensively because of pollution among other causes. No longer running
their agribusiness, Ling Suen-yi’s wife opened a stock brokerage firm. The Ling
family jokingly called their businesses “nomadic” (youmu), because they never
stopped searching for new opportunities to make money.
Yeh-Bao: making bicycles

Located about 40 kilometers north and west of Taichung City, Ta Chia is one
of many small villages lining the coast and skirting the river flood plains along
Highway 1. Well removed from the main North–South freeways, Ta Chia
before the 1970s was noted only for making small products woven from
grass: hats, floor and bed mats, and grass slippers. Only eleven years later, by
1981, Ta Chia had become the center of Taiwan’s export bicycle industry, and
by that time Taiwan had become the world’s largest bicycle exporter (Cheng
and Sato 1998: 8). At the peak of the industry in Taiwan, in 1986, the number
of bicycles exported reached more than ten million (Cheng and Sato 1998).
Giant, Taiwan’s best-known bicycle company, is located in Ta Chia. It is the
largest of many bicycle assembly firms in the region. Yeh-Bao is another firm
in Ta Chia, but its owner, Lin Shun-san, built his business by specializing only
in the manufacture of bicycle frames.
Chairman Lin started his first business in 1975. At the time, he had recently
graduated from a nearby technical school with a specialty in telecommunica-
tions and had received the equivalent of a high school degree. Not knowing
what to do, he returned to his hometown, Ta Chia, to look for opportunities.
201
In the early 1970s, as Ta Chia was just becoming the center of Taiwan’s bicycle
production, there were many opportunities in this region to enter the industry
in one capacity or another. With only very little capital and acting on the
advice of a friend, Lin and his wife decided to start a company making plastic
saddle bags that attach to the rear fender of low-end bicycles. They called their
company Jun-ye (successful enterprise), and, depending on the workload,
employed between ten and twenty people, all from the local village. Their
orders for the saddle bags came from other firms in Ta Chia. These bags would
be attached to the bicycles in the final stages of assembly, just before the
bicycles were packaged and shipped to the OEM buyers.
Building on his personal connections within the local community of bicycle
assemblers and part suppliers, Chairman Lin, in 1978, got an opportunity to
establish a new firm to make one of the technologically most difficult parts to
manufacture, the frame. He called his firm Yeh-Bao (wild treasure) in Chinese
and A-PRO in English. At the beginning they used low-end metals, mainly
aluminum and stainless steel, to construct the frame. The first couple of years,
he recalled, were extremely difficult, because he had to work out the produc-
tion technique for making the frame solid and unbreakable. To accomplish
this task, precision welding is absolutely crucial, because so much pressure is
placed on critical points on a bicycle, particularly the metal fork holding the
front wheel. “Can you imagine,” he said, “a 200 pound American guy riding
on a ten pound bicycle at a speed of 30 miles an hour. Oh boy, the frame has to
hold together. You know an automobile has four wheels, but a bicycle only
has two.”
Because competition at the low end was so tough, Chairman Lin decided he
had to upgrade his position in the network of firms around Ta Chia. He
borrowed money from his friends and bought new equipment in order to
improve the quality of his frames. He also began to use new metals, such as
carbon graphite, titanium, as well as higher grades of aluminum and steel.
Then he hired the best welders he could find, paying then double and some-
times treble the going local wage for welders. When he first bought the
specialty metals from a Japanese company, the Japanese company sent repre-
sentatives to teach him and his welders the best techniques to cut and weld
the frames. But Chairman Lin complained to us that Japanese companies
never explain everything. They always keep some of the core technology to
themselves. Therefore, as they began to work with the new metals, Lin and his
employees had to work out many of the problems on their own, and they had
to test and retest the durability of their frames. Chairman Lin, however,
continued to buy the high-end materials from Japan (for example, titanium
and carbon graphite) and to rely on Japanese manufacturers for key com-
ponent parts, such as the Shimano gear boxes.
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Once they had perfected the manufacturing process, Chairman Lin began to
participate in international bicycle fairs, usually held in Cologne Germany
and New York, and he started to obtain OEM orders, especially from Europe.
His own business quickly improved. He had successfully upgraded his firm’s
position in the manufacturing network, just as the entire network had also
upgraded itself as an OEM producer for major European and American retailers
of bicycles. As Yeh-Bao grew in size, the firm was able to handle yet larger and
more differentiated orders. Chairman Lin’s strategy matched the strategy of
the entire network of firms—namely, to make differentiated products of mass-
produced low-end and middle-range bicycles and batch produced high-end
models, this along with a lot of bicycle accessories.
By 1992, when we interviewed Chairman Lin the first time, he had estab-
lished six independent factories in Taiwan, each making different component
parts. The very first firm, Jun-ye, was still in operation, then managed by Lin’s
wife and making sophisticated bicycle accessories. Yeh-Bao was the largest of
the six firms. Chairman Lin was the owner and boss (laoban) of each of these
factories. We asked him, since he was making so many different bicycle parts,
why not integrate vertically and make the entire bicycle himself, or at least
become a downstream assembler. He answered decisively that that would not
be a wise move. If you try to integrate vertically in Ta Chia, he said, “then
everyone will be your competitor. If you keep your firms separate, then you
will be everyone’s supplier.” He said there were other reasons not to integrate
as well. If you make a small number of products, you do not have to make a
huge capital investment in any one of them. Modest investments, he said, get
better returns with lower risks. Finally, he noted that Taiwan’s tax codes also
favor having multiple companies rather than one big firm. Continually start-
ing small firms means that you can deduct start-up costs, which would not be
available if one began a new operation within an existing firm. Also, multiple
firms create multiple lines of credit. One big company has only one credit line.
And, finally, different sizes of firms are subject to different tax rates. Although
all these reasons are important, he reflected, the main reason not to integrate
vertically is the risk of going it alone, of trying to make money without help
from others.
Chairman Lin thought it was much better for him to make himself indis-
pensable within the overall network of firms. The bicycle industry is continu-
ally changing, he said; it is a “fashion industry.” A network of firms is much
more flexible in changing with the trends than is one big vertically integrated
firm. “It used to be that the big firms in South Korean would make huge
quantities of bicycles,” but the Taiwanese producers were able to follow the
trends so much faster that the “Koreans got out of the bicycle business.”
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Pou Chen: making shoes

Amongst Taiwanese firms, Pou Chen is a legend. In the late 1990s, Pou Chen,
along with its subsidiary Yu Yuan, became the largest shoe manufacturer in
the world, making nearly a quarter of all athletic shoes in the world. Also
amongst private-sector Chinese firms, Pou Chen is one of the largest employers,
with over 250,000 employees worldwide and with over 80,000 employees in
one of its Mainland Chinese factories alone. Like other Taiwanese firms,
however, Pou Chen started small.
When we first interviewed Pou Chen’s owner, Tsai Chi-ray, in 1988, it was a
considerably smaller firm of about 500 employees, operating 5 assembly lines
producing shoes,10 but, by Taiwan’s standards of the day, even then it was
relatively large. Our first interview with Pou Chen occurred just at the time
when the company was beginning, surreptitiously, to move part of its opera-
tions to China. Secrecy was required because the Taiwan government abso-
lutely forbade anyone from making investments in Mainland China, but after
the 1985 Plaza Accord, which caused Taiwan’s currency to appreciate, contract
manufacturers in Taiwan had increasing difficulty in meeting the buyer’s price
points and still earn a profit. At our interview in 1988, we did not learn about
their plans to move to China. Instead, we marveled at their operations in
Taiwan.
In 1969, Tsai Chi-ray, along with his three younger brothers, started Pou
Chen in their hometown of Yuanlin, in those years a modest-sized town in
Changhwa County south of Changhwa City. Reasonably prosperous in the
1960s, Yuanlin was noted for its agricultural products, particularly mush-
rooms, asparagus, and preserved fruits, as well as its food-processing plants
that canned and bottled and otherwise processed these food products for
export as well as for domestic consumption. A graduate of a local teacher’s
college and then a teacher in the local junior high school, Tsai Chi-ray wanted
to take advantage of the new economic opportunities that he saw appear in
his hometown in the late 1960s. He borrowed NT$ 500,000 (equivalent to
US$12,500) from close family members, so that he and his three younger
brothers could start a factory.
With ten employees, in addition to the four brothers, Pou Chen began
making the kind of plastic slippers known colloquially in the United States
as “flip-flops.” At the time the Tsai brothers opened their firm, a number of
other factories in the area had also started making the same style of plastic
shoes. Some of the Tsai family members had had previous experience making
slippers out of woven grass, which they obtained from Ta Chia. Now they
began to use that experience to make these new kinds of shoes. The flip-flop
had been designed by an American firm in imitation of a style of Italian-made
leather shoes for women. The flip-flops initially sold well in the American
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market, but the price per unit was very low. American buyers for the main
retail outlets, especially Kmart, Sears, and Wal-Mart, then only a regional
discounter, began to place orders in Taiwan. The raw plastic material used to
make the flip-flops was readily available in Taiwan from Nanya Plastics, a
subsidiary of Formosa Plastics. Working through a local trading company, the
Tsai brothers were able to land a contract for a quantity of these plastic shoes. At
the same time that this was occurring, the US demand for flip-flops surged,
which led in turn to much bigger orders. The US buyers for the retail chains
then began to come directly to the suppliers, Pou Chen included, and began to
work closely with them to increase both the quantity and the quality of the
products. Chairman Tsai recalled being especially impressed with the buyers
from Wal-Mart, with whom he gradually developed a close relationship.
In the early 1970s, Pou Chen began to receive some direct orders from the
main retail buyers. In response to these orders, Pou Chen increased the size of
its factory and began to develop its own subcontracting network. At this time
the market for non-leather shoes in the United States began to diversify. Pou
Chen’s breakthrough came when the company got some large orders for a new
type of shoe, a canvas-covered plastic shoe, variously called a “sneaker” or
“tennis shoe.” The construction was fairly easy and the unit price was very
low. Working with its production network, however, Pou Chen was able to
keep its production costs low, produce these shoes in large quantities, and still
make everyone a profit. At the same time that Pou Chen’s orders for sneakers
began to come in, two related developments pushed Taiwan shoe manufac-
turers in new directions. First, the technology used in making shoes changed
dramatically when Mitsubishi’s general trading company, CITC, transferred
Japanese technologies for making shoes to Taiwanese suppliers. CITC was one
of the primary intermediaries between a range of specialized retailers of sport-
ing goods and Taiwanese shoe manufacturers. In Japan at the time, a new type
of shoe was being developed, a highly functional and durable shoe that would
become known as the “athletic shoe.” These shoes required new machinery,
advanced plastic materials, and high-quality sewing and lamination techni-
ques. Making these shoes was also very labor intensive. Taking advantage of
Taiwan’s cheaper labor costs and batch production techniques, CITC taught
Taiwanese suppliers the new shoe-making technologies and also sold them
the machines and the materials to make the shoes.
The German shoe manufacturer Adidas had been trying to create a similar
type of shoe with technologies similar to those developed by the Japanese.
Keeping in step with its Japanese competitors, Adidas, in 1971, decided to try
contract manufacturing in Taiwan as well, and signed an agreement with
Hwagang, a shoe company located in northern Taiwan. In the following
year, 1972, Reebok came to Taiwan, as did the Japanese company Mizuno.
These companies signed contracts with a number of the shoe manufacturers,
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amongst them Chinglu, a firm located in the same county as Pou Chen.
Although they had been in business for only about five years, all these con-
tracts for athletic shoes made Taiwanese shoe manufacturers one of the main
global suppliers for this new type of athletic shoe.
The extraordinarily rapid growth of the Taiwan’s shoe manufacturers cre-
ated huge demand for specialized inputs and for the machinery to make shoes,
much of which were initially supplied by the Japanese trading companies. By
the mid-1970s, local firms began to emerge that supplied both the inputs and
the machinery. This follows the general rule in demand-responsive econo-
mies: orders for final products come first, markets for intermediate inputs for
those products come later, which encourages niche suppliers for intermediate
inputs to emerge.
The second important development in Taiwan’s shoe industry was the
arrival of Nike and a surging global demand for athletic shoes that was in
part created by Nike. In the early 1970s, Kihachiro Onitsuka, the owner of
Asics Tiger, cooperated with the American company called Blue Ribbon
Sports, which later became Nike, to manufacture a shoe designed by Phillip
Knight. Knight’s story is well known. He saw that there was no shoe designed
for running and other athletic endeavors. He designed the shoe and con-
tracted with Asics Tiger to make it. In only a few years after their introduction,
Nike captured a huge share of the newly developed market in athletic shoes in
the USA. At first this market seemed to be a niche market that filled, as well as
created, demand from the new popularity for jogging and aerobics. But the
niche expanded, as more and more athletic-type shoes were worn for all
occasions. At the beginning, Asics Tiger made Nike shoes, but, with competi-
tion from Adidas and Reebok, Knight decided to move his contract
manufacturing out of Japan. He split his orders between footwear manufac-
turers in South Korea and Taiwan, with Korean companies making mass-
produced shoes for low-end markets and Taiwanese companies making the
batch-produced specialty shoes. In Taiwan, Nike’s lead firm was Fung-Tai, also
located in Taichung County, about 30 minutes north of Yuanlin.
From 1966 to 1985, the global export of sport shoes from Asia grew 1,200
times. Most of these shoes were produced in only two countries, Taiwan and
South Korea. By 1985, Taiwan and South Korea produced 50 percent of all
shoes imported into the USA. By this time, American shoe manufacturers had
gone into a decline from which they would never recover. Because of the
sudden demand in the USA, for these new types of shoes, the large retailers
and trade-name merchandisers did a lot of research on how to put the shoes
together to get maximum performance. In the early years, recalled Tsai Chi-
ray, when Pou Chen made flip-flops and sneakers for the big-box retailers,
price was the most important issue. Later, when Pou Chen began to cooperate
with the brand-name merchandisers, the ability to use advanced technology
206
was more important than price. What all these brand-name companies most
needed were manufacturers who could transform these R&D models into a
manufactured commodity that yielded a good profit for all concerned. The
secret of the Taiwan manufacturers was the know-how to do this.
As Pou Chen continued to make sneakers for the big-box retailers, it started
to invest heavily in the new equipment needed to produce athletic shoes,
equipment sold to it by CITC. By 1977, it also set up its own internal research
division (Neibu Yanjiu Xiaozu) to further develop materials to make shoes. It
began to do some subcontracting work for other Taiwanese firms that had
primary orders for athletic shoes. Then, in 1979, it received its first order from
Adidas through a local trading company arm of Hwagang. At the time Hwa-
gang handled all Adidas’s local sales; the sales agent did a large portion of
Adidas’s contract manufacturing, and arranged for subcontracts to do the
remainder. The arrangement was very successful for Pou Chen. Then, in
1982, Pou Chen became the primary OEM manufacturer for New Balance,
and gained a good reputation for the quality of its shoes. The quality of its
production attracted Reebok, which signed an agreement with Pou Chen in
1988. Then, in 1989, Nike signed on as well.11
By the time Pou Chen received its first big contract from Nike, Pou Chen was
then transferring much of its manufacturing capacity to China. The golden
period for Taiwan’s shoe production was just ending, and the great rush to
China was just starting. In retrospect, we can see that, in 1989, the golden
period for Pou Chen was just about to begin.
Demand-Responsive Manufacturing
Between the late 1960s and 1985, Taiwanese manufacturers developed into
sophisticated suppliers of consumer goods for global markets. In the begin-
ning of the period, they had very little experience in any kind of
manufacturing and very limited knowledge of the consumer goods that they
would soon be making for overseas markets. At the end of the period, they had
advanced expertise in the process of manufacturing for OEM buyers and
equally advanced knowledge of the products that they were making. In
slightly over fifteen years, Taiwanese manufacturers, the Taiwanese economy,
and the global economy had become tightly interconnected and transformed.
After 1985, in the wake of the Plaza Accord that raised the value of Taiwan’s
currency about 40 percent relative to the US dollar, Taiwan manufacturers had
increasing difficulty meeting the price points set by US retailers and brand-
name merchandisers. In the next decade, from 1985 to 1995, waves of Taiwan-
ese SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) began to move to Mainland
China, and, once in China, the lead firms having the major contracts
207
reorganized their production networks better to fit the needs of overseas

buyers. These reorganizations by Taiwanese manufacturers greatly increased
their capacity to make products on demand from overseas buyers. From this
reorganization emerged a new set of Taiwanese-owned business groups that
rank amongst the world’s most successful enterprises. Three such enterprise
groups—Pou Chen, the world’s largest manufacturer of footwear; Hon Hai, the
world’s largest contract manufacturer for consumer electronics; and Quanta, the
world’s largest manufacturer of laptop computers—are barely known outside East
Asia, but are amongst the largest exporting firms from Mainland China. In fact, of
the top twenty exporters from China in 2008, ten were owned by Taiwanese.
The modular organization designed for flexible production grew out of the
demand-responsive production systems that developed in Taiwan during the
first fifteen years of rapid growth, from 1970 to 1985. Each of these case studies
above illustrates this process of transformation.
The manufacturing of each product came to rely on production networks
that broke down the production process into distinct steps that
standardized the product, the component parts, and the roles of the
participants (Hamilton and Kao 2006).
All varieties of contract manufacturing (for example, OEM, original
design manufacturer (ODM), original brand manufacturer (OBM)) grew
out of a progressively reorganizing economy in which individual firms
were parts of larger economic units. As the orders for products increased,
this form of manufacturing became highly sophisticated and highly
responsive to buyer demand. This form of manufacturing is not a second
class or substandard form of production, which some analysts make it out
to be. The literature often describes the goal of OEM producers as needing
to upgrade, but our interviews show that, even in this first wave of
industrialization, demand-responsive manufacturing, as a definable
process, began to take shape, and was progressively rationalized over
time.
Demand-responsive manufacturing was the result of self-conscious
organizing on the part of Taiwanese manufacturers. It was done
intentionally, in part because of the limited resources they possessed and
because of the social organization that they were accustomed to.
Our interviews show that, from the outset, Taiwanese manufacturers
operated on three principles. The first principle of contract
manufacturing is to make money for your buyer. If they do not make
money, they will not be back. This understanding led Taiwanese
manufacturers to organize by taking the buyer’s perspective into account
and, in fact, by making it their own perspective. The second principle of
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OEM production is to work for the return contract. Meet the buyer’s
expectations in quality, quantity, and price point the first time. If the
buyers come back, then they will have made money and will feel as
though they could make more. The third principle of OEM is to make
money for yourself. How you achieve these three principles is through
taking calculated risks. However, if you do not make money for yourself,
you will not be able to survive. Maybe you will not make money with the
first few contracts, but if you make yourself indispensable to your buyers,
you will make lots of money over the long haul.
How do you organize to make money for your buyers? As we said, you do
that by organizing from the perspective of the buyer. Organize backward
from the product itself and from the order for that product. You have the
specifications for the product, and you know how many they want. Do
not try to develop a totally new product. Simply try to reproduce an
existing product with high quality, at low cost, and in the desired
quantity. The production unit you organize is in direct response to the
product and the orders. Different ways to organize production evolve over
time, but in the early years it was always a production network.
How do you organize to make money for yourself? First, establish a
foothold in the production networks, learn by doing, make incremental
changes to improve what you are doing, cost down the production
process, and accept low margins in the short run in the hopes of receiving
larger margins going forward. Be a network player. And accept the
network agreements about the profit margin. When the opportunity
arises, fill the niches that appear in the production process or develop new
niches that others will find useful.
Second, try to get multiple orders for the same product from different
sources. Multiple orders will allow you to develop a strategy of product
differentiation, based on standardized parts for all models.
Third, modularize the production across the producing units. Standardize
each step in the production to make the manufacturing process
transparent to all those engaged in making the product. Adopt external
standards for the products, as specified by the buyer, and adopt internal
standards for the process of production, as developed and specified by the
network of independent manufacturers.
Conclusion
Taiwanese entrepreneurs developed and perfected a model of how to manu-

facture for foreign buyers. The model they developed contains a number of
209
elements that led to a comprehensive reorganization of the Taiwanese econ-

omy, making the Taiwanese economy into a demand-responsive economy.
This economy had the following features:
The economy was organized around products that big buyers ordered and
services related to those products. For each product, sets of competing core
firms emerged; these core firms assembled and sometimes made key parts and
then subcontracted components to other firms. This production strategy led
to the development of clusters of firms and to internal markets for intermedi-
ate goods and services. These flexible networks supplying final and intermedi-
ate goods and services would expand when demand was great and would
contract when demand was low. Typically, the product concentration led to
a geographical concentration as well, because the production system relied on
a just-in-time delivery of parts to the assembly location. The Taiwanese
learned these techniques from Japanese, but perfected them in Taiwan.
As overseas demand for products increased, product differentiation also
increased. Product differentiation created concentric rings of manufacturing
networks, networks that intersected across numbers of core manufacturers.
These intersecting rings contained many niches for expansion and develop-
ment of additional products and for supporting services. Buyer demand also
led to rigid cost controls that fed back across all supporting sectors, which in
turn created the continuing need to rationalize production and upgrade pro-
ducts relative to big-buyer orders. As Taiwan’s entire economy became ori-
ented to export production in response to buyer orders, it also became subject
to economic trends in the USA. Economic downturns and rising retail con-
centration in the USA began to drive fluctuation in the Taiwanese economy,
later prompting many Taiwanese business people to move all or a portion of
their manufacturing to Mainland China. In Mainland China, they reorga-
nized their businesses in response to rapid increases in retailer orders. Taiwan-
ese, along with Hong Kong, business people, in turn, played a crucial role in
creating export-oriented capitalism in China.
This brings us to our final point. It is our belief that the debates about the
causes of East Asian industrialization need substantive revision. The current
explanations are “supply-side narratives” that entirely ignore the role of inter-
mediaries and the demand, as well as the demand responsiveness, they helped
to produce. Global retailers and the reorganization of the global economy that
retailers have helped to create have changed the way Asian economies fit into
a global economic order. To miss these features of capitalist development is to
miss some of the most important aspects of global capitalism today.12
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7
Global Logistics, Global Labor

Introduction: The Meaning of Global Logistics
“Wal-Mart’s business model does not work without us”—so said Professor
John Liu, the Director of the CY Tung International Centre for Maritime
Studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The “us” to whom he referred
are those people who specialize in logistics and maritime services. Liu was
giving a tour of the state-of-the-art training center at his university, training
that prepares technicians to deliver efficient, predictable, and low-cost service
to global customers like Wal-Mart. The “basic tools of global retailing,” he
continued, “are containerized shipping and the Internet.” He might have
added a few items to his list of tools, but his point was well made. Global
retailing and global logistics are so intimately and thoroughly interconnected
that it is difficult to tell where one starts and the other stops.
Not so long ago, logistics meant simply the tasks of organizing and coordi-
nating the transportation of goods.1 Now practitioners have extended the
term to cover the entire cycle of designing, ordering, placing into production,
and transporting goods to final markets. The activity of integrating all aspects
of this cycle is called “supply-chain management,” and supply-chain manage-
ment is at the heart of the market-making successes of Wal-Mart and all other
large global retailers.
The market-making competence of these retailers can be seen in their ability
to organize their suppliers and service providers, backwards from anticipated
demand, so that even the smallest factory making components for a contract
manufacturer will respond quickly to the decisions that retailers make. Rely-
ing on point-of-sale (POS) data collected electronically, retailers make deci-
sions about the future production of goods, specific product mixes for specific
locations, delivery schedules, inventory flows, and a large assortment of other
issues. In effect, using electronic data interchange, or EDI, retailers determine

what, when, where, and how manufacturers produce goods. This new system
turns on its head the old ways of doing things, where manufacturers would
produce in quantity and retailers would make selections and put in purchase
orders in response to what the manufacturers were making. Nowadays, what is
selling plays a big role in determining what actually gets produced. Production
is geared to sales, rather than the other way around.
Logistics writ large, in the form of supply-chain management, is the essen-
tial ingredient that has allowed retailers to organize their suppliers and, thus,
to gain an advantage over manufacturers. But this turnabout is only one
aspect of what the transformation in logistics has produced. In this chapter,
we focus on the new geography of the global economy, on expanding the
boundaries of consumer markets while simultaneously shrinking the bound-
aries within which suppliers operate. This changing geography has created a
new world of work, a world in which competition amongst retailers and their
ability to set different price points for both consumers and suppliers directly
influence the locations and organization of supply chains all the way down to
the wages that distant manufacturers pay their workers.
With new logistical tools in hand, supply-chain managers constantly mea-
sure the efficiency and timeliness of all aspects of production, distribution,
and sales. The concern over costs and time ultimately feeds back to the cost of
labor in every link in the supply chain. One of the chief reasons retailers and
merchandisers developed and made contracts with foreign suppliers in the
first place was to escape the high cost of US and European labor. As time went
on, however, a second and even more important reason to contract with
foreign suppliers was for retailers and merchandisers to maximize control
and flexibility over their supply chains. With such controls and flexibility in
hand, retailers and merchandisers were free to expand their consumer markets
around the world, testing one new location after another to see what con-
sumer markets they could make.
As retailers grow larger and more global, they require ever more control and
flexibility over their suppliers. The suppliers, in turn, are expected to turn out
progressively larger orders of goods at decreasing costs per unit item. The
retailers’ expanding supply chains paradoxically have the effect of localizing
manufacturing. Fewer places in the world serve as the primary locations for
firms producing more and more of a particular kind of product. Supply-chain
management identifies niches in the global economy in which competing
firms can develop expertise and economies of scale, and, as this process occurs,
manufacturing firms grow in size and in market power. As discussed in Chap-
ters 8 and 9, huge contract manufacturers have emerged since 2000 to control
sizable percentages of the global market in textiles (Nien Hsing for denim),
garments (Li & Fung), consumer electronics (Hong Hai and Flextronics), and
212
footwear (Pou Chen).2 The same process happens in nearly every sector of
production in which large retailers and merchandisers predominate, includ-
ing the production of food, as Chapter 10 shows.
The next chapters in this part document this process. To achieve maximum
efficiency in time and costs, retailers need large-scale manufacturers and
service providers that flexibly and responsibly do most of the tasks required
to get a product into the store. Global logistics allows those manufacturers to
be located anywhere in the world, in any location that offers retailers and
merchandisers the most advantages in time and cost.
In this chapter, we take the process one step further. The same process that
concentrates manufacturing in specific locations also reshapes the markets for
skilled and unskilled workers. It is, perhaps, inaccurate to call these new
markets for labor global in scope, because labor is not as globally mobile as
the goods that labor produces. Still, supply-chain management makes the
conditions and cost of labor at each link of the chain an object of calculation
in assessing the efficiency of the overall chain. The globalization of
manufacturing and logistics, therefore, has the effect of separating the control
of labor from the actual conditions and locations of work. Supply-chain
managers view labor, like any other component of the supply chain, as a
factor that needs to be assessed and controlled, and manufacturers, wherever
they are located, need to view their workers from the point of view of supply-
chain managers, no matter how distant.
Moreover, these supply-chain managers measure logistical services in the
same way they do manufacturing costs. The transportation and warehousing
sectors must also keep their costs at a minimum, including their labor costs.
Not only production, but also distribution workers’ wages and working con-
ditions must be kept in line in order to keep global production profitable from
the retailers’ point of view.
Logistics and Intermediary Demand
Intermediary demand is the demand generated by what Gary Gereffi (1994b)

calls “big buyers,” who are mostly retailers and trade-name merchandisers. As
a Wal-Mart executive once said, “We don’t sell to our customers; we buy for
them.” The same can be said of all other retailers and merchandisers: they buy
goods in anticipation of what their customers will later buy. Big-buyer pur-
chases create intermediary demand.
This intermediary buying comes in two forms. For many items, especially
for in-store brands, retailers take control of their ordered goods at the site of
production and arrange for the shipment of these goods to their stores.3
For other items, manufacturers and brand-name merchandisers control
213
supply-chain logistics for the branded products that end up in the retailers’
stores. A strong indicator of both types of buying is found in maritime statistics.
Focusing only on ocean transportation of containerized products (which
accounts for over 80 percent of the value of total imports in the USA, the
remainder entering by air or land transportation across the borders), and only
on imports to the United States, we can see the importance of imports and
maritime services in retailers’ management of their supply chains.4 In 2008,
according to Leach (2010: 22), 17,121,000 TEUs (or 20-foot equivalent units,
the standardized measure of container volume; one standardized container
holds two TEUs) were imported into the United States, which in a recession
year had declined slightly from the high point in 2006 (18,611,000 TEUs) to
about the same volume of imports as in 2005. The Journal produces an annual
list of the top 100 shippers (referring to importers, rather than shipowners,
which are known as carriers) that import goods to the United States using
ocean transportation. Of the total TEUs for 2008 ( Journal of Commerce 2009:
22A), 720,000 TEUs, one out of every twenty-four imported containers, was
brought in by Wal-Mart. The next biggest importer was Target, with 445,800
TEUs, and the third was Home Depot, with 300,400 TEUs. Thirty-six of the top
100 importers were retailers, as were six of the top seven, which in addition to
the above included Sears, Lowe’s, and Costco.
Amongst the top 100 importers were also foreign firms that manufacture
electronic goods (for example, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Cannon, Sony, and
Hon Hai), brand-name merchandisers that contract firms to manufacture their
products (for example, Nike, Jarden, Whirlpool, and Mattel), as well as a
number of automotive companies, parts manufacturers, and food distributors
(for example, Dole and Chiquita). All of these firms import goods for which
they supervise the distribution. Giant retailers, however, stand out as the
major maritime importers to the USA, with Wal-Mart being head and
shoulders above the rest.
Wal-Mart’s dominance of the importers’ list is not new, and its lead has
been widening, even in a time of recession. The giant retailer’s growth as an
importer can readily be traced during the first decade of the twentieth century.
In 2001 the company brought in 260,000 TEUs. By 2003 the imports leaped to
471,600 TEUs, again in 2004 to 576,000 TEUs, to 695,000 TEUs in 2005.
Although overall imports fell in 2008 from its high in 2007, Wal-Mart’s total
was 720,000 TEUs for both years. This rise in retailers’ imports is not simply a
Wal-Mart phenomenon, but rather reflects the tremendous growth of manu-
factured imports to the United States in recent years. Target’s imports grew
from 121,000 in 2001 to 445,800 TEUs in 2008, and Home Depot’s rose from
80,000 to 300,400 TEUs over the same period.
To gain some perspective on these numbers, consider the last firm on the list
of the top 100 importers, Dal-tile, a manufacturer of tiles that is owned by
214
Mohawk Industries. Dal-tile imported 10,900 TEUs in 2008, which is 5,450

full containers. That totals about fifteen containers every day of the year, each
of which holds around 30 tons of goods. A lot of importers hover in this range.
Now consider Wal-Mart, which receives and handles the distribution of nearly
1,000 containers, totaling about 30,000 tons of goods, every day of the year.
The ability to manage these imports and get the products to the right store at
the right time is truly the triumph of modern logistics and of Wal-Mart’s
mastery of its supply chains.
The retailer statistics tell only part of the story. These figures reflect only the
containerized products that are imported by the retailers themselves. The
retailers also receive imported goods from brand-name merchandisers that
contract with other firms to make their goods. Nike appears on the list of
the 100 importers as a manufacturer. The athletic shoe producer and retailer,
however, does not own its factories, is well known for offshore contract
manufacturing, and has become the target of several major anti-sweatshop
campaigns. Bringing in 70,200 TEUs in 2008, Nike ranked eighteenth on the
list of importers. Other brand-name merchandisers include Mattel Inc., a toy
manufacturer, which sells the largest proportion of its toys through Wal-Mart,
even though Mattel does its own importing. It is ranked thirty-eighth amongst
the top 100 in the Journal of Commerce list, bringing in 35,900 TEUs in 2008.
Another example is Jarden, a little known factory-less company ranked
fifteenth on the list of importers (80,500 TEUs) that contracts and sells well-
known branded products (for example, Mr Coffee, Sunbeam, Oster, Crock Pot,
and Coleman, amongst others) to a large variety of retailers. And there is
Whirlpool, a well-known manufacturer of home appliances, which is ranked
twentieth on the list and which imports a large number of component parts
and branded products, including KitchenAid, made elsewhere also in factories
that it does not own. Wal-Mart and the other large retailers can be seen as
“indirectly” importing goods like those produced by such brand-name
merchandisers.
As these figures suggest, a very large percentage of all imports worldwide
arrive by sea. Although airfreight is rapidly growing as well, container
shipping remains the cheapest and often the most convenient mode of trans-
porting goods, and, as John Liu noted in the opening paragraph of this
chapter, containerized shipping is a “basic tool of global retailing.” Indeed,
they both grew up together.
In 1956, a year after the shopping center construction boom started, the first
maritime shipment of containers occurred on a voyage between Newark and
Houston. After that opening, the success of containerized shipping was rapid,
although it was not until 1966 that competing carrier companies could agree
on standardized containers (Levinson 2006). Once standardization had
occurred, however, and the risk of competing systems vanished, investments
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began to pour into ships, ports, intermodal connections, railways, and truck-
ing, so that, by the mid-1970s, the world’s major ports were container ports
capable of accommodating larger and larger container ships. And, in general,
the size and importance of these ports followed the size and importance of
international trade in those locations that followed supplier markets for global
retailing.
In 1969, the list of the world’s largest container ports listed only one Asian
port, Yokohama, in seventh place, which had about four times less volume
than first place New York (Levinson 2006: 209). By 1980, New York continued
to top the list, but three of the top five were Asian ports: Hong Kong, Kaoh-
siung, and Singapore. Ten years later, in 1990, four out of the top five were
Asian ports (Kobe, in addition to the three above), and New York had dropped
to ninth place on the list. In 1998, the container port in Shanghai joined the
top ten for the first time; the port in Hong Kong, listed amongst the top ten
since the early 1970s, reverted to China with the retrocession in 1997. By
2000, New York had slipped to fourteenth place on the list, and five of the six
largest ports were in Asia, including Hong Kong and Shanghai. By 2008, all the
top five were Asian ports and New York had fallen to twentieth place on the
list. Of these, three of the top five and seven of the top twenty ports were
Chinese (in order: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Ningbo, Guangzhou,
Qingdao, and Tianjin).
The Rise of China
In 1980, the USA imported $1.1 billion worth of goods from China, far below
Taiwan’s US-bound exports valued at $6.7 billion. By 1990, despite a decade of
rapid growth in US imports from Asia, China still exported only a little over
$15 billion of goods to the USA, by which time Taiwan’s exports to the USA
had grown to about $22 billion. After 1990, however, China’s exports to the
USA (as well as to the rest of the world) leaped forward to over $45 billion in
1995, $100 billion in 2000, $243 billion in 2005, and $337.8 billion in 2008.
In 2008, China’s trading surplus with the entire world was $295.5 billion; in
the same year, China’s trading surplus with the USA was $266.3 billion—the
largest trade deficit ever seen between two countries.5
The rise of China reflects a rapid consolidation of global manufacturing. In
the decades preceding China’s rise, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South
Korea became, increasingly, the primary locations where US retailers and
brand-name manufacturers located suppliers for the consumer goods that
they would, in turn, sell to their customers. As the previous chapter shows,
US retailers and their buyers had taken an active role in creating suppliers that
could competently provide the right goods at the right time at the right price.
216
East Asian manufacturers reacted rapidly to this opportunity to make money

off the global economy by becoming better and better suppliers. In response to
this intermediate buying, as Feenstra and Hamilton (2006) show, each of these
East Asian economies began to diverge through supplying different products
and through developing its own specialized production networks to make
those products.
This divergence accelerated after 1985, when the Plaza Accord led to drastic
upward re-evaluations in East Asian currencies, relative to the US dollar, which
forced many Asian suppliers to shift the site of their low-end manufacturing to
locations where labor costs were not so high. At first, in the late 1980s and
early 1990s, Japanese and Korean manufacturers of labor-intensive products
moved their production lines to South East Asia and Latin America. Japan’s
move to South East Asia was so extensive that Japan appeared to be building “a
regional production alliance” (Hatch and Yamamura 1996). By 1985, facing
higher property and labor costs, Hong Kong manufacturers had already begun
to move their production facilities to the Pearl River Delta region in China.
After hesitating for several years and experimenting with South East Asian
sites, Taiwanese manufacturers followed suit. Starting in earnest in the early
1990s, waves of Taiwanese suppliers moved to China, often after having been
encouraged, and some even required, to do so by US retailers and
merchandisers.
In the 1990s, suppliers often split their production facilities. The labor-
intensive production went to low-wage regions where the manufacturers
could get the best deals: cheap land, low taxes on exports, no unionization for
labor. The production of “up-market” products usually remained in the home
country. The 1990s were also a time when production of high-technology
products took off, and the production of high-technology components and
products pushed Taiwan’s and South Korea’s economies to new heights. In
large part, the success of Taiwanese and South Korean manufacturers resulted
from their close collaboration with US retailers and came at the expense of
Japanese manufacturers, who became their suppliers of technology-intensive
component parts, such as flat-screen panels.
The Asian financial crisis in 1997 marked the beginning of the end of this
growing Asian divergence in the products that East Asian countries produced
for Western suppliers. As many economies in East and South East Asia col-
lapsed, global retailers and East Asian suppliers began to consolidate, respec-
tively, their sourcing and their manufacturing, in China. During this period,
China had demonstrated not only financial stability, but also a willingness to
join the World Trade Organization and to conform to WTO rules governing
trade, which appeared to lessen the risk of investing in China. This conjunc-
ture of events led to huge increases in foreign direct investment (FDI), which
flowed into China from neighboring countries, led by Hong Kong and
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followed first by Taiwan, then Japan and South Korea. Japanese and South
Korean investments poured into northeastern China, which could easily be
reached by ship via the Yellow Sea. Hong Kong and Taiwan investment
initially went into the Pearl River Delta, but later also flowed into the area
around Shanghai. In the opening decade of the new millennium, China
became the site of the world’s leading manufacturers and exporters of con-
sumer products.
In the ongoing debate in the USA and Europe about whether China’s
economic policies are unfairly taking advantage of the rest of the world, very
few analysts discuss the role of global retailers and foreign manufacturers in
China. Nonetheless, more than any other single factor, global retailers drive
China’s exports. More than 50 percent of China’s exports come out of firms
not owned by Chinese nationals (Blonigen and Ma 2010). To this total, we can
add the exports of many other firms that local Chinese do own and operate. It
is obvious that very few Chinese firms make any markets in any products
outside China, and so it is equally obvious that global retailers, brand-name
merchandisers, and a range of trading companies acting as intermediaries
between retailers and manufacturers control most of the market making for
Chinese exports.
Offshore Production and Logistics by Retailers
This realization leads us to the following question: what is the relationship

between global retailers and their suppliers in China? Neither retailers
nor brand-name merchandisers typically own production facilities. Instead,
both arrange with contractors for the production of their goods. Brand-name
merchandisers obviously need to maintain some control over the design
and perhaps even over the manufacture of their branded goods. Retailers,
however, would appear to have a different relationship to their suppliers.
A common assumption is that the relationship is merely arm’s length, that
retailers merely purchase whatever they want to sell from suppliers of those
products, with very little if any intervention into the process of design and
manufacturing.
This may once have been the case, before extensive contract manufacturing
began. But, in recent decades, this distinction between retailers and brand-
name merchandisers has virtually disappeared. For one thing, most global
retailers have successfully developed private-label (or store-label) programs,
where they arrange with manufacturers or contractors to produce their own
label. The result is not very different from the kind of arrangements used by
merchandisers like Nike to get their goods produced.
218
To try to understand the degree to which retailers are involved in produc-

tion in Asia, Bonacich interviewed an important executive of one of the giant
retailers that imports products from Asia and that is fairly high on the list of
top maritime shippers. This person was extremely helpful, but wished to
remain anonymous. The person explained the approach of the giant retailers
to offshore sourcing in Asia. Bonacich asked whether retailers are involved in
Asian production only when they are producing their stores’ private label. The
executive disagreed:
We are involved in all production in Asia, not just private label. We engage in the
direct importing of both private label and branded goods. We work with the
producers, oversee the production of our goods, and set up specifications for our
products. It makes no difference whether the products are branded or private label.
In neither case do we own any factories, so we are always dealing with someone
else’s factories.
This particular retailer has a private-label program that it began about a

dozen years ago. The executive calculated that, if the retailer can get 20
percent better value in a private label than in a branded product, and better
quality at the same time, it switches to private label. It then benchmarks the
private label against the brand. Usually the retailer sells the brand right next to
the private label. Essentially this tactic shows the brand-name merchandiser
that its prices are too high. Pitting lower private-label prices against brand
prices can play a role in driving down industry prices. It seems reasonable
to assume that this has implications for labor standards in these industries
as well.
When this retailer started outsourcing in Asia, it used a broker in the US that
worked with a trading company in Asia. But now the retailer’s policy is to try
to get as close to the factory as possible and to limit the role of brokers and
other middlemen. “We don’t have our own offices in Asia, but some Asian
companies are big enough that they serve as their own broker; so we can buy
directly from them.” In contrast, Wal-Mart has its own offices in Asia. In our
informant’s experience, it is the department stores that especially use buying
agents. They form consortia for group purchasing. The big-box retailers are
generally trying to get rid of all unnecessary middlemen.
How does this retailer use logistics effectively? First, the retailer uses POS
data only for replenishment of items that are selling well. When it decides to
try a new item, it uses its sales history elsewhere to determine the size of the
order. The use of electronic data interchange (EDI) is still growing in Asia,
according to our informant. One of the problems is a lack of a common
standard. Thus, this retailer does not directly use EDI (or vendor-managed
inventory (VMI)) for interacting with Asian suppliers. EDI is used extensively
in the USA, noted the executive, and its use will soon be extensive in Asia too.
219
“Eventually the vendor and retailer community will develop a communica-

tions network to standardize ordering at an international level.”
This retailer uses “just-in-time” practices for anything manufactured
locally. It has daily and sometimes twice-daily deliveries. The company presi-
dent has ordered that there should be only one day’s worth of sales on the
floor. This practice has allowed the company to reduce its number of stock-
keeping units (SKUs) or specific items. Imports, by contrast, are planned
inventories. They are rotated into the stores by SKU. They can be seasonal,
like furniture, which is not replenished and involves a one-time buy, or they
can be constant throughout the year, like men’s shirts, which are restocked
on a regular basis.
Bonacich asked Jon DeCesare, CEO and President of World Class Logistics
Consulting, what he thought about the use of advanced logistics practices by
the big box retailers in Asia.6
The big-box retailers vary a great deal in their sophistication, so you can’t general-
ize. They make general forecasts, and then fill in the details using POS data. In
terms of sophistication, Wal-Mart wrote the book, and rewrites it every day. Target
is trying to keep up, as is Best Buy and Home Depot. For example, Target will
budget shelf space for a certain product, and they lose money if it isn’t there on
time. They reckon they save $100 million for every day they can take out of the
transit time. So the supply chain is incredibly important to them. But what they
mainly seek seems to be visibility, not replenishment orders. They want to make
sure that goods are moving as planned. They want a glass pipeline. They want to
be able to see where their SKUs are.
He thinks Asian manufacturers often do not have direct EDI connections,

where POS data are transmitted electronically to the producer so that it can
take charge of the retailer’s replenishment needs, as is the case with many US
suppliers. Rather, the retailers’ inventory control departments get the POS
data, make adjustments to orders, and then send them out. The producer
then has to be flexible in supplying the goods to the retailers. Essentially,
the retailer “outsources” inventory management to the producers.
An example is Huffy Bicycles, made in China, said DeCesare. Wal-Mart may
order 50,000, which are then delivered to a Huffy warehouse in the USA. Wal-
Mart then asks for them on a just-in-time basis—in smaller lots, like 5,000. But
they also have the power and flexibility to tell them that they do not need
any more after they have received 30,000. Then Huffy is stuck with 20,000
bicycles, which it has to figure out how to unload. “This is a common sce-
nario,” says De Cesare. Hamilton’s interviews with bicycle manufacturers in
Taiwan and China confirm this picture. In fact, one manufacturer complained
bitterly about having to pay storage fees in the USA until Wal-Mart assumed
ownership of the bicycles, which occurred only at the point of sale.
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The Impact of Retailers on Labor in Production
The marriage between retailing and logistics has had substantial effects on
labor markets around the world. Giant retailers use their considerable size and
economic power, directly and indirectly, to pressure manufacturers and ser-
vice providers to improve their efficiency and to lower their costs, including,
importantly, their labor costs. They also exercise their influence on labor
standards in both supplier and consumer markets to push for government
and corporate policies that make labor a flexible component of supply-chain
management. Retailers’ influence has the effect of moving the site of control
over labor from the place of work (for example, the shop floor, the factory) to
the supply-chain managers, who make the crucial decisions about which firms
supply goods and services and at what cost.
It is important to recognize that this shift in the locus of control over labor
does not necessarily lower labor standards. Nor is it, necessarily, the intention
of retailers to do so. In the effort to make supply chains more efficient and
flexible in terms of quality and cost of goods and speed of delivery, retailers
help to “modernize” the economies of developing countries. They force firms
in both developed and developing countries to rationalize their production
and distribution methods. Also, through codes of conducts, which they typi-
cally post on their websites, retailers and brand-name merchandisers may
even improve the conditions and increase the wages of workers in those
firms relative to what they are in other firms in the same location (see our
discussion on this point below). However, whether they improve the condi-
tions and wages for workers or not is an ancillary outcome of the retailers’
most important task, which is efficiently and effectively to manage their
supply chains. And, insofar as they do so, then the supply chains, as well as
the economies in which they are embedded, become demand responsive—
that is, they become effectively organized backward from demand to supply.
The extensive use of contract manufacturing, or outsourcing, is known as
“flexible production.” It is typically praised because it encourages production
on an as-needed basis (limiting the costs of inventory accumulation), and
avoids overproduction of unwanted goods that cannot be sold. Moreover, it
allows for the production of small batches of specialized goods that can be
targeted for specialized consumer groups and tastes. Flexible production is
associated with product differentiation, with the multiplication of styles of
products (and SKUs) of the same brand, such as the array of types and colors of
IPods a customer can buy from Apple.
Flexibility, or contingent relationships, works well for retailers, but makes
life difficult for the contract manufacturers and service providers. In turn,
flexibility also makes life more difficult for the employees of these firms,
employees who face increased contingency in the form of piece-rate,
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temporary and part-time positions, independent contracting, and so forth.

These irregular forms of employment have grown enormously in the United
States in recent years. Contingent workers often suffer from a host of ills,
including not only irregular work, but also low pay and the absence of bene-
fits. Big, stable companies lend themselves to unionization. Contingent rela-
tions make unionization much more difficult. With contingent connections,
big buyers can effectively shut out unionization by shifting work to contrac-
tors in regions or countries where they will not have to deal with “labor
problems.”
The shift in the locus of control over labor to supply chain managers means
that direct employers (the factory owners) cannot support worker organiza-
tions that would undermine their ability to meet the price and quality de-
mands of big buyers, lest they lose their contracts. Contract manufacturers are,
therefore, highly motivated to keep unions out of their factories by any
methods whatsoever. Similarly, regions, export-processing zones, even entire
countries face the same basic logic: if organized labor becomes a force that can
improve wages, benefits, and working conditions, then contract manufac-
turers will become less competitive and will have to move to new locations
to retain their contracts with retailers. In fact, as the next chapter shows,
contract manufacturers often maintain factories in multiple locations, which
allow them to shift production from one site to another, as conditions require.
Rural Migrant Labor in Southeastern China
The system of labor that has emerged in southeastern China is a good illustra-
tion of the indirect impact that retailers have on the conditions of workers
engaged in manufacturing. Southeastern China, especially the large area in
the hinterland of Hong Kong and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta, is the
most important of China’s three main export-producing areas. Many manu-
facturers from Hong Kong and Taiwan have located their factories in this
region, and many Chinese firms have grown up in this area to supply services
and component parts for these foreign-owned factories.
This area of Guangdong province has also been the site of a number of
studies investigating worker conditions in these factories. Because these for-
eign-owned factories are responding to greatly expanded orders for goods, the
factories have grown very large and the number of workers employed is huge
when compared to the size and employment figures of these factories before
they were relocated to China. For example, as described in Chapter 6, the
footwear manufacturer Pou Chen was only a medium-sized firm in Taiwan
before it began to move its manufacturing operations to China in the 1980s.
As reported in Chapter 9, Pou Chen, whose Mainland name is Yue Yuen, now
222
employs over 100,000 people in its Guangdong factories, around 80,000 of

which are employed in one factory alone.
Because so many workers are required for these factories, in 2009, analysts,
relying on Chinese government data, estimated that over 150 million rural
migrant workers have moved from China’s interior provinces to the coastal
provinces where the export-oriented factories are located. The largest ratio of
rural migrant workers to local residents is found in the Pearl River Delta,
“where some 20 million rural migrant laborers live and work” in this relatively
small area (K. W. Chan 2009: 11). These migrants, who make up most of the
labor force for export industries, are denied the rights of urban residents and
are forced to be temporary migrants moving back and forth between the
countryside and the city.7 According to Kam Wing Chan (2009: 10):
The denial of local hukou (residency rights) to migrant workers, combined with
their plentiful supply and lack of access to legal information and support, has
created a large pool of super-exploitable, yet highly mobile or flexible industrial
workforce for China’s new economy, catering to global consumers . . . [The policy]
has served very well China’s economic growth strategy of being the world’s “most
efficient” (lowest cost) producer . . . China can continue to draw labor from rural to
urban areas and export-processing zones without having to raise the wages much
above the rural-subsistence level.
The “China price” is based on China’s low labor costs, which result directly
from China’s policies to maintain this very large pool of temporary workers
who are least able effectively to organize to secure their labor rights (A. Chan
2001).
Because most workers in China’s export-processing factories are migrants,
the factory owners typically provide large dormitories to house their employ-
ees with “anywhere from eight to twenty workers per room” and large cafeter-
ias to feed them (Pun 2009: 158). These dormitories are close, and often even
attached, to the factories themselves. The majority of those living in the
dormitories are young, single women. These workers have little to no privacy,
are closely supervised, and are required to follow the rules and regulations set
forth by the owners. According to Smith and Pun (2006), the “dormitory
labour regime” is unlike the dormitory system found in the paternalistic
textiles factories in nineteenth-century Japan, which was set up to house
single female workers fulfilling multi-year contracts. By contrast, in China,
the dormitory system provides short-term facilities for temporary workers.
These workers work seasonally and intensively, often preferring to work over-
time to earn as much money in as short a time as possible. They provide the
factory with a highly flexible labor force that offers, as a rule, little resistance to
the demands of management. With this system of labor control, argues Pun
(2009; see also Smith and Pun 2006), factory owners can lengthen the work
day, suppress wage demands, access labor on a just-in-time basis, exert direct
223
controls over the labor process, and rely on government policies and rural
families’ need for money to replenish the supply of temporary migrants.
Codes of Conduct and Monitoring
This system of labor control is closely connected to the purchasing system that
retailers and brand-name merchandisers have developed over time. Retailers
and merchandisers are reluctant to hold inventories of goods, and thus they
push inventory management down into the factory, where just-in-time pro-
duction becomes a necessary condition for getting contracts. Factories, as well
as the Chinese government itself, have responded to this evolving system of
export production by developing a just-in-time workforce that is capable of
responding to big buyer demands.
Retailers do not want to be labeled as creators of “sweatshop-like” condi-
tions in factories making products that they have ordered. Fearing the con-
sequences of a bad reputation, most retailers and merchandisers have devised
codes of conduct and systems of oversight that are supposed to ensure com-
pliance from their contract manufacturers. These codes of conduct are typi-
cally posted on the website of these firms, so that all interested parties can see
them. In addition, many of these companies have banded together to form, in
the United States, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), which promotes the
independent monitoring of the global supply chain to prevent labor abuses.
Another group, which began in the United Kingdom but has a global orienta-
tion, is called the Ethical Trading Initiative (Birchall 2007).
Researchers, investigating the extent to which contract manufacturers in
China have implemented these codes of conduct, have come up with counter-
intuitive results. Sum and Pun (2005) find three paradoxes that are outcomes
of the adoption of codes of conduct. First, the competition in contract
manufacturing to engage in “just-in-time, low-cost and fashion-conscious
production,” on the one hand, and the big buyers’ requirement to implement
extensive codes of conduct for labor, on the other hand, have led manufac-
turers to use “compliance with labor codes” as a marketing strategy to obtain
more and larger contracts (Sum and Pun 2005: 197). The name of the contract
manufacturing game is to obtain the contracts in the first place, and, for this
task, adopting a code of conduct is useful, if not necessary.
Second, codes of conduct are doubly useful as a tool to “encourage workers
to cooperate with management to avoid the loss of contracts and hence future
employment opportunities” (Sum and Pun 2005: 197). Summaries of the
codes of conduct are posted on the walls of the factories, where they are visible
to inspectors. In relation to outsiders, such as big-buyer and third-party in-
spectors, managers encourage workers to enter into a “tactical alliance” that
224
protects the factory from social auditing by outsiders. Workers are trained to
answer questions in ways that comply with the code of conducts, even though
the actual conditions of work are quite different.
Third, outwardly adopting a code of conduct requires contract manufac-
turers to develop “elaborate managerial and audit/documentation systems
to defend the [contract manufacturer] against charges of infringing the Code
. . . [Hence] more effort goes into paperwork than into actual advancement of
labour rights protection” (Sum and Pun 2005: 197).
The weakness of the codes-and-monitoring system goes beyond China, as is
shown in an October 2006 revelation that Tesco (the giant British retailer that
belongs to the Ethical Trading Initiative) was producing clothing in factories
in Bangladesh that employed children. According to a Financial Times reporter
(Birchall 2007), “the case illustrated the limits of systems established to moni-
tor conditions in sectors such as clothing, footwear and toys. Wayward fac-
tories have become adept at covering up abuses, and even when monitors flag
problems, little progress seems to be made in reducing them.” A study
(described in the same article) that investigated the effectiveness of the Ethical
Trading Initiative found that monitoring has helped to eliminate child labor
and improve factory safety, but has had little effect on the rights to form
unions and to achieve any job security.
Neil Kearney, of the International Textiles, Garment and Leathers Workers
Federation (ITGLWF)—a federation of trade unions in these industries from
around the world—puts these efforts in perspective:
These [multinational] companies adopt codes of conduct, some of them in very

nice language, but then they negotiate deals which make it impossible for their
contractors to honor the codes. The companies say to the contractor, “Please allow
for freedom of association, pay a decent wage,” but then they say, “We will pay
you 87 cents to produce each shirt. This includes the wage, fabric, everything.”
(cited in Varley 1998: 95–8)
As a leader of an anti-sweatshop group put it: “If retailers are not willing to
change the way they deal with their purchasing practices and be transparent
about that, then codes will never be effective” (Birchall 2007).
US retailers can play a critical role in the reproduction of sweatshops,
whether they intend to or not. The sheer size of their ordering power, coupled
with huge competitive pressures amongst contractors and intermediaries to
win the work, create a breeding pool for sweatshop proliferation. Most impor-
tant, however, is the determination of retailers to cut costs to the bare bone,
which leaves little room for contractors to maintain labor standards.
As an example, let us briefly consider Wal-Mart’s relations with its suppliers in
China, the country where most of its offshore production is located. The home
office of Wal-Mart Global Procurement is in Shenzhen, China. By locating
225
there, the company could exercise great oversight over its suppliers and over the
factories they use (Useem 2004). Wal-Mart, however, is not just a passive
recipient of Chinese-produced goods, but an active producer of those goods.
The company is a major actor in China, not only as an expanding retailer, but,
perhaps more importantly, as a shaper of production. Ex-store manager Leh-
man, interviewed for the television program Is Wal-Mart Good for America?,8
reported that the company’s pressure to cut production and shipping costs is
just as intense in China as in the United States. The “natural” cheapness of
Chinese production is not enough for Wal-Mart. The company puts pressure on
already poor conditions to lower them still further.
Wal-Mart’s procurement staff members are constantly making deals with
hundreds of Chinese manufacturers on a daily basis in order to produce goods
tailored to Wal-Mart’s own stringent specifications; these include pricing,
quality assurance, efficiency, and delivery. Wal-Mart is also known to demand
that its suppliers change their bookkeeping systems and improve their logis-
tics to meet rigid delivery schedules while maintaining the lowest price mar-
gins. In exchange for Wal-Mart contracts, Chinese companies are often
required to open up their books to Wal-Mart, and cut prices where necessary,
if Wal-Mart decides the supplier’s profit margins are too large. Wal-Mart
demands rock-bottom prices and forces its clients to cut costs in order to
remain in contention for export orders.9
In a Wall Street Journal article of November 13, 2003, author Peter Wonacott
tells the following story. Ching Hai is a contract manufacturer that produces
juicers, fans, and toasters for some of the largest retailers, with Wal-Mart as its
largest client. Over the previous decade, the average wholesale price for Ching
Hai’s products had almost halved, from $7 to $4, in order for it to continue
doing business with the stringent cost demands of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s
Chinese producers have had to find ways to lower their costs, which often
leads to further demands on their labor force. Ching Hai was forced to cut its
labor force in half, while maintaining the same level of orders. The company
had a starting wage of $32 a month, which was lower than the local minimum
wage, and a high rate of workplace accidents, and many employees had to
work eighteen-hour days. In spite of all the cost-cutting efforts, the company
was barely profitable. Pun and Yu (2008) also found a similar relationship
between Wal-Mart’s procurement practices and the codes of conduct that
Wal-Mart wants its suppliers to follow.
In December 2006, a Hong Kong-based group, China Labor Watch, accused
Wal-Mart of using suppliers that failed to pay legal wages or to provide proper
working conditions.10 The group surveyed 169 employees at 15 Wal-Mart
suppliers in China and found that some of them paid workers as little as half
the minimum wage, threatened to fire workers if they did not comply with
mandatory overtime, and provided no required health insurance. One
226
company had a single bathroom for 2,000 workers. Some of the firms fined
employees as much as an hour’s pay for arriving one minute late to work. And
some were behind in paying wages.
Labor in Distribution
The process of importing requires various types of labor, including: the work
of seafarers on the container vessels; the work of longshore and other dock
workers; the work of railroad employees, who move the cargo inland; the work
of truckers, who transport ocean containers to railheads and warehouses in
the vicinity of the ports, where they are transloaded for trucking to inland
destinations, and the work of warehouse and distribution center employees.
These workers are the backbone of the logistics system. They are the people
who enable the containerized freight to arrive safely, accurately, and in a
timely manner at your local retail outlets.
Statistics show that US logistics costs have declined significantly since
the early 1980s. They dropped from around 14.5 percent of GDP in 1982, to
8.5 percent in 2003 (Wilson 2004). The logistics industry prides itself that the
reason for this shift lies in all the efficiency gains of supply-chain manage-
ment. Inventory costs have been cut, and so have the costs connected with
most of the modes of freight transportation. Yet we can ask, how much have
these gains been made at the cost of workers? In their study of these questions,
Bonacich and Wilson (2008) found that, in general, conditions have worsened
for logistics workers.
US seafarers used to have strong unions, but their jobs have been almost
entirely outsourced. Steamship companies, which transport containers across
the ocean, often use what are called “flags of convenience.” This involves
registering ships in countries like Panama and Liberia, where there is little or
no regulation of conditions on board the vessels. In addition, the steamship
lines employ crewing companies to recruit seafarers, often from the poorest
countries of the world. While container ships can be cleaner than some other
types of ships, seafarers work for longer hours, as well as much longer tours of
duty, than did US unionized workers. Of course, their pay is a fraction of the
earlier system.
Longshore workers still have good jobs, at least on the Pacific Coast, where
the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) continues to have
considerable clout. The steamship lines and terminal operators that employ
the dock workers, organized as the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), have
made serious efforts to undermine the union. In 2002, during a contract
dispute, they locked ILWU workers out, and brought the Pacific Coast ports
to a halt for eleven days. The lockout failed to break the power of the union,
227
though it did gain some technological concessions for the employers (Olney
2003). However, the union is always under threat, as some very powerful
forces are arrayed against it.
As suggested above, trucking can be divided into a number of types. Here we
focus on one particular area of trucking—namely, port drayage. These truckers
haul containers from the ports to their first drop-off point. In Southern
California this drop-off point is typically either a railhead, where the contain-
ers are loaded onto a train to be shipped to the Midwest or East, or a local
warehouse or distribution center, where the container is unloaded and the
goods are prepared for further shipping to their ultimate destinations.
The truckers engaged in port drayage, or port truckers, used to be members
of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), but their jobs have been
deunionized. This occurred when trucking was deregulated in the late 1970s
and 1980s by the federal government, and many drivers were converted from
employees to independent “owner operators.” In fact, port truckers still work
for trucking companies, but as so-called independent contractors, which
means that they have to own their own rigs and pay for upkeep and insurance.
The switch to non-union truckers was accompanied by a shift from largely
native-born to immigrant drivers. Having broken the union in this field, the
employers switched to a lower-cost labor force.
The railroads have a long history of unionization, and unions are still
prevalent in the industry. But railroad workers have been heavily impacted
by efforts to cut the cost of freight train operations. The principal form that
labor cost cutting has taken is the elimination of thousands of jobs. The
consequence has been that railroad workers have to adapt to difficult work
schedules and to increased danger of accidents.
In terms of warehousing, a major agglomeration of warehouses and distri-
bution centers has been developed just east of Los Angeles County, in the
Inland Empire counties of San Bernardino and Riverside. All the giant retailers,
as well as many smaller ones, maintain import warehouses there. Wal-Mart,
Target, Home Depot, Costco, Sears, Walgreen’s, Staples, Kohl’s, Toys “R” Us,
Big Lots, and Ross Stores are amongst the retailers that run distribution centers
in the area. One of the reasons for locating in this area was the availability of
relatively low-cost land and abundant space for new construction. But another
reason is the relatively low-wage, mainly non-union labor force that lives in
the area. In addition, a huge temporary labor industry has now grown up
around these distribution centers to provide them with contingent workers on
an as-needed basis.
In examining the various groups of workers involved in the logistics system,
Bonacich and Wilson (2008) came to the conclusion that there were four
key features of the changes that had occurred for workers in the previous
twenty-five or thirty years. First, labor has been made more contingent, even
228
precarious. This precariousness is especially true for seafarers (crewing contract

workers), port truckers (independent contractors), and warehouse workers
(temporary employees). Second, workers have suffered from racialization;
that is, they are more likely to be racial and ethnic minorities who are willing
to work for less under more difficult conditions than whites. Third, unions
have declined in most of the jobs, with the exception of dock and railroad
workers. Finally, wages and working conditions have generally deteriorated,
with, for example, much lower earnings for port truckers and seafarers, fewer
and more dangerous jobs for railroad workers, unsteady work for seafarers and
port truckers, and so on.
Role of Retailers in Lowering the Cost of Logistics Labor
It is difficult to trace the exact line of retailer pressure to reduce logistics costs,
and the impact on workers. At one level, this pressure is compacted into a
single transaction: the rates paid to the steamship lines for ocean shipping.
Every year these rates are negotiated, and pressure is put on the steamship
lines to push the rates down.
The steamship line rates are so important because they often encompass
railroad and trucking costs. The steamships frequently offer door-to-door
rates, where a single fee covers the entire cost of transportation from a Chinese
port to the importer’s warehouse in the United States. The lower the rate
negotiated with the ocean carriers, the lower is likely to be the rates that are
paid to the railroad and trucking companies, which in turn translates into
pressure on wages and working conditions all along the line.
The big retailers are known for their ability to get special rates from the
transportation community. They can leverage their huge volume to their
advantage. Wal-Mart, for example, pays a significantly lower rate than the
average-sized importer. The giant retailer “makes the market” on setting
the price for the lowest ocean freight rate, and other importers bargain with
the steamship companies relative to Wal-Mart’s price.
The clearest evidence of retailer interference in logistics labor costs came
with the 2002 West Coast ports lockout. In order to “reform” labor conditions
at the ports, and reduce the power of the ILWU, a new group was formed
called the West Coast Waterfront Coalition (WCWC). (The group persists as
The Waterfront Coalition, or TWC.) This group, amongst which large retailers,
including Wal-Mart, were prominent members, played an important role in
helping to pressure the PMA (and the Bush administration) to take a firm
stand against the ILWU in labor negotiations. Giant retailers, who have so
much at stake in the cost of logistics, wanted to ensure that their interests were
strongly pursued.
229
Conclusion
The continuing advances in global logistics have allowed global retailers to

control their supply chains as if these supply chains encompassed a single,
vertically integrated firm. The scope of these supply chains now spans the
globe. All economies with any connections to global trade feel the effects of
supply-chain management. To a lesser or greater extent, all these economies
are reshaped organizationally through these supply chains.
It is, therefore, a fair question to ask at the conclusion of this chapter, to
what extent can we describe global trade in a world so organized as “free
trade”? In conventional terminology, free trade connotes trade that is unen-
cumbered by government regulations, such as tariffs and tightly controlled
financial systems that fix rates amongst currencies. If that is our definition of
free trade, then, indeed, a trading world organized through retailers’ supply
chains is, by definition, free trade. But, if we add to this definition considera-
tions of monopolistic and oligopolistic restraints on exchange opportunities,
then we see that the huge market-making power of retailers channels the flow
of goods and encumbers all those who, in some way, touch those goods. We
should see this condition as the opposite, rather than the epitome, of free
trade.
The global economy is increasingly an organized economy, organized back-
ward from POS information of consumers around the world. Nations may
argue over the conditions of trade between countries and try through multi-
lateral and bilateral agreements to correct problems that may arise in the
course of balancing national accounts. But most of these arguments evade
the central point of how economies get organized and stay organized. We do
not live in a world that David Ricardo would recognize when he developed the
notion that nations each have their own comparative advantages and that, if
trade were unencumbered by tariffs, trade would naturally move toward an
equilibrium. Rather we live in a world of competitive advantage, where na-
tions and firms create their own advantages and exploit them, if they are able,
at the expense of other nations and other firms.
The market-making perspective developed in this book helps us see that
market making is not a benign process. The creation of one set of opportu-
nities for exchange has the potential to influence and even to shape other
opportunities for exchange. As retailers have grown larger and have harnessed
global logistics to their advantage, they increasingly structure the opportu-
nities for exchange, not only for consumers, but also for manufacturers,
service providers, and workers around the world. At present, retailers wear
this cloak of responsibility very lightly.
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8
Making the Global Supply Base

Introduction
As the preceding chapters have discussed at length, the structure of produc-

tion and trade in the world economy has changed dramatically since the
1960s, when relatively self-contained national economies interacted through
arm’s-length trade in finished goods and raw materials. Retailers and branded
merchandisers in the United States wrested power from manufacturers in
consumer markets in the 1970s and 1980s, in part by establishing their own
low-cost sources of supply in East Asia. Thus, a significant step was taken
toward the creation of a more deeply integrated global economy, where the
various stages of production and consumption are dispersed within increas-
ingly elaborate and spatially extensive global value chains (GVCs). The GVC
perspective directs our attention away from the opposing theoretical poles of
production and consumption toward the integrated, meso-level analytics of
market making; specifically, the making of supplier markets. Intermediate
markets account for about two-thirds of all market transactions (Tininga
1992) and intermediate goods trade for about 60 percent of world trade (see
Figure 8.2 below). Evidence for the rise of GVCs can be found in these statistics
as well; developing countries increased their share of intermediate goods trade
from less than 5 percent in 1988 to more than 30 percent in 2008 (Sturgeon
and Memedovic forthcoming). Trade in intermediate goods is indicative of
GVCs because fragmented production processes require that parts, compo-
nents, and partially manufactured products pass across borders—sometimes
more than once—before finished goods are shipped to final markets (Feenstra
1998).
In our view, the making of supplier markets in East Asia by retailers has been
just one facet of GVC formation. The goal of this chapter is to broaden this
story of global buying, global production, and economic development, and

deepen it by grounding it in a series of company and industry case studies. Our
main point is that the emergence of supplier markets in East Asia has been
driven, not only by retailers and the consumer product manufacturers that
supplied them, but also by manufacturers of brand, technology, and capital-
intensive goods such as computers, communications equipment, white
goods, and motor vehicles seeking new markets and low-cost sources of supply
worldwide. In short, purchasing by global retailers has been part of a broader
pattern of outsourcing and offshoring that has helped to “make” supplier
markets in the East Asia region and elsewhere.
For traditional technology-intensive companies, including multinational
corporations (MNCs) with offshore affiliates handling the chores of foreign
production, domestic outsourcing was often a first step. However, in a very
short time, the largest US-based suppliers had set up global operations and
were producing shoulder to shoulder with local suppliers in developing
countries. Through a process that mirrored the retail consolidation outlined
in Chapter 3, the most successful US-based suppliers quickly became huge
global players, with facilities in scores of locations around the world. A hand-
ful of elite East Asian suppliers also grew rapidly, in part by taking on more
tasks for MNC affiliates, expanding production not only in China, but also in
other Asian countries and, in a few cases, in Africa, East Europe, and Latin
America as well. These two trends, by the end of the 1990s, dovetailed to
create a single dynamic: the rise of a global supply base populated by large,
international, highly capable suppliers, contract manufacturers, intermedi-
aries, and service providers, something unique in the history of the world
economy (Sturgeon and Lester 2004). Thus, our second main point is that the
concept of market making in East Asia is not incompatible with industry
concentration and consolidation. The geographic and organizational frag-
mentation that occurred in the 1980s was followed by concentration in
specific places (for example, China) and industry consolidation as lead firms
and suppliers scaled up in an attempt to meet the challenges of global produc-
tion and competition.
As Gereffi (1994a, 1999) has argued, the role of “lead firm” in GVCs—the
company that defines product characteristics and takes the financial risk of
placing orders and putting products up for sale—has tended to vary signifi-
cantly by industry. In the apparel, footwear, household goods, and agro-food
industries, GVCs have traditionally been “buyer-driven.” As they have
acquired more power in the chain, retailers, in particular, have assumed this
lead firm role (see Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5). In the “producer-driven” chains in
the electronics, white goods, and motor vehicle industries, retailers have accu-
mulated less power and are more passive actors in GVCs. Because of product
complexity and high-quality requirements, lead firms in producer-driven
232
chains tend to exercise more control in GVCs even as they focus less on in-
house production and more on design, marketing, and value-added services.
Because goods in producer-driven chains are technology intensive and, early
on, domestic suppliers lacked technical competence to make the required
inputs, production in East Asia was largely accomplished by MNC affiliates—
a fact examined in great detail in the literature on the MNC (Vernon 1971;
Zanfei 2000; Yamin and Sinkovics 2009).
Although firms have been operating internationally since the days of the
British East India Company, suppliers and supply bases tended to be domestic
and beyond the reach of retailers and buyers without international operations.
Foreign affiliates of MNCs, often motivated by local content rules, gradually
increased their use of local suppliers, but were forced by these same rules to
develop redundant supply relationships in each of the countries or regions
where they produced. By the end of the 1990s, this situation had changed
markedly. The most capable suppliers became more “global” by establishing
new plants, acquiring customer facilities, and purchasing smaller local and
regional producers. Suppliers and supply-chain intermediaries from East Asia
also set up facilities to serve customers from a larger set of locations. With this
new supply base in place, retailers, branded merchandisers, and manufac-
turers, whether they were selling globally or simply seeking to cut operating
costs to compete at home, could quite easily tap into supplier capabilities in
multiple locations without the cost, risk, or time required to set up their own
factories and nurture local supply chains from scratch. The next step was to
simplify these supply relationships by using the same set of global suppliers in
each of the regions where production was carried out.
Thus, the rise of the global supply base is not simply a story of more and
better producers coming on-stream in East Asia to supply MNC affiliates in
producer-driven sectors, nor of retailers in buyer-driven sectors placing
increasingly large orders with firms and intermediaries in East Asia. The two
trends are connected. This chapter lays out how the new global supply base
emerged. It is a complex story, one that has played out differently in various
places and in diverse industries. Indeed, much of our understanding of the
dynamics of GVCs comes from detailed research on how these production
chains have evolved in specific industries. We rely on a series of sector- and
firm-level examples, largely from three sectors that dominate manufactured
goods trade—electronics, apparel, and motor vehicles—to highlight several
different facets of the phenomenon.
In this chapter, we first present some evidence of how suppliers based in
advanced economies, especially US-based suppliers to technology-intensive
industries such as electronics and motor vehicle industries, began to establish
global operations in the late 1980s, and then accelerated their global expansion
the 1990s. Second, we describe how the sourcing strategies of transnational
233
manufacturers, global retailers, and global brands spurred the emergence of a

highly capable and responsive set of contract manufacturers and component
suppliers from newly industrialized countries in East Asia. Third, we examine
the related issues of modularity and consolidation in the global supply base,
and discuss how they have helped to shape it and enable its growth. Finally, we
take stock of the global supply base in light of the extreme volatility that has
repeatedly wracked global markets during the past decade or so, especially the
current global economic crisis.
The Globalization of Developed Country Suppliers
Lead firms did not only increase their reliance on suppliers through their
global buyers and offshore affiliates in the 1990s. Outsourcing was a major
strategy at home too, and as a result domestic suppliers won huge volumes of
new business and grew spectacularly. As US-based companies embraced the
main elements of “corporate re-engineering and restructuring” (Harrison
1994) with its focus on core competence, asset variability, and maximization
of shareholder value, most outsourcing began domestically. In the 1990s,
however, the largest suppliers and service providers in these industries and
product categories developed global-scale operational footprints. In some
instances, the motivation of suppliers was to expand their own market
reach, but more often it was to provide integrated global supply capabilities
for their largest customers.
Within the United States, the movement toward outsourcing began with
non-manufacturing services, such as information technology, accounting,
and call centers. By the 1980s, large companies were also outsourcing routine
business functions such as accounting, legal services, advertising, billing, and
payroll (Rabach and Kim 1994). Firms divested themselves of non-core activ-
ities such as provision of food, security, and janitorial services for their build-
ings. Despite recent alarm in the United States about “services offshoring”
(see Sturgeon et al. 2006), most of these services remain difficult or impossible
to source offshore—for both practical and regulatory reasons—and continue,
in large part, to be provided by home-based suppliers (Batt, Doellgast, and
Kwon 2006; Neilsen 2008). Nevertheless, there are some significant and very
large-scale exceptions to this in industries where processes can be segmented,
linkages between activities codified, and inputs and outputs transmitted elec-
tronically. Examples include call-center-based services, back-office business
functions, IT services, enterprise computing, clinical trials, and contract
medical research. In recent years, the economic geography of these services
industries has begun to resemble the manufacturing industries—consumer
234
goods (household goods, apparel, and footwear), electronics, and automotive

and aircraft parts—that have been driving the growth of GVCs for decades.
The rise of global suppliers has been most pronounced in technology-
intensive manufacturing industries, such as electronics and motor vehicles.
In these industries, it has proved to be a powerful combination for suppliers to
have facilities both at home, to work out the manufacturing details of new
product designs in collaboration with their customers’ design groups, and
abroad, to perform high-volume production in locations with lower costs
and proximity to promising new markets. In some cases, the offshore affiliates
of these large domestic suppliers began to challenge developed country sup-
pliers on their home turf. In other cases, a complementary pattern emerged
where global suppliers rely on “second-tier” developing-country suppliers for
components, services, and as subcontractors. A third pattern is for developed-
country suppliers to specialize in products and services that require the initial
co-location described above.
An example of this division of labor can be found in automotive parts.
Suppliers making “original equipment” automotive parts for use in new vehi-
cle final assembly have a requirement for initial co-location, while suppliers
making “after-market” parts sold to repair shops do not. As a result, first-tier
original equipment parts suppliers are generally global suppliers, while after-
market parts suppliers operating mainly in Taiwan and China have been able
to gain significant market share via exporting alone (Cunningham, Lynch,
and Thun 2005).
Whatever the competitive battles and complementarities that have
emerged amongst developed- and developing-country suppliers, the real
news is that increasing supplier capability is allowing lead firms to implement
global production strategies in ways that were undreamt of in the late 1980s.
Lead firms outsourced to suppliers at home, and demanded that these firms set
up operations offshore, both to serve and to substitute for their offshore
affiliates. These sustained efforts to expand and consolidate their sourcing
networks have helped to create a new class of huge global suppliers in a
range of industries, and supplier consolidation has meant that there are
larger, more capable suppliers to choose from. Global suppliers now have
capabilities—accumulated through internal development and acquisition—
to provide “one-stop shopping” for lead firms seeking regional and global
supply solutions. This new class of suppliers has internalized many of the
most difficult and costly aspects of cross-border integration such as logistics,
inventory management, and the day-to-day management of factories, call
centers, and engineering centers. To provide some detail, we briefly present
several examples from the electronics and automotive industries.
235
Global suppliers in the electronics industry

In the electronics industry, a combination of globalization, outsourcing, and
vertical bundling in the 1990s helped to push a small but elite set of supplier
firms to move quickly beyond their traditional cluster- or national-scale foot-
print to become global in scope. Vertically integrated lead firms with global
operations, including Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel, Ericsson, and Apple Computer,
sold off most, if not all, of their in-house manufacturing capacity—both at
home and abroad—to a cadre of large and highly capable US-based contract
manufacturers, including Solectron, Flextronics, Jabil Circuit, Celestica, and
Sanmina-SCI (Sturgeon 2002; Sturgeon and Lee 2005).1
Solectron (acquired by Flextronics in 2007) provides an example of how
these contract manufacturers expanded. The company was concentrated in a
single campus in Silicon Valley from its founding in 1979 through the 1980s.
In 1991 Solectron’s key customers in Silicon Valley, including Sun Microsys-
tems, Hewlett Packard, and Cisco Systems, demanded that Solectron provide
global manufacturing and process engineering support. The company went
on an acquisition-fueled binge of global expansion and revenue growth; by
2001 the company’s footprint had grown to more than 135 facilities world-
wide, and annual revenues had increased from $265 million to $12 billion. In
the process of this expansion the company gobbled up competitors, expanded
customer facilities, and acquired an array of specialized firms with capabilities
that allowed the company to offer a much broader package of services. In just a
few short years, Solectron had morphed from a humble, if highly respected,
regional contract manufacturer (the company won the Malcolm Baldridge
Quality Award in both 1991 and 1997) to become the largest manufacturing
firm that no one had ever heard of; a quintessential global supplier.
An example of a global electronics contract manufacturer that emerged as a
lead firm spin-off is Celestica, an in-house manufacturing division of IBM that
was spun off as an independent company in 1996. At the outset the firm had
only two production locations, a large complex near Toronto, Canada, and a
small facility in upstate New York, since closed. By 2001, after completing
twenty-nine acquisitions of customer and competitor facilities, Celestica had
accumulated nearly fifty facilities in North America, South America, Western
and Eastern Europe, and Asia, and annual revenues had soared to more than
$10 billion.
In the round of consolidation that followed the bursting of the technology
bubble in 2001, Flextronics (listed in Singapore but managed from San Jose,
California) emerged as the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, a
position that was further solidified through its acquisition of number-two-
ranked Solectron in 2007. Flextronics’ 2009 revenues were slightly less than
$31 billion. Aside from dozens of stand-alone factories and technology centers
236
around the world, Flextronics, with its strategy of “vertical integration,” oper-
ates nine huge “industrial parks,” where it has invited many of its most
immediate suppliers of product-specific components (bare printed circuit
boards and plastic enclosures) to co-locate with its final assembly plants for
rapid response in regional markets.2
The sale and spin-off of in-house manufacturing and parts operations
underline the structural shift that was occurring in these industries from in-
house production to global outsourcing, and the accumulation of this off-
loaded capacity within a relatively small number of huge suppliers shows the
dramatic consolidation and increasing integration of the global supply base.
But outsourcing, as such, does not tell the entire story. In the electronics
industry, fast-growing lead firms with little if any in-house production cap-
acity, such as EMC, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and Silicon Graphics, also
demanded that suppliers provide global support.
In some key locations, lead firms did not necessarily have plants to sell or
spin-off, especially in newer locations such as China and Eastern Europe.
Because of this, a great deal of the global expansion of suppliers in the 1990s
was either “organic” in character, involving the enlargement of existing facil-
ities and the establishment of new, “greenfield” plants,3 or achieved through
the acquisition of regional suppliers, in what some industry participants refer
to as the “rolling-up” of regional supply bases into an (albeit imperfectly)
integrated global supply base.
Global suppliers in the motor vehicle industry

In the motor vehicle industry, outsourcing and vertical bundling also
exploded in the 1990s. Employment in final assembly and in parts had main-
tained a rough parity since 1929, but after 1985 employment began to
shift dramatically into the parts sector. By 2000, parts employment stood at
61.4 percent of total sector employment, up from just 49.1 percent in 1985
(US Bureau of Labor Statistics, cited in Sturgeon and Florida 2004: 54). What is
hidden by these statistics is the employment that supplier firms added by
establishing and buying operations outside the United States.
Consider the example of Lear, which began the 1990s as a seat manufacturer
for the American Big 3 automakers. By 2000, Lear had grown to 120,000
employees working at more than 200 locations in 33 countries, making a
full range of automotive interior parts and systems that were used in vehicles
bearing nameplates as diverse as Pontiac, Suzuki, Hyundai, Isuzu, Jaguar,
Mazda, Opel, Ford, VW, Porsche, Mercedes, Chrysler, Saab, Subaru, Fiat, Dae-
woo, Renault, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda, Audi, BMW, Peugeot, Nissan,
Volvo, and Rover. As a result, the company rose from the world’s thirteenth
largest automotive supplier in 1995 to the fifth largest in 2000, with record
237
sales of $14.1 billion. Since then, Lear has suffered from the severe financial
difficulties plaguing the automotive supply base, along with most other large
suppliers. While 2008 revenues and employment are down from the peak in
2000, the company’s geographic footprint has continued to expand.4
The spin-off of the internal parts divisions of General Motors and Ford in
the late 1990s created the world’s two largest and most diversified automotive
parts suppliers almost overnight, Delphi and Visteon. Because they were spun
out of huge parent firms with strong international operations, these “new”
suppliers were born with a global footprint and the capability to supply
complete automotive subsystems. For example, Visteon was born with broad
capabilities in chassis, climate, electronics, glass and lighting, interior and
exterior trim, and power trains. In 2000 the company operated 38
manufacturing plants in the USA and Canada; 23 in West Europe; 21 in
Asia; 9 in Mexico; 6 in East Europe; and 4 in South America; system and
module engineering work was carried out in 1 facility in Japan, 3 in Germany,
3 in England, and 4 in the United States. Like Lear and other large global
suppliers with significant business with the American automakers, Visteon has
experienced deep financial trouble in recent years. Nevertheless, the com-
pany, in 2010, still has a global footprint, with 21 manufacturing facilities
and 2 technical centers in the United States and Canada, 8 manufacturing
facilities and 2 technical centers in Mexico, 43 manufacturing facilities and 5
technical centers in Asia Pacific, 23 manufacturing plants and 10 technical
centers in Western Europe, 8 manufacturing plants and 2 technical centers in
Eastern Europe, and 6 manufacturing facilities in South America. The shift, in
the main, has been from the United States and Western Europe to Asia.
The emergence of global suppliers was mostly, but not solely, a phenome-
non of American firms. European and a few Japanese motor vehicle parts
suppliers followed their customers into new markets and went on acquisition
sprees to gain both a global footprint and the ability to supply larger sub-
systems of the car. Examples include Continental, Bosch, and Siemens
(Germany), Valeo (France), and Yazaki and Denso ( Japan).
By the late 1990s it had become a requirement for automotive suppliers,
large electronics contract manufacturers, and suppliers in several other sectors
to have a global footprint. In separate interviews conducted in 2000, Sturgeon
and Lester (2004: 69–70) quote managers at two global automotive suppliers
as saying:
The industry began to change 5–10 years ago. If a supplier doesn’t have a global
strategy, it can’t bid. New projects are no longer seen as an opportunity to expand
globally—instead, a supplier must have a global base in place to even make a bid.
This forces suppliers to have a global supply system in place.
238
Suppliers must support assemblers as a sole source for global product lines to
support commonalization. We must supply the same part, with the same quality
and price, in every location. If [the automaker] says to go to Argentina, we must go
or lose existing, not just potential, business. Logistics are becoming a key competi-
tive advantage; we must have the ability to move production to where customer’s
facilities are.
Here we see market making in action. Globalization and consolidation in

the automotive supply base were driven by management strategy at lead firms,
first to divest their companies of the high fixed costs and labor needs of
business functions related to production and back-office work, and, second,
to demand that their key suppliers support them on a global basis to increase
scale, reduce transaction costs, decrease redundancy, and increase the com-
monality of products and processes worldwide.
The Rise of East Asian Transnational Suppliers
In the previous section, we argued that global buyers in “buyer-driven” GVCs

were not the only actors responsible for the expansion of GVCs, and that
domestic outsourcing in “producer-driven” GVCs soon morphed into global
outsourcing, as domestic suppliers were driven by customers to set up global
operations (Gereffi 2006). In this section, we examine the rise of an indi-
genous East Asian transnational supply base through a series of “best case
studies” of successful local supplier development in East Asia.
Foreign affiliates of MNCs were set up in East Asia and elsewhere during the
1970s and 1980s to lower costs and gain access to local markets. Over time,
offshore affiliates began to use local suppliers for a broader range of inputs,
materials, and services. In some cases, locals employed at these foreign affili-
ates used what they had learned to establish firms to supply their former
employers and others like them. As more functions were shifted out of the
affiliates and supplier competence grew, the affiliate activities, gradually
and unevenly, shifted to higher-value functions such as purchasing inputs,
adapting products to local markets, working with suppliers on new product
introduction, and coordinating regional activities.
In the 1990s, some of the leading developing country suppliers from places
such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, in response to customer demands
to lower costs and to produce within large emerging markets such as China,
began to set up offshore facilities of their own. The combined demand from
global buyers and transnational affiliates helped to create a new class of
transnational supplier based in East Asia (Bonaglia, Goldstein, and Mathews
2007; Yeung 2009). In the apparel industry there was an additional motivation:
239
to tap the available quota for export to the United States under the Multi-Fiber
Agreement (MFA). This triggered investment in countries that would not
otherwise have large-scale apparel assembly, such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
In contrast to the pattern set in the 1970s and 1980s, control did not migrate to
local suppliers in these new locations. Rather, customer service and network
coordination functions stayed in the suppliers’ headquarters in Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Korea, and Singapore, while production was partially and sometime
completely relocated to less-developed countries.
Gereffi (1994a) calls this pattern “triangle manufacturing,” with developed-
country buyers, Hong Kong and South Korean intermediaries, and developing-
country factories creating a tripartite spatial division of labor. On top of this,
regional production systems, in which American and European apparel man-
ufacturers had been steadily moving production to nearby countries with
lower costs, such as Turkey, Morocco, Mexico, and the Caribbean Basin,
began to be penetrated by a few of the largest East Asian manufacturers and
intermediaries. As more countries were added over time, more complex
regional and even global-scale production systems emerged, with coordination
functions handled by East Asian suppliers and intermediaries. In the following
sections, we show the variety of paths to international production using a few
case studies.
South Korean investment in the Indonesian apparel industry

The role of firms from South Korea in developing the Indonesian apparel
industry shows clearly how foreign direct investment (FDI) within Asia cre-
ated more elaborate production networks over time. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
South Korea dominated garment exports in the 1960s and 1970s. In South
Korea, much of the export business was organized through intermediaries,
especially large trading companies who “played a pivotal brokerage role, link-
ing designers and buyers from the developed core nations to the small Korean
businesses that are the direct producers of the clothing” (D. Smith 1996: 222).
These same intermediaries linked garment producers to producers of textiles
and other inputs located in South Korea. As a result of their control over the
export quotas established under the MFA, firms wishing to export to the USA
tended to work through these traders (Gereffi 1999).
In the 1980s, one of the responses of Korean manufacturers and traders to
rising labor costs in South Korea was to move factories offshore—to China,
Indonesia, Central America, and elsewhere. Korean manufacturing FDI in the
ASEAN-4 countries increased dramatically at the end of the 1980s. The total
for the three years 1987–9 was four times the total for the previous fourteen
years, and 55 percent of this manufacturing investment went to Indonesia.
Many foreign-owned clothing factories were set up, enabling Indonesia to
240
move from thirteenth place to eighth place amongst global garment exporters
between 1988 and 1992. About one-third of foreign-owned plants were set up
by South Korean firms, and another third were established by firms from Hong
Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore (Shin and Lee 1995: 187).
As with the contract garment assembly plants used by US companies in
Mexico and Central America, the new Indonesian plants were inserted into a
much broader division of labor. In many cases, they used materials and
equipment supplied from South Korea. Two-thirds of their inputs were im-
ported and two-thirds of output was exported (Dicken and Hassler 2000: 270).
The plants were also linked with their parent company’s marketing operations
and through these to global buyers in the United States and Europe. A Taiwan-
ese apparel manufacturer in Indonesia described how orders arrived at the
plant:
90% of our orders for Indonesia are coming from our Taiwanese head office. The
remaining 10% are orders from agents and representative offices in Jakarta. The
Taipei office is working with the buying offices directly in America or their repre-
sentative offices in Hong Kong or Singapore. Our main market is the US where we
sell 80% of our products. (cited in Dicken and Hassler 2000: 275)
Similar processes were evident in China, where firms from Hong Kong and
Taiwan created complex value chains with chain management and chain
coordination functions at home and production operations in China. In
many cases, firms from Taiwan and Hong Kong have relocated manufacturing
plants to the Chinese mainland, but maintained ownership.
East Asian intermediaries: The case of Li & Fung

As we have seen in the case of South Korea, intermediaries (Spulber 1996,
1998) have played an important role in the rise of East Asian-based GVCs.
Intermediaries help to create supplier markets by matching manufacturers
with the right requirements to retailers and branded marketers seeking pro-
duction in East Asia and beyond. The largest and best known of these com-
panies is Li & Fung, a Hong Kong-based firm that specializes in sourcing for
global buyers of apparel and household goods. Li & Fung coordinates produc-
tion for many large American branded garment merchandisers and retailers,
such as Donna Karan and the Gap. The company’s website defines it as “one of
the premier global consumer products export trading companies managing
the supply chain for high-volume, time-sensitive consumer goods.”5
Li & Fung offers a full service package for customers, taking responsibility for
product development, the sourcing of inputs, management of all manu-
facturing processes—while owning only a handful of plants itself—and out-
bound logistics. The difference between this division of labor and value-chain
241
configurations in which sourcing is done through specialist traders is that the

retailer or branded marketer plays a role in product development. The extent
of this role will depend upon the competitive strategy and market position
of the buyer. Branded marketers and high-end retailers generally regard prod-
uct development as an important part of their competitive advantage, while
low-end retailers are often content to define broad concepts and to follow
fashion trends, leaving the product-development process to intermediaries
and manufacturers.
Global expansion began in earnest at Li & Fung in the mid-1990s, mainly
through the acquisition of sourcing networks controlled by British-owned
Hong Kong-based trading companies. The acquisition of one such competitor,
Inchcape Buying Services, doubled the company’s size and provided a cus-
tomer base in Europe to complement its strength amongst American retailers.
To support the new business from Europe, Li & Fung strengthened its sourcing
relationships in India, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean basin. In 1999
and 2000, Li & Fung further broadened its customer base in the United States
and Europe through the acquisition of three more of its Hong Kong-based
rivals, Swire & Maclaine Ltd, Camberley Enterprises Ltd, and Colby Group
Holdings Ltd. The company also acquired Disney Sourcing, the consumer
products sourcing arm of Disney International with responsibility for stocking
Disney stores worldwide. By 2001, two-thirds of Li & Fung’s revenues were
being generated through its acquisitions. Revenues grew from $750 million in
1995 to more than $14 billion in 2008.
By the end of 2000, Li & Fung had acquired a global footprint, and in 2009
the company had approximately 14,000 direct employees working in 80
offices in 40 countries. About one-third of these offices are located in devel-
oped countries, mainly Europe and the United States (but also in South Korea,
Taiwan, and Japan), to provide customer support services. Most of the remain-
ing offices are located in developing countries, mainly in China (18), South
Asia (12), and South East Asia (9), but also in Turkey, Egypt, Romania, Poland,
South Africa, Mauritius, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
These offices provide supply-chain management services for the company’s
network of 12,000 suppliers, mainly contract garment and household goods
manufacturers.
This strategy of intermediaries such as Li & Fung is to separate the service
elements in the supply relationship from the production elements. This
approach has advantages and disadvantages. It gives the intermediaries a
free hand to find producers in various countries, and, in the case of the apparel
industry, the MFA and preferential trade deals such as the African Growth and
Opportunity Act (AGOA) have provided many opportunities for firms that can
source production from multiple locations. The disadvantage lies in the lack
of control over production and limited opportunities to introduce process
242
innovations and cost controls. The danger, as always for the trader, is that the
manufacturer and the buyer will deal directly with each other. In fact, this has
happened again and again, as both manufacturers and buyers have gained
competencies. Li & Fung has tried to shore up its position by offering turn-key
solutions, including product design services, and by helping buyers assure
their customer that their products meet labor and environment standards
with its “responsible sourcing” program.6
The case of Singapore’s Beyonics

To get a more finely tuned look at how outsourcing by MNC affiliates has
helped to drive supplier upgrading in East Asia, let us now turn to the case of
the Singapore-based firm Beyonics. The case reveals a common dynamic of
affiliate outsourcing, local learning, entrepreneurship, supplier upgrading,
regional expansion, and organizational consolidation. In 1981, two Singapor-
ean engineers decided to start their own company after they had been laid off
from the Singaporean subsidiary of the German camera manufacturer Rollei.
Seeing that the local tool and die business in Singapore was underdeveloped—
because most foreign firms tended to bring in their own tooling—the two set
up their own tool and die shop on a chicken farm owned by one of the
founder’s parents. From their experience at Rollei they knew that advanced
lathes for precision metal cutting spin very fast, but could be stopped quickly
to make rapid set-up changes. The two retrofitted some inexpensive lathes
with motorcycle brakes to achieve the desired effect. The company, which was
originally called Uraco, generated $700,000 in revenues during its first year of
operation, mostly by supplying precision metal parts to American disk-drive
producers, which were investing heavily in manufacturing in Singapore and
Malaysia at the time (Business Times Online 1995).
As Uraco grew, it began to supply a wider range of products to the disk-drive
industry, including precision metal stampings and assembled electronic cir-
cuit boards. Most of the company’s business was with Seagate, the leading
American disk-drive manufacturer, but the company also exported precision
parts to Hitachi’s disk-drive operations in the Philippines. Because of the
extreme volatility in disk-drive and PC markets, in 1987 managers began
the first of many efforts to diversify Uraco’s customer base by distributing
electronic components, eventually winning distributorships from Motorola,
Harris Semiconductor, and Siemens.7
In the mid-1990s, the company began to leverage its experience with elec-
tronic components, contract manufacturing, and warehouse management to
manufacture and sell products of its own design, including connectors, crys-
tals, automated warehouse vehicles, electronic ballasts for fluorescent lamps,
light bulbs, and telecommunications products. Ultimately, these attempts
243
were not successful, and the bulk of Uraco’s business remained in providing
contract manufacturing services and precision-engineered metal parts to for-
eign firms operating in the South East Asian region. As traditional distribution
networks in the region matured, the need for the company’s distribution
services waned as well.
Nevertheless, in 1995 the company underwent a successful initial public
offering on the Singaporean stock exchange. In 1996, as revenues were ap-
proaching $53 million, Uraco won an important contract to manufacture
flatbed scanners for Hewlett Packard. In this year the company was operating
82,000 square feet of production space in three Singaporean factories, and
165,000 square feet of nearby production space in five factories in Johor and
Selangor, Malaysia (Business Times Online 1996a). In 1997, the firm reorganized
its business into three divisions: precision machining, contract manufacturing,
and investment (Business Times Online 1996b, 1997). The company’s troubles
were not over, however, and flagging profitability led to a management reshuf-
fle in 2000 and a name change, to Beyonics, in 2001. The company returned to
profitability in 2001, when it generated nearly $300 million in revenues, with
62 percent coming from contract manufacturing services, 29 percent from
precision engineering, and 9 percent from distribution (Geocities 2004).
The company’s product and service offerings are electronics manufacturing
services (that is, contract manufacturing), medical and consumer plastic injec-
tion molding and assembly, precision engineering services, precision metal
stampings, and precision tooling design and fabrication services. This is a
highly focused and complementary product portfolio, covering many of the
processes and a few of the basic products required to produce a wide variety of
electronics and closely related goods. The company has followed the rest of
the electronics contract manufacturing industry toward the bundling of ser-
vices to enable the production of complete products through its acquisitions
of precision plastic moldings suppliers Techplas (in 2000) and Pacific Plastics
(in 2002). In 2003 the company merged with a similar Singaporean contract
manufacturer, Flairis Technology Corporation, to achieve additional econo-
mies of scale and scope. The company’s distribution activities and attempts at
selling its own branded products have been dropped entirely.
With this tighter focus the company has expanded dramatically. According
to the market research newsletter Manufacturing Market Insider, Beyonics reven-
ues of $1.57 billion (with a razor-thin net profit of 0.3 percent) ranked the
company thirteenth on a list of the world’s largest electronics contract manu-
facturers in 2008.8 Through a combination of internal expansion and acquisi-
tion, Beyonics has developed a solid regional manufacturing footprint,
most notably by establishing “vertically integrated” electronics contract
manufacturing campuses in Kulai, Malaysia, in 2005; Suzhou, China, in 2006;
244
and Batam, Indonesia, in 2007. In 2010, the company operated 16 facilities: 3 in

Singapore, 6 in Malaysia, 3 in China, 2 in Thailand, and 2 in Indonesia.9
While Beyonics may have grown much larger than most local firms in East
Asia that started as suppliers to MNCs, there are several lessons to be drawn
from this “best” case. First, Beyonics’ managers demonstrated the use of
dynamic capabilities (Teece 2009) for sensing opportunities, seizing them,
and transforming the company as needed. Second, they stumbled by trying
to diversify and develop their own products, which required end-user market-
ing competences they had not yet developed, but recovered when they refo-
cused on providing producer services to MNCs in the region. Third, like most
large electronics contract manufacturers, Beyonics has struggled to remain
profitable, even as the company has grown rapidly. Fourth, as the company
expanded, it chose a variety of lower-cost locations within East Asia, balancing
its investments in China with locations in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.
What the Beyonics case illustrates most dramatically, however, is how with
enough time (a twenty-eight-year span in this case), local firms with extremely
humble roots have been able to grow, master advanced technologies, and set
up multiple locations in East Asia, largely by serving American MNC affiliates
in the region. Here, we see market making in East Asia, not via arm’s-length
buying by retailers and branded manufacturers in the United States, but by the
combination of local sourcing (import substitution) by MNCs operating in the
region with sustained efforts by local entrepreneurs who rely, at least in part,
on local capital markets to raise the funds needed for regional expansion.
Taiwan’s electronics contract manufacturers

While there are significant PC components, subsystems, and peripheral de-
vices in which Taiwan-based firms are not active—namely, software, printers,
hard disk drives, and higher-value semiconductors such as microprocessors
and memory—the sum of the capabilities that have emerged in Taiwan com-
prise a powerful, agile supply base for the design, manufacture, and delivery of
PCs and related products, especially notebook computers.10 Working in close
geographic proximity, mostly along the Taipei–Hsinchu corridor in Taiwan,
this supply base grew to constitute an extremely efficient system that could
respond very rapidly to orders from lead firms (Dedrick and Kraemer 1998).
Notebook computers, which generally have a high enough value-to-weight
ratio to make air shipment viable, can be shipped to customers within two to
three days of incoming orders.
This powerful productive engine has developed, almost in its entirety, in
response to orders from lead firms based in the United States, and more
recently Japan. At the same time, the development of contract manufacturing
in Taiwan and elsewhere has provided lead firms with an increasing range of
245
sourcing options. This process of co-evolution has meant that Taiwan’s elec-
tronics industry has been able to develop without a significant cadre of local
lead firms. From the late 1970s to the present day, sourcing from Taiwan has
expanded from computer monitors, to various components and subsystems,
to complete desktop and notebook PC systems.
Firms from the American PC industry have played an especially important
role in the development of Taiwan’s electronics contract manufacturing sec-
tor. In the early 1980s, IBM began sourcing PC monitors from television and
television tube producers in Taiwan, including Tatung and Chung Hua. As the
demand for PCs expanded rapidly and the open architecture of IBM-compati-
ble PCs became firmly established in 1984 with the IBM model AT, some
entrepreneurial firms in Taiwan, such as Acer and Mitac, recognized the
opportunities and moved aggressively to develop the capability to design
PCs and peripheral devices based on the emerging standard. IBM’s modular
system architecture relied on a central processing unit supplied by Intel and
on an operating system from Microsoft, and, because the contracts famously
did not block Intel and Microsoft from selling to IBM’s competitors, a bevy of
new entrants, intense price competition, and a series of boom and bust cycles
soon followed. These conditions caused contract manufacturing to become a
popular strategy for lead firms in the United States seeking to cut costs and
limit investments in fixed capital.
The surging demand for contract manufacturing services encouraged exist-
ing Taiwan-based contract manufacturers producing consumer electronics
and electronic components, such as Hon Hai, to develop capabilities to assem-
ble PCs. Then, in the late 1980s, a set of firms that had been focused on the
design and manufacture of hand-held calculators entered the field. These
firms, which included Quanta, Compal, and Inventec, eventually became
the dominant notebook computer producers, in part because the design and
assembly competencies that drove miniaturization in calculators were well
suited to notebook computers, where small size, low weight, and efficient
power consumption are key factors for success. Although much simpler,
calculators are similar to PCs in that they are built around a central processing
unit that determines system architecture and most of the product’s
functionality.
The modular system architecture of PCs, and the dominant role of the
central processing unit (CPU) and operating system software in setting system
architecture, along with intense competition and short product life cycles,
created the conditions for the emergence of a set of firms that specialized in
the iterative, post-architectural portions of product design. This includes, for
example, the board-level input/output system (BIOS) of the PC, which deter-
mines how the machine handles the input and output from its main board to
the other elements of the system, such as storage and displays; and industrial
246
design, which determines the physical appearance of the product. However,

because most functionality resides in chips sets and software—system ele-
ments that computer producers do not design—control over the innovative
trajectory of the industry has continued to reside in “platform leaders” such as
Intel and Microsoft (Gower and Cusumano 2002), which have traditionally
worked closely with branded PC firms on future requirements. However, as
the notebook format has come to dominate consumer PC sales, and branded
PC firms have either left the business (IBM) or changed their business focus to
bundling services with PCs (Hewlett Packard), Intel has begun to work more
closely with Taiwanese firms on the requirements for next generation CPU
design (Kawakami 2008).
The story of lead firm, supplier, and platform leader co-evolution that we
have outlined here reveals a powerful dynamic of outsourcing, upgrading, and
subsequent outsourcing; the enabling role of open standards and modular
product architecture in PCs; the intense competition and rapid product life
cycles that drove lead firms to seek to spread risk and lower costs through
outsourcing; and the entrepreneurial agility that many firms in Taiwan dis-
played in shifting to export production by recognizing and seizing new op-
portunities to specialize in narrow segments of the value chain. But there were
two other important factors that have not yet been discussed. The first is the
Taiwanese government, which helped by licensing, refining, and disseminat-
ing foreign technology and encouraging, and in some cases underwriting, the
entry of local firms into promising market areas, especially for IT-related
products. The second is the role of Japanese technology partners, which
provided critical technologies and components, such as disk drives, but with
little support and with restrictions, such that Taiwanese firms were inhibited
from building on the technology to develop independent product develop-
ment strategies. Licensing agreements of this kind have continued to be
important in Taiwan’s flat panel display industry (see Akinwande, Fuller,
and Sodini 2005).
The migration of Taiwan’s electronics production to Mainland China began
in the mid-1990s, following Compaq’s demand for a sub-$500 desktop PC.
The migration started with components and peripherals, and then spread
to the assembly of desktop PCs and motherboards, with the latest stage
being notebook computers. As sales of notebook PCs expanded rapidly, sur-
passing desktop units in the early 2000s, production in Taiwan soared from
2.3 million units in 1995 to a peak of 14.3 million in 2002. After 2002,
notebook PC production in Taiwan dropped just as rapidly, even as Taiwanese
firms produced a larger share of the world’s output, reaching 92 percent in
2008. At the same time, production by the largest five Taiwanese notebook PC
producers—Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, and Asustek—grew to more
than 70 million units in 2006.
247
Under the tight control of headquarters in Taiwan, manufacturing subsidi-

aries co-located with their component suppliers to respond to the time-to-
market, ramp-up, and cost-reduction requirements set by lead firms. This
migration contributed to the dramatic expansion of two industry clusters for
electronics manufacturing, one in the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong and
the second in the Yangze River Delta region near Shanghai. Smaller Taiwanese
contract manufacturers and component suppliers were not able to make this
move, leading to a dramatic consolidation amongst firms specializing in
notebook PC production: the number of Taiwanese notebook PC producers
fell from forty-five in 1993 to only twenty-one in 2006, with market share
shifting dramatically in favor of the largest five producers (Kawakami 2008).
Modularity, Consolidation, and Crisis in the Global Supply Base
The making of the global supply base was enabled by the deployment of
information technologies, which, along with better standards for sharing
information, enabled companies to achieve more precise forms of coordina-
tion, even with highly complex and technologically sophisticated products
and processes, a mode of governance that we have referred to elsewhere to as
value-chain modularity (Sturgeon 2002; Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon
2005). By the end of the 1990s, the depth and breadth of the global supply
base, along with new Internet-based tools for buyer–supplier matchmaking,
quotation, and operational coordination, was opening a new chapter in the
development of the global supply base, in which the barriers to global sour-
cing could fall far enough to encourage smaller and less technologically adept
retailers and start-ups to engage in global sourcing.
On the supply side, new requirements to respond rapidly to buyers and
make timely deliveries of complex products from multiple locations around
the world put a premium on size and technological competence, and raised
barriers for new entrants. Smaller local suppliers in developing countries were
often relegated to the margins of the value chain, if they were included at all.
The result was a process of consolidation, where the largest suppliers gained at
the expense of smaller, regional producers. Today, in the midst of an unprece-
dented global economic slowdown, the survival of this system has come into
question on several fronts. Even prior to the current crisis, supplier profitabil-
ity in some sectors, such as automotive and electronics, had been low to
negative for many years (Sturgeon, Van Biesebroeck, and Gereffi 2008).
Repeated severe economic cycles, previously contained within specific regions
and industries, and now being experienced across the board, have exacerbated
this persistent low profitability in the global supply base, triggering a wave of
plant closures and driving some of the largest and most capable firms to
248
financial ruin. Nevertheless, prior experience reveals that outsourcing and

offshoring have not reversed following economic crises.
Value-chain modularity
The making of the global supply base has been enabled by rapid advances in
computerized design, automated production planning and inventory control,
logistics and production planning software, and robotic manufacturing equip-
ment. Tighter integration between lead firms and suppliers has been facili-
tated by the development of global industry standards (both open and de
facto), not only in the electronics industry, where standards at the component
level have created modularity in system design, but in all global industries. For
example, even when components are unique to specific products and design
architecture is integral and proprietary, as they are in the motor vehicle
industry, information technology can help firms coordinate cross-border ac-
tivities; exchange complex design files; track incoming, in-process, and fin-
ished inventories; and direct the shipment of finished goods directly from
factories to lead firms. In services, information technology and low-cost, high-
bandwidth communications systems installed during the late 1990s facilitate
the expansion of remote call centers for after-sales service and the real-time
provision of a host of other business services. Because these are not capabilities
that can be acquired cheaply or maintained easily, and because they allow
suppliers to handle larger and more diverse orders, increasing value-chain
modularity has helped to drive consolidation in the global supply base.
Consolidation in the global supply base

After decades of expansion and fragmentation in the global supply base,
driven by the needs of multinational firms to develop unique supply bases
in each of the countries where they operated, a cycle of expansion, shakeout,
and consolidation has played out repeatedly since the late 1990s. It is impor-
tant to point out that GVCs were not distributed equally across the globe.
More production locations were added to the system, but large-scale agglom-
eration economies, focused around historic production centers with new,
world-class port facilities, favored specific cities and regions. This triggered
unprecedented booms in some places, such as the region around Shanghai
and the Pearl River Delta region of southern China, while other regions
continued to struggle or remain entirely severed from GVC-related economic
development.
Within this system of uneven development, consolidation has been espe-
cially acute in some of the most geographically extensive and dynamic global
value chains, such as motor vehicles, electronics, apparel, consumer goods,
249
and horticulture, reversing the trend toward organizational fragmentation

and geographical dispersion outlined earlier. It is hard to overstate the rapidity
of this consolidation and the enormity of the changes that it has wrought in
key industries. Substantial segments of important industries such as autos and
electronics were utterly transformed. Value chains that had been increasingly
fragmented and dispersed were rationalized, beginning in earnest during the
latter half of the 1990s, creating more tightly integrated global systems com-
prised of far fewer, much larger players. The fragmentation and dispersion that
had marked the 1970s and 1980s, it seems, had reached their limits.
For MNCs, the rationalization of in-company operations has involved the
concentration of production in fewer, larger plants, often placed to serve
regional markets. The division of labor between these plants has also been
rationalized. Even when companies expand internationally to meet the needs
of new markets, new subsidiaries are designed to function within a larger
international division of labor. Lead firms have moved aggressively to source
from fewer suppliers with larger operations in a smaller number of low-cost
locations, even as they redouble their efforts to sell globally. As China be-
comes a more important location for many global suppliers, some investment
has been either shifted or diverted there from competing existing low-cost
locations in South East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Mexico, although rising
wages in China’s coastal region are driving some new investment inland and
to countries with lower wages, such as Vietnam.
Consolidation in the global supply base is primarily driven by a desire on
the part of lead firms to simplify and streamline supply-chain management.
As the complexity of inter-firm transactions has risen along with outsourcing,
so too has the impulse to simplify the supply chain. Using fewer, larger, more
capable suppliers has meant a smaller number of relationships to manage,
and the ability to collaborate with the same set of suppliers worldwide. Since
design work tends to be carried out in advanced-country locations and high-
volume manufacturing in developing-country locations, this approach re-
quires suppliers to establish a tightly integrated global network of subsidiary
operations, and, most recently, to rationalize those operations by concentrat-
ing activities in a few key locations to build up scale economies and simplify
logistics.
The impact on suppliers has been clear. The largest and most capable global
suppliers, such as the San Jose-based electronics contract manufacturer Flex-
tronics and the Detroit-based automotive seat supplier Lear mentioned earlier,
stepped up to internalize many of the truly difficult and risky aspects of global
production, such as FDI, global purchasing and inventory control, capacity
planning, fixed asset management, and logistics. In apparel, intermediaries
such as Hong Kong-based Li & Fung and manufacturers such as Taiwan’s Nien
Hsing and Pou Chen and China’s Yue Yuen, also moved to set up global
250
operations and offer a broader package of services. In fresh fruits and vegeta-
bles, the large supermarkets in the UK, such as Tesco and Asda (owned by
Wal-Mart), rationalized the supply systems that they had developed in
the1980s and 1990s. They have begun to outsource functions such as planning
year-round supply, customer research, and benchmarking (product variety,
space allocated to different products, and so on) to “category managers.”
According to one leading UK importer, the goal is to reduce the number of
direct suppliers for the complete fruit and vegetable product offering from
dozens to perhaps three or five. These first-tier suppliers will be responsible
for organizing the rest of the chain (Dolan and Humphrey 2004).
This overarching trend, from vertically integrated lead firms with “captive”
supply bases dedicated to them, to outsourcing into a series of national and
regional supply bases, to consolidation and the rise of global suppliers, is
depicted in Figure 8.1. The role of modularity in facilitating this transition is
depicted in the character of inter-firm linkages, shifting from idiosyncratic to
1
Lead firms with captive supply bases (pre-1986)
End users
Lead Firm A Lead Firm B

Value Idiosyncratic
Chain inter-firm links
First tier
Supply Captive Captive

Chain Second tier
Supply Base A Supply Base B
(Region A) Materials (Region B)
2 3
Lead firms with shared, modular suppliers in regional Value chain modularity with supplier consolidation;
supply bases (1986-1997) an integrated global supply base (1998–2009)
Lead Firm A Lead Firm “n”- Lead Firm A Lead Firm “ n”
(Region A | Region B ] Region “n”)
Shared Regional Supply Bases

with Modular Suppliers Global Suppliers
Codifiable transfer of specifications (CAE, CAD, CAM, MRP, ERP) at inter-firm

link—what Baldwin and Clark (2000) call a “pinch point” in the chain of Integrated Global Supply Base
activities
Figure 8.1. The evolution of supply-base modularity, consolidation, and global

integration
251
codifiable, standardized, and modular in later periods. Note that we define the
“value chain” as the full range of value-added activities, from component and
material production to end use, and the “supply chain” as the specific set of
companies that serve a specific lead firm in the context of producing a specific
product or service.
Unmaking the global supply base?

At the time of writing (January 2010), the consolidation of the global supply
base appears to be accelerating further as the global economy undergoes a
severe contraction. For suppliers with the ability to form modular value-chain
linkages, business depends not on the success or failure of any single customer
or narrow industry but on the ability to switch to growing customers or
industry segments when hard times arrive. The difference in the recession of
2007–9 is that there has been a very steep drop in orders across the board, not
to mention difficulties in obtaining the credit needed to keep the wheels of
global production and trade turning. In a broad downturn, there are very few
if any sectors or customers where new business can be won. In a period where
business grinds to a halt, global suppliers suffer more than most, given their
huge investments in factories, equipment, and large-scale employment. What
we can predict is that some will fail, or become easy takeover targets, with
further consolidation the result.
While there is no way to predict the future course of offshoring, outsour-
cing, and the nascent global supply base with any certainty, past experience is
instructive. The long-term trend in intermediate goods trade from 1962 to
2006, with a variety of bubbles and crises, as noted in Figure 8.2, suggests that
outsourcing and offshoring tend to accelerate both in boom times, when
companies are scrambling quickly to add new capacity, and directly following
downturns as well, when cost cutting comes to the fore and companies are
reluctant to expand internally in the face of uncertainty.
While history has shown that that volatility does not spell a retreat from
outsourcing, the bigger question is supplier survival, both in the near and the
long term. Supplier markets may be dramatically remade through consolida-
tion, but it seems unlikely that they will be entirely unmade.
Conclusions
This chapter has outlined how the new global supply base has come about,
how it has begun to remake the global economy, and what its prospects are
going forward. Retailers have been only one of several driving forces in the
development of this supply base. While the global supply base is concentrated
252
Technology
bubble
1991–2 Asian
US recession financial
crisis
1985–6
PC bubble
Intermediate goods Capital goods Final goods
Figure 8.2. World imports of intermediate, capital, and final goods, 1962–2006
in East Asia, it now extends far beyond that region, creating a more-or-less
integrated network of plants, service facilities, distribution and collection
points, and logistics hubs in key locations across the globe.
Suppliers from developed countries, especially the United States, expanded
their roles and set up global operations through the 1990s. Beginning in the
late 1990s, decisions by lead firms (retailers and technology-intensive produ-
cers alike) sought to simplify and consolidate their sourcing networks and in
the process created a new class of global suppliers. As global suppliers added
capabilities and scale, they began to offer their customers turn-key access to a
full package of manufacturing processes, finished products, complete product
lines, and even complementary bundles of services, including product design,
component purchasing, final packaging, global logistics, and after-sales repair.
To establish their global footprints and provide full-package capabilities,
global suppliers invested in new plants, acquired regional competitors and
facilities previously owned by MNC affiliates, and in some cases “vertically
integrated” by entering the business of upstream and downstream component
suppliers and service providers.
While global suppliers have lowered the bar for lead firms to participate in
global value chains, they have at the same time raised the bar for local
manufacturing firms that want to enter GVCs as suppliers. As global suppliers
expanded their operational footprint to new locations, such as Southern Asia,
Central America and the Caribbean, Eastern and Central Europe, parts Of sub-
Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, it became harder for new entrants to
compete. Firms and countries that try to enter global value chains today must
253
meet standards and performance requirements that are much higher than
firms entering one or two decades ago.
Within these broad patterns, there is plenty of room for variation in com-
pany strategy, even in what might appear to be the same market niches. Thus,
The Limited and Gap, Nike and Reebok, Ford and Toyota, Coca Cola and
Pepsi, Hewlett Packard and Fujitsu, and so on, might follow different specific
strategies related to outsourcing and offshoring based on managerial choices
(Berger 2005) or the institutional norms of the company’s home country
(Lane and Bachmann 1997; Sturgeon 2007). A major theme in this chapter
is that market making in global supply chains is not just about offshoring,
fragmentation, and specialization. By highlighting that there is consolidation,
concentration, and rebundling going on in particular locations and within
MNCs around the globe, we reinforce the core idea that market making takes
place through the exercise of “power” by big firms and large countries. These
issues are captured by the GVC perspective, and introduce critical elements of
agency and institutional variation into the story that would be lost in a
straightforward “market-forces” account of global integration.
This chapter has emphasized the self-reinforcing, co-evolutionary character
of the market-making process. In earlier chapters in this volume, we have seen
how experiments with global sourcing in the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of
pioneering retailers and multinational manufacturing firms created the initial
markets for export-oriented economies in East Asia. Retailers and branded
manufacturers in rich countries became more experienced with international
outsourcing; developing countries acquired the infrastructure and capabilities
needed to sustain more complex operations; and suppliers upgraded their
capabilities in response to larger orders for more complex goods. As these
resources improve over time, more lead firms gain the confidence to embrace
the twin (and often entwined) strategies of outsourcing and offshoring. The
global supply base has been made in a self-reinforcing cycle of outsourcing
and supply-base upgrading that connects firms across developed and develop-
ing countries; its frontiers and capabilities continue to evolve.
254
9
Transnational Contractors in East Asia

Introduction: The Changing Dynamics of Global Production
The explosive globalization in the labor-intensive production of consumer

goods is by now a well-known and well-documented phenomenon. Small
firms as well as large ones have been able to access factories around the
world. The global networks through which this international production is
coordinated are typical buyer-driven global commodity chains “in which large
retailers, marketers and branded manufacturers play the pivotal roles in
setting up decentralized production networks in a variety of exporting
countries,” typically located in the developing world (Gereffi and Memedovic
2003: 3). While some of these factories have historically been large (for exam-
ple, in the footwear industry), most contractors have been relatively small.
Their size has reinforced their vulnerability to the big buyers: many factories
have historically been part of “captive networks,” limited to simple, low value-
added assembly operations that follow detailed instructions from their clients
(Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005).
We are now entering an era in which a qualitatively higher degree of
integration between production and distribution has begun to reshape the
entire buyer-driven global commodity chain (Abernathy et al. 1999; Bonacich
2005; Bonacich and Wilson 2005). Two trends have emerged in the past
decade, particularly in the Pacific Rim region, that are erasing the boundary
between “manufacturer,” on the one hand, and “retail buyer,” on the other:
the emergence of giant retailers, and the emergence of commensurately large
factory contractors who serve them. The first trend constitutes the central
focus of this volume, and will not be treated in this chapter. The second trend,
however, remains understudied and as a result largely untheorized.
In the following discussion I will argue that the emergence of giant transna-
tional contractors may alter the dynamic of global supply chains, including
the current seemingly unstoppable dominance of giant US- and EU-based
retailers as market makers. At the very least, I will argue, the rise of China as
an economic power will probably impact on the current dynamic in several
ways. At a minimum, giant contractors—“Big Suppliers”—are themselves
market makers for their own suppliers, exerting increasing control over key
aspects of the production supply chain. More speculatively, if the current
trends continue, the giant contractors may come to challenge the power of
all but the biggest “Big Buyers” they serve. This could alter the governance
structure of some global supply chains, raising the possibility that Taiwanese-
and Chinese-based multinational “Big Suppliers” may themselves someday
morph into “Big Buyers,” challenging the firms they now serve. In other words,
the current shift in the governance structure of global market dynamics—from
manufacturer to retailer—may turn out to have been merely a stage, associated
in part with the ready availability of low-cost labor in the rising East Asian
economies during the past three decades. But, as these economies mature,
moving from export-oriented industrialization to producing for their own
internal markets, the dynamics that once favored the growing power of US-
and EU-based “Big Buyers” may also shift, eroding the market-making ability of
the latter relative to multinationals based in the East Asian economies.
The Emergence of Giant Transnational Contractors
The appearance of giant factories as global suppliers for Wal-Mart and other
large retailers is a largely unexpected development, since so many business
and management theorists, emphasizing “flexible specialization,” the “virtual
corporation,” and other forms of decentralized production and distribution,
have argued that the era of the gigantic production facility was over (see, e.g.,
Piore and Sabel 1986; Kapinsky 1993; Pine and Davis 1999). No longer would
entrepreneurs assemble tens of thousands of workers at capital-intensive fac-
tory complexes like River Rouge or Cannon Mills. But since the late 1990s,
giant transnational corporations have emerged, mainly from Hong Kong,
Taiwan, South Korea, and China, that operate massive factories under contract
with consumer goods buyers—retailers and branded merchandisers—a trend
that may well portend a dramatic twenty-first-century shift of organizational
power within global supply chains. The emergence of these giant transna-
tional contractors has yet to be examined.
In the textile and apparel industries, for example, the consolidation of
production, both at the factory and the country level, is highly pronounced,
and will greatly accelerate now that the thirty-year-old Multi-Fiber Agreement
256
(MFA), whose quota system resulted in the dispersal of clothing production to

some 140 countries, expired on January 1, 2005. The end of the MFA is
predicted to lead to a consolidation of production into larger companies
and a smaller number of supplying countries because of the economies of
scale that can be achieved (Speer 2002). Industry sources claim that large
retailers and manufacturers such as the Gap, J. C. Penney, Liz Claiborne, and
Wal-Mart—which once sourced from fifty or more countries—will source
from between ten and fifteen when quotas no longer constrain their sourcing
decisions (Malone 2002, Just-style.com 2003; McGrath 2003). A large body of
research projects that, with the end of the MFA, China alone may eventually
claim as much as half of all export-oriented apparel production (Nordås 2004),
with potentially devastating effects on those developing countries in South
Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, and Africa that have become highly
dependent on textile and apparel exports. (For a detailed treatment, see
UNCTAD 2004, 2005.)1
Examples of giant East Asia-based contractors abound. In the textile and
apparel industries, the Taiwanese multinational Nien Hsing Textile Co. Ltd,
“the largest specialized denim fabric and garment in-one-stream manufacturer
in the world,” boasts a “customer base from designer brands such as Calvin
Klein, DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, Nautica, Mudd Jeans, GAP, Levis Japan to retail
private labels or importers such as J. C. Penney, Wal-Mart, Target, VF Jeanswear
(Lee, Wrangler), Sears, No Excuses etc.”2 Nien Hsing has factories in Taiwan,
Mexico, Nicaragua, and Lesotho. Yupoong Inc., a Korean multinational that
has become the world’s second largest cap manufacturer, has factories in
the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. Yupoong’s “flexfit”
hats (motto: “worn by the world”) are exported to some sixty countries (see
Yupoong 2003). In consumer electronics, large contract factories also provide
integrated production and final assembly of circuit boards, personal compu-
ters, cell phones, handheld digital devices, game consoles, and other IT devices
for brand names such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, and Siemens. South
East Asia, and China in particular, have become the center of the most
advanced consumer electronics fabrication (UNCTAD 2002; Lüthje 2005).
The world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, the US-based Flextro-
nics, employs nearly 100,000 workers worldwide, half of whom are in Asia,
mainly southern Malaysia (close to its Asian headquarters in Singapore) and
southern Guangdong Province in China (Flextronics 2003; Lüthje 2005).
A number of these large firms, particularly those from Taiwan, have set up
operations in Latin America and Africa. By 2003, for example, Taiwanese
firms had invested an estimated $2.1 billion in South Africa, Swaziland, and
Lesotho, employing more than 110,000 workers, representing a fifth of the
workforce in the latter country (Du Ling 2003).
257
Supply-chain management in China’s apparel and textile industries

China’s textile and apparel production remains concentrated in small and
medium-sized firms in the coastal areas, although this is changing, both as
firms move inland in search of cheaper labor, and as larger firms—with
advanced forms of supply-chain management—become more central. Cao
Ning identifies three kinds of supply-chain management that are found in
China (Cao 2005): vertical integration, traditional purchasing, and third-party
coordinated.
In vertically integrated supply chains, retailers have internalized the supply
chain, at the least owning their own assembly plants, and sometimes achiev-
ing additional backwards integration through ownership of yarn and textile
factories and even cotton farms. Hong Kong’s Esquel Group, “one of the
world’s leading producers of premium cotton shirts,” is an example.3 Esquel
produces its own brand (the “Pye” label), although it produces primarily for
other clients.4 Overall, the firm’s 47,000 employees manufacture 60 million
garments annually, with 17 factories in 9 countries, including garment-
manufacturing facilities in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mauritius, and
Sri Lanka, as well as cotton farms and yarn factories. Esquel’s retail outlets in
Beijing in 2000, which carry its “Pye” series clothing, provide an example of
vertical integration: “From the cotton field to the retail outlet, Esquel is the
absolute coordinator” (Cao 2005). According to its website:
Esquel’s vertically integrated operations ensure the highest quality in every step of
the apparel manufacturing process. Production begins in Xinjiang province in
northwestern China, where the Group grows its own Extra Long Staple (ELS)
Cotton and Organic Cotton, continues through spinning, weaving, dyeing,
manufacturing, packaging and retailing.5 Esquel’s textile and apparel production
is complemented by strong product development capabilities. The Group’s design
and merchandising team work closely with its research and development center to
create unique finishings such as wrinkle-free and nanotechnology performance
qualities that consistently give Esquel the cutting edge in the apparel industry.
The degree to which such vertical integration signals a move from

manufacturing to retailing is open to debate, however. While Esquel’s high
degree of vertical integration can be seen as a form of market making in terms
of control over suppliers, the company remains primarily a manufacturer for
others. Its high-end Pye brand represents a small percentage of the company’s
total revenues.
The second kind of supply-chain management, according to Cao (2005), is
the familiar traditional purchasing supply chain, in which the retailer contracts
with independent manufacturers to produce garments according to specifica-
tion (OEM). Either the retailer or the manufacturer can assume responsibility
for supply-chain coordination. Manufacturer-coordinated supply chains are
258
of special interest, because they signal a possible shift in supply-chain control

from retailer to manufacturer. One form of manufacturer coordination—
“vendor managed inventory”6—is illustrated by the Hong Kong-based TAL
Group.7 TAL, founded in 1947 as a single textile spinning mill in Hong Kong,8
has grown into one of the major apparel manufacturers, incorporating design,
logistics, and fabrication. Its global workforce of 23,000 employees, producing
annual sales of $600 million, is found in factories in Hong Kong, Thailand,
Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States.
TAL’s clients include Brooks Brothers, L. L. Bean, J. C. Penney, Giordano,
Land’s End, Liz Claiborne, Nautica, and Tommy Hilfiger, with the majority
of its sales to retailers. TAL accounts for one out of every eight dress shirts sold
in the USA. Its success is attributed to its ability to manage its supply chain
efficiently:
Today, TAL boasts that it is one of the few Asian suppliers capable of handling a
variety of EDI documents, such as purchase order (PO), advance ship notice (ASN),
invoice, point-of-sales (POS) data, order status, etc. . . . From the late 1990s to
today, the hurdle has once again been raised: firms are now being asked to
synchronize their supply and demand activities far more effectively and this
means ensuring that far-flung product development, marketing/sales, and supply
chains are in close coordination. TAL responded by enabling vendor managed
inventory with customers such as J. C. Penney. In doing so, TAL was able to link its
designers and its factory floors half a world away to the points of sale in the US,
resulting in ever greater efficiencies for its customers and expanded business
opportunities for TAL . . . Now as an integrated synchronization services provider
with manufacturing capabilities, TAL not only has visibility into demand at the
retailer’s point of sale, i.e. to demand from the final consumer, but can link this
information back directly to production operations on the factory floor as well as
to product development and R&D activities. (Koudal and Long 2005)
By relying on TAL as its principal supplier, J. C. Penney is able virtually to

eliminate inventory of its private-label dress shirts. TAL runs POS data from
Penney’s North American stores through its proprietary software to determine
the quantity of different styles, colors, and sizes of shirts to make—all without
the need to consult with J. C. Penney itself. TAL even designs and market tests
J. C. Penney’s new shirts.
The new process is one from which Penney is conspicuously absent. The entire
program is designed and operated by TAL Apparel Ltd. . . . TAL collects point-of-
sale data for Penney’s shirts directly from its stores in North America, then runs the
numbers through a computer model it designed. The Hong Kong company then
decides how many shirts to make, and in what styles, colors and sizes. The
manufacturer sends the shirts directly to each Penney store, bypassing the retail-
er’s warehouses—and corporate decision makers. (Kahn 2003)
259
TAL provides similar services to Brooks Brothers and Land’s End. Vendor-
managed inventory gives the manufacturer increased market-making power
over its suppliers, thereby signaling some shift in power from retailer to
contractor: it is now the contractor, rather than the retailer, who manages
the supply chain (Kahn 2003). TAL’s New York City-based design team devel-
ops the style, TAL analyzes sales data to determine the quantity to produce for
J. C. Penney stores, and TAL’s Asian factories turn out the product. According
to one management consultant who has studied the industry: “You are giving
away a pretty important function when you outsource your inventory man-
agement. That’s something that not a lot of retailers want to part with” (cited
in Kahn 2003).
The third kind of supply-chain management, according to Cao (2005), is the
third-party coordinated supply chain, in which garment trading companies pro-
vide the coordination, oversee quality control, and sometimes provide fashion
design. The prime example of this form of supplier market making is the Li &
Fung Group, the giant multinational trading company is based in Hong Kong,
with a staff of 25,000 distributed across more than 70 offices in 40 countries
and territories, with 2006 revenues of $10.4 billion (Li & Fung 2007). As
discussed in the Chapter 8, trading companies such as Li & Fung have become
more powerful, taking the lead in supply-chain management (Kahn 2004b;
Pun 2005). Li & Fung is organized into three core businesses: exporting
services, value-chain logistics, and retailing.
Li & Fung Ltd manages the export supply chain for a variety of consumer
goods,9 “work[ing] together to find the best source for different
components or processes, and drawing on a global network of some
10,000 factories.” Activities span the supply chain, including initial
product development and design, raw material sourcing, production
planning, factory sourcing, manufacturing control, quality assurance,
export documentation, and shipping consolidation. Its venture capital
fund invests in consumer products companies in Europe and the United
States. By way of example (this from an interview with Li & Fung CEO
Victor Fung in the Harvard Business Review), the company might fill a large
order by sourcing its yarn from Korea, doing the dyeing in Taiwan,
purchasing buttons and zippers in China, and assembling the final
product in Thailand (Magretta 2002).
Integrated Distribution Services (IDS) Group provides “value-chain
logistics” throughout Asia in “three core business areas”: marketing (sales,
billing, and collection), logistics (shipping, warehousing, and delivery),
and manufacturing (fabrication, testing, and packaging).
Li & Fung Retailing Ltd operates more than 950 retail outlets, with 11,500
employees, in Greater China, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia,
260
the Philippines, and South Korea for Toys “R” Us, Circle K, and Branded
Lifestyle. Toys “R” Us is a joint venture with the US-based parent
company (in 1999, Li & Fung acquired 100 percent ownership of the
business in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia). Branded
Lifestyle represents major European and US brands in Asia, seeking to
establish a consciousness of “brand values” for its clients (these include
Salvatore Ferragamo and Calvin Klein, amongst others).
Retailers move closer to their suppliers

The emergence of large contract factory suppliers alters the power dynamics of
global manufacturing, as lean retailing, with its associated cost cutting and
quick response, compels retailers to shift such critical functions as inventory
management and sales forecasting to giant contract suppliers (Kahn 2003).
The example of TAL, discussed above, provides one illustration of this trend.
In some cases, this shifting of key functions has even meant the migration of
many pre- and post-production functions, including design, warehousing,
and control over logistics, to Asia—as is seen with Luen Thai in China (Kahn
2004b).
Luen Thai Holdings Ltd is a leading apparel supplier, with more than 25,000
employees, 12 manufacturing facilities, and 14 offices in 9 countries, and with
2006 revenues of $662 million (Luen Thai 2006, 2007). The company pro-
duces more than eighty million pieces of garments annually, including sleep-
wear, pants and shorts, sports and active wear, ladies’ fashion, intimate wear,
and children’s wear (Luen Thai 2006). Luen Thai is rapidly expanding, having
recently acquired GJM from Warnaco, Tomwell Ltd from the Jones Apparel
group, and a 50 percent stake in On Time, and a 50–50 joint venture with
Guangzhou Huasheng Garment Company. Additionally, it has formed a joint
venture with Yue Yuen for its sports and active wear.10 The company, pursu-
ing a “design to store” (“D2S”) business model, has created a “supply-chain
city” in Dongguan—a two-million-square-foot factory, a 300-room hotel, a
dormitory for the factory’s 4,000 workers, and product-development cen-
ters.11 The factory permits apparel manufacturer Liz Claiborne and other
Luen Thai customers12 to work in a single location, their designers meeting
directly with technicians from the factory and fabric mills to plan production
far more efficiently. The consolidated supply chain is projected to reduce Liz
Claiborne and Luen Thai staff by 40 percent, cutting costs and improving
turnaround by providing tight coordination over logistics. Liz Claiborne,
which currently sources from some 250 suppliers in 35 countries, plans to
consolidate sourcing in a handful of places, utilizing facilities such as the Luen
Thai complex; it has already begun to relocate staff from its Hong Kong and
New York City offices. This process of consolidation has been reinforced by
261
the ending of the MFA, which, as noted elsewhere, has encouraged major
apparel companies to concentrate production in a smaller number of much
larger facilities in a relative handful of countries. In addition to the labor cost
savings that would result from concentrating production in China, Liz Clai-
borne and Luen Thai executives believe that “the real gains would come by
reorganizing their entire production process so as to be able to cut down on
turnaround times for new clothes and coordinate logistics” (Kahn 2004a).
Having everyone in a single location—designers, fabric and raw-material sup-
pliers, sewing—is viewed as significantly cutting costs and improving turn-
around time, “getting new styles into stores faster.”
Instead of having 100 people spread between New York and Asia doing the same
job, the new supply-chain city will enable the two companies to reduce staff to 60
people in China, concentrating all functions closer to the factory floor . . . By
moving all but the most critical designers and trend spotters to Asia, the company
can dispense with the tedious back and forth, slashing precious weeks off produc-
tion times and getting up-to-minute fashions into stores sooner . . . In the new
supply-chain city, everyone from the fabric mill to the store will use the same
scan-and-track inventory system. Goods can roll off the factory floor and go
straight to a store . . . (Khan 2004a)
The world’s largest footwear suppler: A counterweight to Nike?

Yue Yuen/Pou Chen Industrial Holdings Ltd,13 based in Hong Kong, is the
world’s largest maker of branded athletic and casual footwear, with $3.7
billion in revenues in the FY 2006 (Yue Yuen 2007b).14 The company pro-
duced nearly 200 million pairs of branded athletic shoes for export in 2006,
an increase of nearly three-quarters over the previous five years, representing
17 percent of the world total (Merk 2006; Yue Yuen 2007a). The company is
Nike’s biggest supplier, providing 15–30 percent of its shoes (estimates vary
widely), with one Indonesian factory reportedly turning out a million shoes a
month for Nike; other major footwear clients include Reebok, Adidas, Asics,
New Balance, Puma, Timberland, and Rockport (owned by Reebok). While
most of its shoes are made in factories throughout southern China (four
out of six are in Dongguan Province), the company also has factories in
Vietnam and Indonesia.15 Overall, it operated 373 production lines as of
2006 (Yue Yuen 2007a). Yue Yuen is also expanding its sports apparel produc-
tion, having acquired Pro Kingtex, invested in Eagle Nice, and formed a joint
manufacturing venture with Luen Thai, amongst other activities, although
this segment contributes less than 2 percent of the company’s total revenues
(Yue Yuen 2006, 2007b).
Yue Yuen’s global workforce of 280,000 people in 2006 had grown by half
since the turn of the century, primarily as a result of its steady growth as the
262
leading manufacturer of athletic shoes, but also because of the growth of its
Greater China (China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) wholesale and retail opera-
tions. In terms of its manufacturing capabilities, Yue Yuen manages what are
probably the world’s largest footwear manufacturing plants in Dongguan,
China (with over 15 million square feet of manufacturing floor space) and
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (1.3 million square meters) (Yue Yuen 2007a). Its
sprawling factory complex in Dongguan alone reportedly employs some
110,000 workers, including 21,000 for Nike and 13,000 for Adidas. The Nike
production sector includes recently renovated dormitories for its workers
(eight women to a spartan room, in two rows of bunk beds), cafeteria, and a
recently constructed “activities center” that includes a library and reading
room, karaoke and dancing facility, a chess room, and meeting rooms and
classrooms. Nike reportedly invested some $4.5 million in these renovations;
it uses the new facilities to offer workers courses in personal finances, compu-
ters, and counselling.16
As of September 2006 Yue Yuen expansion into wholesale and retail sales
boasted a network of more than 2,100 wholesale distributors in the greater
China region, operating 640 retail outlets, distributing products from the
major brands made in its factories (Merk 2003; Yue Yuen 2007b).17 Revenues
from the company’s wholesale and retail operations in Greater China grew by
four-fifths over the previous year—although they still represented only a small
percentage (5.4 percent) of total revenues. As of FY 2006, Asian markets
accounted for 30 percent of Yue Yuen’s total turnover—second only to the
United States (38 percent) (Yue Yuen 2007b). The company remains bullish
about its wholesale and retail operations. The company, however, did not
meet its goal of opening 1,000 additional stores or counters by 2008, a goal
based in part on its belief, in 2007, that the Beijng Olympics would serve as a
catalyst for increased sporting goods sales in China (Yue Yuen 2007b).18
Yue Yuen is also engaged in the upstream production of raw materials, shoe
components, and even production tools—affording a high degree of vertical
integration over its supply chain. In 2002, for example, it acquired Pou Chen’s
interest in sixty-seven upstream footwear material providers, including raw
materials, equipment, and shoe components (Yue Yuen 2006). It is also seek-
ing downstream integration, in terms of exerting tighter control over its
logistics. As the company reported
To accelerate its downstream vertical integration, SupplyLINE Ltd, a joint venture

between Yue Yuen and Logistics Information Network Enterprise (“LINE”), a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Hutchison Port Holdings, was formed to act as a
Lead Logistics Provider, offering fully integrated supply chain and logistics solu-
tions that shorten lead times for inbound materials and outbound products.
(Yue Yuen 2006)
263
The company is clearly emerging as a market maker with regard to its own
suppliers, as well as its Asian consumers. Yet, when dealing with major brands
such as Nike or Reebok, how much of a market maker is Yue Yuen in the retail
sector? When Yue Yuen’s costs rose sharply in 2004,19 it was able to pass on
less than a third of the cost increase to its customers, forcing the company to
post a 1.6 percent year-to-year decline in profits, the first such decline in
twelve years. While some analysts regard this decline as indicative of the
relatively weak bargaining power of even the largest contractors vis-à-vis the
brands that rely on them (Fong 2005), others disagree (Hermanson 2005).
Moreover, the company reported that, in 2006, “the average selling price
continued its upward trend, reflecting the product mix change and the
increase in underlying material costs” (Yue Yuen 2007b), suggesting that it
was in fact able to pass on some of its cost increases to its buyers.
Whereas Wal-Mart’s relationship with its suppliers is famously fleeting,
determined purely by price considerations, the athletic footwear industry
requires close cooperation between buyer and supplier, achieved through
stable, ongoing relationships. Yue Yuen, for example, began as a supplier for
Wal-Mart in the 1970s, but eventually developed the know-how, technologi-
cal capacity, and size to move up to high-end brands such as Nike. Because the
major brands require a highly diversified product mix and flexible production
systems, Yue Yuen’s high degree of vertical integration (including control over
inputs and logistics) enables it to work with customers that require rapid
market response. These same requirements afford the company a fair amount
of bargaining power with even its largest customers.
Yue Yuen is already engaged in a limited way in original brand
manufacturing; is it likely to “learn through doing,” and eventually replace
Nike and its other clients as a leading designer and retailer of athletic shoes?
Nike and Yue Yuen are highly dependent on one another, reducing the
probability that Nike will cut production if Yue Yuen begins to market its
own low-cost brands in China (Ho 2005). On the other hand, Yue Yuen is a
highly profitable business, thanks to its broad and loyal client base; it is
unlikely to threaten those relationships by creating potentially competing
brands (K. W. Chan 2005; Pun 2005).
At the present time, it is clear that, while Yue Yuen is a powerful market
maker with regard to its own suppliers, it remains subordinate to its buyers,
particularly the largest ones such as Nike. Beginning with design, and
throughout the complex process of manufacturing athletic footwear (which
involves as many as 200 different steps), Nike’s hand is felt—as is evidenced by
the thousand production specialists Nike employs to work closely with its
suppliers (Merk 2006: 6–8). Yue Yuen is more dependent on Nike than the
reverse;20 moreover, it has carved out a highly profitable niche as the world’s
leading supplier, a niche it would not want to jeopardize.21 Jeroen Merk,
264
who has conducted a detailed study of Nike’s relationship with Yue Yuen,
concludes:
Even though Yue Yuen has enough skills and cash to launch their own brand, they
deliberately decided not to do so because that would make them a direct competi-
tor of many of their customers. In fact, Yue Yuen is very concerned with protecting
brand secrets. The company makes sure that its R&D centre never puts competing
brands in the same place. This also implies that Yue Yuen cannot break into
end-markets directly. (Merk 2006: 17)
Although Yue Yuen viewed the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a significant

opportunity for expansion into retailing, the company did not plan to
develop and market its own brands for the occasion. According to one news-
paper account:
The company will make the most of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to gain market share
in the mainland . . . Pou Chen executives emphasized that their company would
never develop own-branded shoes to rival its customers including Nike. Yue Yuen
has long promoted Nike, Adidas and Reebok sport shoes at its stores. (Taiwan 2007)
China’s Rapid Growth and the Prospects for Upgrading
China’s rapid economic growth has averaged around 9 percent annually since
1990. Even allowing for exaggerated claims and poor governmental statistics,
China’s growth is explosive by any standards. Bear in mind that this is an
average; the growth poles of China—South China in Guangdong Province
around the Pearl River Delta, Shanghai, and the Yangtze River Delta—are
growing at much greater rates. The lion’s share of this growth is concentrated
in South China, which accounts for nearly half of all the country’s exports.
The region boasts the highest concentrations of manufacturing, the largest
factories, the greatest influx of labor from rural areas, the world’s third and
fourth busiest ports (in Hong Kong and Shenzhen), and the world’s largest
freight facility (IAM Journal 2005: 17).
A wide range of consumer goods industries have contributed to this growth.
As noted previously, China is predicted to account for as much as half of the
world’s textile exports once the full effect of the end of the MFA is realized. In
2004, China accounted for 45.1 million computers, an increase of 39 percent
from just one year earlier; 70.5 million air-conditioning units (an increase of
43 percent), 30.3 million refrigerators (30 percent), and 23.5 million washing
machines (19 percent). Similar yearly increases were posted in metal-cutting
machinery (36 percent), cement equipment (63 percent), metal rolling equip-
ment (60 percent), and tractors (84 percent). “Morgan Stanley . . . says that
China now absorbs half of the world’s cement production, a fourth of its
265
copper, and a fifth of its aluminium” (IAM Journal 2005: 15). This accelerated
growth has created enormous energy needs; the International Energy Agency
reports that China accounted for a third of the increase in global demand for
oil between 2002 and 2004 (IAM Journal 2005: 13–14).
Government policy in China has fostered the creation of vibrant industrial
districts comprised of clusters of suppliers, manufacturers, and contractors
that specialize in a single product, fostering economies of scale, lowering
transaction costs, and cutting prices. It has opened land for the development
of industrial parks, given tax benefits to businesses, built transportation net-
works and other infrastructure, and subsidized utilities. Private companies,
with government support, build factory complexes that include dormitories
and hospitals. The resulting clusters create synergies that foster technological
development (Barboza 2004). According to Ruizhe Sun, president of the China
Textile Information Center: “In terms of vertical supply chain, China has no
competition. We have button makers, fabric makers, thread makers, zipper
makers, you name it” (cited in Barboza 2004).
At the high end of the technology spectrum, the Shenzhen campus of
Huawei Technologies—manufacturer of globally competitive telecommunica-
tion equipment—boasts a research center, football fields, swimming pools,
and housing for 3,000 families. Baosteel, based in Shanghai, is in 2010 the
third largest producer of steel in the world. The Lenovo Group, amidst much
fanfare, bought IBM’s ailing PC business in December 2004. The Haier Group,
China’s leading maker of home appliances, has offices in 100 countries.
And TCL Electronics, China’s most profitable maker of televisions, acquired
the TV business of France’s Thomson in 2004; its website claims TCL-
Thomson Electronics to be “the largest color television enterprise in the
world.” More than a dozen Chinese companies number amongst the Fortune
Global 500 (see Table 9.1). And China is investing heavily in the next
Table 9.1. A sample of Chinese “global champions,” 2004 ($bn)
Company Sector Revenue h$bni Net income ($bni
Sinopec Oil/gas 71.45 3.90

PetroChina Oil/gas 48.18 12.45
Hai’er White goods 12.29 0.19
Baosteel Steel 7.09 1.14
CNOOC Oil/gas 6.68 1.96
Chalco Aluminium 3.91 0.80
Huawei Telecoms 3.83 0.62
TCL Electronics 3.29 0.04
Lenovo PCs 2.90 0.14
Galanz White goods 1.60 0.70
Tsingtao Brewery 1.04 0.03
Source: The Economist (2005).
266
generation of technologies: it plans to train 50,000 engineers in advanced

chip design over the next few years, by creating design training centers in
universities in seven cities, and is investing heavily in nanotechnology. All of
this suggests a strong future counterweight to the power of Wal-Mart and
other big buyers, as China moves rapidly from being an export platform to
becoming an industrial power in its own right. This transformation will
probably depend less on expertise in production, and more on expertise in
selling—that is, in making consumer markets. Still, it is reasonable to expect
that some of the emerging Chinese firms will become major brand managers
in their own right, and that there will also be a slew of Chinese retailers poised
to compete with global retailers for the share of the China’s consumer market.
The economic power of giant retailers remains limited in China, which
initially regulated the expansion of foreign retailers (for example, requiring
substantial local partnerships). Wal-Mart may account for some 3 percent of
China’s total exports,22 but, in terms of retail presence, by the end of 2004
the company had only forty-three stores in China, accounting for less than
$1 billion in revenue, barely 2 percent of its international sales. Since joining
the World Trade Organization, China has eased its restrictions on foreign
retailers, and Wal-Mart continues to open new stores, including supercenters
in Beijing and Shanghai, the first in those cities,23 with talk of increasing its
floor space in China by as much as half in the near future (C. Chandler 2005).
Wal-Mart CEO David Glass views China as one place where continued expan-
sion is possible (Gilman 2004).24
If you look at Europe, it’s difficult to green-field or grow a company of much size.
But you can build an enormous-sized company in China if you make some fairly
aggressive assumptions about what’s going to happen to it. It’s the one place in the
world where you could replicate Wal-Mart’s success in the US.
Yet even Wal-Mart may face an uphill battle in China. China’s state-run
Shanghai Brilliance group, China’s largest retailer, claims sales of $8.1 billion
in 3,300 stores. And Wal-Mart is also competing with France’s Carrefour,
which has 60 “hypermarkets” with sales of $2 billion (C. Chandler 2005).
Yet the biggest challenge to retail expansion in China may be cultural: with
small apartments and limited space for consumer items, the growing number
of middle-class Chinese shoppers are accustomed to shopping on foot, making
frequent trips for small volume purchases.
Directions for Future Research
There is growing evidence that consolidation in consumer goods industries,

with increasingly integrated production and distribution systems between
267
giant retailers and equally giant contractors, may be replicating the vertical
integration characteristic of the earlier “Fordist” organization of production.
These dynamics remain poorly understood. What is needed is long-term
research to chart the impact of changes in retailing and contracting. In partic-
ular, I would suggest a number of interrelated questions that could guide
systematic, long-term investigations, focusing principally on China, but also
on East Asia generally—bearing in mind that the present moment is but a
snapshot with the changing dynamics of the world economy:
How does the trend toward concentration of production in large
transnational contractors impact the relative power of contractors
vis-à-vis retailers in supply-chain networks—for example, the ability of
contractors to negotiate production costs, or “move up” into such higher
value-added activities as designing and marketing their own labels?
How do recent innovations in supply-chain management influence the
relationship between big buyers and their suppliers—for example, when
the largest suppliers take over many of the functions of supply-chain
management from retailers? What is the role of giant trading companies,
such as Li & Fung, which appear to be becoming increasingly central in
supply-chain management?
What will be the impact if a growing number of retailers move
geographically closer to their principal suppliers—for example, in the
form of Luen Thai’s “supply-chain city” (a move that also undoubtedly
signals a desire to be closer to China’s rapidly emerging markets)?
How does the rise of China as an industrial power change the dynamics of
the global supply chains in which Chinese firms are involved? Will
China’s largest suppliers move increasingly into retailing, first locally,
then regionally? How will this affect the dominance of the world’s current
retail giants? And how will China’s growth in capital-intensive industries
(such as shipbuilding, automotive, aircraft, construction, and so on) affect
the relative power of retail-controlled supply chains?
To what extent will the emergence of large contractors generate linkages
with other firms and sectors that contribute to industrial upgrading and
more broadly based economic development? Does their vertical
integration restrict the formation of local economic linkages that might
stimulate more broad-based economic growth?
Finally, what will be the impact of China’s move into advanced
technologies, on the dynamics of global supply chains?
268
Part Four
Industries and Market Making
10
The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing

Introduction
Today you could walk into supermarkets or a supercenter (selling food and
general merchandise) in Mexico City or Shanghai or hundreds of other cities
around the world and think you had just entered an upscale store in an
American or European suburb. Of course, once you looked at the customers
and employees or at some of the different food products, you would realize
you were not in the USA or Europe. However, the general appearance and
operation of the supermarket would appear very familiar. In the late 1980s,
modern food retailing was pretty much exclusive to the United States, Western
Europe, and a few other economically advanced countries such as Australia
and Canada. In a phenomenally short period (since the middle 1990s), mod-
ern food retailing has spread around the world to countries in Latin America,
Asia, Eastern Europe, and even parts of Africa. The global expansion of mod-
ern food retailing is an excellent example of the concept of market making.
Food retailers are remaking their consumer and supplier markets.
On the consumer side, supermarkets and other formats such as supercenters
have transformed the food shopping experience for hundreds of millions of
consumers around the world. People in Brazil, China, South Africa, and
dozens of other countries who used to shop only at open-air public markets,
street vendors, and small family-operated stores are going to modern super-
markets and supercenters as well as other modern retail formats (such as
chains of hard discounts, neighborhood stores, and convenience stores).
They are no longer waited on personally by the shopkeeper or vendor, but,
like Americans and Western Europeans, they are walking up and down the
aisle making their own selections before checking out. The selection of pro-
ducts is many times greater typically than in the traditional markets and stores
and the overall quality, variety, and safety of the food much better. In addi-
tion, in many cases the prices are lower than in the traditional markets and
small shops, especially at first in processed foods, and with a lag, in fresh
foods.
At the same time, modern food retailing has so dramatically altered the
consumer market that it has also reshaped the supply chain. Most aspects of
the traditional agro-food systems, including production, transportation, and
marketing, in developing countries have been markedly inefficient. They have
been characterized by low productivity levels, high post-harvest losses because
of factors such as spoilage, and poor quality and food safety standards.
Modern Food Retailing
Although there are many additional variations, we will cover only the basic
store formats of modern food retailing. Supermarkets are departmentalized,
self-service stores that carry a wide selection of food and household goods that
are consumed regularly. Most supermarkets are now part of a chain of stores.
They are substantially larger and have a much broader selection than tradi-
tional grocery stores. Customers move along aisles stocked with products with
a cart or basket to fill. The items are paid for at cash registers in the front of the
store. Many of these features, which we take for granted, were remarkable
innovations when they first appeared. The first self-service grocery store was
opened in 1916. Before that clerks had to wait on each customer and get the
items wanted from behind counters. Many products were kept in bulk form
and were measured out and packaged for customers. The New York-based King
Cullen (1930) and Big Bear (1932) stores are typically considered the first real
supermarkets. By 1937, there were 3,000 supermarkets in operation in forty-
seven states (Zimmerman 1955).
Supermarkets spread rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the growth
of suburbs. Supermarkets and the food manufacturing industry grew together
in a symbiotic relationship. Supermarket chains developed their price advan-
tage over traditional retailers by buying in bulk and thus exploiting economies
of scale. The natural partner from whom to buy in bulk was a large-scale food
manufacturer. In the same way, to establish mass brand presence, be priced
competitively, and develop economies of scope with a diversity of products,
large food manufacturers found supermarket chains to be natural partners,
with clear advantages over mom-and-pop shops in all but the manufacturer’s
degree of bargaining power with the client. This symbiosis was as true of large
food manufacturers and supermarkets in the USA in the 1940s as it is in
developing countries today.1 Jointly, supermarkets and large food manufac-
turers transformed the consumer food market. While this is true in general,
272
some of the largest early supermarket chains, such as A&P, the largest retailer
in the world in the mid-twentieth century, had quite a strained relation with
many big manufacturers, and relied to a large extent on private labels. In the
case of A&P, this strategy eventually contributed to its downfall, mostly at the
hand of the antitrust authorities.
Supercenters, such as those operated by Wal-Mart, began to appear in the
USA in the 1990s; they combined a supermarket and mass merchandise
retailing in a single, very large store. A similar combination format actually
appeared in France first, where it was referred to as a hypermarket. The so-
called combination stores were common in the USA before they appeared in
France. In fact, French managers went to the USA to study the principles of
modern retailing, and came up with the hypermarket format.
Wholesale clubs, such as Sam’s Club and Costco, also carry both food and
general merchandise. They require a membership to shop, and lean toward
large sizes and bulk sales. Limited-assortment stores, such as Aldi and Sav-A-
Lot, are small, “bare-bones”, “hard-discount” food stores. They typically carry
fewer than 2,000 items and few, if any, perishables. Convenience stores, such
as 7-Eleven, offer a very limited selection of food and non-food items (Food
Institute 2007).
The Universal Product Code (UPC) providing bar codes on individual
packages was adopted in the 1970s. Scanners came into use to expedite
checkout and eliminate the necessity of stamping a price on each item.
However, unlike in other retail sectors where scanners were adopted, few
advances in the overall supply chain occurred. There was an imbalance of
bargaining power between the food retailers and the major food manufac-
tures, which favored the latter in the USA, as large food manufacturers had
innovated with national brands in the late 1800s and early 1900s when super-
markets were in their infancy. Therefore, well-established food manufacturers
had considerable bargaining power until well into the late twentieth century,
when the pendulum of market power swung toward the retailers. In contrast,
the market power balance has clearly been on the side of the large retailers in
the UK from the mid-twentieth century (Wrigley and Lowe 2002).
Manufacturers had adopted the practice of periodically running large
batches of a product and then pushing it through the system with special
discounts. The distribution system had become bloated with inventories sit-
ting in warehouses. The inventory cost hurt retailers’ competitiveness. Hence,
food retailers instituted a version of “lean inventory management” in the early
1990s under the banner Efficient Consumer Response, widely referred to as
ECR. The development of ECR was in large part a response to Wal-Mart, with
its highly efficient distribution system and “every day low pricing” (EDLP)
strategy. Wal-Mart had already affected supermarket sales in household mer-
chandise and was beginning to open supercenters, which directly competed
273
with supermarkets (King and Phumpiu 1996; Coggins and Senauer 1999). ECR
was designed to “drive costs” from the distribution system, a phrase fre-
quently used. ECR used the advances in information technology to link
retailers, distributors, and suppliers electronically, so that they could coordi-
nate more closely. Timely, accurate, paperless information on sales, inventory
replenishment needs, and payments were to flow one way, with a smooth,
continual product flow matched to consumption in the other direction. Ware-
houses became distribution centers with the goal of speeding the flow of
goods rather than storing inventory. Direct store delivery, in which a truck-
load was sent directly from the supplier to retail stores without ever going
through a distribution center, was adopted for some products. The most
innovative and best-managed food retailers were most successful at achieving
the goals of ECR and thus achieving a competitive advantage with lower costs
(King and Phumpiu 1996; Coggins and Senauer 1999).
By the end of the 1990s the major food retailers had largely remade the
supply chain in the USA and Western Europe. With their control of the flow of
information, they now had the upper hand in their relationship with food
manufacturers and other suppliers. The shift in power from food manufac-
turers to retailers in the USA (following a trend that had occurred a decade or
more before in the UK) was also affected by the waves of consolidation that
occurred in US food retailing and the growth of “private-label” or “store-
brand” products, which competed directly with the national brands. (Both
the consolidation and the private-label trends started later in the USA than in
the UK, as discussed in Wrigley and Lowe (2002).) For example, stores began to
sell cereals that were similar to General Mills’s Cheerios and Kellogg’s Corn-
flakes, but that sold at a much lower price. The new supply-chain practices
allowed food retailers efficiently to expand geographically. These practices
also helped in chains’ internationalization.
By 2005, many of the major food retailers in Europe and some of the
major chains in the United States were operating internationally, as shown
in Table 10.1 (Supermarket News 2007). The two largest global general-
merchandise retailers, Wal-Mart and Carrefour, are also the world’s two lead-
ing food retailers. This is because food accounts for at least a third of the sales
revenue of their most important store formats, Wal-Mart Supercenters and
Carrefour Hypermarkets. Wal-Mart is, in fact, the largest US food retailer, as is
Carrefour in France, its home country. As they have entered the markets of
developing countries like Mexico and transition countries like Poland, food
has been an even more important component of their strategy. This is because
people with lower incomes spend a higher proportion of their household
budgets on food.
Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, publishes an annual Global
Powers of Retailing study. The 2007 report makes clear that the fastest sales
274
Table 10.1. The ten largest global food retailers, 2007
Company Headquarters Sales ($bn)a No. of stores No. of countries
1. Wal-Martb United States $312.40 6,380 16

2. Carrefourb France $92.6 12,179 38
3. Tesco England $69.6 2,365 14
4. Metro Group Germany $69.3 2,458 27
5. Kroger United States $60.6 3,726 1
6. Ahold Netherlands $55.3 6,422 11
7. Costcob United States $52.9 ,460 8
8. Rewe Germany $51.8 11,242 14
9. Schwarz Group Germany $45.8 7,299 22
10. Aldi Germany $45.0 7,788 14
a
Total sales, including non-food, for most recent financial year, usually 2006.
b
Food accounts for at least one-third of the total sales of these companies.
Source: Supermarket News (2007).
growth for the world’s 250 largest retailers is occurring outside the developed
countries. Their average sales growth was only 2.4 percent in France in FY
2005 and 2.1 percent in the UK, whereas it was 20.3 percent in Latin America.
The majority of the top 250 global retailers are involved in food retailing.
Some 54 percent operated supermarkets, superstores, or other formats in
which food products constituted a major proportion of retail sales (Deloitte
2007).
Wal-Mart de Mexico provides a good example of international business
operations of a major global retailer. Wal-Mart’s expansion outside the United
States began in 1991 in Mexico. In a joint venture with the Mexican retailer
Cifra, the country’s largest and strongest retailer at the time, a Sam’s Club was
opened in Mexico City. Wal-Mart acquired majority ownership of Cifra in
1997, and the name was changed to Wal-Mart de Mexico. After Wal-Mart had
bought Cifra, it kept the experienced local managers, but introduced its
efficient US purchasing and distribution system, while investing in expansion.
Just as in the United States, Wal-Mart’s core strategy was focused on low prices
(Malkin 2004). Today Wal-Mart is the largest general-merchandise and food
retailer in Mexico. However, the acquisition by Soriana of Gigante in Decem-
ber 2007 means that there is now a large domestic rival. Wal-Mart operated
several formats in Mexico, with a total of 783 stores in 103 cities throughout
the country and 140,000 employees. Wal-Mart de Mexico sales were equiva-
lent to $18.3 billion in 2006. Total sales grew by 15.3 percent in 2006 in real
terms (corrected for inflation)—more than three times the rate of GDP/capita
growth—with comparable store (for stores open more than a year) real sales
growth of 6.9 percent. With sales growth that is much more robust than it has
been in the United States for Wal-Mart in recent years, it should not be
surprising that Wal-Mart de Mexico expanded rapidly, investing $1.1 billion
and opening 120 new stores since 2004 (Wal-Mart 2007).
275
Interestingly, Wal-Mart operates a more diverse range of store formats in

Mexico than in the United States, and food constitutes a much larger share of
total sales. As of January 2007, Wal-Mart Mexico operated 118 supercenters,
77 Sam’s Clubs, 218 Bodega Aurrera, which offer a limited assortment of food,
housewares, and staple goods, 60 Superama supermarkets, 311 VIPS restau-
rants, and 62 Sububia apparel stores, plus smaller numbers of some other
formats. Food accounted for 45 percent of supercenter sales, 49 percent for
Sam’s Clubs, 48 percent for Bodegas, and 70 percent for Superama super-
markets (Wal-Mart 2007). These figures are a good example of the greater
importance of food in most large retailers in developing and transition
countries, as already discussed. The competition between Wal-Mart and
the main domestic chains has encouraged domestic chain mergers and
acquisitions, such as the one noted above, as well as competitive investments
in procurement system modernization, such as in distribution centers (see
Reardon et al. 2007).
The Spread of Modern Food Retailing into Developing Countries
It is useful to distinguish several distinct phases or “waves” in the geographic

spread of modern food retailing beyond the countries with advanced market
economies. From earliest to latest adopters of supermarkets in emerging mar-
ket areas, there have been three waves of diffusion, and an emerging fourth.
First Wave. Experiencing supermarket-sector “take-off” in the early to mid-
1990s, the first-wave countries include much of South America and East Asia
outside China (and Japan), Northern-Central Europe, and South Africa—a set
of areas where the average share of supermarkets in food retail went from
roughly only 10–20 percent circa 1990 to 50–60 percent on average by the
early 2000s (Reardon and Berdegué 2002; Reardon et al. 2003). Compare that
to the 70–80 percent share that supermarkets had in food retail in 2005 in the
USA, UK, or France, and one sees a process of convergence. Examples include
front-runners where the supermarket take-off started in the early 1990s,
such as Argentina with a 60 percent supermarket share in food retail in 2002
(Gutman 2002), Brazil with 75 percent (Farina 2002), Taiwan with 55 percent
in 2003 (Chang 2005), and the Czech Republic with 55 percent (Dries, Reardon,
and Swinnen 2004). While a small number of supermarkets existed in most
countries during and before the 1980s, they were primarily local firms using
domestic capital,2 and tended to exist in major cities and wealthier neighbor-
hoods. That is, they were essentially a niche retail market serving 5–10 percent
of national food retail sales in 1990 (for at-home consumption: not bought at
restaurant/retail for consumption away from home). However, by 2000, super-
markets had risen to occupy 50–60 percent of national food retail amongst
276
these front-runners, almost approaching the 70–80 percent share for the
United States or France. South America and parts of developing East Asia
and transition Europe had thus seen in a single decade the same development
of supermarkets that the United States experienced in five decades.
There is a second set of countries perched at the tail end of the first wave and
near the start of the second wave, which we class with the first wave, with their
supermarket “take-off” in the mid-1990s, such as Costa Rica and Chile, with
close to 50 percent market share by 2002 (Reardon and Berdegué 2002), and,
in 2003, South Korea with 50 percent (Lee and Reardon 2005), the Philippines
and Thailand with approximately 50 percent each (Thailand Development
Research Institute 2002; Manalili 2005), and South Africa with 55 percent
(Weatherspoon and Reardon 2003).
Second Wave. The second-wave countries include parts of South East Asia
and Central America and Mexico, and Southern-Central Europe, where the
share went from around 5–10 percent in 1990 to 30–50 percent by the early
2000s, with the take-off occurring in the mid- to late 1990s; examples of rapid
growth by 2003 include Mexico with a 40 percent share of supermarkets in
total food retail (see Reardon, Berdegué, and Timmer 2005), Colombia with a
47 percent share (see Hernandez 2004), Guatemala with 36 percent in 2002
(see Orellana and Vasquez 2004) Indonesia with 30 percent (Rangkuti, 2003),
and Bulgaria with 25 percent (Dries, Reardon, and Swinnen 2004).
Third Wave. The third wave includes countries where the supermarket
revolution take-off started only in the late 1990s or early 2000s, reaching
about 10–20 percent of national food retail by circa 2003; they include some
of Africa (see below), some countries in Central and South America (such as
Nicaragua (see Balsevich 2005), Peru, and Bolivia), and some countries in
South East Asia (such as Vietnam (see Tam 2004)), China, India, and Russia.
The latter three countries were the foremost destinations for retail foreign
direct investment (FDI) in the world in 2004 (T. Burt 2004) and remain so
in 2010.
China had no supermarkets in 1989, and food retail was nearly completely
controlled by the government; the sector began in 1990, and by 2003 had
climbed meteorically to a 13 percent share in national food retail, with $71 bil-
lion of sales, 30 percent of urban food retail, and growing the fastest in the
world, at 30–40 percent per year (Hu et al. 2004). Many of the driving forces
for supermarketization were in place (rising incomes, urbanization), and it
merely took a progressive privatization of the retail market and, even more
importantly, a progressive liberalization of retail FDI, which started in 1992
and culminated in 2004, to drive immense competition, even a full-out race,
in investment amongst foreign chains and between foreign chains and
domestic chains. This expansion and competition greatly accelerated in
2005 with the full liberalization of FDI that occurred as a condition to
277
accession to WTO by China. Russia is a similar case, with a late start because of
policy factors holding back the take-off despite propitious socioeconomic
conditions, and then a very rapid take-off spurred on by an immense compe-
tition in investments underway in the early and mid-2000s (Dries and
Reardon 2005).
India is an interesting case, with its substantial middle class acting as a
“springboard” for the spread of supermarkets; the country is amongst the
top three retail FDI candidates in the world and is poised at the edge of a
supermarketization take-off, although the share in food retail is still only, at
most, 5 percent. In 2010, FDI is still far from fully liberalized, and regulations
concerning joint ventures in retail still block what observers think is an
imminent flood of foreign investment. Yet already a massive wave of domestic
capital investment, which should rise to $20 billion sometime before 2015, is
rushing into the Indian retail sector and already beginning to transform it,
fueled by rapid economic growth. Even though retail FDI by 2008 was not yet
liberalized, Metro and other global chains have already entered and operate
cash and carry stores (wholesale to small shops and food service and hotels),
and joint ventures have started, such as Bharti with Wal-Mart, with the latter
assuring the “back end” operations while Bharti assures the “front end” of
retailing, opening stores in March 2008 (Reardon and Gulati 2008).
Sub-Saharan Africa presents a very diverse picture, with only one country
(South Africa) firmly in the first wave of supermarket penetration (Weath-
erspoon and Reardon 2003), and the rest either in the early phase of the “third
wave” take-off of diffusion or in what may be a pending—but not yet started—
take-off of supermarket diffusion. Kenya (Neven and Reardon 2004) and
Zambia (Neven et al. 2006) are in the early phase of the “third wave,” and
have substantial numbers of supermarkets, initiated by both domestic invest-
ment and FDI from South Africa. This investment was attracted by a middle-
class base and high urbanization rates, but supermarket penetration is still
approximately where South America was in the early 1980s. The share of
supermarkets in urban food retail is about 10–20 percent in the large/medium
cities, and the share of produce hovers around 5 percent (see Neven and
Reardon 2004 for Kenya). Even with mainly domestic investment and some
South African retail capital and technology, there is still considerable uncer-
tainty about the rate at which the supermarket sector in these countries will
grow. The great majority of Africa, however, can be classified as not yet
entering a substantial “take-off” of supermarket diffusion. At the upper end
of this group are a score or so of supermarkets in countries like Mozambique
and Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola, places where South African retail FDI is
just starting (see Weatherspoon and Reardon 2003 for evidence on invest-
ments by the South African chain Shoprite) and may by 2020 be recognizable
as a “fourth wave.” Supermarkets in these countries show signs of early growth
278
and are surrounded by a more general trend of the growth of self-service in

large semi-traditional stores in urban areas as in the first third of the twentieth
century in the USA.
In addition to these somewhat distinct phases of expansion, there are also
certain trends that are common to the global spread of modern food retailing.
Supermarkets gain market share most quickly in groceries, and in processed
and packaged goods, because of advantages in both scale and the efficiency of
their supply logistics compared to mom-and-pop stores. Their growth in fresh
foods is usually slower (just as it was in the USA in the twentieth century, not
becoming important in produce, for example, before the 1960s–1970s),
because traditional markets and vendors are nestled in the neighborhoods
and thus provide easy access, and in the early stages are more attuned to local
consumer habits and have better connections to local suppliers. Over time
supermarkets begin to adapt to and shape their customers’ preferences and
also establish a supply network that is more efficient, as well as imposing
higher standards of food quality and safety for fresh products than previously
existed (Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004). The increased importance of
fresh produce retail is very recent, even in first- and second-wave countries.
For example, produce became important in Mexican supermarkets only since
2000 (Reardon et al. 2007); produce was minor in Hong Kong hypermarkets
and supermarkets until they launched in-store wet markets in the early 2000s
and quickly gained share from traditional wet markets (Reardon and Gulati
2008).
Another common trend is for supermarkets to open first in the largest urban
areas, then to spread to smaller cities, and in some countries the expansion has
reached towns in rural areas. The modern food retailing sector has become
typified by both a greater presence by multinational, foreign-owned compa-
nies and by consolidation and more concentration. The multinational opera-
tors, such as Carrefour, have advantages in their access to investment capital
and their procurement and logistics efficiency.
Figure 10.1 shows clearly just how rapid the recent expansion of modern
retailing has been compared to the much slower historical spread in countries
like the United States and France. Some of the countries in which modern food
retailing appeared most recently have seen even faster growth in the sector
than those emerging economies where the expansion began earlier, such as
Brazil and Korea. The rate of expansion in China has been nothing short of
phenomenal.
The customer base of modern food retailers has spread well beyond just the
expatriate and higher-income segments of the population in developing
countries. Few rigorous empirical studies have been conducted of who shops
at these supermarkets and what they are buying. In general, however, the
emerging evidence indicates: (1) that, controlling for wave or stage,
279
90
80
70
60
Percent of sales
50
40
30
20
10
20 0
20 5
10
19 0
45
19 0
55
19 0
65
19 0
75
19 0
19 5
19 0
95
0
0
4
8
8
9
20
19
19
19
19
19
USA France Brazil & Korea China
Figure 10.1. Supermarket share of the retail food market, 1940–2010
supermarkets penetrate first the upper-income, then the middle, and later the
poorer consumer segments; (2) supermarkets have already penetrated well
beyond the middle class into the food markets of the poor in the first-wave
countries and some of the second-wave countries (as can be seen in comparing
the supermarkets’ share in food retail versus the share of the middle and upper
classes in overall population in these countries); (3) while upper and middle
consumer segments are increasingly buying fresh produce from supermarkets,
the poor still mainly buy processed staples (rice, wheat and maize flour, edible
oil, bread, noodles, snacks, beverages, and condiments, as well as dairy) from
supermarkets.
An example is a household survey carried out in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2003
that interviewed a sample of 445 food shoppers, which covered all income
groups. The survey found that a surprising 80 percent of the households
shopped at a supermarket at least once a month and that the figure was
60 percent for even the poorest families in Nairobi. However, higher- and
upper-middle-income households, which essentially constitute what will be
referred to as the emerging global middle class in developing countries in a
later section of this chapter, were crucial in terms of sales. Although they made
up only 15 percent of Nairobi’s population, they accounted for 44 percent of
supermarkets’ sales. The study revealed a clear pattern in what was purchased
at supermarkets, which were mostly processed foods. Only 15 percent of those
sampled bought fresh fruits and vegetables there. Poorer households bought
mostly easy-to-store bulk items like sugar and soap and purchased less than
280
1 percent of their fresh produce at supermarkets. The most frequently given

reason for shopping at a supermarket was “low prices”, followed by “large
assortment.” On the one hand, the most common reasons for buying from
traditional retailers, such as kiosks and over-the-counter shops, were that they
were “easy to get to” and the “availability of credit.” The research found that
prices for processed foods, such as sugar, cooking oil, flour, and bread, were
some 3–4 percent lower at supermarkets than traditional retail outlets. On the
other hand, fresh fruits and vegetables were less expensive at traditional
retailers, almost 90 percent lower at open-air markets, although the quality
might not be as good. In other countries with healthier economies than
Kenya, the growing middle class could be expected to be doing more of its
food shopping predominantly at supermarkets, including purchasing fresh
fruits and vegetables there (Neven et al. 2005).
Factors Driving the Spread of Modern Food Retailing
The global expansion of modern food retailing is being driven by factors that
can be placed in three categories. As shown in Table 10.2, one can distinguish
between push or supply-side, pull or demand-side, and external enabling
factors. Food retailers in the advanced economies are increasingly faced with
domestic markets that are saturated, particularly in Western Europe, which
has pushed them to go abroad. Profits in many cases are under pressure from
intense competition. In these highly developed countries, expenditures on
food are still growing, but very slowly, especially for groceries as opposed to
restaurant and other food service meals.
In addition, food retailers are more capable of operating over far broader
geographic areas because of the innovations in information technology,
which allow them to monitor closely inventories and track the movement
of goods through the supply chain. They have been able to improve greatly
Table 10.2. Factors driving the spread of modern food retailing
Push/supply factors Pull/demand factors Enabling/external factors
Domestic market Per capita income growth in Political stability

saturation other countries
Reduced growth in food Urbanization Trade liberalization
spending
Competitive pressure on Entry of women into the Globalization of other industries (i.e.,
profits work force finance)
Supply-chain technology Emergence of middle class Communication and transportation
technology
Fear of being left behind Size of market potential Cultural globalization
Importance of scale End of the Cold War
Inefficiency of traditional
food systems
281
the efficiency of their supply chains. The companies with the highest effi-
ciency have a competitive advantage that they have tried to transfer to their
operations in other countries. Another push/supply-side factor is that large
retailers must be concerned if they let major international competitors get well
established in a particular foreign market first (Reardon, Timmer, and Berde-
gué 2004; Senauer and Venturini 2005).
At the same time there are demand-side forces that can be thought of as
pulling major food retailers to expand into other countries, especially those
with emerging market economies. Many of these countries, especially some of
the largest, such as Brazil, China, and India, have been experiencing robust
economics growth. China’s economy has grown at 10 percent or more annu-
ally for over a decade. Expenditures on food are growing rapidly in these
countries. According to Engel’s Law, the lower the initial per capita income
level of the population the greater will be the expansion in food demand for a
given rise in income. With additional income, many of the people in these
developing countries want to add more animal protein and greater variety and
improved quality to their diets, which have been dominated by one or two
staples, such as corn, rice, or wheat (Senauer and Venturini 2005).
The emerging middle class in seventeen developing and three transition
countries was estimated to contain over one billion people in 2000. These
consumers lived in households with at least $2,500 in income per person
(Myers and Kent 2003). Foreign currencies were compared to US dollars
using purchasing power parity (PPP) to correct for distortions in foreign
currency exchange rates. In another analysis that focused on food expendi-
tures, the emerging middle class was identified as persons living in households
with annual total consumer expenditures per capita of $2,695 per capita or
more in 2000, a very similar level to the other study. Based on data for Lima,
Peru, the emerging middle class corresponded to the top quintile in terms of
per capita expenditures. The households in the top quintile spent over three
times more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and red meat than the average
purchases of people in the lower four quintiles. They spent over four times
more on yogurt, butter, and cheese; and over six times more on prepared foods
consumed at home (Senauer and Goetz 2004). This makes clear why this
middle class is so attractive to food retailers. The size of the emerging middle
class in China in 2003 was estimated to be 352 million, in India 105 million,
in Russia 89 million, in Brazil 57 million, all of which continue to grow rapidly
(Senauer 2005).
In addition, the increasing urbanization and growing participation of
women in jobs outside the home have created opportunities for modern
food retailers. Also, the ownership of a refrigerator allows a family to shift its
food shopping patterns. With a refrigerator, people do not need to shop as
frequently, even daily in many cases for fresh foods, or as close to home, as
282
they would without a refrigerator. They can stock up on less frequent trips to a
more distant supermarket (Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004).
With rapid economic growth and large populations, the size of not just the
present, but especially the future potential, market for retail food in countries
such as China and India makes them extremely attractive opportunities.
Beyond that, the larger scale that can be achieved with expansion in a country
or a region, or even globally, allows for increased efficiency. There are scale
economies in a distribution system that serves more stores. The investments
in information technology and logistics can afford to be greater and the costs
of distribution centers and transport are spread over more retail outlets.
Traditional food production and marketing systems are burdened by ineffi-
ciencies and marked by low levels of capital, labor, and land productivity.
Post-harvest crop losses during storage, transportation, and marketing are
frequently in the order of 30 percent. Losses may be even higher for perishable
products, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, since they were not kept chilled
during distribution, which also affects quality.
Although trade liberalization has dominated the globalization debate, retail
(and processing) FDI liberalization is a far larger force in affecting the “remak-
ing of markets” in developing countries. In fact, the liberalization of retail FDI
in many developing countries in the early 1990s was the main “sufficient”
factor (beyond the necessary factors of the propitious demand-side situation
of rising incomes and urbanization) to initiate the supermarket revolution in
the 1990s in developing countries (Reardon and Timmer 2007).
Moreover, the global expansion of food retailers, as with other industries,
has been facilitated by the globalization of other services, including the
financial industry, as well as by improvements in communication with the
Internet and transportation, with convenient jet travel to most places in
the world. The movement of information and key personnel is crucial to a
global business. Food preferences still vary significantly between countries,
and even within regions of many nations. However, cultural globalization has
brought preferences closer together, which makes it easier for food retailers to
expand internationally.
Transformation of the Supply Chain
The rapid growth of supermarkets is profoundly transforming the marketing

channels and the agro-food markets in many developing countries. Super-
markets initially gained a large share of the market for packaged groceries, but
more recently have been making rapid gains in fresh products, such as dairy
and fruits and vegetables. Modern food retailers, such as Carrefour and
Wal-Mart, as well as many competing domestic chains, need large product
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volumes and operate centralized procurement operations. They want to deal

with only a small number of large, reliable suppliers and not a multitude of
small fragmented producers. The retailers are imposing stringent quality stan-
dards, and are beginning to impose safety standards. Procurement contracts
and “preferred” suppliers are replacing traditional wholesale markets already
in an advanced way for processed products, and in initial phases for fresh
products. Sourcing is becoming regional or even global. The use of modern
logistics practices is driving costs from the system, as was done in the United
States and Europe.
These supply-chain changes are leading to a consolidation of the procure-
ment system—in particular for processed products. Examples include a
Chinese medium-sized supermarket chain cutting back sharply on its pro-
cessed food suppliers (Hu et al. 2004) and Russian supermarket chains doing
the same for their dairy suppliers (Dries and Reardon 2005). This sort of
“exclusion” is still far less common in fresh produce for several reasons. Super-
markets in developing countries have only very recently introduced fresh
produce. (We noted above the example of Mexico, which is typical amongst
second-wave countries, where supermarkets started to have a substantial
retailing effort in fresh produce only in the 2000s). Moreover, supermarket
chains still mainly rely on traditional sourcing from wholesale markets. Where
they have begun to modernize fresh produce procurement, such as via
specialized wholesalers or via direct sourcing, the general tendency is toward
use of the “upper tier” (in terms of land or non-land assets) of horticultural
producers (Reardon and Berdegué 2007). Thus, for example, even the
specialized wholesaler working for Carrefour in Indonesia sources from small
tomato farmers, but these tend to be the “elite” of the small farmers in terms of
assets like irrigation, access to infrastructure, and education (Natawidjaja et al.
2007). Moreover, the nationwide network and even regional and global net-
works of supermarkets in developing countries mean that local farmers
become more exposed to competition.
The modern food retailers’ procurement contracts set quality and consis-
tency requirements that most small producers cannot meet, in particular in
the case of processed plus semi-processed foods (constituting some 80–90 per-
cent of the food sales of supermarkets, the rest being fresh produce and fish).
As noted above, to the extent that supermarkets are moving away from
sourcing from the traditional wholesale markets, these higher private stan-
dards are beginning to affect produce growers and form a challenge, especially
for small farmers. These private standards are becoming more important in
agro-food systems than the public grades and food safety standards estab-
lished by governments and international agreements (Reardon et al. 1999).
Meeting a retailer’s requirements for fresh produce may necessitate major
investments in packing and cooling facilities, cold storage and shipment,
284
and trucking capacity. Carrefour applies the same quality certification to some
200 items globally, and other international retailers are also applying similar
quality standards across countries (Reardon and Berdegué 2002).
Considerable attention has been given to the effects of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) accords and CODEX Alimentarius (an international food
code) protocols on agro-food quality and safety standards. In reality, the
private standards established by global food retailers have a greater impact in
many cases, except for the international trade of basic agricultural commod-
ities. Likewise, there has been a focus on the potential for exporting fruits and
vegetables and other agricultural products from developing countries to the
industrial ones. However, the domestic market opportunity may be greater.
For example, supermarkets in Latin America buy 2.5 times more produce to
sell to local consumers than these countries export to the rest of the world
(Reardon and Berdegué 2002).
Why are modern retailers in developing countries moving toward procure-
ment system modernization? In many countries, modern food retailers have
found the traditional wholesale markets and distribution systems challenging.
Javier Gallegos (2003), who was the head of marketing for Hortifruti, the
dedicated produce wholesaler for the CARHCO chain of supermarkets in
Central America (bought by Wal-Mart in 2006), clearly outlined the short-
coming of the traditional supply chain:
The market is fragmented, unformatted, and lacks standards. The growers produce
low quality products, use bad harvest techniques; there is a lack of equipment and
transportation, there is no post-harvest control and infrastructure; there is no
market information. There are high import barriers and corruption. The informal
market does not have: research, statistics, market information, standardized pro-
ducts, quality control, technical assistance, infrastructure. (Gallegos 2003)
Modern food retailers operating in developing regions have both qualitative

and quantitative goals in re-engineering the supply chain, with the first
increasing product quality and food safety and with the second reducing
costs and increasing volume. Traditional procurement systems have relied on
wholesalers and wholesale markets. The new procurement systems have four
key elements or “pillars”: (1) centralized procurement systems, (2) specialized/
dedicated wholesalers, (3) preferred suppliers, and (4) high-quality and
improved safety standards (Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004; Reardon
and Timmer 2007).
As food retailers expand the number of stores in their chain in a country or
region, they shift from a system of each store handling its own procurement to
the centralization of procurement operations utilizing regional distribution
(wholesale) centers. This organizational change in procurement occurs earliest
in processed products, then in semi-processed, and very recently has started in
285
fresh produce. For example, Ahold, a Dutch supermarket chain, and Tesco, a
British chain, both operate central distribution centers (DCs) to serve their
stores in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Carrefour, the French
hypermarket chain, distributes to fifty stores in southeastern Brazil from a
DC in Sao Paulo. Procurement of perishable products such as fresh fruits and
vegetables and dairy products, which used to be largely local, has become
regional and even, in some cases, global. Centralization increases scale econo-
mies and efficiency, although transportation costs typically increase (Reardon
and Timmer 2007; Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004).
The second pillar is moving from relying on spot markets, such as tradi-
tional wholesale markets and brokers, to wholesalers and logistics firms,
which are specialized for product categories and dedicated to meeting the
needs of modern food retailers. Hortifruti was established to procure the
fresh produce for the major supermarket chain in Central America. Freshmark
serves a similar function for Shoprite, the largest supermarket chain in Africa.
At the same time, the retailers require these dedicated wholesalers and their
suppliers to adopt best-practices distribution and logistics processes. These
practices include electronic interchanges replacing paper transactions. Physi-
cal improvements in how, especially fresh, products are harvested, shipped,
and stored are required, with a continuous cold (refrigerated) chain from the
grower/shipper to the retail store. These changes have improved both effi-
ciency and product quality (Reardon, Timmer, and Berdegué 2004; Reardon
and Timmer 2007).
The third pillar involves establishing longer-term contractual relations with
“preferred suppliers,” usually via the dedicated wholesalers. This practice is an
example of “vertical coordination,” which brings many of the benefits of
vertical integration via acquisition and merger without the costs and manage-
ment problems. A food processor or producer is “listed” as a preferred supplier.
The contract usually contains incentives for the supplier to stay with the
buyer and to make the investments in equipment and processes to meet the
particular requirements of the retailer. If a supplier does not meet the retailer’s
expectation, they can be “delisted,” losing a major customer. Xincheng Foods
acts as the primary produce wholesaler for the two largest food retail chains in
China. Xincheng leased some 1,000 hectares (about 2,500 acres) of prime farm
land, hired farm workers, invested in tractors, drip irrigation, and greenhouses
to supply high-quality produce to the supermarkets and to the export market,
Xincheng also contracted with some 4,500 small farmers for additional pro-
duction (Hu et al. 2004; Reardon and Timmer 2007).
The final element of modernizing the supply chain is the implementation
of private quality and food safety standards by the retailers that its suppliers
must meet. The regulation of food safety and quality has not been a primary
concern for the governments in developing countries. Even if rules and
286
regulations are in place, the monitoring and enforcement are usually missing.
The private standards substitute for the absence of government regulation and
also serve several other important purposes. The safety of the food supply
should be a government responsibility, but in its absence large food retailers
need to consider both their liability and public reputation.
Private standards also harmonize the product and delivery attributes
amongst partners in the supply chain, which improves efficiency and reduces
transaction costs. The food retailers can also use their private quality and
safety standards as a means of differentiating themselves from the competi-
tion. Global food retailers can lower costs by applying the same standards
across countries. Carrefour started to apply the same quality certification
to numerous items globally, for example (Reardon and Berdegué 2002).
Finally, though, the food retailers need sufficient market power to impose
their standards and suppliers capable of actually meeting them (Reardon and
Timmer 2007).
Implications for Farmers and Agricultural Development
The global spread of modern food retailing is bringing more change to the
agricultural sector in many developing countries than decades of government
programs, projects by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and
international development assistance. The procurement requirements of
modern food retailers offer both opportunities and challenges for agricultural
producers. Becoming a supplier to a supermarket chain can open the door to a
market that is growing in terms of volume, value added, and diversity. Produ-
cers can move from supplying a local market to one that is regional, national,
and even international.
To supply a large domestic food retail chain increasingly requires producers
to meet the same standards of efficiency, quality, reliability, and food safety
necessary to export to international markets. To fulfill these requirements,
though, requires improvements in production techniques and substantial
investments in everything from information technology to modern packing
houses with cooling units. Food retailing is a low-margin business typified in
general by a high level of price competition. These pressures mean retailers are
pushing their suppliers to lower product and transaction costs. Not surpris-
ingly, supermarket procurement becomes increasingly dominated by the most
capable farmers and firms, which are normally the larger operations (Reardon
and Timmer 2007).
Small farmers with limited assets are largely being excluded from the super-
market supply chain because they lack the knowledge or capital to make the
necessary changes and investments. To understand the reasons more fully, we
287
must simply review supermarket procurement strategy and requirements.

Above all, supermarkets require consistent, reliable supplies of a standardized
quality. In comparison to traditional markets, supermarkets demand: (1) a
higher, consistent quality that satisfies food safety standards, (2) a reliable
supply of large volumes, (3) modernized logistics practices, such as truck
transportation and chilled storage, (4) strict delivery conditions in terms of
grading, packaging, labeling, timing, and so on, (5) a high level of efficiency
resulting in low prices and transaction costs, and (6) advanced management
and information technology systems (Neven and Reardon 2003).
Suppliers typically do not receive payment from supermarkets immediately
upon delivery, which is what small farmers are used to in traditional market-
ing channels. As supermarkets become established in a country, they shift
from store-level delivery to centralized distribution centers, from traditional
brokers and wholesalers to dedicated wholesalers and a system of preferred
suppliers, and impose their own private quality and safety standards, rather
than rely on government ones (Weatherspoon and Katjiuongua 2003). Econ-
omists would argue that an essential reason that small producers are being
excluded is the high transaction costs and transaction risk (Dorward et al.
2004). It is costly to deal with many small suppliers rather than a few large
consolidated ones. Moreover, there is greater risk they will not deliver pro-
ducts with the reliability and consistency required.
The institutional innovations required to link small producers into the
supermarket supply chain are likely to be the most essential element for
their participation. These institutions must be arranged to reduce
substantially the high transaction costs and risks associated with sourcing
products from small farmers. Contract farming, also referred to as out-grower
schemes, and cooperatives, farmer associations, and other forms of farmer-
controlled enterprises have been increasingly seen as a potential way to
improve the inputs and technical support available to small farmers, as well
as expanding their marketing opportunities (Coulter et al. 1999). They might
also serve to lower transaction costs and risks, particularly if the contracting is
with a farmer cooperative or association.
In contract farming, private agribusiness companies establish a contractual
arrangement with individual farmers for a specific quantity and quality of
product at specified terms. The contract frequently includes the provision of
inputs, such as seed and fertilizer, as well as technical and even financial
support. There are some clear benefits and also some problems with contract
farming and out-grower arrangements. Farmers may fail to make delivery or
default on the credit repayment, and supervisory and transaction costs with
many small producers can be very high (Coulter et al. 1999). The greater risks
and costs have led to the exclusion of small farmers.
288
Current farmer-owned enterprises are different from the state-controlled

cooperatives of the past. The latter were usually unresponsive to farmer
needs and generally performed poorly. The new cooperatives perform best
with small, cohesive groups of farmers and when directly linked with an
agribusiness enterprise buying their production. They are more likely to suc-
ceed when the functions are kept relatively simple and focused and when they
concentrate on higher-value products rather than low-value staples. The suc-
cessful ones are also more likely to have been built upon already existing
farmer organizations and have a clear member-driven agenda. The link with
agribusiness and other private-sector market intermediaries is critical to ensur-
ing there is a viable market (Coulter et al. 1999). These characteristics suggest
such cooperatives deserve careful consideration as an institutional structure
for integrating small farmers into the supermarket supply chain.
Farmer cooperatives can work well in combination with contract farming.
Group liability for credit repayment reduces the risk of default, and transac-
tion costs are reduced by the scale economies. The governments of developing
countries and donors can provide an enabling setting for successful out-
grower schemes and farmer-owned enterprises, particularly in terms of the
appropriate laws and regulations. Government agencies and NGOs can pro-
mote farmer cooperatives, especially those that develop contractual links to a
supermarket procurement channel and other expanded market opportunities.
This promotional role requires that the government agencies and NGOs
develop good working relations with both the farmer groups and agribusi-
nesses. A high priority needs to be placed on improving the business and
technical skills of the groups (Coulter et al. 1999). The most viable institu-
tional structure will depend on the particular situation and participants
involved. As Haggblade, Hazell, and Reardon (2002) stressed, flexibility is
important to be able to adjust to changing circumstances.
The history of agriculture in the developed economies of countries such as
the United States offers an important lesson. Increasing labor productivity
in the agricultural sector is essential to improving the incomes of farmers.
However, as productivity rises, fewer farmers and agricultural workers are
needed. In 1900, 40 percent of the US population lived and worked on
farms; now only 2 percent do, and somewhat over 100,000 large farms
account for the majority of agricultural output (Offutt and Gunderson 2005;
USDA NASS 2007). US agricultural policy has tried to ease the effects of this
transformation with limited success.
In the final analysis, as the number of farms shrinks in developing
countries, in no small part because of the spread of modern food retailing,
hundreds of millions of people will transition to employment in other sectors
of the economy over time. It is fortunate that modern food retailing is
expanding most rapidly in countries that have been experiencing robust
289
economic growth, such as China. Therefore, their economies are in a better

position to handle the large migration out of agriculture and rural areas.
However, strong government policies and programs are necessary to help
provide these people with the education and skills to find jobs in other sectors.
Efforts are also needed to encourage private businesses to help create more
off-farm job opportunities in rural areas.
290
11
Market Making in the Personal

Computer Industry
Introduction
Since the mid-1980s, personal computer makers have been steadily changing
from manufacturers to market makers. Leading PC makers once designed and
built their own PCs and sold them through a mix of direct and mostly indirect
distribution channels.1 PCs were built to forecast, and fluctuating demand led
to alternating periods of costly inventory build-up and product shortages.
Given the rapid depreciation and obsolescence of PCs and their components,
and the common practice of price protection given to retailers, this produc-
tion and distribution model was very costly to PC manufacturers.
This model was severely disrupted in the 1990s by the rise of direct sales
specialists Dell and Gateway. By selling directly to the customer and building
only products to order, these companies were able to reduce inventory and
introduce new products without needing months to clear out old inventory in
the channel. Dell’s rapid growth and superior financial performance, in par-
ticular, put enormous pressure on the rest of the industry, eventually driving
some competitors out of the market and forcing others to revamp their
distribution channels and supply chains. While different models were applied
over the years, PC makers moved to selling directly to the customer or to
working closely with retailers to match supply and demand through sophisti-
cated marketing, forecasting and supply-chain management. A key element
has been the use of the Internet as a distribution channel and information
technology more generally to streamline processes within the firm and across
the supply chain.
The impacts are greatest in the USA, where direct sales increased from less
than a quarter to over one half of the market between 1995 and 2005. The
direct channel is especially important in serving the commercial market,2
where PC makers offer a variety of services together with hardware to support
IT departments in organizations. In the indirect channel, aimed at the con-
sumer market, sales shifted from dealers and specialist stores to larger con-
sumer electronics and office retailers, such as Best Buy and Office Depot, who
work closely with PC makers to shape and efficiently fulfill market demand.
The US pattern contrasts with other markets. Worldwide the indirect
channel accounts for two-thirds of sales, and the dealer/reseller segment is
larger than retail. Retail exhibits many different local patterns as a result of
local consumer preferences, government regulations, and differences in his-
torical evolution. This local complexity makes it difficult for branded PC
makers to become global market makers. Instead, branded PC makers such
as Dell, HP, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba are forced to adjust their distribution
models to fit local markets. Internet sales, in particular, are constrained by
consumer preferences and by the quality of IT and delivery infrastructure
(Kraemer et al. 2006).
In some country markets, domestic competitors maintain extensive dealer
networks (for example, NEC, Toshiba and Fujitsu in Japan, Samsung in Korea,
and Lenovo in China). Elsewhere, local retailers developed their own store
brand PCs, or collaborated with local companies to act as market makers (for
example, Germany, Brazil). In many markets, “white-box”3 PCs make up a large
share of the market. In these markets, small local shops build PCs for individual
customers or small businesses. However, while there is a great deal of variation,
the global trend is also toward more direct sales and toward large electronics
retailers taking market share away from specialist dealers and resellers.
Although PC makers have become market makers, retailing PCs to commer-
cial customers and consumers, the PC industry offers a different and interest-
ing twist on the “market-makers” theme. In other industries, retailers used
their relationship with the final customer to gain leverage over brand-name
manufacturers. They also developed store brands, essentially coordinating the
manufacturing process, even though they did not own any factories them-
selves. In the PC industry, major branded manufacturers became market
makers in their own right, primarily by selling directly to the final customer,
and also in collaboration with major retailers. PC makers perform market-
making activities such as targeting markets, defining products, capturing
customers, organizing efficient supply chains, and integrating hardware, soft-
ware, services, and content to deliver new user experiences. Meanwhile, some
retailers have developed “store” brands, but most have either lacked the ability
to compete directly with brand-name vendors, or decided it is not profitable to
try to do so.
292
Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry
Evolution of the PC Industry
Historically, computer companies were vertically integrated, handling all as-

pects of manufacturing and distribution. The introduction of the PC, which
was a modular product whose architecture was open, changed the industry
into horizontal industry segments, each of which specialized in different
aspects from microprocessors to components and peripherals to PC systems
to operating systems and applications to distribution (see Figure 11.1). PC
companies designed and assembled modular systems from components and
software developed by outside suppliers. These systems were distributed
through a variety of channels, including wholesalers, corporate resellers,
department stores, electronics superstores, specialty retailers, and the vendors’
own direct sales force. The connection between the PC maker and the final
customer was often weak (via advertising and marketing) or non-existent. This
market diversity made it difficult to match supply and demand, leading to a
build-up of inventory that was costly, given the rapid depreciation of the
product.
In the mid-1990s, a major shift began in the US market toward direct sales of
PCs, led by Dell and Gateway. By selling directly to the end customer, the PC
maker was able to respond to demand and also to shape the demand to match
available supply (for example, by using telesales staff to promote or offer
discounts on products in stock). The direct model also cut out the distributor
and retailer, thereby eliminating two layers of inventory, avoiding costly price
protection guarantees to retailers, and allowing new products to be brought to
market without clearing old inventory out of the channel (see Figure 11.2).
The direct model put the PC maker in the role of “market maker,” with control
over pricing and branding and the ability to bundle a variety of products and
services to the customer.
In the US market, the direct model came to dominate the corporate market,
as a result of the success of Dell and the shift to greater use of direct sales by
Compaq, HP, and IBM. The direct model was augmented by e-commerce, as
Component Retailer/
CM/ODM PC maker Distributor Customer
suppliers reseller
R&D Manufacturing Design, Distribution Sales,

manufacturing final assembly, service
marketing
Figure 11.1. Indirect distribution

Note: CM = contract manufacturer; ODM = original design manufacturer. (ODMs are mostly
Taiwanese firms that provide manufacturing and design services. Over 80% of notebook PCs are
now manufactured by ODMs. CMs provide manufacturing services to a broad array of electronics
firms.)
293
Component
CM/ODM PC maker Customer
suppliers
R&D Manufacturing Design, final

manufacturing assembly, marketing,
sales, service
Figure 11.2. Direct distribution
customers could easily compare, configure, and buy PCs online from the PC
vendor, or place the order by phone. In the consumer market, while many
customers began to buy direct, many still preferred shopping in a physical
store. However, the retail market for PCs changed. Whereas the indirect
channel dominated with 76 percent of PC shipments in 1995, direct sales
accounted for nearly 55 percent of all PC shipments by 2005 (see Table 11.1).
Market-Making Models in the US PC Market
Many variations of market making are used in the direct and indirect models,
with different companies choosing different mixes of the two. Four such
variations in the US PC market are shown in Table 11.2 and are described here.
1. In the traditional channel third-party intermediaries supply branded PCs to

business and consumer end users. These intermediaries may be distributors,
value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators (SI), or large merchandisers
(for example, department stores, large electronic stores, or large discount
stores). In addition, distributors supply branded PCs to the many specialty
Table 11.1. US PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005 (% of total units)
Channel 1995 2000 2005
Directa 23.79 41.70 54.46

Direct inbound 16.02 22.31 17.31
Direct outbound 7.77 12.67 24.76
Internet direct 0.00 6.72 12.39
Indirectb 76.21 58.30 45.54
Retail 29.76 24.05 21.36
Dealer/VAR/SI 37.32 29.77 19.85
Other 9.13 4.48 4.33
a
Direct sales include: (1) sales by customer-initiated inbound calls, (2) sales by a feet-on-the-street sales
force, and sales by vendor-initiated outbound calls, (3) sales made strictly online directly by the end
user with no human interaction from the vendor.
b
Indirect sales are those sold through a distributor, aggregator, system integrator, value-added reseller,
mass merchant, or retailer, including vendor-owned retail stores.
Source: IDC (2006).
294
Table 11.2. Comparison of market-making models in US PC market
Characteristics Indirect traditional Retail Direct PC maker as Retailer as PC

channel collaboration retailer maker
Channel roles Channel as Re-intermediation: PC maker Retailer employs

intermediary PC maker and disintermediates ODMs to make own-
between retailer collaborate the traditional brand PC and go to
manufacturer and in going to market channel and goes market
the market direct to the market
Channel Channels include Channels include Channels include Retailer is the channel
members large distributors, large retailers vendor sales force,
VARs, SIs, and inbound and
electronics/ outbound phone
discount stores sales, online sales,
vendor-owned
stores
Examples HP and Apple: Gateway/ Dell: Web, Wal-Mart, CompUSA,
IngramMicro, eMachines, and telesales, white-box dealers,
TechData, Fry’s, HP with Best Buy, experimenting with ODMs/
Costco, Best Buy, Costco, Office with own stores component suppliers
CompUSA Depot Apple: Web,
telesales, Apple
Stores
Market Commercial and Consumer market Commercial SME, consumer
strength consumer markets market markets
retailers, especially smaller ones. Hewlett-Packard is the iconic illustration of

this variation, but also involves retail collaboration (as described below). The
traditional channel is the dominant variation used by vendors for many other
related products (for example, components, peripherals, supplies) whose
manufacturers are too small to deal directly with retailers.
2. Retail collaboration was created by eMachines, whose CEO was a former
Best Buy executive. It is incorporated by Gateway, which bought eMachines
and continues to sell both brands. It involves
close collaboration between the PC maker and a few major retailers,
using very sophisticated demand forecasting models to match supply and
demand, and
three-month product cycles with sell-out at the end of each cycle to
avoid inventory build-up (Ralston, Kraemer, and Dedrick 2004).
The market-making mechanism is shared by the branded PC maker and the

retailer, who cooperate in determining target markets, product design, and
advertising programs. The number one consumer PC vendor, HP, reportedly
developed a similar approach in the retail channel for consumer and SME
(small and medium enterprise) markets.
295
3. The PC maker as retailer is the classic illustration of the pure direct-sales

model that employs the vendor’s own direct-sales force in the field, its own
and third-party telesales, and Internet sales to reach customers. It proved
especially attractive to the commercial market, but also caught on with
consumers in the USA.
The direct model is associated mostly with Dell for the commercial market
(Kraemer, Dedrick, and Yamashiro 2000) and originally with Gateway for the
consumer market (Dedrick, Kraemer, and MacQuarie 2001). It also is used by
other PC makers such as Apple and HP. In this case, the PC maker acts as
retailer and market maker and disintermediates the channel. Direct sales have
been expanded by Dell and Apple to include other electronics products such
as big-screen TVs, printers, and portable music players. The most familiar
forms of direct sales are telesales and online sales, but both Dell and HP have
feet-on-the-street sales forces that deal with large corporate and multinational
customers.
The vendor-owned store is a variation of PC maker as retailer. Although
abandoned by Gateway (Dedrick, Kraemer, and MacQuarrie 2001), it is highly
successful for Apple. Dell is currently experimenting with its own stores.
Apple’s success is partly due to the design and location of its stores, which
are generally in high-end retail malls and districts and do not compete directly
with electronics retailers who also sell its products. Also, retailers cannot
obtain Macs or iPods elsewhere, unlike the Wintel standard PCs, and so they
lack leverage with Apple.
4. Retailer as PC maker, the private-label brand was experimented with by
WalMart, CompUSA, and other retailers (Tzeng and Shen 2005). It is also used
by small local makers who long held a strong position in the small business
market. Although declining, private labels still supply about 20 percent of the
total PC market in the USA and more in developing countries. Retailers can
easily source PCs from contract manufacturers and original design
manufacturers, as well as from distributors who provide final assembly.
There is no real barrier to selling private-label brands, yet, as of 2007, large
retailers in the USA have not done much to develop their own PC or
electronics brands, unlike retailers in clothing, tools, furniture, and other
products.
Evolutionary patterns of PC makers as market makers
When these models are applied to the branded PC firms in the industry, it is
clear that no single firm fits the direct and indirect models perfectly, although
Dell and Gateway were closest to the direct model and HP and Compaq were
closest to the indirect model in 2000. Since then, the companies have chosen
296
Table 11.3. US branded PC makers as market makers, percentage of shipments by channel,

1995–2005 (%)
Vendor Indirect Direct
Retail Value-added Vendor-direct Pure Internet and

reseller/system sales force and third- party
integrator telesales Internet
1995 2005 1995 2005 1995 2005 2000a 2005
Apple 36 39 53 13 11 43 7 4
Dell 0 0 0 6 100 67 15 27
Gateway 0 67 1 3 99 25 8 5
HP 20 51 80 21 0 24 2 5
Compaqb 34 - 58 — 8 — 2 —
IBM 30 0 57 51 14 36 6 13
a
Note that this column contains values for 2000 rather than 1995. The 1995 values for each vendor add to 100. Internet
sales were 0% in 1995, the year that the Internet was opened for commerce.
b
Compaq was acquired by HP in 2002. Its 2005 data are included in HP’s results.
Source: IDC (2007).
different mixes of the two models, with their distinct patterns apparent when
changes in channel use from 1995 to 2005 are compared (see Table 11.3).
The table shows the following:
All PC makers listed moved to greater use of direct sales, but indirect sales
still dominate for most companies.
Although all PC makers moved to greater Internet sales by 2005, they
comprise only 5 percent for Apple, Gateway, and HP with a greater share
for IBM (13 percent) and Dell (27 percent). Gateway actually went
down in its Internet share between 2000 and 2005.
Dell, which was 100 percent direct in 1995, has remained largely direct,
with 27 percent of sales from the Internet. Dell has begun to use value-
added resellers and system integrators (6 percent), mainly for the SME
market, where its own direct sales force is too expensive and which retail
is not equipped to serve.
Hewlett-Packard, which was 100 percent indirect in 1995, had become
nearly 30 percent direct in 2005, partly by acquiring Compaq, which had
established a direct sales business. The ratio of retail to VAR/SI shifted
from 2:8 to 5:2.
Apple moved the farthest toward engaging in its own market-making
activity. Whereas only 18 percent of shipments were direct in 1995,
47 percent were direct by 2005. This change was largely through its own
retail stores and telesales rather than the Internet.
297
Gateway migrated from nearly 100 percent direct to mainly retail

collaboration (67 percent), after its acquisition of eMachines and
introduction of Gateway brand products into large retail outlets. In
between 1995 and 2005, it opened and then closed over 200 of its own
Gateway Country Stores in an unsuccessful market-making strategy. In
2007, Acer, Taiwan’s largest PC maker, acquired Gateway, and made it a
wholly owned subsidiary. In 2009, Acer relaunched Gateway-branded
computers in online and retailer markets in and outside the USA.
These individual patterns illustrate that the industry remains dynamic, with
each firm seeking relative advantage through different combinations of direct
and indirect approaches to market making.
Market-Making Activities by PC Makers
Two fundamentally different market-making approaches to customer and

supplier markets underlie the direct and indirect channels: supply–push in
the indirect channel and demand–pull in the direct channel (see Table 11.4).
Individual firm innovations also resulted in variations of these approaches.
Market making through the indirect channel historically followed a supply–
push approach to both customer and supplier markets (see Table 11.4, col-
umn 2). For customer markets, vendors decided what products to offer to
customers, developed sales targets for regions, supplied the products to distri-
bution, and provided high margins to retailers and value-added resellers
to push the product through their own advertising and sales campaigns.
The vendor also provided umbrella advertising for its brand and products,
and protected the channel through price protection to retailers who had to
discount to move inventory.
For supplier markets, vendors developed quarterly sales forecasts, placed
orders for systems/components to suppliers and required them to keep a
45–60 day inventory in the vendor’s regional distribution centers to reduce
the risk of stock-outs. Both vendor and supplier bore substantial inventory risk
if the sales forecasts were high, because another 45–60 day inventory was
already in the supply chain. In recent years, vendors have made significant
improvements in supply-chain management, with techniques such as vendor-
managed components inventory, supply hubs close to the assembly site, and
interorganizational IT systems to coordinate with suppliers. As a result, indi-
rect vendors have seen significant improvements in inventory turnover and
other measures of supply-chain efficiency. Today, the indirect model con-
tinues to be an important way to reach markets, particularly consumer and
298
Table 11.4. Market-making activities in PC industry
Market-making activities Indirect (Supply–push) Direct (Demand–pull)
Customer markets
Market and product Hardware and software, e.g., Hardware, software, and a
definition HP/Compaq “relationship”, e.g., Dell
Capture customers Vendor provides the box; Vendor offers custom box and
retailers and resellers offer relationship through vendor
“value beyond the box”: touch direct sales force, inbound
& feel, additional software, and outbound call centers
services
Vendor develops brand; retailers Vendor develops brand, makes
do advertising sales calls to capture
customers
Develops customized website,
offers PC services to lock in
customers
Incentives and risk Incentives for channel partners, Vendor and suppliers bear risk;
but vendor takes inventory risk no retail
Collaborative variation involves
shared risk by retailer and
vendor
Demand management Only what is in inventory. Can match demand and supply;
Retailers can push products can shape demand
with advertising and sales
Supplier markets
Product management Vendor designs product, Vendor designs product,
procures key components, procures key components,
manages supply chain does final assembly, manages
logistics and distribution
centers
Outsourcing Development, manufacturing, Development, manufacturing,
assembly, logistics, support
distribution, support
IT-based supply-chain Vendor supply–push; IT critical Customer demand–pull; IT
management for supply-chain management critical for demand signals &
supply chain mgt.
SME markets, and in developing countries without adequate information and

transportation infrastructure to support direct sales.
The collaborative variation on indirect market making emerged as a
response to problems with the indirect channel in managing demand and
controlling inventory between the PC maker and end customer. By making
quarterly commitments to sell predefined quantities, the retailer takes the
market risk. In turn, the PC maker is able to incorporate the latest components
into new designs each quarter in order to have a fresh supply of new products.
The quarterly commitments enable the PC maker to provide accurate forecasts
of demand so there is no inventory in the supply chain. These commitments
also enable better forecasting of long-term demand by the PC maker, which in
turn gives them greater price leverage with the original design manufacturers
(ODMs) and suppliers who can see the potential volume of business.
299
In addition, the PC maker is able to provide umbrella marketing for its retail
partners and to mount joint advertising campaigns to promote sell-through of
all products with the retailers. For example, eMachine’s collaborative model,
which focused on market making with large electronics retailers, was also
adopted by Gateway when it acquired the firm. A similar approach has been
taken by HP for its HP and Compaq brand PCs, which are the biggest sellers by
far in the US retail market. As will be seen below, the collaborative model was
emulated outside the USA by the German PC maker Medion, which collabor-
ated with the very large supermarket chains and mass retailers in Europe.
In contrast to the supply–push approach, the direct model involves a
demand–pull approach to market making (see Table 11.4). For customer mar-
kets, vendors promote customization (build to order), standardization (down-
load of corporate standard software to all PCs), and low cost, especially to
commercial customers (business, government, education) to attract their busi-
ness. Vendors take orders through their own direct sales force, call centers, or
the Internet, giving vendors direct understanding of customer demand and
the ability to detect new market trends early. The direct relationship also
enables the vendor to up-sell customers by offering related products at low
cost (computer plus printer, monitor, training and service), sell components
that are in inventory by offering discounts, and shape demand by offering
newer technologies at the same price as current ones. Vendors develop adver-
tising to build brand image, promote specific products, and drive customers to
their websites and call centers. A substantial direct sales force and “executive
centers” are also used to promote large commercial contracts. For example,
Dell has executive centers located at manufacturing plants whose purpose is to
sell customers on the Dell model and Dell’s execution of it through briefings,
an in-plant tour, and an informal lunch or reception with Dell executives and
staff (Dell interview 2000).
Commercial contracts usually involve thousands and frequently tens of
thousands of PCs to be delivered over several years, which have major im-
plications for supplier markets. Vendors are able to forecast demand better,
plan production, and negotiate prices with suppliers based on known
demand. Because the PCs are built to the customer’s order and delivered direct
as a complete package, there is no inventory in distribution. Inventory in the
supply chain can be reduced through IT, supply-chain management, and
factory systems. And, because the vendor controls final assembly and logistics,
it can better ensure product quality and timely delivery, even when parts of a
complete system (for example, monitors or peripherals) are shipped direct to
the customer from suppliers’ factories.
The result is a brand image of low cost, customization, and advanced
technology, a package that helped propel Dell to be the industry leader for
commercial markets, and, for a while, Gateway to be a leader for direct sales to
300
consumer markets. Dell’s success forced other major PC makers to emulate

its market-making strategy by developing direct capabilities. Although Dell
retains the lead on most performance measures, emulation and process
innovation by other vendors have resulted in the performance gap being
closed.
Market making by others

A special feature of the PC industry is that technical standards are set by key
component and software suppliers, who engage in market-making activities to
promote their own brand and products, and who both cooperate with and
compete with the PC makers.
Intel develops reference designs for PCs based on each new processor and
chip set that it introduces. These standard designs reduce the ability of
branded firms to differentiate based on technical architecture, while also
making it easier for non-brand firms (white-box makers) to compete with
the branded firms by simply following the standard. Intel also provides tech-
nical assistance (engineering, training, testing services) to the white-box ma-
kers, which are mostly small and medium-sized firms without engineering
staffs (Tzeng and Lang 2003; R. Chan 2005; Yeo 2006). Intel cooperates with
the branded PC firms by providing funds for its “Intel Inside” co-branded
labeling, marketing, and advertising, but also has its own marketing and
advertising programs to promote the Intel brand. These activities are designed
to increase Intel’s market power and to keep the branded PC makers in line,
while cooperating with them in joint marketing efforts.
Intel is not alone. Microsoft also funds co-branded marketing and advertis-
ing for PC makers as well as manufacturers of non-PC devices that run on its
operating systems (for example, phones and PDAs). Its own advertising for
Windows products promotes retail sales of its operating systems, but also
helps drive sales of new PCs to take advantage of the capabilities of its
software.
These activities are a double edged sword from a market-making perspective.
The Wintel standard helped to make the PC market through standardization
of hardware and software interfaces and greater interoperability of PCs, which
is increasingly important in a globally interconnected world. Branding and
advertising programs also increased the overall demand for computing through
greater public awareness and stimulation of demand. However, these programs
also reinforced the monopoly power of Intel and Microsoft, enabling them
to keep prices high and to punish PC makers who strayed from the standard (for
example, using AMD (advanced micro devices) chips or promoting open source
software) by supporting their competitors (retailers, white-box makers). We would
argue that Intel and Microsoft could have a greater effect on demand simply
301
by cutting their prices, enabling vendors to reach more customers, particularly in

big emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, and Mexico.4
Impacts of Market Making on Customers and Suppliers
The impacts of market making by PC makers and others have been largely
positive for customers while quite mixed for suppliers.
Customers
Consumers are offered a richer variety of purchasing options thanks to the
innovation in market making by the PC industry. They can shop and buy
online, or window shop online and buy in a vendor’s retail store, or choose
from a number of physical retail outlets. The ability of PC makers and retailers
to eliminate excess inventory also means lower prices and fresher products
with the most recent technologies. Consumers also benefit from more product
information and the ability to compare prices online, even if they shop in
person. However, consumers now have fewer choices of retail PC brands, as a
result of mergers (HP–Compaq, Gateway–eMachines, Lenovo–IBM), and the
exit of brands from the US market, such as AST, Packard Bell, and Acer (which
is just returning to the US market with their purchase of Gateway, as well as
their own branded products). HP (including its Compaq brand) controls over
half of the in-store retail PC market, with only Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba as
major competitors in the USA. Yet, given the rapid introduction of new
products and ever lower prices, it is hard to argue that consumers are suffering
from this consolidation.
Commercial customers reap all these consumer advantages and more. With
build-to-order procurement and systems that download corporate approved
software and system images and the ability to migrate to newer technologies
that come along for the platform, large firms can more easily manage PC
resources from procurement to disposition. Furthermore, they achieve greater
standardization of platforms. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) can acquire
installation and maintenance services through channel partners (VARs and
SIs) or through white-box makers as well as from their vendors.
Suppliers
The PC makers’ market-making activities that led to industry consolidation
also increased their market power over their ODM/CM contractors and the
entire supply chain. It impacted on the industry structure, the way firms must
do business, the roles they perform, and their prices and profits.
302
INDUSTRY STRUCTURE
The branded PC makers reduced the number of suppliers they do business
with, resulting in a two-tier supplier structure of very large and midsize-to-
small firms. Although they use fewer contractors and engage in long-term
relationships with them, the PC makers still shift contracts for specific pro-
ducts amongst suppliers based on cost, quality, or unique capabilities (Dedrick
and Kraemer 2006).
DOING BUSINESS
PC makers have adopted just-in-time supply hubs and vendor-owned inven-
tory to reduce inventory costs. Contract manufacturers are pushed to provide
direct shipment services. In some cases, the PC maker never takes physical
possession of the product, which is built by outside suppliers and shipped
directly to the end customer or retailer. The exception is build-to-order assem-
bly, which Dell and others keep inside their own factories (Kraemer, Dedrick,
and Yamashiro 2000). However, IBM–Lenovo outsourced build-to-order pro-
duction in the USA and Europe, and Apple did the same in the USA, so there
appears to be no real barrier to complete outsourcing of manufacturing.
SUPPLIER ROLES
As PC makers have shifted their focus from manufacturing to retailing/market
making, their suppliers have taken on new roles. ODMs, mostly Taiwanese
companies who design and manufacture PCs for all of the major PC vendors,
now:
do new product development, especially for notebook PCs;
provide warranty and repair services in some cases.
As these suppliers gained capabilities, the PC makers were able to con-

centrate on marketing, branding, product management, and supply-chain
coordination.
The production model pioneered by the PC industry has been adopted to
varying degrees in other parts of the electronics industry as well. Contract
manufacturers and ODMs have taken over more manufacturing and parts
of the design process, especially for lower-end and more mature products.
Typically, contract manufacturers have specialized in efficient production,
logistics, and related services for a wide range of products such as printers,
network equipment, iPods, and video games. But for some products, such
as cell phones, joint development with ODMs is becoming more common.
However, the outsourced manufacturing and development approach is little
used by Japanese and Korean firms, who are still much more vertically
integrated than US firms.
303
PRICES AND PROFITS

The biggest impact of market making on suppliers, for both the direct and the
indirect model, is the constant pressure from PC makers to cut costs to meet
industry competition. Dell’s efficient direct model enabled it to lower prices.
Other vendors had to match prices by greater use of outsourcing and contin-
ual pressure on suppliers to cut costs. Vendors force the ODMs to compete
with one another for business and expect quarterly cost reductions of 5–7
percent.5 Suppliers go along with these practices in the hopes that lower prices
will grow the market and enable them to gain economies of scale. Low profits,
on the order of 1–2 percent, led some ODMs to integrate forward and to
develop their own brand products, while others moved upstream to produce
components and subassemblies. The result for the PC industry is a continual
increase in the number of units sold, but only a modest increase in sales
revenue, and a continual decline in profits for both PC makers and suppliers.
The exceptions are Microsoft and Intel, who continue to enjoy rich margins,
leading PC makers and suppliers to complain that they are killing themselves
to make money for Microsoft and Intel.
The Global Picture
Outside the USA, the market-making picture is quite different. The direct sales
model for PCs has been successful only in some markets. For example, Dell’s
market share is 35 percent in the USA, but only 18 percent worldwide (IDC
2006). Comparison of the US and worldwide trends shows that there is
growing use of the direct model generally, but that the indirect model still
dominates outside the USA (Table 11.5).6 Moreover, the rest of the world tends
Table 11.5. Worldwide PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005

(% of total units)
Channel 1995 2000 2005
Directa 21.70 27.90 33.70

Indirectb 78.30 72.10 66.30
Retail 24.11 29.80 28.60
Dealer/VAR/SI 49.22 39.68 35.39
Other 4.97 2.62 2.31
a
Direct sales include: (1) sales by customer-initiated inbound calls, (2) sales by a feet-on-the-
street sales force, and sales by vendor-initiated outbound calls, (3) sales made strictly online
directly by the end user with no human interaction from the vendor.
b
Indirect sales are those sold through a distributor, aggregator, system integrator, value-
added reseller, mass merchant, or retailer, including vendor-owned retail stores.
Source: IDC (2006).
304
Table 11.6. Non-US PC makers as retailers, percentage of shipments by model,

1995–2005 (%)
Vendor Indirect model Direct model
Retail Value-added Vendor-direct sales Pure Internet and

reseller/System force and telesales third-party
integrator Internet
1995 2005 1995 2005 1995 2005 2000 2005
Lenovo — 1 — 56 — 37 — 6
Acer 31 3 67 96 3 0 10 0
Fujitsu — 10 — 64 — 23 5 3
Sony — 49 — 33 — 5 10 13
Toshiba 56 — 44 - 0 — 2 —
Source: IDC (2007).
to use dealers, VARs, or system integrators more than retailers, regardless of

region (see Appendix).
This broad pattern for the leading non-US PC makers is also illustrated in the
evolution of individual firms from 1995 to 2005 (see Table 11.6). Four of the
five leading Asian brands (Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Toshiba) use VAR/SI over
retail. Sony uses retail, including its own Sony Style stores, over VAR/SI and
shows increasing use of the Internet. As with US firms, the leading non-US
vendors use different mixes of direct and indirect strategies for their markets,
though still mainly indirect.
The VAR/system integrator channel dominates outside the United States
because most countries do not have the large nationwide retailers, as in the
USA (as illustrated in earlier chapters), or national distribution networks.
Moreover, neither commercial customers nor consumers are accustomed to
buying by phone or over the Internet (Kraemer et al. 2006). As a result, local
retail models differ amongst countries. We label this difference generally
“retailer as PC maker.” Some countries, such as Japan, use traditional two-
tier channels, with local retailers dominating, as illustrated by the “electronics
district” in major Japanese cities (for example, Akihabara in Tokyo). Others
with strong domestic PC brands (such as NEC and Fujitsu in Japan, Samsung
in Korea, and Lenovo in China) are marked by vendor-dominated nationwide
networks of dealers who carry only those brands. In Brazil, local brands are
sold in supermarkets and other non-traditional retail outlets. In Europe, the
German company Medion decided to leverage the already established but
unexploited mass-market retailer chains, such as food retailers, supermarkets,
and discounters (for example, Aldi, Carrefour, and Metro) to sell PCs to con-
sumers—a model similar to eMachines (Ordanini, Kraemer and Dedrick 2006).
In many developing countries, small white-box makers have up to half
305
the market. They buy assembled notebooks from the ODMs, assemble desk-
tops themselves, and install PCs for consumers and small businesses.
These differences suggest multiple models in different places rather than an
emerging global model for PC or consumer electronics retailing. Market
making for PCs is almost always local and must be done through local distri-
bution networks. The need for localization is also a reason why many vendors
or their contract manufacturers must keep some local final assembly capabil-
ities, and/or very sophisticated supply-chain and logistics systems. Because
other markets are much less PC-centric than the USA and more focused on
wireless technologies and games (for example, Japan, Korea, China), the
power of mobile service providers and interactive game services is greater.
In their case, the focus is on the service rather than the sale of the hardware
per se.
Under these circumstances, the branded PC and consumer electronics ma-
kers or retailers in the USA face significant hurdles if they are to become truly
global market makers. Moreover, it is in the interest of the core technology
standard setters such as Intel to limit the market power of any would-be global
market maker. Standards issues become even thornier on a global level. Gov-
ernments and local actors become involved, and often different standards
prevail in different countries. While the Wintel standard became a de facto
global standard, there are, and will be, multiple standards for 3G cell phones,
DVDs, wireless networking, and many other technologies. As we move into
the next phase of the PC and consumer electronics industries, we may see
more fragmentation of market making rather than more standardization, with
the fragmentation aided by governments and technology alliances amongst
competing groups of companies.
Future Trends in Market Making

Systems integration
The trend that is most likely to redefine significantly the PC and consumer
electronics industries, and the nature of market making in those industries, is
the proliferation of technologies with the potential to be interconnected in
the “digital home.” Consumers no longer buy PCs, TVs, cameras, or audio
systems as separate items with separate functions. Instead, they store digital
photos on PCs, download music from PCs to iPods, save TV shows on PCs, and
play movies on portable DVD players. And now they are listening to music
and playing games on cell phones. The challenge is getting these technologies
to work together, which has proved to be a big hurdle for consumers, retailers,
and technology companies.
306
Convergence
Partly because of the systems integration hurdle and also because of competing
visions, the PC-centric orientation of the PC industry is being challenged by
network-centric and PC-independent visions. The network-centric idea is that
user applications and content will be stored on the Internet and accessible from
anywhere with a variety of devices such as an MP3 player, PDA, phone, or PC—
but the PC will no longer be central. The PC-independent vision is that the
functionality of a PC will be built into some consumer electronic devices such
as TVs, set-top boxes, and DVRs (for example, Tivo) and consumers will no
longer require a media center PC. It is unclear which of these visions (or some
other) will hold sway in the future, but it is likely that the PC will play a
significant role in convergence.
Apple’s music service illustrates such convergence. What is being sold is an
entertainment ecosystem rather than just an MP3 product. Apple integrated
an independent device (the iPod) with the PC (Mac or Wintel). The iTunes
software provides the capability to download songs stored on the network
(the Internet-based iTMS), to manage a music library, to play songs, and to
transfer them to the iPod. Apple needed to keep tight control over the hard-
ware, software, and electronic commerce components in order to make a
market for digital music. HP tried to do the same with digital photos, but it
had to be more open in allowing interconnection with competing camera, PC,
and printer brands. Apple is trying to extend the iPod success with the
iPhone, which adds communication capabilities and phone carriers to the
ecosystem.
Technology integration and new services

For retailers, the issue is providing customers with the help they need to get
the technologies to work together. The integration challenge creates new
opportunities in market making. Firms that can make the disparate technol-
ogies work for consumers will have a new role as market makers. Attempts to
do so include Best Buy’s Geek Squads (Krazit 2006) or Circuit City’s Firedog
service, which make house calls to get balky systems to work, and Apple’s
in-store experts, who will show customers how to use the products they sell.
Given that the digital home incorporates products from multiple computer
and electronics companies, retailers are in a good position to be market makers
if they can develop the needed expertise. Sensing this situation as an oppor-
tunity, the distributor Ingram Micro is developing a new business based on
providing support to these emerging digital home integrators.
307
Standards
At the technology end, the big issue is standards. Here the problem is that
companies need to establish standards for products to work together, but
some hope to capture monopoly profits by having their own standards
adopted. Also, no one wants to cede power and profits to a future Microsoft
or Intel. The result is often years of delay in introducing technologies, or a
profusion of standards that do not work together in the home. In the PC
industry, Microsoft and Intel set the standards, and everyone else (except
Apple) went along. In the digital home era, everyone from Microsoft and
Intel to Sony, Toshiba, Nokia, Cisco, and even Yahoo! and Google are all
trying to set standards. PC makers who do not create technologies are left in
the position of lining up on one standard or another, or supporting multiple
standards, and hoping to be right. Retailers are in the same position, as no
retailer has the market power to determine standards by its own choice of
what to carry.
The choice of vision

It is likely, therefore, that future market making will include PC-centric,
network-centric, and PC-independent visions, perhaps with a mix of these
visions for individual firms. While market making in the PC industry was
historically focused on the commercial market, which led the consumer mar-
ket in adopting new technologies, now it is the consumer market that leads.
This dramatically changes the nature of market making, as individual con-
sumers can have very different motivations from corporate IT departments.
Consumers care about style, ease of use, convenience, and service and do not
get enjoyment or job security from getting technologies to work together.
Thus, the future of market making will be driven more by those who under-
stand the customer and less by those who create the technology.7
308
APPENDIX
Channel shares of PC shipments

by world regions
Table 11.A1. Asia Pacific PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005

(% of total units)
Channel 1995 2000 2005
Direct 25.77 16.40 16.60

Indirect 74.23 83.60 83.40
Retail 13.64 30.18 32.61
Dealer/VAR/SI 60.16 52.43 49.97
Other 0.43 0.99 0.82
Source: IDC (2006).
Table 11.A2. Latin America PC shipment share by channel, 1995–2005

(% of total units)
Channel 1995 2000 2005
Direct 20.85 28.32 40.43

Indirect 79.15 71.68 59.57
Retail 8.01 23.59 18.95
Dealer/VAR/SI 65.60 45.11 38.64
Other 5.54 2.98 1.98
Source: IDC (2006).
309
Table 11.A3. Western Europe PC shipment share by channel,

1995–2005 (% of total units)
Channel 1995 2000 2005
Direct 17.12 16.74 22.48

Indirect 82.88 83.26 77.52
Retail 22.80 32.60 34.47
Dealer/VAR/SI 58.39 48.45 40.38
Other 1.69 2.21 2.67
Source: IDC (2006).
Table 11.A4. Central/Eastern Europe PC shipment share by channel,

Channel 1995 2000 2005
Direct 20.61 23.60 21.21

Indirect 79.39 76.40 78.79
Retail 12.29 31.25 33.69
Dealer/VAR/SI 67.05 45.08 45.07
Other 0.05 0.07 0.03
Source: IDC (2006).
Table 11.A5. Middle East/Africa PC shipment share by channel,

Channel 1995 2000 2005
Direct 26.23 25.61 29.05

Indirect 73.77 74.39 70.95
Retail 6.27 8.50 21.01
Dealer/VAR/SI 67.50 63.41 49.82
Other 0.00 2.48 0.12
Source: IDC (2006).
310
Notes
Introduction
1. The latest information about the global spread of shopping centers can be found at the
website of the International Council of Shopping Centers: www.icsc.org/index.php.
2. The monumental works by the late Alfred D. Chandler, Jr (1962, 1977, 1990) bear
vivid testimony to the accuracy of this statement that large manufacturers were
driving the US and European economies.
3. Recently Nelson Lichtenstein also titled his book on Wal-Mart The Retail Revolution:
How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009). Though the book is
certainly one of the best studies on Wal-Mart, it is also narrowly focused on a single
firm, and so misses most of what we describe here as the main characteristics of the
retail revolution.
4. Since we have not dedicated a distinct chapter to the issues of consumption, we
address it here in rather more detail than the first four trends, which are each dealt
with extensively in various chapters of this volume. A major part of this section is
drawn from Hamilton and Fels (2010).
5. Sears and Kmart merged in 2004 into Sears Holding Corporation. Federated and
May Department Stores merged in 2005.
6. For a good review of these arguments, see Ailawadi (2001).
7. Morris Tabaksblat, the CEO of Unilever, describes this fundamental change in
marketing in the following way: “The maker can no longer make the consumer do
what he decides . . . The era of ‘push selling’ is definitely over. We are now well and
truly in the era of ‘pull marketing.’ . . . The question is no longer, ‘What can we sell
the consumer?’ but ‘What learning can we draw from the consumer in terms of his or
her needs and then how can we help satisfy those needs?’” (G. E. Morris 1997).
8. Cortada (2004) emphasizes that “No segment of the American economy has
changed so much because of information technology than [sic] retail, with the
possible exception of the Trucking Industry” (p. 258). Also: “Other factors also
played a part—such as globalization and national economic conditions, to men-
tion two obvious ones—but other than in banking, one would be hard pressed to
find an industry influenced so profoundly by one family of technologies” (p. 272).
9. The US figure is an estimate, because the official figures for the retail industry do not
include non-employer firms. The number of non-employer firms engaged in retail-
ing is reported separately, but the number of persons working in such firms is only
an estimate. At the same time, this number certainly does not represent more than
Notes
15% of all retailing employment in the USA, while it is as high as 45% in Spain and
over 60% in Italy.
10. This analysis suggests that occupational categories should no longer be thought of
in national terms, but rather as global divisions of labor. If we use commodity-
chain or value-chain analysis, we should see that product creation, manufacture,
distribution, and sale are truly global in character. For instance, Harvey Molotch’s
book Where Stuff Comes From (2003) allows us see how product design has become a
highly professionalized occupation that is quite distinct from other occupations
relating to manufacturing, marketing, and sales—all of which in one form or
another can be outsourced.
Chapter 1
1. The main reason that the productionist bias is less recognized is that it squares
better with the common-sense view of the economy. The equilibrium bias is often
criticized as being too “artificial,” an accusation that has little theoretical merit, but
is easy to accept intuitively. The productionist perspective, on the other hand,
seems a natural way to define the economy as being about satisfying human
“material” needs or increasing wealth. When criticized at all, this is typically
done from the “consumerist” perspective, which misses yet again the crucial
importance of market making for the organization of the economy.
2. Theories that suffer from equilibrium bias typically see the firm as a “production
function.” This creates theoretical problems (see, e.g., Mirowski 1989) for the
discussion of how the marginalist theorists of the first half of the twentieth century
struggled with the notion of production. But, in principle, production becomes a
problem only insofar as it is externally determined.
3. Indeed, a typical reaction of so many theories suffering from the productionist bias
is to see “distribution” as a realm that can be organized, just like production, on the
engineering principles of efficiency.
4. We will spend more time discussing the productionist than the equilibrium bias,
because we see this volume as primarily countering the productionist viewpoint.
Throughout the volume, we attempt to establish the importance of market making
by retailers—i.e., by the type of economic actor that, not being involved in pro-
duction in any major sense, was also the most ignored and misunderstood by
productionist theories. These theories have been developed mostly in fields of
“applied economics,” from industrial organization and development (industriali-
zation) policy, to organization studies and business history. If we are successful in
completing this task, we believe that we will have set a firm foundation from which
to counter the equilibrium bias of mainstream economics. This later task would
include putting market-making activities and their institutional outcomes squarely
in the center of economic theory, and is clearly beyond the scope of our current
discussion.
5. Throughout this chapter we use generic terms buying and selling to denote market
activities in general, instead of more specific terms such as retailing and marketing.
312
Notes
Market making, then, refers to creating institutions—i.e., markets—in which the

activities of buying and selling take place.
6. In the years following the Napoleonic Wars, the chartered companies of European
powers (e.g., the British East Indian Company) lost their hold of international trade
to aggressive and rapidly expanding merchant enterprises that organized far-flung
networks of firms and that linked into other networks of firms organized by ethnic
and local traders. For nineteenth-century British trading companies, see Chapman
(1992) and Jones (1996, 2000); for their links with Chinese business networks in
China, see Hao (1986), in South East Asia, see Suehiro (1989); for their links to
Indian merchant networks, see Markovits (2000, 2008); for their links with local
merchants in Latin America, see Orlove (1997).
7. There are several reasons for the increasing popularity of the productionist per-
spective, including: the religious, and especially Puritan distrust of consumption,
selling, and profit; the fascination with the technological sophistication and trans-
formative effects of the new industrial enterprise; the role that manufacturers and
infrastructure (transportation, communication networks, power supply, etc.) de-
velopers played in the rise of the modern state, its administrative and military
capacities; the degree to which engineers, scientists, and industrialists developed
into influential interest groups; general misunderstanding of markets and the
market economy; and so on. We cannot address fully this powerful and pervasive
current of thought in this volume, but are hoping to demonstrate its detrimental
effect on the understanding of market making and market makers.
8. Some early examples of this work have been collected by Chandler and Daems
(1980). For Chandler’s legacy and the influence of his work on later scholarship, see
the special issue of Business History Review (82/2 (Summer 2008)) devoted to this
topic.
9. Spulber (1998) assumes a static economy that can be divided into roles. Our
conception views intermediation as leading to dramatic shifts in the overall orga-
nization of economies.
10. Clower and Howitt (1996: 24) also provide a more formal definition of market
making as: “The organization by income-seeking agents of specialized trading
arrangements that offer (for an implicit or explicit price) other potential agent-
traders convenient facilities for acquiring desired commodities in exchange for
other commodities on terms that are specified by the organizer of the market
facility.”
11. The idea of market making, as defined here, is obviously broader than a narrow
notion of product marketing, yet it is more precise than many broad definitions of
marketing that refer to a firm’s generalized orientation toward the market and its
trading partners. Above all, however, the notion of market making emphasizes the
activities of making and shaping the market, not just operating in the externally
defined markets.
12. In most lists of the largest companies (e.g., Forbes) factory-less brand-name mer-
chandisers are typically listed among the manufacturers and not among the retail-
ers. They are, in fact, a type of modern market maker that specializes in designing,
promoting, and creating a market for brand-named products, without actually
making those products themselves.
313
Notes
13. The misunderstanding of the retailer’s role, or even of the market-making activity
in general, is pervasive in the productionist literature. At best, retailers are seen as
efficient distributors of goods and services, but their expenses on advertising, their
pricing and promotional strategies, and other market-making activities are seen as
unnecessary and wasteful from the perspective of the society. The identification of
the true price with the manufacturer-suggested price has been the basis of the retail
(resale) price-maintenance policies, ubiquitous in the developed economies of the
mid-twentieth century. Interestingly, one of the main objections in the post-
Depression era was not that retailers inflate prices so much as that they sell below
the recommended price, thus undermining the manufacturer’s goodwill and repu-
tation of its products, and leading to harmful competition.
14. The exceptions to this, as shown in Petrovic (Chapter 3 this volume), were a few
very large retail department stores, mail-order operators, and early chain stores,
such as A&P and Woolworth’s. Most of them, however, grew large by integrating
wholesaling and retailing functions, and sometimes operating as wholesalers for
other retailers, too.
15. These two well-known strategies of consumer markets pricing are distinguished by
the intensity and frequency of price promotions. The “hi–low” strategy offers
frequent and deep price promotions (markdowns, rebates, coupons) over a sub-
stantial part of merchandise assortment, while maintaining high prices on non-
sale items; the everyday low price strategy is the opposite.
16. Store brands (private brands/labels, own brands) refer to goods that are either
directly manufactured or, more commonly, branded by the retailer. Such brands
have been on the rise, in terms of both the proportion of sales and brand recogni-
tion and status, across many categories of products, especially non-durables. A
single mass retailer, such as Wal-Mart, Tesco, or Carrefour, can easily manage
thousands of products under several dozen store brands. Other mass retailers,
such as Ikea, offer only store brand merchandise.
Chapter 2
1. It is bad enough that automobile lights come in a bewildering array of sizes and
bases that make it necessary to shop for new auto lamps with the car’s owners’
manual in hand.
2. Public safety in an elevator remains a cause of concern to many, but such fears have
been dramatically reduced by yearly safety inspections required by local building
codes. The inspection report is normally dated and posted in each elevator, near the
phone for calls to help if the elevator should stall.
3. National BankAmericard, Inc. (NBI) was spun out of the Bank of America in 1970 to
run the BankAmericard Program. This provided issuing banks with a share of
ownership of the network.
4. See Cardweb.com, Inc.
5. If a manufacturer refused to provide a different code format desired by a second
retailer, the manufacturer feared that it might be forced to comply by the Federal
314
Notes
Trade Commission under the doctrine of equal treatment. Manufacturers would

not want to have separate product inventories for two retailers, each carrying
special codes.
6. Chicago population figures from http://condor.depaul.edu/history/chicago/
population.html (accessed June 19, 2008).
7. The service was originally called Parcels Post, implying parcels by post. Now it is
called simply Parcel Post.
8. While most containers are 40 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 8.5 feet high, container
ship capacity is always reported in TEUs: a single 40-foot container is counted as
2 TEUs. Reflecting McLean’s background in trucking, the container is sized for
highway trucking and is wide and high enough for loading with standard forklifts.
9. Information about the ship can be found on the Maersk website, and a picture
and specification of the fully loaded ship at a container terminal is available at
www.kgomez.com/mystery/maersk.php (accessed June 19, 2008).
10. Mass merchants faced an immediate question of where cost savings were going to
come from if they were to adopt bar codes and scanning, and who would put the
bar codes on all the items. There was also the problem of scanning large and heavy
objects that would not easily pass the scanner at the checkout. There were only
simple hand-held scanners in the mid-1980s, and their operation was not as simple
as the wands used today in most retail stores to supplement the laser scanners at the
checkouts. The pen-like scanning laser diode devices similar to hand-held laser
pointers required the clerk to sweep the pen across the bar codes to get a reading.
But in 1987, patent number 4,694,182, called Hand held bar code reader with modu-
lated laser diode and detector, was issued to P. Guy Howard of Spectra–Physics, Inc. of
San Jose, CA, which would lead, in time, to the ubiquitous hand-held scanners in
every department store and home center today. With these new scanners, clerks
need only aim the red laser light onto the code for it to be read. Generally a beep
equals a successful read. The eventual availability of hand-held scanners allowed
each electronic register in a department store to use the bar-code systems easily to
check out customer purchases, and helped drive the adoption of bar codes and
scanners in all retail stores.
11. Wikipedia has a brief but comprehensive discussion of EDI and a listing of the most
common formats (“Electronic Data Interchange,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Electronic_Data_Interchange#Standards (accessed June 19, 2008)).
Chapter 3
1. Hypermarkets, and hard discounters, which have often been hailed as specifically
European contributions to modern retail formats, are, in fact, not only adaptations
of the US formats, but were, in most cases, a result of direct emulation of the latter
by European entrepreneurs who traveled to the USA after the war (Colla 2003;
Schröter 2004).
2. While nominally many European retailers have a much higher international pres-
ence, this presence is almost always regional. For instance, out of the twenty-five
315
Notes
non-US-based firms on the top forty list, only six have operations in the USA, and
only eight, including the two leading Japanese firms, Seven and I, and Aeon, have
operations in Japan.
3. This means that several other retail globalization issues, such as the retailers’ role in
making “supplier markets,” the organizational structure and evolution of retail
firms, as well as the influence of the retail evolution on overall economic develop-
ment, will have to be ignored or addressed only in passing.
4. Department stores were the core form of organizing the new world of goods of
industrial capitalism, compared not only to smaller specialty stores, but also to
often grand, yet temporary formats such as world fairs and universal expositions
(Greenhalgh 1988; Rydell 1989). For their relation with the broader culture of
collecting, displaying, and organizing objects in the nineteenth century, see Harris
(1990) and Bennett (1995).
5. Parisian Bon Marché, the most famous department store of the nineteenth century,
distributed 1.5 million catalogs for the winter season of 1894, 260,000 of these
abroad (Crossick and Jaumain 1999). A few years later, US mail-order giants Sears
and Montgomery Ward, which served as “department stores” for rural America,
would distribute between three million and four million catalogs several times a
year, each containing more than a thousand pages (Hoge 1988).
6. At the same time, the smaller size of German department stores and the availability
of financing led to the early development of department store chains, an issue that
US department stores faced only in the 1930s (Coles 1999).
7. As Nystrom (1930) points out, there were a number of wholesale–retail
partnerships in the mid-nineteenth century that could be qualified as chain-store
organizations. A. T. Stewart had a controlling interest in several stores outside New
York, and in the early 1860s opened fully owned branches in Boston, Philadelphia,
and Chicago. A&P, however, was probably the first retailer to open several stores of
similar design and manage them in a centralized manner.
8. Other notable chains that started before 1910 included Kroger (1882) and National
Tea Company (1899) grocery stores, Kress (1896), Kresge (1897), and W. T. Grant’s
(1906) variety stores, United Cigar Stores (1900), and J. C. Penney stores (1902).
9. Those numbers, impressive as they are, do not fully capture the extent of the chain
revolution, since many firms that legally figured as independents in the 1929
Census, were in fact linked to chain-type organizations through franchising and
other agreements. The number should perhaps be increased by at least 20,000–
30,000 franchised car dealerships and by up to 40,000 franchised gasoline stations,
which do not count as chain stores according to the Census definition. At the same
time, the Census number obviously includes a large proportion of very small chains
that consisted of only two or three stores, and thus does not give us a very good
indicator of the extent of market integration through replication.
10. See, for instance, the survey reported by Beckman and Nolan (1938), in which
“sanitary and clean” and “good store appearance” were not only low on the list of
reasons for buying from chain stores, but were also cited with the same frequency
as the reasons to buy from independents.
316
Notes
11. In 1920, there were two car makers and two oil companies among the biggest ten
US companies, and in 1930 the number of oil companies on the list increased to
four (Collins and Preston 1961). Today, the same two car makers, Ford and General
Motors, are still on the list, and the number of oil companies decreased to three, but
only because another two major gas station operators, BP and Royal Dutch/Shell,
are not domestic companies. Out of the current top twenty largest global compa-
nies (by revenues), eleven are either car makers or oil refiners, and an additional
two, Wal-Mart and Carrefour, are chain-store operators.
12. Early DuPont company studies of supermarket shopping, conducted between 1945
and 1959, attracted a lot of attention by showing that up to two-thirds of actual
purchases are unplanned, and that this percentage increased over time (Clover
1950; Shaffer 1960). Of course, the more the supermarket’s merchandise assort-
ment got standardized, the more customers could shop without a specific purchase
plan in mind. Trying to account for this fact, Stern (1962) distinguished between
four different types of impulse buying, from “reminder buying” to “pure impulse
buying.”
13. There were more than 3,000 such stores in 1929, exhibiting a standardized and
patented layout of a single U-shaped path through the store, which exposed
customers to the entire merchandise assortment arranged on wall shelves and in
cases. However, Piggly Wiggly stores were small and stocked with a very basic line
of grocery merchandise; hence they could not benefit from the effect of self-service
either on consumers’ shopping behavior or on operating costs.
14. The only exception to this could be the development of e-retailing in the late
1990s. However important this new format might become in the future, the
focus on the globalization of established American retail formats in this chapter
means that online retailing will be mentioned only in passing. For a more detailed
discussion within this volume, see Chapter 5 by Kotha and Basu. The rest of this
section builds on Petrovic and Hamilton (2006).
15. This famous phrase appears in George Marshall’s speech at Harvard, on June 5,
1947, which signaled the beginning of the ERP (see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Marshall_Plan).
16. Early operators of European hypermarkets, as well as of somewhat similar Japanese
“general superstores,” consciously emulated operations of American supermarkets.
17. The same period witnessed a rapid international expansion of US automotive
services, hotel/motel chains, car rentals, and other similar franchises that are not
being covered in this survey. Individual companies’ data in this section are derived
from companies’ annual reports and websites, unless indicated otherwise.
18. Several lists of the largest shopping centers are available, including the ones
provided by Emil Pocock (2009) at Eastern Connecticut University, by Tom Van
Riper (2007) for Forbes.com, and on Wikipedia. The claim here is based on Pocock’s
list; according to other lists, the number of Asian malls in the top ten would be seven
or nine. The tenant composition was assessed from the shopping centers’ websites.
317
Notes
Chapter 4
1. A report of the European Productivity Agency wrote in 1954: “When Europe is
taken as a whole the tendency for self-service seems to be more an experiment than
a development” (cited by Schröter 2005: 79).
2. Generally land-use policies in the UK are much more restrictive than in most other
European countries, but this was typically not directed toward the discrimination
of certain retail formats.
3. Thus hypermarkets are very similar to the supercenters of Wal-Mart in the United
States (see below).
4. Looming in the background at that time were the successes of the extreme right-
wing party the NPD at several state-level elections in 1966–7.
5. General exemptions existed for certain assortments, especially for furniture and
DIY (do-it-yourself) products such as household repair suppliers.
6. Fears among the political establishment of petit bourgeoisie radicalism among
dissatisfied small retailers might have been a reason for the introduction of social
protectionist regulation in France, as a contemporary UK report (Hall 1971: 53)
points out, referring explicitly to the Poujadist movement in France.
7. Retail price maintenance had already been abolished in 1945, subject to the possi-
bility of ministerial exceptions. These exceptions were also abolished in 1973.
8. These analyses are to a large extent based on materials published by the
companies in print or on the Internet. In addition, various press reports
have been used.
9. On the history of Carrefour, see Lhermie (2003); see also Burt (1986), Dupuis, Choi,
and Larke (2006), and Durand and Wrigley (2009).
10. The hypermarket has nearly the size of Wal-Mart’s biggest supercenter at Cross-
gates Commons in Albany, which opened in May 2008. Its 259,650 square feet
(24,100 square meters) are spread over two floors, while most European hypermar-
kets are completely at ground level.
11. Cora later became part of the Belgian Group Louis Delhaize.
12. Delhaize le Lion is not to be confused with its Belgian competitor Louis Delhaize.
13. Some of these stores were later converted to Gateway Superstores, which were later
taken over by Asda, and thus are part of Wal-Mart today.
14. President Group was already in a partnership with Southland Inc. to manage over
800 7-Eleven stores in Taiwan.
15. The handover of another four hypermarkets in Slovakia to Tesco was barred by
local authorities for monopoly reasons.
16. Because of a huge acquisition by Wal-Mart, it has now lost this position in China.
17. On the history of Aldi, see Brandes (2004); see also Wortmann (2004).
18. This description of the origins of the Aldi discount strategy is based on one of the
very few public statements of Karl Albrecht in 1953, cited in Brandes (2004: 20–2).
19. Netto also acquired Carrefour’s unsuccessful Danish Ed stores in 1995.
20. The concept is described on the US home page of Aldi (www.aldifoods.com), even
though some of the features described here as typical for the Aldi discount concept
can be found in all German—and many European—supermarkets: here customers
318
Notes
have to pay for shopping bags, there is no assistant to bag groceries, and there is
a coin system for shopping carts, which have to be returned to the store by
customers.
21. Aldi stores and supermarkets had frequently existed in a kind of symbiosis: con-
sumers would combine the extremely low prices for basic foods at an Aldi store
with the variety found in a nearby supermarket. Aldi and Edeka had several times
engaged in joint property development.
22. Because two other department-store chains also merged the same year, when
Karstadt acquired Hertie, the whole German department-store sector became con-
solidated into two groups.
23. A brief overview of the national varieties of different retail formats can be found in
Zentes, Morschett, and Schramm-Klein (2007: 13–18).
24. www.metro.com.cn/kitchen_1.htm (accessed May 5, 2008).
25. Including Greece and Turkey.
26. On the history of Tesco, see especially Dawson, Larke, and Choi (2006).
27. In 2005, Tesco started operations of a store format (Homeplus) that sells only non-
food products, mostly the same items available at Extra hypermarkets.
28. Metro’s partner SHV also held a small share in these operations.
29. The large stores of the Spar group were taken over by Wal-Mart.
30. The store count underestimates the size of supermarket operations in the United
States, since these stores are usually much larger—similar to British superstores—
than those in other countries.
31. See n. 12 above.
32. The dimensions of retailers’ embeddedness are further explored by Wrigley, Coe,
and Currah (2005) and Tacconelli and Wrigley (2009).
33. On the rationalization of local grocery supply chains and their impact on local
suppliers, see Senauer and Reardon, Chapter 10 this volume.
34. www.telegraph.co.uk (accessed Nov. 13, 2009).
35. Discount companies like Aldi do all their global sourcing of private-label non-food
items via specialized import companies. Since discounters offer most non-food
items only once or twice a year, they do not build up the know-how and organiza-
tional structures needed for direct sourcing.
36. At the same time, there is no cross-penetration between the three large European
countries of modern retailing, the UK, France, and Germany—despite several
attempts starting in the late 1960s and continuing to the mid-1990s. In these
countries it has been impossible for foreign hypermarket chains to gain the size
needed to achieve competitive buying power. Foreign hypermarket entries by the
United States failed, too. Thus the success of Wal-Mart in the UK, where it bought
Asda, one of the leading grocery retailers (with sufficient buying power of its own),
has remained an exception, while its failure in Germany rather proves the rule.
37. It is difficult to make a general statement about cash and carry, another format not
restricted by German retail regulations. The fact that Metro is concentrated in
Europe is at least partially due to the fact that it was SHV, its former ally, that
expanded into the emerging markets of Latin America and Asia.
319
Notes
Chapter 5
1. A survey commissioned by the American Booksellers’ Association found that some
106 million adults purchased about 456.9 million books in any given quarter. The
survey, which looked at book-buying habits of consumers during the calendar year
1994, revealed that six in ten American adults (60%) say they purchased at least one
book in the last three months. Annually that corresponds to 1.8 billion books sold,
an average of 17 books per book-buying consumer a year. The average amount paid
for the three most recent books purchased by consumers in the previous thirty days
was about $15.
2. With the growing popularity of Amazon.com, the issue is not whether companies
in the traditional value chain will be dis-intermediated, but more about how
incumbents such as Barnes & Noble and others could effectively leverage their
physical assets and compete against Amazon.com.
3. These included computer hardware and software, consumer electronics, antiques
and collectibles, books and comics, automotive, and miscellaneous (Cohen 2002).
4. According to eBay: “A merchant can open a PayPal account and begin accepting
credit card payment within a few minutes. Merchants are approved instantly for a
PayPal account, and do not need to provide a personal guaranty, acquire any
specialized hardware, prepare an application, contact a payment gateway or encrypt
customer data. Furthermore, PayPal charges lower transaction fees than most mer-
chant accounts, and charges no setup fees and no recurring monthly fees” (eBay
2006: 5).
5. Although “off-eBay” penetration of PayPal represented only about 2% of retail
ecommerce opportunity worldwide in 2005, the company was making concerted
efforts in getting online retailers to accept payment through PayPal. For example,
eBay signed up Apple’s iTunes store (the largest legal music retail website in the
world) to accept PayPal.
6. The benefit of using a store format is that it enables sellers to list their items for sale
at lower insertion and final value fees than regular auction and fixed-price listing.
7. It should be noted that direct retailers with physical stores (e.g., L. L. Bean, Eddie
Bauer) captured 52% of the Internet sales as early as 2003, and those without stores
(e.g., Amazon) garnered 31%. This should not be a surprise, because the Internet
represents an evolutionary technology (as opposed to a disruptive one) that helps
direct retailers further to improve their efficiencies in reaching and interacting with
customers, rather than just through mailing them catalogs.
Chapter 6
1. For an exception, see Spulber (1996, 1998).
2. For a related discussion of this literature, as well as an analysis of the rise of
capitalism in East Asia, see Hamilton (2006).
3. For a more complete discussion of the transformation of US retailing after the
Second World War, see Feenstra and Hamilton (2006) and Hamilton, Petrovic,
and Feenstra (2006).
320
Notes
4. During the decades after the American occupation of Japan had ended, Japanese
business groups grew at a pace much faster than Japan’s rapidly growing economy.
In addition to selling finished products, the general trading companies for the main
business groups imported intermediate goods needed by firms within the group.
However, in the 1960s, as the main keiretsu firms grew more proficient in securing
their own inputs and marketing their own products, many in Japan began to worry
that the trading companies would lose their central role. This decline in local
business “led to a belief that the trading companies would gradually become less
and less useful and would eventually die out, a belief popularized in the so-called
‘demise theory’” (Kojima and Ozawa 1984: 13). This belief prompted most trading
companies to internationalize their operations.
5. Constance Lever-Tracy (2000) argues that Japanese trading companies had only a
limited role in the development of East Asian economies outside Japan. However,
her argument misses the important contribution that the Japanese trading compa-
nies made to create competent suppliers in Taiwan and South Korea.
6. The Kuomintang government, however, did not help in this matter. The govern-
ment banned the speaking of Japanese in public, a law that was in force after 1947.
The mainland migrants to Taiwan, of course, viewed the Japanese with dislike and
distrust. After all, they had fought a war against the Japan. Taiwanese residents,
however, did not experience the Second World War in the same way. Although
they were not without hard feelings toward the former colonizers, local Taiwanese
could deal with the Japanese without animosity.
7. Among the top ten exports were two types of TVs, one type of radio, one type of
integrated circuit for an unspecified final product, one type of Christmas tree lights
and one type of mahogany plywood, as well as three types of clothing (acrylic
sweaters, knit shirts, and trousers made from synthetic material) and one category
of footwear (vinyl shoes), all for women and girls. The consumer electronic pro-
ducts were likely made in factories wholly or partially owned by Americans or
Japanese, but the other products likely came from factories owned by Taiwanese.
8. It was not until 1990, however, that most multinational manufacturers withdrew
from Taiwan (Chu and Amsden 2003: 37).
9. This number is, of course, sizable in its own right, especially as compared to Korea
in the same period (Feenstra and Hamilton 2006: 268–72).
10. It is almost certain that the Tsai brothers owned other shoe companies in the
region. At the time, the general pattern was to own multiple companies and
thereby to be a part of multiple networks, instead of creating one big firm to
integrate the operations vertically.
11. Nike’s agreement with Pou Chen came after Nike had made a near disastrous
attempt to contract production from Chinese firms in China. In the 1980s, Nike
located a manufacturer in China to make a large portion of their shoes, but the effort
failed because of poor-quality manufacturing and the lack of supporting suppliers.
Then Nike returned its operation to Taiwan, and started to work with Pou Chen.
12. This chapter is drawn from a book on which we are currently working, entitled
Making Money: How the Asian Economy Works from an Asian Point of View. We would
like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting a portion of the research
reported here. Also, an early version of this chapter appeared in Y. W. Chu (2010).
321
Notes
Chapter 7
1. For a full analysis of the changing nature of logistics, see Bonacich and Wilson
(2008). This chapter draws on that analysis.
2. As explained in Chapter 9, Li & Fung is a Hong Kong-based trading company that
arranges apparel manufacturing with a large number of retailers and brand-name
merchandisers, including Wal-Mart, and with hundreds of apparel manufacturers.
The Wall Street Journal reported on January 29, 2010 that Wal-Mart had signed a
sourcing deal with the giant merchandise provider Li & Fung with the expectation
that it would buy $2 billion worth of goods through Li & Fung in the first year of
the deal.
3. Even though retailers order and arrange for transportation of goods, the retailer
may not assume actual ownership of these goods until the final sell occurs. A
number of suppliers in Taiwan explained to Hamilton that Wal-Mart required
them to pay for storage of their goods until the actual sale took place, at which
time Wal-Mart owned the product—i.e., at the moment of sale.
4. Ocean shipping also includes bulk shipping—not just containers. This includes
things like lumber and big machinery, as well as automobiles, some of which are
now containerized.
5. For statistics relating to US and China trade, see www.uschina.org/statistics/
tradetable.html.
6. This was a phone conversation on July 1, 2004.
7. All Chinese citizens are classified, according to a household registration system,
called the hukou system, as “rural” or “urban” permanent residents and are assigned
rights and privileges accordingly. Rural migrants moving to a urban location are
necessarily temporary migrants and cannot receive the “minimum protection”
(dibao) in the form of social services that is available to people classified as urban
residents (Chan 2009).
8. www.pbs.org.
9. http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P82353.asp.
10. “Wal-Mart Suppliers Face Abuse Accusations,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 9, 2006,
p. C4.
Chapter 8
1. A Wall Street Journal article focusing on Oracle, GM, Pepsi, and other US big firms
suggests that the pendulum may now be swinging back to vertical integration
(Worthen, Tuna, and Scheck 2009).
2. Countries with Flextronics industrial parks are Poland, Hungary (2), Mexico (2),
Brazil, India, and China (2). See www.flextronics.com/about/pages/industrialparks.
aspx.
3. At Celestica, for example, 40% of global capacity expansion was “organic” in
nature.
322
Notes
4. According to the company’s website, in 2008 Lear’s net sales were $13.6 billion,
employment was 71,000, the number of facilities was 210, and the number of
countries was 36 (www.lear.com/jsp/common.jsp?page=al_co_companyoverview,
accessed Jan. 15, 2010).
5. See www.lifung.com/eng/global/home.php (accessed Dec. 2, 2009).
6. See www.lifung.com/eng/business/responsible.php for more information (accessed
Dec. 12, 2009).
7. The opportunity for electronic component distribution in Singapore and Malaysia
stemmed from the lack of an adequate conduit to connect local chip assembly and
test operations with the growing subassembly and product-level manufacturing
that foreign firms were doing in the region. Offshore affiliates of both semiconduc-
tor and product-level firms had increased their Asian operations, and Uraco’s new
distribution arm helped to connect the dots.
8. www.mfgmkt.com (accessed Aug. 12, 2009).
9. In addition to computer-aided design (CAD) tools, capital equipment in these
facilities included 86 electronic circuit board assembly lines using surface-mount
technology (SMT), 250 plastic molding machines, 85 metal die-casting machines,
1,000 computer numerically controlled (CNC) drill and tap machines, and 30
multi-spindle high-speed coil winding machines.
10. This section is adapted from Sturgeon and Lee (2005).
Chapter 9
1. See also Malone (2002); Speer (2002); Just-style.com (2003); Kearney (2003);
McGrath (2003); Nordås (2004).
2. www.nht.com.tw/en/about-2.htm.
3. The following information comes from Esquel’s website, www.esquel.com/en/
index.html.
4. Esquel’s client list includes Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, J. Crew,
J. C. Penney, Marks and Spencer, Nike, Nordstom, Polo Ralph Lauren, and some
fifteen other leading brands (www.esquel.com/en/index6.html).
5. Esquel’s Gaoming factory complex (Guangdong Province) does the weaving, dye-
ing, and assembly. The firm’s recently opened weaving mill occupies 29 acres, and
is described as “China’s most advanced woven fabric manufacturing facility,” an
environmentally friendly facility featuring “the textile industry’s most advanced
machinery and advanced computer control systems to reduce operational errors,
ensure quality and shorten production time” (www.esquel.com/en/index7.html).
6. See www.vendormanagedinventory.com.
7. The following information comes from TAL’s website, www.talgroup.com/eng/
home.html.
8. The company was originally called South China, then—through a collaboration
with Jardine Matheson—became the textile Alliance Group (TAL).
9. In addition to garments and footwear, Li & Fung export management includes
furnishings, toys, stationery, home products, sporting goods, and travel goods.
323
Notes
10. Yue Yuen, the world’s leading manufacturer of footwear, became a “strategic
shareholder” in Luen Thai when it acquired a 9.9% stake in 2004; this firm is
discussed below.
11. A second supply-chain city is being developed in Qing Yuan, also in Guangdong
Province; in addition, Luen Thai maintains supply-chain centers in the USA and
the Philippines (Luen Thai 2006).
12. Luen Thai’s principal customers also include Polo Ralph Lauren, Limited Brands,
Adidas, Dillard’s, Nike, and Fast Retailing (Luen Thai 2006).
13. Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings is the principal source of Pou Chen’s shoe
production; as of June 2004, Pou Chen held 50.1% of the stock in Yue Yuen
(www.yueyuen.com).
14. Yue Yuen’s fiscal year ends on September 30.
15. China, Indonesia, and Vietnam together account for 90% of all athletic footwear
production (Merk 2006).
16. I visited the Nike/Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan in September 2005, as a guest of
Nike. The immaculate and ultra-modern activities center, newly opened, showed
no signs of having yet been used; even the polished glass tables had no smudges or
fingerprints.
17. Other clients include Polo Ralph Lauren, Kenneth Cole, Calvin Klein, and NBA
Properties. Yue Yuen is the exclusive China licensee for Converse, Wolverine, and
Hush Puppies (Xinhua 2007). About 60% of Yue Yuen’s footwear production is for
Nike, Reebok, and Adidas-Salomon (Merk 2003).
18. Based on its Interim Report for the first six months of FY 2007 (ending March 31),
the company’s growth trajectory appears to be continuing, despite rising wage
pressures and the continuing cost of the petroleum-based imports that constitute
a major part of the company’s costs. Yue Yuen added 14 additional production
lines, bringing its total to 387; its year-to-year production of shoes increased 15%
(111 million pairs for the six-month period); and wholesale/retail sales grew by
37%, accounting for 8.0% of total revenues (in comparison with 5.4% for FY 2006)
(Yue Yuen 2007c). On the other hand, on July 26, 2007, Credit Suisse initiated
coverage on Yue Yuen with an “underperform” call because of what it regarded as
the company’s “decreasing exposure to the retail business sector,” claiming that
“Yue Yuen is actively considering spinning off its retail business arm in China”
(Xinhua 2007).
19. The cost of the petrochemicals that comprise a significant portion of the raw
materials used in making shoes increased 50–60% (Fong 2005).
20. In 2002, 28% of Yue Yuen’s athletic shoe production was for Nike, yet it supplied
only 15% of Nike’s total demand (Merk 2006: 16).
21. Yue Yuen’s net profit rate in 2002 (11.9%) was higher than Nike’s (6.2%), Reebok’s
(2.9%), or Adidas’s (3.4%) (Merk 2006: 17). The company has continued to post
near double-digit profits (10.02% in 2006) (http://finance.google.com/finance?
q=HKG:0551).
22. According to one frequently cited statistic, “if Wal-Mart were a country, it would be
China’s sixth-largest export market.” Wal-Mart executives talk of doubling their
purchases from Chinese suppliers (C. Chandler 2005).
324
Notes
23. Wal-Mart already has a supercenter in Shenzhen.

24. With the exception of Mexico and a few other developing economies, Wal-Mart
has generally not fared well in securing significant market share; see C. Chandler
(2005).
Chapter 10
1. See, e.g., Farina et al. (2005), for the case of dairy processing and retail in Argentina
and Brazil.
2. The existence of these early supermarket chains serving a tiny niche market in
some developing areas, e.g., in Puerto Rico, was noted as early as 1953 by Holden
(1953) in the Holden–Galbraith study.
Chapter 11
1. Direct channels include telephone and Internet sales made directly by the manu-
facturer. Indirect sales involve sales to distributors and/or retailers.
2. The commercial market refers to enterprise, SMEs, governments, education, and
other organizational segments, whereas the consumer market refers to households
and individuals.
3. “White box” refers to generic PCs that carry the brand of the retailer or distributor
rather than the manufacturer.
4. Although admittedly, many customers in those countries already pay close to zero
for Windows, and for application software, given high piracy rates.
5. Numbers based on field interviews with ODMs and suppliers by the authors.
6. Indirect sales worldwide are over 66% of total sales; excluding the USA would make
the figure much higher.
7. This research is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the
Personal Computing Industry Center at The Paul Merage School of Business,
University of California, Irvine. We gratefully acknowledge the International
Data Corporation (IDC) for providing data for the study and Paul Gray for com-
ments on the chapter.
325
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Index
Figures and tables are indexed in bold.
A&P 87–8, 90, 92, 95, 150, 272–3 Au bonheur des dames (Zola) 83
Abaza, M. 8 Auchan 124
Abernathy, F. H. 15, 72, 74, 255 Australia 103, 136–7, 151
Abolafia, M. Y. 36 Austria 1118, 127, 135, 137, 138, 150
Adams, Henry 35 automobile industries 51–2, 61, 89, 235, 238–9
Adelman, M. A. 93 consolidation 239
Adidas 112, 206, 207, 263 dealerships 89–90
advertising 51, 82, 94, 95, 97, 134 disruptive technologies 64, 66
Africa 232, 257 globalization 239
PC shipment share 310t11.A5
African Growth and Opportunity Act Bachmann, R. 254
(AGOA) 242 Bair, J. 15
agriculture 27, 290 Balsevich, F. 11, 276, 277, 279
developed countries 289 Bank of America (BOA) 55
Aguirre, M. 11, 276, 279 BankAmericard 55
Ahold 27, 130, 150, 286 bar codes 5, 15, 23, 46, 57–8, 59, 61, 70, 71, 72,
Akinwande, A. 247 117, 273
Aldi 4, 9, 21, 24, 106, 117, 119, 124–5, 134–7, Barboza, D. 266
137, 273 Barger, H. 87
Alexander, A. 104, 118, 120 Barnes & Noble 161, 163
Allawadi, K. 14 Barth, G. 82
Amazon.com 24, 112, 113, 156, 157–9, 160, Batt, R. 234
161, 162, 163–6, 167, 169, 170, 177–8 Belgium 103, 126, 127, 130, 131, 135, 137,
America, see USA 138, 140, 150
Amsden, A. 193, 195 Bell, D. E. 126, 127
anticompetitive behaviour/practices 12, 18 Bell Labs 55
antitrust authorities 273 Bennett, T. 83
apparel industry 15, 91, 239–40, 256–7 Berdegué, J. A. 11, 276, 277, 279, 282, 283,
bar codes 71 284, 285, 286
China 257, 258, 261 Berekoven, L. 121
Indonesia 240 Berger, S. 254
Apple Computers 10, 296, 297, 307 Beyonics 243, 244
Armstrong, A. 155 Bianco, A. 9, 162
ARPAnet 70 big buyers, see global retailers
Asda 118, 122, 123, 129 big-box retailers 5, 11, 18, 23, 52, 60, 85, 97,
Asia 23, 102, 111, 120, 130, 132, 142, 152, 98, 99, 106, 108, 112, 117, 119, 138
219, 261 1945–1970 104
design manufactures 28 big suppliers, see giant retailers
economies 6, 182 Bingen, J. 284
ports 216 Birchall, J. 224, 225
Asia Pacific PC shipment share 309t11.A1 Bliss, P. 42
AsiaOceania 11 Blonigen, B. A. 21, 218
Asian financial crisis (1997) 217 Bluestone, B. 3, 183
Asian Miracle 16, 17, 25, 182 Bon Marché (Paris) 84
Index
Bonacich, E. 211, 219, 220, 227, 228, 255 chain stores 5, 14, 23, 91, 95, 96, 97, 98–9
Bonaglia, F. 239 buyerdriven 15
book industry 161 history of 87
value chain prior to online retailing 160, Chamberlin, E. H. 181
160t5.1, 162t5.2 Chan, A. 223
Borders 161 Chan, K. W. 223, 264
Bornemann, D. 19 Chandler, Alfred D. 3, 32, 36, 58
Bowles, Samuel 31 Chandler, C. 267
Box, The (Levinson) 67 Chang, C. C. 276
Bradley, S. P. 166, 170 Chang, R. 301
Brandes, D. 134 Chapman, S. 35
brand values 261 Chege, J. 281
brands 18, 86, 90, 97–8, 164 Cheng, L. L. 187, 201
manufacturing 264 Chessel, M. E. 84
name merchandisers 4, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, Chile 70
182, 187, 214, 215, 221, 233, 292 China 11, 19, 22, 103, 112, 150, 167, 182,
prices 219 208, 235, 237, 247, 256, 268, 283, 286
USA 6 apparel industry 257, 258
brick-and-mortar retailers 156, 157, 158, 159, bicycle industry 220
162, 163, 164, 167, 175, 176–8 cash and carry 142
Brinkley, J. 60 competition 200
broadband communications 74, 173–4 contract manufacturers 21, 26, 224, 226
Broehl, W. G. 104 convenience stores 110
Brown, C. 234 economic development 20, 21, 265, 268,
Brown, S. A. 58, 71 282, 290
Bucklin, L. P. 92, 95 employment 17, 223
Burt, S. 108, 123, 126, 150, 152 exports 20–1, 25, 218
Burt, T. 277 to USA 216
Busch, L. 284 foreign direct investment (FDI) 217–18
Bush, President George H. 60, 61 global champions 266t9.1
business groups (keiretsu) 189, 192 government policy 266
Japan 193 manufacturing 207, 217, 244
Taiwan 208 retail formats, modern 115
business models 4, 90, 171, 177, 261, 291 social organization 198
buyers and sellers 15, 155–6, 158, 181 supermarkets 109, 277, 279
eBay.com 167, 168 textile industry 258
China External Trade Development Council 196
Canada 107 China Labor Watch 226
Cao, N. 258, 260 Choi, S. C. 108, 126, 143, 144
capital goods, world imports 253f8.2 Chu, W. W. 193, 195
capitalism 2, 31, 34, 35, 36, 82, 182, 210 Chu, Y. W. 210
Caribbean 257 Chua, B. H. 8
Carrefour 4, 9, 10, 16, 21, 24, 27, 41, 49, 86, clothing, see apparel industry
108, 111, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, Clover, V. T. 93
125–7, 150, 274, 284, 285, 286 Clower, R. 37
China 127–8, 132–3, 152, 267 Coase, R. 31
internationalization 126, 145, 151–2 codes of conduct 224
Latin America 127 CODEX Alimentarius 285
and Promodès 125, 137 Codron, J.M. 284
Carrefour 127–8, 132–3, 152 Coe, N. 152
cars, see automomobiles Coggins, J. 274
cartel 45 Cohen, A. 96, 166
cash and carry 119, 122, 125, 137, 137, 138, Coles, T. 83, 84, 103
139, 141, 142, 278 Colla, E. 80, 123
Celestica 236 Collins, N. 91
Central America 257, 285 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and
Central Europe, PC shipment share 310t11.A4 Engels) 34
352
Index
competition 12, 39, 42, 43–4, 45, 63, 121, 212, Davis, S. 256
276, 281 Dawson, J. A. 104, 143, 144, 150, 152
China 200, 277 De Grazia, V. 80, 103
direct 102, 114–5 Debenhams 86
global 232 Dedrick, J. 245, 292, 295, 296, 303, 305
horizontal 43, 44 Dell 4–5, 28, 49, 291, 293, 296, 297, 300–1,
price 43 303, 304
competitive advantage 19, 164, 230, 282 Deloitte 2, 81, 113, 274, 275
consumer electronics 194–5, 257, 306 demand-pull 298
consumer goods 45–6, 86, 94 demand-responsive economies 16, 25, 181–2,
consolidation 267–8 190, 221
developed countries 108 demand-responsive manufacturers 207, 208
East Asia 6, 25 demand-side 281, 282, 283
Europe 111 Denis, C. 16
globalization 255 Denmark 135, 138
markets 2, 10, 19, 101, 111–12, 115–16 department stores 23, 40, 64–5, 71, 80, 82–3,
global 113; internalization of 81 93, 94, 98, 102–3, 110, 138, 185
modern 103 Austalia 103
USA 6, 41, 100 China 103
imports of 185; 1970–2010 99–100 down-town 121
consumer markets 23, 40, 42, 43, 44, 84, Europe 35, 103
182–3, 212 France 84
consumer power 19, 100–1 Great Britain 84
Consumer Credit Protection Act 1968 (USA) 57 inventory control 71, 72
consumption 6, 7, 82 Japan 84, 103
patterns 18, 19 limits of 85
containers, see shipping, containers replication of 103
contract manufacturing 5, 10, 21, 26, 208, 212, USA 35, 91, 183
218, 221–2, 236, 243–4, 250, 303 decline of 97
Beyonics 244 developed countries 240, 253, 254, 299
China 224, 226 developing countries 231, 232, 242, 248, 254,
East Asia 26, 188 255, 257
and supply chain 27 food retailers 274, 283, 284, 285, 286
Taiwan 245–6 white-box makers 305–6
convenience stores 42–3, 90, 99, 102, 107, 131, Dicke, T. S. 89
133, 273 Dicken, P. 241
Cook, R. 11, 276, 279 digital home 306, 307
Cortada, J. 15 Diotallevi, Ezio 79
Costco 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 21, 42, 100, 214, 273 discount stores 23, 96, 98, 99, 132–3, 143, 151,
Coulter, J. 288, 289 188, 273
credit: disk-drive manufacturers 243
cards 51, 56–7, 97, 169 disruptive technologies 52, 53, 61
industry 55 air conditioning 53
technology, use of 56 automobiles 64
Crossick, G. 82, 83, 103 early 51, 61
Cunningham, E. 235 Internet 61
Currah, N. 152 railroads 61, 66
Curth, L. 104, 118 distribution 5, 33, 102, 104
customer services 163–4, 165 centers 72–3, 89, 276, 286
PCs 307 channels 38, 39, 45, 291, 293
Cusumano, M. 247 direct 294f11.2; indirect 293f11.1
Czech Republic 11, 109, 122–3, 131, 132, 141, Europe 104
144, 145, 150, 152, 276, 286 “The Distribution Upheaval” (Lebhar) 98
division of labor 33
Daems, H. 36 Doellgast, V. 234
Davis, H. B. O. 60 Dolan, C. 251
Davis, R. T. 79 domestic markets 107, 111, 119
353
Index
Dorward, A. 288 motor vehicle industry 237

drapery stores 85 USA 221–2
Dries, L. 276, 277, 278, 284 encryption techniques 56
Du Ling 257 Engels, Friedrich 34
Duan, C. P. 192, 193 England, production 34–5
Dunlop, J. T. 15, 59, 72, 74, 255 equilibrium bias 32–3, 39, 47, 48
Dunn, W. S. 79 Esquel 258
Dunning, J. H. 151 Ethical Trading Initiative 224, 225
Dupuis, M. 108, 126 EU 115
Durand, C. 126 department stores 35
employment 17
East Asia 6, 97, 107, 110, 128, 133, 144, 182, grocery chains 120
208, 268 retail formats 110
consumer goods 6, 25 retail markets 9, 23, 107, 118
contract manufacturing 26, 188, 257 Europe 6, 11, 21, 102, 103
convenience stores 103 and China 218
currencies 217 consumer goods 111
economies 16–17, 256 distribution 104
global economy 10 retailers 109, 118–19
global supply base 252–3 grocery 146, 146–9t4.2
industrialization 25, 152, 210 internationalization 24, 107, 119
manufacturers 217 grocery retailers 146
newly industrializing countries (NICs) 185, retail markets 16, 23–4, 117, 118
187, 234 modern 82; into USA 108
suppliers 231–2, 233, 239, 240 shopping centers/malls 105, 106
Eastern Europe 23, 24, 108, 110, 117, 131, 133, supermarkets 105, 106
137, 142, 144, 151, 232, 237 Evans, D. S. 55
PC shipment share 310t11.A4 Evans, P. B. 155, 156
eBay.com 24, 112, 113, 156, 157, 158, Exxon 49
166–8, 170, 171, 175, 177–8
ecosystem 168–9, 170 Fair Labor Association (FLA) 224
goods over $1 traded on 171–2, 172t5.2 Farina, E. M. M. Q. 272, 276
small merchants 169–70Echánove, F. 11, farming 288–9
276, 279 USA 289
ecommerce 51, 110, 293–4 fastfood retail 27, 42, 107
economies 20, 230 FederalAid Highway Act 1956 65
analysis 38 feedback loops 8, 46–7
crises 249 Feenstra, R. C. 5, 16, 21, 182, 183, 187, 188,
modern 34, 221 191, 193, 196, 199, 217, 231
productionist view 35, 39 Fels, D. 6
theory 31 Field, Palmer, and Leiter (FPL) 62
economies of scale 2, 85, 91, 250, 257, 266, Fields, K. J. 193
272, 283, 286 File Transfer Protocol (FTP) 70
efficiency 12, 13, 282 final goods 10, 210
Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) 273 world imports 253f8.2
Egypt, shopping malls 8 First World War 84
Eisenhower, Predsident Dwight, D.: firsttier suppliers 251
support for insterstate highway 65–6 Fishman, C. 9
Eldener, Y. B. 127 fiveanddime stores 88, 103
electronic authorization/transactions 56 Fletcher, S. R. 120
electronic data interchange (EDI) 70, 73, 212, flexibility 221, 289
219–20 Flextronics 236–7, 250, 257
email 70 Fong, M. 264
electronics industry 235, 236, 237, 246 food retailing 18, 27, 57, 58, 73–4, 93, 152–3,
Emmet, B. 89 271–2, 273, 274–5, 287
employment 17, 82, 256–7, 259, 262–3 bar codes 59–60, 71
China 223 Czech Republic 11
354
Index
East Asia 110 hypermarkets 127, 129

geographic spread 279–80, 281t10.2, 282 self-service 134
first wave 276–7, 280; second wave 277, social protectionism 121
280; third wave 277 supermarkets 105
global expansion of 271, 274, 275t10.1, variety stores 103, 118
281, 282, 283 giant contractors 257, 261, 267–8
Greece 11 giant factories 256, 257, 261
sales 276 giant retailers 255–6, 267–8
standards 284, 285 Gibbons, H. A. 64
supermarket share 280f10.1 Gilman, H. 267
footwear 185, 187, 189 global commodity chains 14, 255
athletic 262, 264 global economy 1, 2, 3, 9, 20, 22, 46, 52, 181,
US imports 190f6.5 182, 194, 230, 231, 248
Ford 90, 238 contemporary 49
foreign direct investments (FDI) 277 contraction 252
Asia 240 East Asia 10, 217
China 217, 277–8 new geography 212
India 278 global footprints 238, 253
Japan and Taiwan 193 global retailers 9, 10, 49, 81, 181–2, 188, 189,
foreign trade, USA 184f6.1 196, 197, 198, 206, 210, 211, 213
Forrester Research 172, 173t5.3, 175, Asia 220
176, 177 and China, suppliers 218
France 11, 24, 120–1, 128, 138, 143, 279 purchasing by 232
discount stores 133–4 USA, market share 12t0.2
hypermarkets 123, 152 global sourcing strategies 17, 25, 26, 248
self-service 79, 126 global supply base/chains 232, 233, 237,
shopping arcades 50 248, 249
shopping centers/malls 106 China 268
supercenters 273 consolidation 249–50, 252, 254
supermarkets 105, 123, 124 East Asia 252–3
variety stores 103 global value chains (GVCs) 231, 234–5, 241,
see also Carrefour 249–50, 253–4, 256
franchise systems 90, 107, 109, 111, 133 globalization 236, 283
free trade 230 Godley, A. 120
Fukami, G. 84 Goetz, L. 282
full-package contractors 26 Gold, T. B. 191
full-package 74, 253 Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia
full-package selling 40 (McDonald) 8
Fuller, D. 247 Goldman, M. I. 80
Goldman, A. 104
Galeries Lafayette 86 Goldstein, A. 239
Gallegos, Javier 285 Goodland, A. 288, 289
garment exports, see apparel industry government regulations 47–8, 104, 117–18, 287
gasoline: Gower, A. 247
chain stores 89, 90 Gragg, C. L. 72
self-service 99 Great Britain 24, 103, 108, 121, 273, 274, 286
Gates, B. 155 department stores 84
general-merchandise 11, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, grocery chains 103
100, 114, 157t5.1 shopping centers/malls 106
General Motors 238 supermarkets 120, 122, 123, 251
Gereffi, G. 15, 97, 182, 194, 213, 232, 239, 240, variety stores 103
248, 255 Woolworth 102, 103, 118
Germany 9, 11, 24, 108, 111, 140–1 Great Depression 65, 183, 184
cash and carry 122, 125, 137, 138, 139, 141 Greece 11, 71, 150
department stores 138 Greenhalgh, P. 83
grocery chains 125 grocery retailers 11t0.1, 87–8, 89, 93, 94,
hard-discount stores 106, 124–5 114, 123
355
Index
grocery retailers (cont.) Hollander, S. C. 38, 97, 103

East Europe 152t4.3 Holt, D. B. 7
Europe 120, 123t4.1, 146–9t4.2 Home Depot 41, 112, 214
Germany 125, 139 Honeycombe, G. 102
Great Britain 103 Hong Kong 8, 26, 27, 110, 153, 185, 216, 240,
Italy 124 241, 258, 262
Japan 105 and China 217–18, 222
market share 124t4.1 horizontal competition 43, 44
point-of-sale technology 15 Hower, R. M. 82, 83, 84
self-service 95 Howitt, P. 37
small 92 Hu, D. 277, 284, 286
standardization 88 Hughes, G. B. 84
USA 92 human capital 47
Grosso, C. 177 Humphrey, J. 15, 248, 251, 255
Grove, A. 155 Hungary 137, 140, 141, 144, 286
Gulati, A. 278, 279 hypermarkets 40, 85, 99, 105, 109–10, 121,
GUM (Soviet Union) 103 122, 126, 130–1, 133, 141, 150–1, 152,
Gunderson, C. 289 153, 273, 274
Gurdjian, P. 151 Austria 127
Gutman, G. E. 272, 276 France 123, 124
Guy, C. M. 120
IBM 246, 247, 293
Haberman, A. L. 60, 73 identities 7, 8
Hagel, J. 155 IKEA 108, 112
Haggblade, S. 289 imports:
Hall, M. 122 USA 184, 185f6.2, 185f6.2
Hamel, G. 47 from East Asia 186f6.3, 188; from South
Hammond, J. H. 15, 72, 74, 255 Korea 186f6.4
Hanchett, T. W. 1, 96, 183 world 253f8.2
Hansell, S. 166 impulse buying 93, 94
Hanna, P. 3, 183 independent retailers 108, 121
Hansen, U. 19 India 19, 80–1, 142, 167, 278, 283
Hao, Y.-P. 35 economic development 20
hard-discount stores 106, 119, 122, 123, employment 17
124–5, 128, 129, 151 Indonesia 150, 245, 284
see also Aldi apparel industry 240–1
Hardwick, M. J. 96 industrial parks 237
Harris, C. 284 information:
Harris, N. 83 broker 159
Harrison, B. 234 collective 176
Harrods 86 on customer shopping behavior 174–5
Harvard Business School 72 intermediary 167
Hassanien, A. E. 110 information technology 5, 15, 19, 22, 74, 182,
Hassler, M. 241 248, 249, 281, 283, 287, 291
Hatch, W. 217 Ingram Book Co. 161, 162
Hayes Communications 55–6 Ingram Micro 307
Hazell, P. 289 in-house manufacturing 236, 237
heating, ventilation and air conditioning innovations 47, 98, 113, 115, 116, 120, 288,
(HVAC) 52 298
Heinz 71 Insterstate Commerce Commission (ICC) 63, 67
Henksmeier, K. 79, 104, 135 insterstate highways 52, 61, 65–6, 69, 183
Hermanson, J. 264 Intel 246, 247, 301–2, 304, 306, 308
Hernández, R. 11, 276, 277, 279 inter-firm markets 40, 45, 49
hierarchies 31, 33 intermediaries 36–7, 38, 41, 210, 240, 250–1, 294
Hilton, M. L. 103 demand 16, 213
Ho, T. M. C. 264 goods 10, 252, 253f8.2
Hoge, C. C. 83, 89 South Korea 241
356
Index
International Brotherhood of Teamsters Kai Hsiang 199–201

(IBT) 228 Kao, C. S. 198, 208
International Longshore and Warehouse Kaohsiung 216
Union (ILWU) 227–8, 229 Kapinsky, R. 256
International Standards Organization (ISO) Kapital, Das (Marx) 34
57, 69 Katjiuongua, H. 288
International textiles, Garment and Leathers Kawakami, M. 247, 248
Workers Federation (ITGLWF) 225 Kearney, Neil 225, 257
internationalization 101, 107, 108–19 keiretsu, see business groups
Internet 19, 24, 51, 56, 57, 61, 70, 74, 75, 110, Kent, J. 282
112, 155–6, 211, 248, 291, 296 Kenya 280–1
book industry, value chain 161–2 Kerschbaumer, G. 151
technologies 156, 164, 165, 171, 177–8 Khalil, O. 110
eCommerce functional websites 175–6 Kikkawa, T. 105
websites 177 Kim, E. M. 234
see also Amazon.com; eBay.com King, R. 274
Internet protocol (IP) 70 Kingfisher 112
inventory control 70, 71, 73, 97, 220, 224, Kliger, M. 151
227, 261, Kmart 71, 91, 96, 97, 98, 144, 188, 194, 197
lean 273 Kojima, K. 191
invisible hand 32, 33 Kotha, S. B. 158, 159, 163, 164
Ireland 143 Koudal, P. 259
Isetan 86 Kraemer, K. L. 245, 292, 295, 296, 303, 305
Italy 24, 108, 138, 140, 154 Krazit, T. 307
grocery chains 124 S. S. Kresge 88
self-service 79 Krider, R. E. 104
social protectionism 121 Kroger 87, 92
restrictive regulations 124 Kuhn, S. 3, 183
Kwon, H. 234
J. C. Penney 86, 89, 96, 183, 194, 259, 260 Kydd, J. 288
Jakle, J. A. 90
Japan 21, 41, 80, 103, 104, 108, 109, 111, labor 17, 18, 93, 104, 222, 227, 228–9
115, 142, 146, 184, 185, 186, 216, China 222, 223–4
217–18, 303 codes of conduct 224–5, 226
convenience stores 109 conditions 227, 229
department stores 84 control 221, 224
exports to Taiwan 193–4 costs 212, 213, 217, 240, 262
fast-food retail 107 low 228, 256; retailer interference 229
foreign direct investment (FDI) 217–18 division of 235, 240, 241
grocery stores 105 precariousness 228–9
and South East Asia 217 racialization 229
speciality stores 105 and unions 217, 222, 225, 227–9
supermarkets 105 Lai, R. 126, 127
technology partners 247 Lane, C. 254
trading companies 187, 191–4 Lang, W. Y. 301
wages 192 Larke, R. 108, 126, 143, 144, 150
Jaumain, S. 82, 83, 103 laser technology 60, 72
Jefferys, J. B. 103 Latham, F. B. 62, 63
Jensen, J. B. 234 Latin America 23, 107, 108, 111, 119, 217, 232,
Jeuck, J. 89 257, 275, 285
joint ventures 192, 193, 275, 278 Carrefour 127, 132, 133, 152
Jones, G. 34 PC shipment share 309t11.A2
just-in-time 220, 224 Lavarello, P. J. 272
PC supply hubs 303 Leach, W. R. 82, 214
lead firms 232–4, 239, 246, 247, 248, 253, 254
Kacker, M. 80, 108 and suppliers 249
Kahn, G. 259, 260, 261, 262 supply-chain management 250
357
Index
lean retailers/ing 5, 16, 72, 73, 261 MacPherson, K. L. 103

Lear 237–8, 250 MacQuarie, B. 296
Lebhar, G. M. 87, 91, 98 Macy’s (New York) 84, 86, 183, 185
Lebow, V. 88 Magretta, J. 260
Lee, J. R. 236, 245 mail-order businesses 35, 51, 61, 63, 65, 83, 89
Lee, J.-H. 277 customers 62
Lee, S. H. 187 delivery problems 54
Lee, Y.-I. 241 railroads 66
legge Berdani 1998 124 Malaysia 127, 145, 150, 244
Lester, R. 232, 238, 239 Malkin, E. 275
Lever-Tracy, C. 191 Malone, S. 257
Levinson, M. 67, 215, 216 Manalili, N. M. 277
Levy, B. 187, 189 Mandell, L. 56
Levy, F. 234 Mann, Hugo 118
Lewis, W. W. 16 manufacturers 10, 14, 38, 91, 212, 255
Lhermie, C. 121, 126 East Asia 217
Li & Fung 241–2, 243, 250–1, 260–1, 268 manufacturing 2, 5, 40
licensing 104, 121, 247 USA 6
Lichtenstein, N. 9 outsourcing of 18, 26
Lidl 129, 151 maritime services 211, 219
Life is Not Complete Without Shopping (Chua) 8 market equilibrium 21
lifestyles 7–8, 46 market formats 115, 117
limited price variety stores 88–9, 103 market organization 32, 36, 45
Liu, John 211, 215 market power 44–5, 175
localization 306 marketing 38, 164
logistics 5, 14, 45, 46, 82, 89, 211, 212, 213–14, markets 2–3, 14, 31, 33
215, 219, 227, 250, 262, 279, 283, blurring of boundaries 4–5
284, 306 institutions 45–6
advanced 220 intermediate 231
global 20, 213, 230 and organization 31–2, 33
USA 25, 227 push and pull 14
Lohr, S. 155 strategies 19
Loi Raffarin 1996 123 Markovits, C. 35
Loi Royer 1973 123 Marks and Spencer 103, 143
London Transit Authority 55 Marshall Fields 102
Long, V. W.-T. 259 Marshall Plan 104
Longstreth, R. 92 Martinez, A. 11, 276
loss leaders 83 Marx, Karl 34
Lowe 214 Marx, T. G. 89
Lowe, M. 273, 274 mass media 14, 46
Luen Thai Holdings Ltd 261–2, 268 mass production 36, 102
Lui, T. L. 8 mass selling 34–5, 36
Lüthje, B. 257 Mastercard 55
Lynch, T. 235 Mathews, G. 8
Mathews, J. 239
Ma, A. C. 21, 218 May, E. G. 96
McDonald 27, 40, 107 Medina, R. 11, 276, 279
Mcdonaldization 6, 9 Melville, N. 292, 305
Maersk 68 Memedovic, O. 255
machines 35 merchandisers/ing 4, 11, 15
McGrath, P. 257 Merk, J. 262, 263, 264, 265
McKinsey Global Institute 16 Merrilees, B. 103
McLean, Malcolm 67, 68, 69 Metro 24, 27, 117, 118, 119, 122, 125, 129,
McMorrow, K. 16 137–42, 152, 278
McNair, M. P. 7, 96 Mexico 107, 274, 275–6, 277
McNichol, D. 65, 66 Meyer-Ohle, H. 105, 109
McPherson, J. 177 micro-enterprises 17
358
Index
Microsoft 246, 247, 301–2, 304, 308 Offutt, S. 289

Middle East, PC shipment share 310t11.A5 O’Hara, M. 36
middlemen 10, 219 oil, demand for 266
eBay.com as 167 Olney, P. 228
elimination of 82, 194 Olson, L. 193
Miller, D. 103 one-stop-shopping 114, 176, 235
Miller, M. B. 82 online auction model 168
Mirowski, P. 33 online retailing 24, 155, 157, 157t5.1, 158,
Mobil 49 170, 176–8
mobile services 306 Amazon.com 163, 164–5
modular production networks 15, 208, 209 adoption by major merchandisers 113
Moeran, B. 103 USA forecasts 172–3
Molotch, Harvey 20 publishing and retailing industry 160, 162
monopolistic competition 181–2 value added 171f5.3
Moore, L. 3, 183 see also Amazon.com; eBay.com
Morgan Stanley 175, 265–6 online store fronts 170
Morris, G. E. 14 online-trading platform 166
Morris, J. 121 open standards 247
Morrison, J. 288 Ordanini, A. 305
motor vehicle industry 235, 237 Orellana, D. 277
Mulpuru, S. 175 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) 15
multinational corporations (MNCs) 232, 233, Orlove, B. 35
250, 254 outsourcing 26, 221, 236, 237, 243, 247, 249,
foreign affiliates 239, 243, 253, 279 251, 252, 254, 303, 304
Multi-Fiber Agreement (MFA) 240, 242 Asia 219
end of 256–7, 261–2 motor vehicle industry 237
Myers, N. 282 USA 234
Ozawa, T. 191
Natawidjaja, R. 284
National BankAmericard, Inc (NBI) 56 Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) 227, 229
National Grange of the Patrons of Pacific Rim 155
Husbandry 62–3 Palmer, M. 144
Nelson, J. E. 73 Pan, M. L. 194
Nelson, R. R. 47 parcels post 64
Netherlands 79, 135, 138, 150, 286 Pasmadjian, H. 83, 84
Netto 135 payment 23, 51
Neven, D. 278, 281, 288 PayPal 168–9
newly industrializing countries (NICs) 185, 187 Pellegrini, L. 124
niches 209, 212 personal-computer industry (PCs) 28, 246–7,
products 175–6, 206 291, 289–9, 299t11.4, 300–4, 308
retailers 184 convergence 307
Nielsen, P. B. 234 models 306
Nien Hsing Textiles 26–7, 250–1, 257 network-centric 307, 308
Nike 112, 206, 207, 215, 218, 263, 264, 265 profits 304
non-food products 94–5, 98, 99–100 retailer as PC maker 305
Nordås, H. K. 257 Taiwan 245, 246, 298, 303
Nordstrom 86 USA 292, 294, 298, 302, 304, 306
North America 81, 112, 115, 119 branded PC makers 296–7, 297t11.3;
Nunes, R. 272 direct sales 293, 296, 297, 300–1;
Nystrom, P. H. 84, 87 indirect sales 297; models 295t11.2;
retail collaboration 295, 298, 299–300;
OEM: traditional sales 294–5; shipment
contracts 187, 197, 198, 199–201, 202, 203, share 294, 294t11.1
207, 208 worldwide shipment share 304t11.5
production 208–9, 258–9 non-US 304–5, 305t11.6
offshore sourcing/affiliates 219, 232, 234–5, Petkova, A. P. 164
239, 240, 249, 252, 254 Petrovic, M. 182
359
Index
Phumpiu, P. F. 274 purchasing power parity (PPP) 282

Piggly Wiggly stores 95 push and pull marketing 14
Pine, J. B. 256
Piore, M. 256 quality standards 285, 286
Plaza Accord (1985) 217
Pocock, Emil 109 Rabach, E. 234
point-of-sales (POS) 19, 182, 211, 230, 259 radio-frequency identification (RFID) 57
information 5, 14, 46, 175, 219 railroads:
technology 15, 57, 71 cost of shipping by 63
Poland 128, 131, 133, 137, 140, 141, 144, 150, disruptive technology 66
274, 286 USA 51, 61, 68–9
Porter, K. A. 166, 170 Chicago 61–2
Porter, M. 153 Rajgopal, S. 163
Portugal 131 Ralston, B. 295
postal mail 63–4 Ramaswami, S. 104
Potz, P. 124 Rangkuti, F. 277
Pou Chen (Yue Yuen) 204–7, 208, 213, 222–3, Rappaport, E. D. 83, 102
250–1, 262, 263 Raucher, A. R. 88, 89
Prahalad, C. K. 47 Reardon, T. 11, 272, 276, 277, 278, 279, 281,
Preston, L. E. 91 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287,
prices 10, 12, 83, 85, 97, 94, 143, 164 288, 289
competition 43, 45, 85–6 Regan, W. J. 95
low 95, 114 regulations 24, 101–2, 115, 118
transparency 175 liberal 120
Prime, N. 108 protective 121, 122
Le Printemps 86 restrictive 80, 107, 121
private standards 287 Germany 138; Italy 124
private-labels 185, 218, 219, 273, 274, 296 retail 122, 154
procurement 279, 283–4 rental car companies 56
food retailers 284, 285–6 Resseguie, H. E. 84
PCs 302 retail establishments 12–13, 13t0.3, 65
supermarket strategy 288 retail formats 4, 18, 49, 84, 86, 114, 120, 151
producer-driven chains 232–3 complementary 102
product codes 59, 303 diffusion 101, 103, 106–7
production: globalization 109
chains 233 innovations 80
England 34–5 USA 23, 81–2, 92, 100, 110
facilities 218 retail price maintenance 125
global 232 Retail Protection Law 1933 (Germany) 121
networks 14–15, 208, 209, 217, 240 retail revolution 3–9, 10, 14, 20, 23, 183, 187
regional systems 240 Retail Revolution, The (Bluestone et al) 3
see also mass production retail sectors 10–12, 14, 17, 48, 101
productionist bias 33–4, 35 grocery trade 11t0.1
products 5, 18, 22, 39, 40, 45, 84 retailers, large 2, 3, 4, 6, 9–10, 13, 14, 15
development 40 reverse engineering 197–8
differentiation 9, 114, 209, 210 Revolution at the Checkout Counter, The Explosion
global sourcing 16, 69 of the Bar Code (Brown) 58
long tail 175 Rezabakhsh, B. 19
narrow line of 90 Ricardo, David 230
Promodès 125, 126, 128, 144 Rindova, V. P. 164
internalization 129–30, 132, 134 Rivkin, Jan 59
publicity 82 Robinson, J. 181
Pun, N. 223, 225, 226, 260, 264 Röger, W. 16
purchasing 89 Rogers, J. S. 90
by global retailers 232 Romania 131, 133, 139, 140, 141, 150
PCs 302 round-table etiquette 198
tradition 258 Rouibah, K. 110
360
Index
Rozelle, S. 277, 284, 286 containers (TEUs) 52, 61, 65, 67, 74, 211,
rural free delivery (RFD) 64 214–15, 227
Russia 141, 278, 284 bar codes 72; size 69–70; standards 69
Rydell, R. 83 flags of convenience 227
ports 68, 216
Sabel, C. 256 shoe manufacturers, Taiwan 204–7
Safeway 92, 95, 120, 123 shopping centers/malls 1–2, 4, 18, 23, 85, 86,
Sainsbury’s 123, 150 109, 117, 183, 215
Salmon, W. J. 126, 127, 153 developing countries 109–10
Sam’s Club 100, 273, 275, 276 Europe 106
Sato, Y. 187, 201 greenfield 143
scanning devices 15, 23, 46, 58, 59–60, 61, spatial planning 121–2
70–1, 117, 136, 273 USA 2, 50–1, 92, 96, 97, 99, 183–4
Scheck, J. 236 store fronts 52; suburban 51–2
Scheybani, A. 121 Singapore 8, 128, 133, 150, 216, 241, 243
Schmalensee, R. 55 Sinkovics, R. R. 233
Schrader, U. 19 small businesses 12–13
Schröter, H. G. 80, 104, 105, 106, 118 smart-chip technology 57
Schumpeter, J. A. 42 smart modems 55–6
Scott, R. V. 98 Smith, Adam 32, 33, 181
Scranton, Philip 2 Smith, C. 223
Sculle, K. A. 90 Smith, D. 240
Sears, Roebuck and Co 9, 41, 52, 63–4, 65, social welfare mechanisms 13
66, 86, 88, 89, 90, 97, 98, 107, 183, Sodini, C. 247
185, 214 Solectron 236
Second World War 65, 115 Solomon, B. 61, 62
department stores after 84–5 Song, H. K. 187
USA 90, 184 sourcing strategies 233–4, 245–6, 257
manufacturers 183 South Africa 278
selfservice 48–9, 65, 93, 95, 104, 143, 279 South Asia 69, 70, 74, 110, 257
adoption of 105 South East Asia 97, 133 244
France 79, 126, 128 South Korea 26, 111, 115, 145, 182, 185, 186,
Germany 134 189, 203, 216, 303
Great Britain 120 Indonesian apparel industry 240–1
grocery chains 95, 272 economy 187–8
Italy 79 foreign direct investment (FDI) 217–18
Netherlands 79 intermediaries 241
retailers 119 Japanese trading companies 191
supermarkets 92, 94, 95 mass produced goods 189
West Europe 79 shoe manufacturers 206
West Germany 79 Soviet Union 103, 110
Selfridge, Gordon 102 Spain 108, 127, 129, 130, 137, 138, 150, 152
sellers, see buyers and sellers Sparks, L. 90, 107, 152
selling 28, 39, 43, 95, 104 speciality stores 11, 23, 40, 51, 86, 92, 97, 112,
full package 40 119, 157t5.1
new methods of 42 Japan 105
see also mass selling Speer, J. K. 257
Senauer, B. 109, 274, 282 Spulber, D. F. 36–7, 181, 241
7-Eleven 43, 90, 107, 109, 273 stakeholders 159
Seven-I Holdings Company 107, 111 standards 56, 284
Shaw, G. 104, 118, 120 adoption of 73, 209
Shell 90 container shipping 69
Shetty, S. 284 global industry 249
Shi, C. 177 technology 308
Shin, H. Y. 241 standards of living 105, 117
shipping: start-ups 203
coastal 67 Sternquist, B. 80, 108
361
Index
Stewart’s 84 modernising 70, 286

stock-keeping units (SKUs) 71, 72, 129, 136, spillover 16
143, 220, 221 structure 14, 303
store brands 14, 292 systems 251
Staples 112 supply-chain management 211, 212, 213, 221,
Starbucks 40 227, 242, 245, 250, 258, 268, 284, 291
Strasser, S. 94 supply-side/push 210, 281, 282, 298, 300
Stringfellow, R. 288, 289 sweatshop conditions 224, 225
Sturgeon, T. 15, 232, 234, 236, 238, 239, 245, Swinnen, J. 276, 277
248, 254, 255 Switzerland 126, 131, 137
sub-Saharan Africa 110, 278 symbol code 59
Suehiro, A.35 Symbol Technologies 56
suitcase companies 196 systems integrators (SI) 294, 297, 305
Sum, N.-L. 224, 225 convergence 307
supercenters 271, 273–4, 276 Szulanski, G. 40
supermarkets 23, 27, 40, 42, 48, 65, 85, 93,
94, 108–9, 110, 118, 122, 133, Tacconelli, W. 152
141, 146, 150, 271, 272–4, 276–7, Taiwan 25, 26, 27, 110, 111, 127, 130, 132,
278–9, 283 133, 145, 152, 182, 185, 186, 187,
checkouts 58, 70, 272 235, 248
China 109 apparel industry 240–1
developing world 109 batch produced goods 189, 198
diffusion 109 bicycle industry 201–3, 220
France 123, 124 business groups 208
goods 94–5 and China 217, 222
Great Britain 120, 122, 123 contract manufacturing 245–6
international adoption of 101 economy 188–9, 190, 194, 207, 209–10
organization 94 electronics industry 246
prices 43, 272 migration to China 247
self-service 92, 94, 95, 118 exports to:
suburban 102 Japan 193–4; USA 194
USA 92–3, 104, 272 foreign direct investment (FDI) 217–18
formats 93, 105–6superstores 143, 144, government 247
154, 161, 163 as independent agents 192
suppliers 14, 25, 41, 101 industrialization 190–2, 197, 198–9
and consumer markets 42, 44 manufacturers 297–8, 207
developed countries 253 for foreign buyers 209–10; move to
developing countries 235 China 207–8
East Asia 231–2, 233, 240 PCs 28, 245, 246, 303
transnational 239 ordering system 195–6
expansion 237 shoe manufacturers 204, 205–7
global retailers 182 trading companies 196–7
global support 237 Japanese 191, 193, 195
markets 182–3, 1984–5, 231, 252 see also Kai Hsiang; Nien Hsing; Pou Chen;
USA 197; USA pre 1965 183–5 YehBao
non-developing countries 235 Takaoka, M. 105
organization 101 Takashimaya 86
preferred 27, 286 TAL Group 259–60, 261
supply and demand 38, 39, 181, 293 Tallontire, A. 288, 289
supply chains 5, 15, 21, 25, 39, 45, Tam, P. T. G. 277
62, 103, 221, 252, 258–9, Target 91, 96, 97, 98, 100, 113, 214
274, 306 taxes 104
bar codes 70 reforms 183
competition within 45 Taiwan 203
dynamics 27 technologies 22, 46, 75, 117
food retailing 272 contemporary 57
global 49, 97, 224 intensive 233, 235
362
Index
Internet 165–6, 171 Urey, I. 288

new 82, 104, 156, 308 USA 11, 21, 23, 74, 150, 166, 279
eBay platform 168, 169–70 book industry, value chain 161, 162t.2
self-service 93 buyers in Asia 194
shopping centers/malls 51 category killers 11
technologies 156 chain stores 91
see also disruptive technology department stores 35, 80
Tedlow, R. S. 94 economy 100, 210
Teele, S. F. 72 employment 17, 221–2
Tesco 24, 41, 49, 86, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, exports to 187
122, 123, 131, 132, 139, 142, 143–6, Taiwan 194
150, 152, 154, 225, 251, 286 farming 289
textile industries 256–7 foreign trade 184f6.1, 185f6.2
China 258 grocery chains 92
Thailand 145, 150 hard discount stores 135, 137
Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen) 6 imports 184, 185, 185f6.2, 185f6.3, 214–15
third-party co-ordinated supply chain 258, 260 from China 216; from East Asia 186f6.3;
Thun, E. 235 footwear 190f6.5, from South
Timmer, C. P. 277, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, Korea 186f6.4; from Taiwan 188, 216
286, 287 manufacturing, outsourcing of 18
Tininga, R. 231 markets:
Tokatli, N. 127 modern retail formats 115; share of top
Tordjman, A. 153 firms 11t0.1
Toyota 49 online retail sales 172–3, 173t.3, 174, 177–8
Toys “R” Us 108, 112 outsourcing 234
trade: publishing and retail industry 160
in goods, in GNP 184t6.1 retailers 13, 15, 16, 38, 41, 118, 119, 120,
in intermediate goods 231 177, 183
liberalization 283 formats 23, 82, 116
trade imbalances 21, 22 shopping centers/malls 50–1, 183–4
Trader Joe’s 135–6, 137 store fronts 52
traders, role of 36–7 supplier markets 253
trading companies 218 pre 1965 183–5
Japan 187, 191–4, 195–6 standards of living 117
trading partners 45 supermarkets 92–3, 150
traditional purchasing 258 Useem, J. 226
transaction-cost theorists 31, 33, 36
transaction costs 156 value chain logistics 260
mechanisms 89 value chain modularity 248, 249, 251,
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) 70 251f8.1, 252
transportation 213, 227, 286 value chains 159, 160, 177
triangle manufacturing 240 in China 241
trucking 216, 227, 228 see also global value chains
Truth in Lending Act 57 value-added 17, 252, 255, 268
Tucker, N. 11, 276, 279 resellers 294, 297, 302, 305
Tuna, C. 236 Van Biesebroeck, J. 248
Turkey 128, 129, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141 Van Riper, T. 109
turn-key 253 Vance, S. S. 98
Twenty Five Years behind Bars (Haberman) 73 variety chains 88, 89, 91, 102, 103, 107
Tzeng, D. 301 Germany 118
Varley, Pamela 225
UK, see Great Britain Vasquez, E. 277
unemployment 17 Veblen, Thorstein 6, 7
Universal Product Code (UPC) 58–9, 71, 72, vendor managed inventory 259, 260
73, 273 vendors 5, 47, 301, 302
up-market products 217 inventory turnover 298
Uraco 243–4 Venkatachalam, M. 163
363
Index
Venturini, L. 282 white-box retailers 28, 292, 301

Vernon, R. 233 wholesale 35, 39–40, 41, 88, 119, 122, 138,
vertical bundling 236 284, 286
vertical competition 44 clubs 273
vertical integration 203, 236, 253, 258, 264, US publishing 160–1
267–8, 303 Whysall, P. 118, 122
computer companies 293 Williamson, O. E. 31, 156
downstream 263 Wilson, J. B. 211, 227, 228, 255
electronics industry 244 Wilson, R. 227
motor vehicle industry 237 Winkler, H. A. 121
Visa 55 Winter, S. G. 40, 47
visible hand 32 Wonacott, Peter 226
Visible Hand, The (Chandler) 36 Wood, General Robert 64, 65
Woodward, Richard 50
Wade, R. 191, 193 Woolworth’s 86, 87, 88, 106–7
wages, Japan 192 Canada 107
WalMart 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 21, 24, in Germany 102
27, 28, 43, 49, 52, 61, 66, 71, 86, 96, in Great Britain 102, 107
97, 98–9, 100, 113, 118, 122, 123, Mexico 107
125, 127, 132, 139, 141, 156, 168, 170, West Germany 107
188, 197, 211, 213, 214–15, 219, 220, workers, see labor
225–7, 229, 256, 264, 267, 273–4, World Trade Organization 21, 69, 217,
275, 276 267, 277–8
see also Asda accords 285
Walsh, C. 84 World Wide Web (WWW) 74, 155
Walton, Sam 66 Worthen, B. 236
Wanamaker, John 53, 54, 64 Wortmann, M. 122, 125, 134
Wang, H. 277, 284, 286 Wrigley, N. 126, 152, 273, 274
Wang, H.-L. 281 Wurster, T. S. 155, 156
Wang, S. G. 142
Ward, Montgomery 51, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 86, 89 Yamamura, , K. 217
warehouse clubs 42 Yamashiro, S. 296, 303
warehousing 89, 213, 228 Yamin, M. 233
Waterous, J. 151 Yeh-Bao 201
Watson, James 8 Yen, C.-H. 103
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) 33 Yeo, V. 301
Weatherspoon, D. D. 277, 278, 288 Yeung, H. W.-C. 239
Wei, S. J. 21 Young, J. D. 103
Weil, D. 15, 72, 74, 234, 255 Yu, X. M. 226
West Germany, self-service 79 Yue Yuen 250–1, 261, 262–4, 265
West Europe 23, 24, 80, 104, 108, 133, 281 Yupoong 257
internationalization 151
PC shipment share 310t11.A3 zaibatsu 192
retail markets 110, 115, 125 Zanerighi, L. 124
modern 115 Zanfei, A. 233
and shopping environment 79 Zentes, J. 151
standards of living 117 Zhang, Y. C. 142
supermarkets 105 Zhu, K. 292, 305
West Germany, Woolworth’s 107 Zimmerman, M. 88, 92, 94, 95, 272
white-box makers 305–6 Zola, Émile 83
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The Market Makers

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The Market Makers

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First and foremost, we want to acknowledge the support and encouragement

Pittsburgh), Greg Magnan (Albers School of Business, Seattle University), Mary

Part One: The Market Makers: A General Perspective

1. Retailers as Market Makers 31

2. Technology and Public Policy: The Preconditions for

Part Two: Making Consumer Markets

3. US Retailing and its Global Diffusion 79

4. Globalization of European Retailing 117

5. Amazon and eBay: Online Retailers as Market Makers 155

Part Three: Making Supplier Markets

6. The Asian Miracle and the Rise of Demand-Responsive

7. Global Logistics, Global Labor 211

8. Making the Global Supply Base 231

9. Transnational Contractors in East Asia 255

Part Four: Industries and Market Making

10. The Global Spread of Modern Food Retailing 271

11. Market Making in the Personal Computer Industry 291

4.1. Grocery market share according to store size, four European

0.1. Retail concentration in grocery trade, select economies, 2005 11

A&P Great Atlantic and Paciﬁc

ILWU International Longshore and Warehouse Union

Frederick H. Abernathy is Abbott and James Lawrence Research Professor of

The transformation of retailing in the last half of the twentieth century

tip of an iceberg. Underpinning this expansion is the dominance of large

The Retail Revolution

as a way to establish their distinctiveness. For Veblen (1899), writing in the

of McDonald’s in Asia. Like everything else, McDonaldization is a source of

Large Retailers and their Impact on the Global Economy

Size and concentration

Country % share of top ﬁve Country % share of top ﬁve

Sources: Planet Retail, Euromonitor, authors’ estimates.

Sector Four largest ﬁrms Twenty largest ﬁrms

Source: US Bureau of the Census (2002).

The impact on retail structures

Table 0.3. Number and density of retail establishments, 2001

Total retail Total retail Retail establishments

United States 444.5 694.3 2.5

Large retailers and their suppliers

“production networks.” Gerefﬁ (1994b) emphasized the importance of

Technological change and productivity

Impact on labor markets

somewhat ironic that, because of the efforts of a whole generation of histor-

Overall impact on economic development

manufacturing and were instrumental in driving China toward industrializa-

Overview of the Book

the railroads and improved ocean transportation, which allowed retailers

controls. This pressure translates in company-level policies that directly inﬂu-

industry. In the traditional structure of the PC industry, PCs were marketed

Retailers as Market Makers

When we think of capitalist economies, we think of organizations, or of

an appendage to or wastage of production in productionist ones. We will

Mass Production and Mass Selling:

While we cannot survey in detail the entire history of market organization

The Idea of Market Making

Market making is a concept rarely used in general economic analysis. It is,

Most of this previous conceptual work on market making aims to broaden

Retailers as market makers

large, however, mainstream economic analysis has ignored such market-