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How The A&P Changed The Way We Shop

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Americans who go food shopping are used to a dizzying array of products and
plenty of price competition, but our guest today takes us back to the early
20th century, when selections were few, and nobody ever heard the phrases two
for 99 cents or buy one, get one free.

Marc Levinson's new book tells the story of how the A&P grocery store chain
revolutionized food retailing in the United States. Run for decades by two
brothers, George and John Hartford, the A&P used its market power to drive down
prices and expand operations, eventually owning nearly 16,000 stores in 39
states.

A&P's success threatened thousands of smaller mom-and-pop stores and food
wholesalers, who fought the chain store in Congress, the courts and state
legislatures for more than 20 years.

Marc Levinson covered business for Time magazine and was a finance and
economics editor of The Economist in London. He's the author of "The Box," a
book about the impact of containerized shipping. His latest book is "The Great
A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America." He spoke with FRESH AIR
contributor Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, host:

Well, Marc Levinson, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's start with the state of, you
know, retail food shopping, say in the early 1920s. What was a typical grocery
store like?

Mr. MARC LEVINSON (Author, "The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business
in America"): A typical grocery store in the early '20s was perhaps 20 feet
across, 30 feet deep; so a pretty small space. It held an array of canned
goods, not a large array, a very small number of vegetables, mostly things that
wouldn't spoil, potatoes and cabbages, perhaps a little cheese, maybe a slab of
bacon.

It was pretty sparse in terms of what was available to the average American
consumer. It was run typically by a shopkeeper and his wife. Sometimes they had
family help. Once in a while, they had a hired person helping out. And the
typical housewife would have to go grocery shopping just about every day to
meet her family's needs.

DAVIES: And shoppers were used to walking into a store and finding prepackaged
goods on the shelf. How did the shopper in a grocery store back then fetch
their goods?

Mr. LEVINSON: For the most part, the shopkeeper got your goods for you back in
those days. There was self-service, but self-service stores were few and far
between. So the shopper might go into the grocery store, and the shopper was
almost always a housewife in the food industry, and the shopper would say I
need a box of soap powder.

The store clerk, who was often the owner, would reach up on a shelf and put the
box on a counter, and the housewife would say I need a can of green beans, and
the storekeeper would get a can of green beans.

So this was a pretty arduous process. The prices, by the way, weren't always
very well-marked, either. So the shopper didn't necessarily know what the bill
was going to be for all of these things.

DAVIES: And could they count on stuff being fresh and things being accurately
measured?

Mr. LEVINSON: Many things were sold in bulk. So the shopkeeper would actually
have to measure things out. You would ask for a certain weight of cheese, you'd
ask for vinegar. The vinegar was not bottled. The vinegar was in a barrel, and
the shopkeeper would pump it out into a small jar for you.

If you wanted some pickles, they'd be in a barrel, too. So a lot of things
would be in bulk, and the shopkeeper was responsible for giving you the
quantity you wanted or the quantity that he happened to feel like giving you
because every store had a scale and the scale might or might not be accurate.
There was a lot of risk here.

DAVIES: You know, to a lot of Americans who are turned off by megastores with
their, you know, shiny aisles and processed food, this might seem like an
appealing image. I mean, lots and lots of small food with food that was grown
locally and delivered by hand by somebody. I mean, you paint kind of a
different picture. This was a burdensomely inefficient to grow food and get it
to people, it seems.

What was the sort of bottom line for Americans' diets and their spending on
food?

Mr. LEVINSON: Well, it was not only an inefficient system in an economic sense,
but basically these stores had nothing special to offer. Today, people get kind
of misty-eyed at the thought of the independent store: maybe it had some unique
product, maybe we had more variety, maybe we had more choices than we've got
today. The truth was exactly the opposite. Most of these stores had a very,
very limited selection.

They had no unique products at all. The main thing that they had to offer of
shoppers, aside from being located close by, was that they made credit
available. So that's what the reality was. Shoppers could get a limited
assortment of goods. So they would have to go perhaps to two or three different
grocery stores in their neighborhood if they wanted different type of goods,
plus the butcher, plus the baker if there was one.

Perhaps there was a fruit and vegetable store because their local grocery store
probably didn't sell fruits and vegetables to any great extent. It probably
didn't have much by way of dairy products because it didn't have a
refrigerator. So the consumer's choices were pretty constrained here.

What that meant was that while the average family could get plenty of food and
plenty of calories, it wasn't getting much nutrition.

DAVIES: And spending a lot more of its income than we do typically now, right?

Mr. LEVINSON: The average urban family in the '20s was spending probably a
third of its income on food. This is an enormous amount. By comparison, today
the average urban family is probably spending five or six percent of its income
on food.

So food was the largest single expenditure of the average household. And the
reason for that was the very, very high cost in this distribution system at
every stage. The manufacturers, the wholesalers, the retailers, they all had to
extract their bit in order to survive, and the end consumer then had to pay a
very, very high price for food.

DAVIES: A&P, of course, was shortened from the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea
Company. And the two brothers who really guided this company through this
formative period, when it really revolutionized retailing, were George and John
Hartford. Let's talk about how they did this. I mean, they managed to cut
costs. Describe, if you will, some of the techniques they used to do this. I
mean, one of them involved how they purchased, right, from wholesalers or even
manufacturers.

Mr. LEVINSON: Well, A&P cut costs in a number of different ways at a number of
different times. This first became a serious business for them right around
1912. At the time, food was a pretty hot political issue. The price of food had
gone up a lot, and people looked around, and they blamed the food industry.

They said, you guys are inefficient. You're not running your business
correctly. And at the time, there was a lot of talk in American business about
scientific management.

John Hartford's idea was, hey, let's take scientific management and apply it to
our business, grocery retailing. So they created a small store. It had a small
number of items. It had a single employee. It had no telephone, so customers
couldn't call in their orders, and it had lower prices than any other grocery
store.

So without advertising, without promotion, this store, called The Economy
Store, turned out to be an enormous hit. People figured out that they could
save money by shopping there.

DAVIES: And why were its prices cheaper than the other places?

Mr. LEVINSON: Its prices were cheaper than other stores because it did away
with many of the amenities, OK? It offered absolutely no credit. It offered no
delivery. It would not give trading stamps like regular stores. It stocked only
items that were fast-sellers, so it wasn't stuck with an inventory of products
no one was buying.

For all of those reasons it could keep costs down. It had limited hours. It had
a single employee who would lock the door when he went to lunch. So you were
not paying for unnecessary labor.

The Hartfords looked at this quite scientifically, and again we're talking in
1912, and they found a way to sell groceries cheaper. This went - this
burgeoned. OK, they started this at a time when the Great Atlantic and Pacific
had fewer than 500 stores, and within eight years, this approach turned their
company into the largest retailer in the world.

DAVIES: Wow, and at some point, they did actually expand the stores and expand
their selections. Why?

DAVIES: In the 1920s, times had changed. Customers wanted bigger stores.
Customers wanted a different approach. So the Hartfords did a couple of things.
They expanded their stores. Some of them started carrying meat. Electric
refrigerators had been invented, so some of the stores started carrying dairy
products.

But the other things is that the Hartfords decided to expand into
manufacturing. This was a pretty dramatic idea for the 1920s. Their idea was
that the Great Atlantic and Pacific could buy bakeries, could buy salmon
canneries, could buy vegetable canning plants, could buy dairy plants, and it
could run these to supply its stores.

So if it organized the stores' orders correctly, it could run its plants at
full capacity. This gave the company a huge advantage. Most canning plants
around the country, like most industries in general, had their ups and downs.
So you had times when the plant was very busy, and you had to pay workers
overtime, and then you had times where there wasn't enough business.

A&P, because it controlled both the retail end and the manufacturing end, was
able to organize its business such that the plants operated at capacity and
produced more cheaply than competitors' plants. And those savings then could be
passed along to customers in the stores.

DAVIES: And that means they were going around the distributors, right?

Mr. LEVINSON: One of the things that the Hartfords figured out is that the
wholesalers were a major cost in the system. Typically the manufacturers of
food would sell it to the wholesalers. The manufacturers didn't want to deal
with hundreds of thousands of little grocery stores.

And the wholesalers would then sell it on to the retailers, and of course the
wholesalers would take a cut. The Hartfords said to the manufacturers: We want
to buy from you directly. We want you to sell us freight-car loads, huge
quantities. We want them on these terms, we want them delivered on this date,
we want them in this way. And the manufacturers would offer A&P much better
prices, first because they didn't need to pay the wholesalers a commission and
second because A&P was buying in vast quantities. So the unit cost for the
manufacturer was much lower.

So A&P was getting its goods to sell at a much lower price than most of its
competitors. You can imagine that if you were running an independent grocery
store in the 1920s, and you were seeing that A&P was selling canned corn at
retail for less than you were paying at wholesale, you'd have been pretty
unhappy, and that's what was going on. The small retailers simply could not
compete because A&P's system had led to much lower costs.

DAVIES: And how rapidly did A&P expand in the 1920s? How much of the market did
they get? How many stores did they have?

Mr. LEVINSON: By 1929, A&P had almost 16,000 stores in the United States. These
were now not modern-style supermarkets, they were much smaller, but they were
omnipresent in big cities. A&P at one point had more than 300 stores in
Chicago, for example.

Many people in 1920's America grew up walking to the neighborhood A&P. A&P
operated at the peak in 39 of the 48 states. It operated in almost every major
city in the country. It was a behemoth, and people knew the name.

DAVIES: And since they were so aggressive at cutting costs, the question
arises: How did they treat their employees?

Mr. LEVINSON: This was a very paternalistic company. The Hartfords, after all,
controlled the company. John and George Hartford could do really whatever they
pleased with this company because they had no outside stockholders to answer
to.

They had a very strong commitment to their employees. On the one hand, they
expected their employees to do what management asked them to do, and they were
very big on rule books and rules and procedures and guidebooks and all of that
sort of thing.

The A&P would send its experts out to your store and tell you how to arrange
the store window, and as the store manager, you were supposed to listen to what
the expert said, and in fact you would be graded on how well you listened and
how well you did.

On the other hand, if you did what the Hartfords asked, they were extremely
loyal. They avoided laying people off. They felt that after you'd worked for
the company for a couple of years, the company had a responsibility to you.

If you were in a job that you were not capable of doing, that was management's
fault for either not training you properly or for putting you into the wrong
job, and they would find another job for you. So the Hartfords were exceedingly
loyal to their employees, and the employees were quite loyal to A&P, a very
traditional sort of patriarchal relationship between management and labor.

DAVIES: And how did their pay compare to competitors?

Mr. LEVINSON: Their pay in general was somewhat above competitors. For store
managers, it was well above competitors, for the most part. Again, though, they
expected performance. If a store manager didn't do what was asked, the manager
wouldn't necessarily be fired but would be just returned to being a normal
store clerk, and somebody else would be put in as manager. You were expected to
perform.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Marc Levinson. His new book about the A&P grocery
chain is called "The Great A&P." We'll talk more after a short break. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, our guest is historian and economist Marc
Levinson. He has a new book about the A&P grocery chain called "The Great A&P
and the Struggle for Small Business in America."

A lot of your book deals with the reaction of mom-and-pop stores and
independent grocers to A&P and other chains that were competing against them.
What was their case? They obviously - they went to politicians to try and get
restrictions. What was their point? I mean, consumers were benefitting, weren't
they?

Mr. LEVINSON: Consumers were clearly benefitting. There was a lot of concern
along the line of what's a man to do? OK, we've got young men, they want to
come up in the world. In the past, young men have always been able to start
businesses like grocery stores.

But now, you've got these gigantic companies like A&P. They're dominating
retailing, they're dominating wholesaling, and they're not leaving a chance for
the average guy. So that was really the basis of the complaint.

It had something to do with economics, but a lot of it had to do with small
towns and local society. Remember, you had not only these grocery stores, you
had 13,000-plus wholesalers spread all over the country, many of them in small
towns, where the wholesaler was a substantial business.

It might employ 20 or 30 people, maybe the owner was on the city council or was
an important person in town. And unlike the retailers, which came and went, the
wholesalers tended to be established. Many of them had been around for years.

And so there was a sense that the underpinnings were being knocked out of
society in this way. If the independent grocers went out of business, then who
needed wholesalers? A&P didn't buy from wholesalers. And so the small towns
would lose their economic base, and all of the money would go to some rich
people off in New York. And that was really the argument that led to the
massive campaign against chain stores and against the A&P.

DAVIES: So how did they fight back?

Mr. LEVINSON: There were efforts to limit chain stores going back as long as
1912. But it got serious in the mid-1920s. And states and localities started
passing a series of laws that were designed to basically help independent
merchants.

These took all sorts of different forms. There were taxes on chain stores. The
idea was, for example, if you own one store in a state, you pay no tax, and if
you own two stores, maybe you pay two dollars per store, and if you own 100
stores, maybe you pay five hundred dollars per store. So the chain merchants
were put at a huge financial disadvantage. That was one approach.

Another approach was to require suppliers, food manufacturers, soap
manufacturers, those kinds of businesses, to sell to merchants at the same
price. The argument was that, gee, it's unfair when A&P can buy so cheaply. So
let's prohibit this kind of price discrimination. If Procter & Gamble wants to
sell soap powder, it should sell soap powder at the same price per box to every
merchant who wants to buy soap powder.

Another idea that was used was to prohibit retailers from being in the
wholesale business. A&P circumvented the wholesalers and basically collected
the commission that a wholesaler would otherwise have received. And so some
states tried laws that were effectively saying a retailer's not allowed to keep
a wholesaler's commission. So you have to use a wholesaler, effectively, to
distribute the goods because it's not going to be profitable for the retailer
to work around it.

Those were some of the approaches that were used. Perhaps the biggest issue for
many people in America in those days concerned what was called vertical
integration. Vertical integration meant that A&P controlled the different parts
of the production process. It controlled pieces of manufacturing, you know,
baking, canning, those sorts of things. It controlled wholesaling. It
controlled retailing.

And many people said vertical integration is not fair. So let's force the
company to break up. Let's just make it be a retailer, and it will have to buy
its merchandise from other people, and it will have to make use of wholesalers.
It gives it an unfair advantage if it is vertically integrated.

GROSS: Marc Levinson will talk more with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies in
the second half of the show. Levinson is the author of the new book "The Great
A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America." I'm Terry Gross, and this
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross.

Let’s get back to the interview FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies recorded with
Marc Levinson, author of “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in
America.” It’s about how the A&P grocery chain revolutionized the business by
owning thousands of stores and dozens of warehouses and factories, enabling it
to undersell the competition. It's also about how the people who were getting
driven out of business organized a movement in the 1920s, attempting to limit
the growth of chain stores and level the playing field by eliminating certain
advantages chain stores had over small businesses.

DAVIES: To a modern sensibility, a lot of these notions just seem so
brazeningly anticompetitive; the idea that you can tax stores differently
depending upon their size or whether they're a chain or not, that you can
dictate to suppliers that there are rules under which they can sell. But this
had support from some serious minds including, you know, the Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, right? What was his view?

Mr. LEVINSON: The attack on chain stores had a lot of support from a lot of
different people. Louis Brandeis, who became Supreme Court justice in 1916, was
one of the early critics of chain stores. And his notion was basically, yes,
granted, these chain stores are saving money for the consumer now. OK, but what
they're going to do is they're going to put the small merchant out of business
and then the chain store will have monopoly power. So it's saving the consumer
money in the short run but it's going to monopolize the food trade in the long
run and charge higher prices to everyone.

That was a pretty popular argument. No one really looked very closely at the
fact that the food industry would be pretty difficult to monopolize. But there
was a lot of sentiment that there were somehow these far away companies that
were in a position to exercise a monopoly over a product that people needed
every day.

DAVIES: There was also a government suit to try and break up A&P. In the end,
you know, the anti-chain movement lost steam. But why?

Mr. LEVINSON: The anti-chain movement lost steam about the time the economy was
starting to get revved up for World War II. By late 1939, 1940, unemployment
was starting to fall, prices were starting to rise and profits were starting to
go up because the U.S. wasn't at war yet but Europe was at war and that was
being felt here. And then, of course, you got to full employment during World
War II. So the fate of mom-and-pop merchants was not the burning political
issue that it had been during the Depression.

Then after the war, you had huge changes in American society and people liked
the idea of shopping at a larger store, perhaps they were beginning to move to
the suburbs, which really burgeoned after World War II. And they didn't like
being told that they were supposed to do business with a little independent
grocer who didn't offer them many choices.

DAVIES: In the late 30s, while the battle about chains raged in Congress and in
the courts, and in, you know, the court of public opinion, retail was changing
as well. I mean other companies had developed the idea of a supermarket -
something that was bigger, you know, a wider selection than the A&P stores. And
eventually A&P came to embrace this and do it better than anybody else. But
let's just talk about that change. How is a supermarket different from what A&P
had done so successfully before?

Mr. LEVINSON: Well, the early supermarkets were set up typically not by
existing grocery companies. They were set up by entrepreneurs who had some
support from wholesalers. They were for the time pretty big spaces. They were
pretty bare-boned. They would put a bushel basket of cans out on the floor and
a sign saying three cents apiece, and shoppers would go through. It was
entirely self-service. And so shoppers would go around to big stores collecting
their own merchandise and pay for it. The supermarkets were typically not on
the main street. They were someplace nearby where there was parking - very
important in the 19, early 1930s. And A&P couldn't figure out how to respond to
this.

Now there were not that many supermarkets, but it was clear that they were
popular because they could offer lower prices. A&P had some issues in dealing
with this though. One was that it had this existing store network. It had these
16,000 stores; it couldn't just shut them down. Another was that these early
supermarkets often lost money for the owners, and they were one-off stores.
Okay, remember, A&P was a huge company and if it was going to get into the
supermarket business it needed something that it could replicate. It couldn't
open one supermarket; it was going to need to open hundreds and thousands of
them.

So the Hartford's spent a long time thinking about this. There was a lot of
opposition within the company and it really wasn't until 1937 that they started
seriously to open supermarkets - probably five years after supermarkets had
started coming onto the scene in the United States. Once they did they opened
supermarkets quickly and within two years A&P became the biggest supermarket
operator in the United States. So they were slow in getting into the
supermarket concept, but once they did they made the shift really with amazing
speed.

DAVIES: And how did supermarkets change for example, the role of people who
worked in the supermarket, in grocery stores?

Mr. LEVINSON: Before the supermarket grocery stores were pretty small. You
might have two or three people, a store that had meat, might have five or six
people working in it. There was a store manager but the store manager worked
alongside all the other workers - opening boxes, putting things on shelves,
serving customers. A supermarket was an entirely different business. You needed
a full-time manager. You needed workers who are specialized because the store
was so large so you had some workers who just handled boxes. You had some
workers who just handled the cash register to deal with the stream of
customers. So workers’ lives in general became more specialized and more
regimented. This was not a personal business as running a small grocery store
was. In a supermarket you are likely not to know your customers. You have
masses of people coming through and you simply had an hourly job.

DAVIES: And once they had these bigger stores their manufacturing operations
and distribution operations made it easier for them to put their stuff on the
shelves and in big quantities and at low prices – give them even more of a
competitive advantage, right?

Mr. LEVINSON: Sure. And A&P had very powerful brands. A&P had a brand called
Jane Parker, for example, that it used on baked goods, very well-known. A&P had
Eight O'Clock Coffee. And so it wasn't just the stores. It had a reputation for
high-quality merchandise, much of which it manufactured in its own factories.
And the supermarket really gave A&P a way to push those products through the
system – to take advantage of its vertical integration, to keep prices low and
to pump more food out to customers.

John Hartford's belief above everything in all his years in the grocery
business, his belief was what matters is volume. If you can keep up the volume
you can keep the prices low and you can keep the customers coming in the door.
And everything that he did in more than half a century at the A&P was designed
to keep the volume up, keep the prices low, keep the volume high.

DAVIES: This raises an interesting point. When you look at the debates in the
anti-chain movement, in Congress, in the courts that raged all through the 30s
and 40s, they were making the case that, yeah, okay, maybe chains like A&P will
reduce prices at times but that's only so that they can corner the market and
then make huge super profits themselves. But at least as you describe it; it
seems that John Hartford's had a real almost an aversion to growing profits.

Mr. LEVINSON: John Hartford was a long-term thinker, OK. He wanted his company
to grow and he didn't need to worry about short-term profits because he didn't
have any shareholders. So he could take a very long-term perspective on the
grocery business. And he was concerned about his managers focusing too much on
profits.

If they took short-term measures that would raise profits, that would drive
customers away. A&P would get a reputation for not being the lowest cost
grocer; customers would go elsewhere and would not come back. And while higher
profits would be good in the short-term, they would be bad for the company in
the long-term.

When you go through the company's records, you find again and again that John
Hartford is actually having to persuade his regional managers and his district
managers that they need to lower prices and make less profit in order to build
a business. That's pretty extraordinary for an executive.

DAVIES: Marc Levinson's book is “The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small
Business in America.”

We’ll talk more after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: If you’re just joining us, our guest is historian and economist Marc
Levinson. He has a new book about the A&P grocery chain called “The Great A&P
and the Struggle for Small Business in America.”

So the two longtime patriarchs of the company, George and John Hartford, died
in the 1950s. What became of A&P after they left, after they died?

Mr. LEVINSON: After they died the company was taken over by people who had been
there for a century. A&P was basically run by people who had been there since
before the Model T era and they had very, very old-fashioned ideas about
retailing. They couldn't, for example, be bothered to expand in California
which was the fastest growing state in the country. A&P stores were in the
cities. Most of the growth in the 50s and 60s was in the suburbs. But the
managers really were not interested in going into a market they didn't know. So
they stayed in the cities.

The ownership of the company passed into the hands of George and John
Hartford's nieces and nephews. And for the most part these people had no
interest in the grocery business. They wanted cash. So the company had a public
offering allowing them to sell shares. And from that point it was all downhill.
Now there were stockholders. The stockholders were demanding dividends and A&P
had to pay out a large proportion of its profit in dividends, which meant that
there was no money to expand the stores, keep the stores up to date, the
stories started to look dowdy, and there were social trends happening.

For example, in the year 1962, there were three important retailers established
- companies that would later become known as Kmart, Target, Wal-Mart. A&P
didn't know what to do with discount retailing, so it just gradually went
downhill, its profits turned into losses. Finally in 1979 it was sold off to a
good German grocery operator who thought it could do a better job of running
A&P. That wasn't such a great idea either. As of August 2011, the company still
exists, but now it's a small regional retailer around the New York area. It's
really no longer an important force in the grocery industry.

After the death of the Hartford's in the 1950s, A&P destroyed itself and it
didn't take very long. What had been the biggest and most successful retailer
in the world quickly became an also ran which eventually ended up filing for
bankruptcy in 2010.

DAVIES: So the company is still operating but it’s in bankruptcy
reorganization?

Mr. LEVINSON: The company is operating in bankruptcy reorganization and it's a
regional grocer now in and around the New York area. It's is pretty steep fall
for a company that used to operate stores in 39 states and had 100 warehouses
and 70 factories.

DAVIES: You know, one of the themes of your book is that, you know, capitalism
thrives on creative destruction. You know, old ways can't compete with new
ways, in the end consumers are better served. And it's interesting when you
look at food retailing then, because it really has dramatically changed. But
there's a movement now that, you know, kind of is reacting to that. I mean that
agriculture now is done on an industrial scale and it's pouring all kinds of
pollutants into our streams and that we’re, you know, we're burning fossil
fuels to transport food thousands of miles before it's sold. And there is this
economic notion that the market does a lot of things well, but it doesn't
particularly deal with environmental damage. You know, there is a, you can make
a case that while the competition in the retail food trade did bring us a lot
of cheap food, there are other ways in which it was harmful and we need to
rethink it, do it differently. What's your take?

Mr. LEVINSON: There is an economic case and an environmental case but there's
also a romantic case. And these things get mixed up a lot. There is a lot of
fondness for the idea of a locally owned merchant, an independent unique
merchant. Well, perhaps that's where we're going. But certainly, in the days of
the great A&P, there was nothing unique about those independent merchants. They
were simply selling the same goods everyone else was at a higher price. The
ability to distribute food to consumers at a low price was an enormous
achievement of huge importance to everyone in America.

There's no household in this country that spends a third of its income on food,
as was the case in the 1920s and it's really hard to imagine going back to a
system in which people are paying a lot more money for food because of the
inefficiency of the system.

On the other hand, you do have people who want unique products that are not
well served by a supermarket. You want people who have products produced close
at hand, local farming, local ranching, whatever it is. If people would like to
have that kind of thing, I think it's wonderful. It's something that I think is
good for the world. But this can't be a solution that's forced upon everyone,
because frankly, these local farmers and local ranchers are not going to be
able to meet the demand for food at prices that the public can't afford. There
are real benefits to size. There are real benefits to economies of scale. And
you can't just romanticize those away. I think any economic change has negative
as well as positive effects, and that's definitely the case with the great A&P.

DAVIES: You know, when you look at modern retailing, you see how A&P, what A&P
did in the 1920s and '30s, really aggressively changing the way food retailing
is done - has Wal-Mart done the same thing to A&P and companies like it?

Mr. LEVINSON: Yes. Absolutely. Wal-Mart has received a great deal of criticism
for many of its techniques, such as hard bargaining with suppliers. Well, most
of that was started by A&P back in the 1920s. Wal-Mart has learned a lot from
A&P's experience and has followed many of the same methods of reducing costs.
The one thing it hasn't done is manufacture. A&P decided to integrate into
manufacturing and Wal-Mart decided deliberately not to integrate into
manufacturing, so it purchases all the good it sells rather than making them.
But it's learned a great deal from the experience of A&P.

DAVIES: You know, one difference that might be, that as you describe it, when
A&P was in its heyday, it was cutting costs for consumers, but it was also
paying its employees more. You know, Wal-Mart has a reputation for cutting
costs to consumers while, eh, I don't know, being tougher on its employees -
more part-time, fewer benefits, that kind of thing. Is that a difference? Is
that sort of the inevitable direction of a competitive retail economy?

Mr. LEVINSON: It's a difference that I think is attributable to Wal-Mart being
a publicly traded company, whereas A&P didn't have to answer to anyone. On the
other hand, I would point out that A&P was a strongly anti-union company just
as Wal-Mart has been. A&P really opposed unions for many, many years and only
accepted them during the Great Depression. The Hartfords felt that this was
their company. They were going to take good care of their employees the way
they wanted to, and nobody needed to have a union. So in that sense A&P and
Wal-Mart were fairly similar.

DAVIES: Well, Marc Levinson, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. LEVINSON: Thank you.

GROSS: Marc Levinson spoke with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies. Levinson is
the author of "The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America."

You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.
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Two Experimental Rock Bands Stay True To Their Roots

TERRY GROSS, host:

Two experimental rock bands have new albums that music critic Milo Miles is
going to review. He says these bands have found ways to increase their popular
appeal while staying close to their roots.

(Soundbite of music)

MILO MILES: The anti-pop element in rock 'n' roll began in the late '60s with
groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Henry Cow and continued right through
the '90s with performers like Nick Cave and Nine Inch Nails. All were compelled
to make rock more noisy and intricate rather than catchy or sensual. The
results have been mixed at best - far too many albums that appeal to true
believers but feel distant, even alienating, to everyone else.

But there's always been grand exceptions like Sonic Youth, who began abrasive
but discovered their own way to go pop and still be themselves. With enough
effort, they forged hooks, melodies, even beauty in their own idiom. And
following a similar path, two bands coming from very different directions have
recently put out their most appealing, yet still cerebral records.

The New York trio called Battles consists of guitarist and keyboardist Ian
Williams, bassist and guitarist Dave Konopka, and drummer John Stanier. It's a
sort of super-group, though only Stanier's previous band, Helmet, had a
national profile. Battles originally featured vocalist and multi-
instrumentalist Ty Braxton, but his return to solo projects has been good for
the group, because their second album, "Gloss Drop," is far less cluttered and
fussy than their debut. Why, the first single, "Ice Cream," is almost friendly,
in a bristly way.

(Soundbite of song, "Ice Cream")

BATTLES: (Singing) (Unintelligible)

MILES: "Gloss Drop" includes several guest vocalists, but they're
afterthoughts, textures among the textures, and not the bearers of messages or
stories. But even without catchphrases, you quickly come to recognize every
track on the album when you hear it again - and you want to replay it. Although
Battles are full of current ideas, they offer one of the oldest fascinations of
rock 'n' roll. You don't quite know what it is, but you like it.

(Soundbite of music)

MILES: Chicago's experimental rock band Cheer-Accident has been around for 30
years and releasing albums for 20, with many changes of personnel and styles.
But the key constant is founding member Thymme Jones, who is a keyboardist,
singer, and most important, a drummer. So from the start, Cheer-Accident had
the advantages of commitment to a firm rhythm attack - and, as the band name
indicates, a slightly eye-rolling sense of humor.

That didn't help much in the early years of abrasive sound as an end in itself,
abrupt starts and stops, and rote Nirvana imitations. Cheer-Accident got better
at bringing elaborations and eventually turned out 22-minute workouts that were
marvels of coherence but no more emotionally engaging than the previous squawks
and blats. But all along, a current was rising in the band's material -
harmonies, melodies, done with increasing affection and skill. On the latest
album, "No Ifs, Ands or Dogs," Cheer-Accident can make an otherwise ominous
line - I'll be the one to drag you down - sound almost sweet.

(Soundbite of song, "Drug You Down")

CHEER-ACCIDENT (Rock band): (Singing) (Unintelligible). I'll be the one to drag
you down. Never drag you down. I'll be the one to drag you down. Never drag you
down. I'll be the one to drag you down. Never drag you down.

MILES: The album includes lots of the group's characteristic puns and racket,
including "Drug You Down," a kind of satire of the harmonies on "Drag You
Down." However, "No If, Ands or Dogs" indulges in pleasure more than any
previous release by the group. I hoped "Cynical Girl" might be a cover of the
Marshall Crenshaw tune. It's not, but it's still pretty.

(Soundbite of song, "Cynical Girl")

CHEER-ACCIDENT (Singing) Cynical girl, why you so scared? What in the world are
you frightened of? What life undoes, love will repair. Feeling the loneliness
inside of us.

Cynical girl, life can be fair if there is someone to be counted on. Whatever
comes please don't despair. There will be time for us to work at all out.
Falling in love, loving the fall-out, loving it all, working it all out.

MILES: Among bands Cheer-Accident recalls, they're not as intellectually tight
as Henry Cow nor as casually poetic as Soft Machine. But even if you don't know
who those bands are, Cheer-Accident is worth deliberate investigation.

GROSS: Milo Miles lives in Boston. He reviewed new albums from Cheer-Accident
and Battles. You can download podcasts of our show on our website,
freshair.npr.org.
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