The Political Economy of Big Retail, Then and Now: The Story of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, With Marc Levinson

Long before Walmart and Amazon, there was A&P—The Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company—which started as a mail-order
tea business in the Civil War era before displacing Sears,
Roebuck & Co. in the 1920s to become the world’s largest
retailer. Its pioneering innovations made the mom-and-pop grocery
business more efficient and less expensive, and in so doing it
pitted consumer and civil rights advocates against small-business
groups. Rob and Jackie sat down with historian and economist Marc
Levinson, author of The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small
Business in America, to discuss the life and times of the company
and how the debates around its growth resemble the antitrust
debates we are having again today.


Mentioned:


Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the
World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton University
Press, 2008).

Marc Levinson, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed
from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (Princeton University Press,
2020).

Marc Levinson, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small
Business in America (Marc Levinson, 2019).

Robert D. Atkinson and Michael Lind, Big Is Beautiful:
Debunking the Myth of Small Business (The MIT Press, 2018).