Book Review: "THE GREAT A&P AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SMALL BUSINESS IN AMERICA"

sounds familiar..............from nytimes.......

"During the first decades of the 20th century, A&P’s stores replicated so virally and offered goods so cheaply that they put thousands of mom and pop stores out of business, presaging more recent debates about Wal-Mart’s oozing retail dominance. Between 1922 and 1925 A&P opened roughly seven new stores every day. By the 1940s it operated at nearly 16,000 locations. This dominance scared people.

“I would rather have thieves and gangsters,” the populist Huey Long declared in the 1930s, “than chain stores in Louisiana.”

A&P’s story is worth understanding, too, because the chain upended the way Americans ate and the way we continue to eat. A&P transformed, as Mr. Levinson puts it, “the humble, archaic grocery trade into a modern industry.”