Content area
Full Text
We would like to thank Annamarie Sandecki and Amy McHugh for providing access to the Tiffany Archive, Parsippany, N.J. Their help and advice is much appreciated.
The business history literature generally considers sustained international retailing activity to be a feature of the globalization of markets at the end of the twentieth century.1Management literature encourages this perception, although the chain store firm of Woolworth, which entered Canada in 1897, the United Kingdom in 1909, and Germany in 1926, is acknowledged as the notable exception that proves a general rule.2The accepted narrative for the internationalization of American retailing on a large scale is one of a gradual increase in international retailing activity associated with food retailers and specialist retail firms from the 1960s onward.3
However, this interpretation does not stand up to close scrutiny. American manufacturing firms were involved in retailing outside the United States from the late nineteenth century, while American retail firms established international buying networks from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Singer, the sewing machine manufacturer, developed an extensive network of agents and retail outlets in foreign markets in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.4Kodak, the photographic materials manufacturer, launched a chain of European stores in the 1890s; by 1900, its advertising in Europe claimed the firm had stores in London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow.5From a buying perspective, large American department store firms such as A. T. Stewart's, Marshall Field's, and Wanamaker's imported impressive volumes of goods.6In 1872, a congressional investigating committee heard that A. T. Stewart's was responsible for 10 percent of the imports coming through the port of New York.7By 1906, "Marshall Field and Company was paying three-fifths of all customs duties at the Port of Chicago and was the largest importer in the United States."8The scale of their buying encouraged these firms to establish European buying offices.9This international sourcing was fundamental to how they marketed themselves to domestic consumers. However, American department stores did not internationalize in this period.
Given the contribution American chain store retailers such as Woolworth made to the internationalization of retailing in the twentieth century, consideration of nineteenth-century international retail activity provides an opportunity...