Mammoth market: the transformation of food retailing in Canada, 1946‐1965
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to appraise the spread of supermarkets in Canada during the mid‐twentieth century. It examines how corporate chains altered the organization of distribution, reconfigured shopping experiences, and promised gains realized through greater business volume. Design/methodology/approach The paper utilizes a mix of primary and secondary sources to compare how companies responded to opportunities for mass marketing that emerged in the post‐war era. The perspective is grounded in the theory of managerial capitalism, which was originally elaborated by Alfred D. Chandler. Findings The paper highlights how mass food retailing in Canada shared some attributes normally associated with the rise of managerial capitalism, but it also reviews the variations and highlights the difficulties faced by firms despite their jump to giant size. In particular, it stresses how the leading companies did not build secure positions. Research limitations/implications Corporate archives in Canadian retailing either did not survive or remain inaccessible. The essay therefore draws upon a mix of sources including company publications and government investigations. The paper highlights the inability of companies to realize permanent gains commonly associated with large firm size or mass retailing. It stresses that there was no one “model” of corporate development. Originality/value This paper illustrates the complexities associated with developing strategic leadership in retailing and therefore should be valuable to educators and practitioners.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it