As the United States industrialized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many considered the retail industry a relic of the past. Lawrence Mann noted in his 1923 American Economic Review article (v.13-4) that many believed “the chief waste in delivering goods to the ultimate consumer is due to ‘middlemen’.” One manufacturer remarket in 1934 that retailers were “incompetent, blindly ignorant, biased, lazy, and even a trifle unscrupulous” (David Monod. Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890-1939. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. p. 173). While Daniel Bloomfield wrote in his 1930 book Trends in Retail Distribution that, “The general prosperity of the country has carried with it a host of poorly managed retail enterprises many of which have succeeded for the time being in spite of themselves.” One source of these beliefs was the fact that as farms, mines, and manufacturers grew in size, adopting new technologies and practices, the typical retailer of 1900 remained small, specialized, and very labor intensive. They sold non-branded goods often on credit, frequently delivering the purchased products to the shopper's home. Finally prices were seldom posted and typically up for negotiation. Retailing in the United States and most other developed nations, however, was to change dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. Today's retailers have largely abandoned their nineteenth-century practices. An important exception is automobile retailing. Interestingly, the car entered the scene just as many of the old practices of retailers were beginning to change. The car may indeed have played an important role in causing those changes as I, Richard Longstreth, and others have suggested. However, automobile retailing itself remains a relic. As Steven Gelber's title suggests, the act of purchasing a car today more closely resembles the purchase of a horse in 1900 than modern consumer durable like a refrigerator.

Gelber's book is a narrative of the history of automobile retailing and an analysis of the potential causes of its unique place in twentieth-century retailing. The introduction notes that behavioral historians seek to explain contemporary practices as functions of previous conditions. Gelber suggests that in some cases, such as the automobile, the patterns set in previous generations continue to guide contemporary practices even when those practices seem ill-suited to current situations. In fact, he writes that “the way men bought horses became the model of the way people (mostly men) bought and sold cars-despite a multitude of reasons why it would have been more rational for cars to be retailed in the same fashion as other manufactured goods.” However, in the very next paragraph he states, “The history of car buying is not a history of inertia.” Instead, he hopes in his book to explain what he says are the multitude of cultural and economic factors that prevented car retailing from entering the twentieth century despite, as he notes, the expressed desire of both buyers and sellers for it to do so. This conflicting introduction is representative of the rest of the book. The reader is presented with factors that only partially convince one of their role in perpetuating the horse trading patterns and in the end the reader is left to conclude that inertia must have played a significant role or more likely there are alternative factors that have not been fully explored.

The reader will immediately understand and appreciate the title of the book upon reading Gelber's description of horse trading at the turn of the last century. Like car retailing today, the experience was not generally considered enjoyable. Horse traders were described as untrustworthy and devious. It was common to disparage a political opponent by suggesting that they traded in horses. Because horses were not uniform items, posting a fixed price was essentially impossible. Further, the true merits of a horse were difficult to access. This encouraged negotiation and, as with used cars today, it was expected that the seller would make any and all attempts to conceal the faults of the “vehicle” in question while highlighting and exaggerating its positive characteristics. This expectation was important. Because the buyer anticipated deceit, if such deceit was successful the buyer was expected to assume the consequences of his poor choice or poor negotiating skills. This “buyer beware” mentality continued in the retailing of used cars and plays a central part in Gelber's narrative. In fact at the end of chapter four, Gelber concludes that “used cars were the element in car dealing that ensured the persistence of the horse-trading traditions in automobile retailing.”

According to Gelber, once the used and new car transactions were coupled there was little chance of selling cars with posted fixed prices. The reasoning is simple. Every used car was different and required a different price. This made the posted price for the new car irrelevant. A dealer might always pay more or less for the used car to effectively control the price of the new one. While a compelling explanation, one weakness in this logic is that cars were sold new before a used car was ever traded. Gelber notes that the retailing of new cars was not generally characterized by posted fixed prices, even in the early years. The narrative is also thin on an analysis of why the two were coupled. Again the author appears to suggest inertia. For example, he writes in chapter four, “by the 1920s, the horse-trade model had become integral to the way cars were sold. No individual dealer could refuse to buy his prospect's used car.” There is also the fact that even when a used car is not part of the transaction, negotiation remains common in automobile retailing.

Following chapter four, the book tells the story of different periods in the history of car retailing and the attempts made by the government, consumer groups, dealers, or manufacturers to impose a posted fixed price system. Each is unsuccessful, according to Gelber, because of the used car problem. These chapters are indeed fascinating but don't provide truly compelling reasons to explain why car retailing remained like horse trading. They instead detail more the level of horse trading practices that occurred. This includes discrimination against women and generally unsavory tactics by salesmen, dealers, and even buyers. These stories and the general history of the automobile retail industry make the book an important read for scholars of the retail industry. The book does not, however, provide compelling evidence for why car retailing remains the black sheep of the industry.