“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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".