During the second half of the nineteenth century the world-historic gains in agricultural and manufacturing productivity in parts of Europe and the United States resulted in a distribution problem that could be summed up in one word: surplus. Utopians, reformers, and political philosophers dreamed that this surplus could provide the basis for a new civilization in which equality flourished and all needs were met. Business entrepreneurs, in contrast, figured out how to turn surplus into profit: the new retailers founded mail-order firms, department stores, and chain stores whose high-volume sales disposed of some of the surplus. In doing so, they helped foment a consumer culture pulsing with never-ending desire. These institutions, which emerged in full force after the 1870s, reinforced the proclivity among Americans toward believing that they were a “people of plenty,” as David Potter titled a 1954 book about the forces that shaped American character. As Americans moved away from scarcity mentalities, their appetites grew, but their purchasing power could not keep pace with the “land of desire,” as William Leach titled his 1993 landmark study of department stores. The price sensitivity of consumers pushed retailers toward ever-larger units of business enterprise in order to maximize economies of scale in the quest to offer the lowest price and in turn capture the largest market share. Thus a story such as the one historian Vicki Howard seeks to tell in From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store is one in which price pressures and their subsequent politics should—and for the most part do—play the leading role.

The opening two chapters of From Main Street to Mall address the origins of urban “palaces of consumption” in downtown districts and of provincial department stores on the main streets of small towns. Howard introduces retail trade associations, whose formation by the second decade of the twentieth century fostered department stores’ dependence on government policies, “promoted chain organization[,] and privileged ‘bigness’” (p. 31). It is in chapter 2 that prices are first discussed explicitly. Howard details how, after 1900, Macy's subverted manufacturers’ insistence that stores “sell merchandise at suggested retail prices” (p. 34). She might have explained that resale-price-maintenance practices flourished as manufacturers of brand-name goods sought to bolster the market for their goods, not only by making it profitable for small merchants (who relied on margins rather than volume) to stock them but also by protecting the integrity of their brand from the degradation of appearing cheap. Large retailers nevertheless flouted retail price maintenance, and Supreme Court decisions in 1908 and 1911 called into question the legality of price fixing. But sentiment in favor of small businesses flourished such that the obfuscating term “fair trade” was bandied about as states began to pass bills in favor of price fixing, culminating in two pieces of federal legislation: the Robinson-Patman Act (known as the Cracker-Barrel Bill) (1936) and the Miller-Tydings Act (1937), which are each discussed in chapter 4. As did mail-order firms and chain stores, large department stores heavily marketed private-label brands whose prices they had a great deal more control over than branded goods bought directly from manufacturers or wholesalers. Chapter 5 considers how price ceilings, rather than price floors, operated during World War II; it concludes that department stores experienced some challenges while following the Office of Price Administration's mandates, but for the most part succeeded.

The emergence of discounters within the ranks of department stores, according to Howard, accounts for the eventual demise of “traditional department stores” (p. 188). After the war, a new breed of retailers slashed prices, jettisoned service and style, and still made a profit. In doing so they adapted innovations that had cemented the A&P grocery chain's success since the teens. Howard argues that these economizing developments destroyed the department store. The ranks of discounters (including Sam Walton and Eugene Ferkauf) grew in the fifties and sixties and then flourished after the passage of the Consumer Goods Pricing Act of 1975, which eliminated all vestiges of price maintenance. Technically, many of today's discount stores are department stores—retail establishments with at least four separate departments of goods. Traditional department stores began to seek efficiencies of scale through mergers and consolidation in the 1920s, but they were no match for retailers willing to strip every vestige of service and style from their stores. By the 1980s most nameplate department stores had either disappeared or became parts of national chains, losing some of their local flavor and distinctive character as a result. Howard makes it clear that she admires the local department store as an example of a family-run business, as a longtime employer of hard-working folk, as a civic actor fostering local traditions, as a purveyor of goods that generate a sense of the local and the distinctive, and as the site of many coming-of-age memories. So its demise, in Howard's view, is lamentable.

From Main Street to Mall has many strengths, particularly the exploration in chapter 7 of discounters, the discussion throughout the book about the effects of public policy on department stores, and the nuggets sprinkled throughout about the histories of small-town department stores. It is a good fit for Penn's “American Business, Politics, and Society” series, the mandate of which is to “explore the relationship over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries.” Nevertheless, Howard might have developed a more robust argumentative thread about the influence of “the actions (and inactions) of federal, state, and local policy makers, regulators, jurists, legislators, and lobbyists” on “the decline of the local department stores” (p. 7). With regard to the causes of the decline of the local department store, more attention to the needs, practices, and beliefs of American consumers might have been useful. Why did they so exuberantly embrace low prices? Low wages are certainly part of the story, but so is intensifying demand. Howard's research about the department stores found on the main streets of small-town America provides a counterweight to the much-studied large urban department stores. In drawing attention to the many different types of department stores, however, Howard undermines the utility of studying them together. After all, what does Breese's Department Store in Oneonta, New York, have in common with the behemoth Macy's? These criticisms aside, From Main Street to Mall is a welcome and excellent addition to the literature on mass retailing in the United States.