Promotional activity proved key to the success of department stores in fending off competition from the expanding chain stores by drawing in customers to their large, central, premises. This paper uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative archival data to examine the promotional methods...

The 1930s witnessed an intense struggle between gas and electricity suppliers for the working class market, where the incumbent utility--gas--was also a reasonably efficient (and cheaper) General Purpose Technology for most domestic uses. Local monopolies for each supplier boosted substitution...

Department stores represented one of the most advertising-intensive sectors of American inter-war retailing. Yet it has been argued that a competitive spiral of high advertising spending, to match the challenge of other local department stores, contributed to a damaging inflation of costs that...