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New work on North American retail history
Edited by Tracey Deutsch
Cultural historians and other scholars have given us excellent studies of advertising that examine the relationship between mass market institutions, national advertising, and the rise of a commercial society ([45] McGovern, 2006; [39] Laird, 1998; [55] Scanlon, 1995; [41] Lears, 1994; [61] Strasser, 1989; [43] Marchand, 1985; [52] Pope, 1983). This literature explores the democratization of goods over the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century as an increasing array of consumer goods and services became available to an even broader segment of the population. Advertisements are a key primary source in this literature, which treats ads (both their image and copy) as texts that generate meaning. While these scholars debate the degree to which ads shaped consumer attitudes and behavior or reflected contemporary understandings of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and citizenship, most draw upon advertisements for branded goods or national ad campaigns. Business historians and scholars of marketing, noting both the national orientation and big-business focus of this literature, have called for new studies that evaluate the persistence of local identities in markets and document the selling efforts of businesses with limited local or regional trade ([14] Elvins, 2004, pp. 158-9; [64] Witkowski, 2009; [32] Howard, 2008a). To that end, this essay will offer a brief history of the advertising efforts of the independent department store and the regional department store chain in the USA, neither of which promoted their business extensively in national magazines, but rather depended upon local advertising media.
Trade literature, industry studies, and the internal records of individual department stores together reveal the insistently local nature of independent department store advertising in the face of rapidly expanding national markets and national media in the period 1920-1960. Through newspapers, radio, and later television, these firms reached a geographically limited market, something that potentially put them at a competitive disadvantage with the larger advertising budget and market of chain department stores, variety stores, and discounters. Into the early postwar era, department stores of all sizes spent their advertising budget on media such as hometown newspapers, and on local programming on radio and television in their nascent commercializing stage. While many stores experimented with new advertising technologies, by the end of the period...