“A More Definite System”: The Emergence of Retail Food
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Examinations of the rise of modern retail activities traditionally have emphasized developments in the United States, where firms could exploit strong economies of scale and scope and could service transcontinental markets. In middle-sized economies such as Canada, the opportunities for expansion were more limited and firms often were slower to adopt new modes of marketing organization. This paper reappraises the rise of large retailers in the Canadian grocery industry during the inter-war era. It provides an overview of the issues that propelled the formation of the firms, their organizational traits, and the factors that slowed the ability of the firms to achieve market dominance. “Chain stores are here to stay, ” declared Theodore Loblaw in the spring of 1925. This optimistic statement, by the founder of one of the most profitable of Canadian food retailers, was widely accepted by contemporaries who expected modern merchandising techniques would allow big enterprises to gain rapid ascendancy in the retail sectors during the inter-war era. The shift toward large-scale retailing was well developed in the United States and the initial successes garnered by department stores appeared to suggest a similar trend north of the border. The T. Eaton Company and Simpson’s implemented practices similar to those developed by Macy’s, Wanamaker’s, and Marshall
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".