The Great A and P and the Struggle for Small Business in America Part 1

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America.

Marc Levinson.

1.

THE VERDICT.

Judge Walter C. Lindley was no one's idea of a flaming radical. Born in 1880 in the village of Neoga, deep in the corn and soybean country of south-central Illinois, Lindley had a reputation as a scholar: at a time when many learned the law as apprentices rather than as students, he earned not only a law degree but also a doctorate in laws from the University of Illinois. In Danville, a commercial hub 150 miles south of Chicago, he became a man of prominence. He built a law practice, won a seat on the city council, and became an attorney for Joseph Cannon, who served eight years as the ironfisted Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and represented Danville in Congress for almost half a century.

Lindley was a Republican, and shortly after Warren G. Harding, the great friend of business, became president in 1921, he named Lindley to the federal bench. As a judge, he drew more than his share of high-profile cases. In a 1929 jury trial that held Chicago rapt, Lindley's court convicted sixteen candy wholesalers of terrorizing storekeepers who refused to buy their candy. Two years later, he upheld the near-dictatorial powers of the commissioner of major-league baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. In the early 1930s, he oversaw the restructuring of the collapsed utilities empire of the Chicago entrepreneur Samuel Insull and survived an attempt by Insull's henchmen to have him impeached by Congress. Suggested as a possible nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1929, during Herbert Hoover's presidency, Lindley was not beyond criticizing that court and, by implication, the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1939, he commented acidly that for some new Supreme Court justices, "precedents may be of little avail and their lack no bar."1 On a sunny Sat.u.r.day in September 1946-the federal courts worked six days a week back then-Lindley issued what would be the most controversial decision of his long judicial career. Before a crowded courtroom on the second floor of Danville's post office, he declared that George L. Hartford, eighty-one; John A. Hartford, seventy-four; their company, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company; and other company executives had conspired to violate the Sherman Ant.i.trust Act. The fact that the secretive Hartford brothers, two of the wealthiest men in America, were deemed criminals was startling, but their crime was truly remarkable. Rather than being accused of acting like monopolists to keep prices artificially high, the Hartfords were found to have done the opposite. They and their company, Lindley declared, had acted illegally in restraint of trade by using A&P's size and market power to keep prices artificially low.2 The victims of this unorthodox conspiracy were not families that purchased groceries. The evidence before Lindley's court made clear that prices at A&P were below those at the compet.i.tion; as John A. Hartford himself had testified nearly a year earlier, "We would rather sell 200 pounds of b.u.t.ter at 1 cent profit than 100 pounds at 2 cents profit." While selling food cheaply was good for consumers, it was bad for the hundreds of thousands of retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers who needed high food prices in order to make a living. U.S. v. A&P was the climax of decades of effort to cripple chain stores in order to protect mom-and-pop retailers and the companies that supplied them. The Hartfords' real crime was to have endangered mom and pop.3 But it was the partic.i.p.ants, not the legal issues, that made the Danville trial so notorious. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was not just another grocery chain. It was, by a wide margin, the largest retailer in the world. Its footprint stretched from coast to coast, covering thirty-nine of the forty-eight states and parts of Canada as well. It collected more than ten cents of every dollar Americans spent at grocery stores. It was an enterprise so familiar that millions of Americans knew it as "Grandma," so ubiquitous that when John Updike penned a short story about the eternal boredom of teenage life a few years later, he called it simply "A&P." Its influence over America's lunch boxes and dinner tables was so overwhelming that when an ambitious young Florida grocer decided to lower prices at his tiny store, he received one piece of advice: "Don't make A&P mad."4 A&P was at the center of a bitter political struggle that lasted for nearly half a century-a struggle that went far beyond economics. At its root were competing visions of society. One vision could be described with such words as "modern" and "scientific," favoring the rationalism of cold corporate efficiency as a way to increase wealth and raise living standards. The other vision could fairly be termed "traditional." Dating to Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, the traditional vision harked back to a society of autonomous farmers, craftsmen, and merchants in which personal independence was the source of individual opportunity and collective prosperity. The words of Judge Lindley's ruling against the Hartfords and A&P embodied the conflict between those two visions. "To buy, sell and distribute ... one and three-quarter billion dollars worth of food annually, at a profit of one and one-half cents on each dollar, is an achievement one may well be proud of," he acknowledged, in a nod to the modern vision. Yet this achievement, he decided, ran afoul of the Sherman Ant.i.trust Act by making it hard for smaller firms to compete with A&P. "The Sherman Act," he ruled, "was intended to secure equality of opportunity." Equality of opportunity could not be secured if big firms were allowed to pummel the small.5 * * *

There may never have been a more improbable pair of convicts than the Hartfords. The elder of the brothers, George L. Hartford, was as predictable as they come. He lived in the same house for half a century and took rooms at the same New Jersey sh.o.r.e resort every summer. He left home at 9:05 every morning, wore a black suit with stiff collar to work every day, and made a point of tasting the company's coffees at 2:00 each afternoon. His hobbies, when he was a younger man, were repairing cars and building crystal radios, activities that required him to utter hardly a word to anyone; in later years he did jigsaw puzzles. Few employees ever laid eyes on the man known throughout the company as Mr. George. The minutes of meetings of A&P's top executives rarely cite his words. One of the few journalists to meet him said he could be taken "for a retired Polish general-bulky, stolid, rumpled, with a foreign air that his American drawl immediately belies." No one who encountered him on the street would have imagined that he headed one of the largest, most powerful enterprises in the world.6 John A. Hartford, his younger brother, had an entirely different personality. A dapper dresser who favored custom-tailored gray suits, Sulka bow ties, and pocket squares, he enjoyed traveling, visiting stores, and pressing the flesh. In his thirties and forties he had raised horses that won prizes at the National Horse Show, a premier event of New York society. He lived in an eight-room suite at the Plaza Hotel and lunched alone on milk and crackers at the Biltmore. On weekends he commuted to his suburban estate, a Tudor mansion with a nine-hole golf course, stable, and polo field, and in the winter he went to The Breakers in Palm Beach. He was married three times, twice to the same woman and, in between, to a woman who came into his life modeling clothes for his wife. It was Mr. John's job to motivate employees, spreading the company's paternalistic management gospel through philosophical missives that often referred to "my brother and I." In the 1930s, when A&P's political troubles became life-threatening, John A. Hartford reluctantly became the company's public face, sporadically meeting with the press, putting his name to the occasional folksy article, and making end-of-year p.r.o.nouncements about the outlook for food prices in the months ahead.7 The brothers' distinct personalities were displayed in the way they ran their company. Mr. George was cautious, favoring a rock-solid balance sheet, wanting each store and each product to pay its own way, distrusting new ideas. Mr. John was more aggressive, more open to new ideas, but always insisting that lower prices would make more money by bringing more customers in the door. The brothers met each morning to discuss the smallest details of their business, from the price of canned tomatoes to the profitability of the stores in Pittsburgh. They made a formidable team. It was Mr. John who engineered the company's remarkable expansion in the 1910s, its climb to be the first retailer to sell $1 billion of merchandise in a single year in the 1920s, and its quick conversion from grocery stores to supermarkets in the 1930s. It was Mr. George who kept A&P solvent.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific lay at the center of both men's lives. Neither ever worked anywhere else. Neither attended a day of college; in fact, neither finished high school. They learned business on the job, from their father, who ran the company before them and gave them meaningful responsibilities when they were still in their teens. They treated the company as their family, almost never dismissing employees, creating one of the first company pension plans, and shortening working hours simply because they could afford to do so. All managers had moved up the ranks, and almost every executive had worked at A&P for decades. Because they completely controlled the company, with no shareholders to please and no creditors to satisfy, they could run A&P however they wished, and they sometimes ran it in ways that drove their more short-term-oriented managers to despair.

George and John Hartford were in the grocery trade at a time when selling food was an activity of enormous economic importance. There were literally grocery stores on every corner: in 1926, Kansas City, by no means the most densely populated of American cities, had 30 food markets per square mile. The first national survey, in 1929, found 585,980 food stores-one for every fifty-one American families. Richard Nixon, a future president, grew up working in his family's grocery in Whittier, California, in the 1920s, and the family of Lady Bird Johnson, a future first lady, sold groceries from a general store in Karnack, Texas. These mom-and-pop stores were serviced by a thick web of suppliers. The United States boasted 13,618 wholesale distributors of groceries in 1929, or one wholesaler for every forty-three food retailers. This wholesale network, in turn, distributed the products of nearly sixty thousand canneries, sugar-beet mills, slaughterhouses, soap factories, and other plants making everything from brooms to baking powder. Mom and pop ran many of these operations, too. The typical food plant had fewer than fifteen workers.8 In 1920s America, every town of any consequence had its grocers, its food brokers and wholesalers, its bottling plants and flour mills. These enterprises provided a tax base for their communities, a cadre of owners and managers to serve as civic leaders, and a major source of jobs. Just the retail side of the food business provided livelihoods for 1.2 million workers on the eve of the Great Depression, many of them self-employed proprietors. Food retailers, wholesalers, and processors together engaged one out of every eighteen nonfarm workers in the entire country-more than apparel and textile factories, iron and steel plants, coal mines, or even railroads.9 Americans paid a high price to support this balkanized system for conveying food from farm to table. Food was hugely expensive, relative to wages. The average working-cla.s.s family in the 1920s devoted one-third of its budget to groceries, the average farm family even more. Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage. And for the average housewife, shopping for food consumed a large part of the day. This money, time, and effort bought plenty of calories, but only moderate amounts of nutrition. With neither display s.p.a.ce nor refrigeration, many neighborhood stores carried only token stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables. Fresh fish and poultry were rarities. The poorest third of American households consumed a sorely inadequate daily intake of vitamins and minerals, because there was little of either in the food that their neighborhood shops had for sale.10 The Great Atlantic & Pacific did much to destroy this world. The Hartfords were among the most rigorous managers of their day. At a time when many grocers consulted self-help books to figure out how to price their goods, the brothers pored over data to fine-tune operations, closing this store, relocating that one, dropping a product whose sales languished, adding another that promised better margins. They totally reshaped their business at least four times. At its peak, their company owned nearly sixteen thousand grocery stores, seventy factories, and more than a hundred warehouses. It was the country's largest coffee importer, the largest wholesale produce dealer and b.u.t.ter buyer, the second-largest baker. Its sales were more than twice those of any other retailer. Their basic strategy was so extraordinarily simple it could be captured in a single word: volume. If the company kept its costs down and its prices low, more shoppers would come through its doors, producing more profit than if it kept prices high.

The Great A&P transformed the humble, archaic grocery trade into a modern industry, but its relentless expansion posed a mortal threat to a sector of the economy upon which so many families and communities depended. Those mom-and-pop grocers, local wholesalers, and small manufacturers understood the threat full well, and they fought back with a vengeance. The Hartfords were in no sense robber barons, yet they became the most controversial, and most reviled, American businessmen of the first half of the twentieth century. Had Mr. George tuned his crystal radio to America's most widely heard station in the 1920s, he would have heard diatribes against the "childless brothers" who monopolized food retailing. When Senator Huey Long warned in 1934 that "about ten men" have "chained the country from one end to the other," he was talking about Mr. George and Mr. John. When a lawyer working for the administration of Franklin Roosevelt called the country's largest retailer "a gigantic blood sucker," there was no question he had the Hartfords in mind: it was he who convinced Judge Lindley to convict them.

A contemporary of the Hartfords, the economist Joseph Schumpeter, coined the phrase "creative destruction" in 1942 to describe the painful process by which innovation and technological advance make an industry more efficient while leaving older, less adaptable businesses by the wayside. For the economy as a whole, creative destruction is enormously beneficial, permitting a s.h.i.+ft of labor and capital from sectors where less is required into areas where new products and services are in demand. It is precisely such s.h.i.+fts that make economies grow. For many individuals and many communities, on the other hand, creative destruction is painful, entailing business restructuring, job elimination, and the disappearance of companies and industries that have provided the economic base for a particular town or an entire region. Whatever its advantages, economic change inevitably leaves major losses in its wake.11 When creative destruction brings layoffs to autoworkers or closes coal mines across an entire region, the world pays close attention. When it means the closure of a family-run grocery store or the replacement of a failing supermarket by another store down the street, though, creative destruction does its work unremarked. This invisibility reflects the sheer lack of drama in the retail trade: a shuttered store leaves no gargantuan machinery standing idle, no angry workers milling around outside a padlocked gate. The building, torn down for parking or converted to some other use, will quickly fade from memory. The workers will be expected to find other jobs wherever they can. Displaced industrial workers, tough, rugged, and usually male, are presumed to have had important dreams and plans tragically destroyed by the vagaries of economic change and to merit public sympathy. Displaced grocery clerks rarely get such respect.

That neglect speaks to the prejudices of social thinkers of many ideologies. Thomas Jefferson, along with his contemporaries in the Enlightenment, saw special merit in the toil of the farmer, but very little in the work of the merchants who dealt in the farmer's produce. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels judged that the course of history would be shaped in vast factories by workers engaged in physical production; the labor of the merchant, they wrote, "is not labor that creates value." Their near contemporary William Graham Sumner, one of the most influential American social thinkers of the late nineteenth century but decidedly no Marxist, fully agreed with their point. "Wealth comes only from production, and all that the wrangling grabbers, loafers, and jobbers get to deal with comes from somebody's toil and sacrifice," Sumner wrote.12 The effect of economic change on store owners occasions particular ideological confusion. After all, the independent grocers displaced by the growth of the Great Atlantic & Pacific were capitalists, even if their capital was only a few hundred dollars. Their wives, by extension, were capitalists, too, even if being capitalists did not absolve them from twelve-hour days totting up purchases and keeping the books. When larger compet.i.tors undercut their prices and decimated their businesses, these small-time capitalists received neither sympathy nor a mention in the unemployment statistics. They simply vanished.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Hartfords turned their company into one of the greatest agents of creative destruction in the United States. Although s.h.i.+fts in the way the world buys food are far less heralded than innovations such as cars and computers, few economic changes have mattered more to the average family. Thanks to the management techniques the Great A&P brought into widespread use, food shopping, once a heavy burden, became a minor concern for all but the poorest households as grocery operators increased productivity and squeezed out costs. The proportion of workers involved in selling groceries plummeted, freeing up labor to help the economy grow. And the company's innovations are still evident in the supply chains that link the business world together. Although the Hartfords died decades before the invention of supercenters and hypermarkets, they employed many of the strategies-fighting unions, demanding lower prices from suppliers, cutting out middlemen, slas.h.i.+ng inventories, lowering prices to build volume, using volume to gain yet more economies of scale-that Walmart's founder, Sam Walton, would later make famous.

The bitter political and legal battles surrounding the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company were limited to North America, but they presaged similar conflicts around the globe. Under j.a.pan's "big store law," in force from the 1970s, anyone seeking to open even a modest supermarket had to gain local compet.i.tors' approval by paying them compensation. West Germany protected mom-and-pop retailers in 1956 by allowing stores to open only from 7:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and until 2:00 p.m. on Sat.u.r.day; a worker with a daytime job was essentially forced to patronize grocery stores and butcher shops near home or workplace because there was no time to shop elsewhere. In France, a 1973 law to aid artisans and small merchants restricted the opening of large stores and prohibited manufacturers from selling more cheaply to big merchants than to small ones. Everywhere, the complaint was the same as it had been in America: the unchecked growth of large retailers threatened the traditional role of local merchants and destroyed opportunities for economic independence.13 Such restraints faded toward the end of the twentieth century, in part because consumers demanded lower prices, in part because as working hours grew more diverse, more people needed to shop at nontraditional times. Yet the century-old battle between independent merchants and large retailers was by no means over. In the United States and Western Europe, critics of "industrial food" advised consumers to avoid the processed goods at the supermarket and purchase locally grown foods from farmers and independent retailers; the Hartfords' great achievement, making food affordable, was now looked upon with disdain. Merchants' protests led Thailand's government to halt expansion by grocery chains in 2006. In 2010, the Czech Republic required minimum price markups in order to keep chains from undercutting mom-and-pop stores-precisely the same obstacle A&P confronted in the United States in the 1930s.14 The Hartfords' enterprise did not prosper without its founders. Within a few years of their deaths, the once-mighty A&P was a basket case, staggering from one failed strategy to another as better-run companies pa.s.sed it by. Soon enough, the company that had decimated independent stores by the thousands became a victim of the creative destruction it had once meted out. But while A&P's fortunes waned, the economic forces it helped unleash only grew stronger. It made the process of moving goods from producer to consumer impersonal and industrial, but also cheap and efficient, a job for the big, not for the small.

2.

THE FOUNDER.

In their later years, after they became immensely wealthy and exceedingly controversial, George L. and John A. Hartford allowed certain legends to grow up around the family business. "Back in the year 1859, a little store opened its doors on Vesey Street, New York," the official company history recounted. "This was the first store of the great chain of grocery stores now operated by the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. George H. Hartford, the Founder, had a vision-the hope of a great national business." In some tellings, George H., the visionary entrepreneur and father of George L. and John A., was claimed to have been the company's first president, the creator of the first of the great chains that would soon dominate American retailing. An even more elaborate version credited George H. with starting the great enterprise by acquiring an entire s.h.i.+pload of tea in 1859 and selling it to the deserving public at 70 percent off the going price.1 Those legends, and much else that has been written about the Hartfords and their powerful company, are at best misleading, if not simply false. The story of how an obscure tea-store clerk and two of his sons would come to run the most admired, and reviled, business in America is more improbable, if less heroic, than the myths.2 The founder was not George H. Hartford but George Francis Gilman, a man destined to become one of the more bizarre characters in American business history. Gilman, born in Maine in 1826, could trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower. His father, Nathaniel Gilman, had become wealthy as a privateer and embargo runner during the War of 1812, and became involved in New York's booming leather industry in 1834, when he came to sell a cargo of African hides and formed a partners.h.i.+p with a young tanner and leather merchant named Thomas Smull. New York was the center of U.S. leather manufacturing, and the fetid alleyways of the neighborhood known as the Swamp, just two blocks east of City Hall, were lined with tanneries soaking and pounding imported hides into leather. Gilman, Smull & Company was soon among the largest hide and leather dealers in New York. Nathaniel Gilman, a newspaper wrote later, "was a queer individual, a daring speculator, a taciturn, secretive trader."3 Over time, much of the tanning process, with its noxious fumes and poisonous runoff, was moved upstate, near supplies of hemlock or oak bark used to make the tannic acid that rendered hides soft and flexible. New York City's erstwhile tanners turned themselves into merchants, buying hides at the docks, storing them, sending them off to be made into leather, and marketing the finished leather to boot and shoe manufacturers. Dozens of leather merchants were located cheek by jowl along Beekman, Spruce, Gold, and Frankfort streets and two alleys, known as Ferry and Jacobs streets, that had been cut to provide access to tanneries built on interior lots. Gilman's partners.h.i.+p with Smull ended around 1845, but by the early 1850s Nathaniel Gilman and three of his sons had three leather warehouses in the Swamp and owned tanneries northwest of the city.4 Their father's dynastic dreams abruptly came undone when Nathaniel Gilman Jr., the heir apparent, died in 1853 at the age of thirty-eight. Nathaniel Gilman & Son was dissolved, finally allowing George Gilman, then twenty-seven, to strike out on his own. In 1858, he erected a five-story brick building at 98 Gold Street for his own leather firm, Gilman & Company. His father died in December 1859, leaving an estate worth a million dollars and a tangle of claims and counterclaims that would take nearly half a century to resolve.5 * * *

George Gilman entered the tea trade sometime in late 1859 or early 1860. Evidence suggests that by then he was working with not one Hartford but two: George Huntington Hartford and George's younger brother, John S.6 George H. and John S. Hartford grew up in modest circ.u.mstances in Augusta, Maine, just twenty miles from George Gilman's birthplace in Waterville. George Huntington Hartford was born in 1833, seven years after George Gilman. John Soren Hartford was born around 1836. Their parents kept a boardinghouse and ran a livery stable, among other ventures. The 1850 census found the brothers boarding together in Boston, working as shop clerks. After further travels, the young men surfaced in St. Louis in 1859, working for the local office of George F. Gilman's hides and leather business at 31 South Main Street.7 The official corporate version of the Great Atlantic & Pacific's founding has George Hartford spending two years in the leather trade in St. Louis, then moving to New York to become a clerk in Gilman's business. Several aspects of this rendition are noteworthy. First, it places George H. Hartford alongside George Gilman at the birth of the tea company that would grow to become the world's largest retailer. Second, it mentions John S. Hartford not at all; the younger brother does not register in any history ever published by the company. Third, the official company history has George H. Hartford moving from St. Louis to New York to work with George Gilman in 1859. The historical record confirms none of these points. The first published reference to George Gilman's tea business, in June 1860, mentioned John S. Hartford but not George. Census takers counted both Hartford brothers at the family home in Augusta in June 1860, but John S. was listed as a "merchant" with a personal estate worth $500, whereas George H. gave his profession as "Box Maker" and claimed no a.s.sets-a hint that John, although younger, was the more established. And even if George H. Hartford did move to New York to work with Gilman in 1859, Gilman had no tea shop or other business on Vesey Street in that year. In 1860, Gilman & Company, "Importers of Tea," was operating at the same address, 98 Gold Street, at which Gilman had dealt hides. For a year or two, Gilman may have run the tea business and the hide business simultaneously.8 Why did George Gilman start dealing teas and coffees alongside hides? The simplest answer is the most likely. Trading hides could not have been a particularly pleasant vocation. His father's death left Gilman wealthy, and there is no question that he aspired to a higher status in New York's increasingly stratified society; he would shortly be the owner of three carriages, two watches, one piano, and a house on Lexington Avenue in the newly fas.h.i.+onable Murray Hill neighborhood. Working around piles of filthy cattle and goat skins would not have suited his pretensions at a time when New York's capitalists were distancing themselves from the physical labor performed in their firms. The tea trade, which usually involved dealing in coffee as well, was altogether more pleasant and prestigious, and offered opportunities to interact with some of the city's most influential merchants.9 Dealing in tea and coffee drew on many of the skills and connections Gilman would have developed as a hide dealer. Like hides, tea and coffee arrived by s.h.i.+p; in New York, hides were second only to coffee in terms of import value in 1860. Gilman would have known his way around the docks, and would have had experience with the commission merchants who received and distributed imports. He would have been familiar with the biweekly s.h.i.+pping and Commercial List and the daily Journal of Commerce, both of which were filled with intelligence about s.h.i.+pping and commodity trading; indeed, it was not unusual for seven or eight merchants to offer calfskins, salted goatskins, and buffalo hides on the Journal of Commerce's dense front page. Undoubtedly, he would have known that tea consumption had soared since 1843, when China opened additional ports to U.S. trade. By 1860, an average of one vessel a week was arriving in New York from China. Clipper s.h.i.+ps frequently made the run in less than three months, a.s.suring that the tea, packed in lead-lined chests, arrived fresh. And Gilman would have been quite aware of the great public fascination with tea that began in the late 1850s, when leading magazines devoted long articles to tea plantations in distant China, the raucous tea markets of India, and the elaborate Asian rituals of tea drinking. George Gilman was certainly not the only merchant to notice these things: New York, which received 90 percent of U.S. tea imports, had some seventy-five tea dealers in 1860.10 Some New York tea merchants were willing to sell in small quant.i.ties to individual consumers. Among them was J. Stiner & Company, America's first known chain retailer, which operated several tea shops. The main business of most tea merchants, though, was wholesaling. In some cases, an arriving tea cargo would be offered privately to a merchant, who would inspect individual leaves, taste the tea, and make an offer for hundreds of chests. In other cases, the cargo would be offered for auction one chest at a time. The merchants who bought the imports, in turn, sent samples to representatives in other cities, who would show the teas to retailers or to wholesalers serving smaller towns nearby.11 The business was arduous at a time when communications between cities were still poor; the New York dealer might have sold out of a proffered tea by the time an order arrived by post from Buffalo or Cincinnati, or local market conditions might have made the New Yorker's price expectations unrealistic, requiring a further exchange of correspondence before a sale could be arranged. Tea merchants typically extended thirty to ninety days' credit to their customers, and when payment finally arrived, it usually took the form of a draft on a distant bank that the New York merchant would have to sell at a discount to bankers on Wall Street. Customers faced risks, too. Merchants were known to s.h.i.+p tea that was not identical to their samples, that was adulterated with sawdust, or that was not the variety it was claimed to be. Consider this proposition from a sales representative in Boston to a tea merchant in New York: "I fear the Souchong will not sell @22 at present or as long as good Congo or Souchong is selling at 18. If you will have it labelled Ningyung, I think I could sell it better."12 By the time George Gilman entered the tea and coffee business, the established merchants were facing compet.i.tion from a new type of wholesale distributor, the jobber. Although the distinction was not precise, jobbers generally had less capital and operated on a smaller scale than the better-established wholesalers, filling one-off orders from retailers rather than cultivating long-term relations.h.i.+ps with wholesalers in other cities. Gilman may have begun as a jobber. He undoubtedly had the necessary capital, and he would have been very comfortable with the requisite wholesale wheeling and dealing. In 1861, he decided to concentrate entirely on tea and coffee, apparently turning his remaining leather interests over to his brother Winthrop. The substantial building George Gilman had erected at 98 Gold Street in 1858 was not appropriate for a tea company: polite New Yorkers would not have wanted to shop for teas and coffees amid the tanneries and stables of the Swamp. At some point between June 1860 and May 1861, Gilman & Company relocated to rented quarters at 129 Front Street. George H. Hartford later claimed to have joined Gilman around this time. As for John S. Hartford, we know only that he is said to have returned to Maine and died there in 1863. No extant records mention him in connection with the business after 1860.13 Front Street, where Gilman & Company made its new home, ran parallel to the East River waterfront. South Street, along the water, was lined with four-story brick buildings occupied by s.h.i.+pping companies, importers, and exporters. Sailing s.h.i.+ps docked so close that their prows reached almost into second-story windows, and the street was choked with horses, handcarts, pa.s.sengers buying steams.h.i.+p tickets, and barrels and bags of cargo. Front Street, just a block away, had an entirely different atmosphere. Almost every one of the brick structures from Whitehall Street, at the south end, to the Fulton Market, at the north end, was occupied by the counting room and warehouse of a provisions merchant. These men dealt in the tea and coffee, whiskey and sugar, salt pork and lard arriving on the piers, storing the goods in their warehouses before sending them by s.h.i.+p to customers in other cities or, in the case of grains and cotton, to buyers in Europe. Sturges, Bennett & Company, one of the city's biggest tea and coffee dealers, was at 125 Front Street, two doors down from Gilman & Company, and John Scrymser, another tea and coffee dealer, was across the street at number 126. The Front Street merchants did business with one another on a daily basis and also traded flour and grains at the rooms of the New York Corn Exchange, on South Street, so having their establishments in close proximity was a great convenience.14 Gilman & Company would not have stood out among the hundreds of food merchants on Front Street in 1861. It was far too small to merit much attention from the five largest provision dealers, who were said to "run the works," manipulating prices. Neither Gilman nor anyone from his firm was involved in 1860 when important produce merchants formed the New York Commercial a.s.sociation to construct a proper exchange building. Gilman was not among the 204 merchants and s.h.i.+pping executives who subscribed to the stock offering used to acquire a square block at Water and Whitehall streets and erect an impressive brick edifice. Some twelve hundred people paid the $20 fee to become members when the New York Produce Exchange opened for business on April 22, 1861, including men from at least sixty-five firms with addresses on Front Street, but there was no one from Gilman & Company. The exchange, where trading opened at 10:00 a.m., six days a week, and closed with the sounding of a gong at 1:00 p.m., did not trade coffee or tea, and Gilman apparently had no interest, yet, in sugar or other commodities.15 Nothing, beyond the Front Street location, is known of Gilman's business in 1861 and 1862. The imposition of steep import duties in 1862 to finance the Civil War, fifteen cents per pound of tea and four cents per pound of coffee, probably hurt profits; coffee imports collapsed, and much of the available supply was purchased by the U.S. government, which is unlikely to have patronized dealers as small as Gilman & Company. Even if the firm was prospering, it was doing so on an extremely small scale. George H.'s role during those years is as mysterious as the firm's performance. The New York postmaster Abram Wakeman, who claimed to have known Gilman well at the time, recalled that the Front Street store was run by one Alex. Davidson. Hartford did not earn a mention in Wakeman's memoir.16 Whatever the case, being a tiny tea dealer did not satisfy George Gilman's ambitions. After taking a couple of years to learn the business, he struck out on a radical course, establis.h.i.+ng himself as a marketer of no small genius. First came a new name. At some point between June 1861 and early 1863, Gilman & Company became the Great American Tea Company-a startling departure from the universal practice of merchants putting their names on their businesses. The Great American banner was soon attached to five different storefronts selling tea and coffee, and Gilman identified himself as both a "retail dealer" and a "wholesale dealer" when paying his federal income tax. By 1863, the company office and warehouse had moved to the five-story brick building at 51 Vesey Street that would later become part of the foundation myth. The Vesey Street location, on the Hudson River side of the island, was just steps from Was.h.i.+ngton Market, a large produce market, in an area crowded with housewives and servants making their daily purchases of food.17 In the most nontraditional departure of all, Gilman began to advertise ma.s.sively. The company's first known advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared on May 27, 1863, in The New York Herald, announcing, "The Great American Tea Company's New Wholesale Tea House no 51 Vesey street, N.Y." That initial foray into marketing promised that Great American would sell to wholesale customers at a profit of two cents per pound. Three days later, Gilman took out three separate advertis.e.m.e.nts in a single column of the Herald. "The organization of the Great American Tea Company of New York, created a new era in the history of retailing tea," one proclaimed, as if Great American were a brand-new undertaking rather than an ongoing concern. The advertis.e.m.e.nts promised teas at "old prices, without the duty," and repeated a phrase that was to become a staple of Great American's advertising for years to come: "ALL TEAS sold at TWO CENTS PER POUND PROFIT."18 Unbranded tea, sold loose by the pound as "black tea" or "imperial tea," was one of the most profitable items sold by grocers all over the country. Gilman's new strategy was to go directly after that market. By July 1863, Great American was advertising in newspapers outside New York, soliciting both wholesale and retail purchases and-in a frontal a.s.sault on the established distribution system-publis.h.i.+ng the prices at which it would sell various grades of teas and coffees. The days when the sales representatives of New York merchants could hope to extract an extra cent or two per pound from customers ignorant of market conditions were numbered; Great American touted roasted coffee for thirty-five cents per pound and best-quality young hyson tea for a dollar. "The Company are determined to undersell the whole TEA trade," one advertis.e.m.e.nt declared.19 * * *

George H. Hartford had the good fortune to have signed on with a man who possessed not only big ambitions and ample capital but also a remarkable flair for marketing. Gilman was a promoter in the mold of P. T. Barnum, the showman whose famed American Museum, located in lower Manhattan from 1841 to 1865, was a veritable laboratory for testing methods of persuading Americans to part with their money. Drinking tea and coffee was a long-established custom, but no one had ever promoted it quite as aggressively as Great American did. Teams of coal-black horses with white harnesses crisscrossed New York, pulling delivery wagons bearing the sign "An organization of capitalists for the distribution of teas and coffees at one small profit." Even as the Civil War was at its height, Great American advertis.e.m.e.nts proclaimed, "SIGNS OF PEACE! THE WAR SOON WILL BE OVER!" and shamelessly thanked the police for maintaining order in the company's crowded stores.20 Exaggeration was fundamental to Great American's promotion from the beginning. A September 1863 advertis.e.m.e.nt casually ended with the line "Great American Tea Company, Importers and Jobbers," as if the company were bringing its own teas directly from China; in reality, Great American almost certainly had no agents abroad and imported nothing. The company "will open a large a.s.sortment of Teas by the Benefactress (the latest arrival from China)," another 1863 advertis.e.m.e.nt stated, implying that Great American had access to unique products when in fact it was buying the same varieties and qualities of tea and coffee its compet.i.tors did. As George Gilman discerned, what distinguished one dealer from another was not the merchandise but the way in which its products were promoted and sold. In April 1864, Great American announced its relocation from 51 Vesey Street to the "larger and more commodious Marble Stores" at 35 and 37 Vesey Street, a move, it explained, that was necessary to handle its large trade.21 The marketing task was to persuade consumers in New York and around the country that this tiny tea company was "Great," and Gilman never missed an opportunity to do so. On March 6, 1865, one month before Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Gilman secured a prominent place in New York City's Civil War victory parade. Tens of thousands marched down Broadway, past City Hall, then up the Bowery and Lexington Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street before circling back to Union Square. The business division included a float sponsored by the Great American Tea Company. Ten white horses pulled a wagon decorated with the symbols of the thirty-six states of the soon-to-be-restored union. From atop the float, thirty-six tea-store clerks waved to the crowd, while men on horseback rode back and forth alongside. Shortly thereafter, Gilman took retail showmans.h.i.+p to a new level by locating his coffee roaster at Broadway and Bleecker Street in a frenzied shopping and entertainment district. The cost of renting s.p.a.ce at this prime location left others wondering about Gilman's sanity. They need not have worried. As Abram Wakeman recalled, "Thousands of dollars could have been spent on advertising and would not have been nearly as productive as the aroma from the fresh roasted coffee at so prominent a locality."22 Another stroke of marketing genius followed quickly: the buying club. Advertising heavily in religious weeklies such as The Methodist, farm journals like American Agriculturist, and professional publications such as New York Teacher, Great American urged readers to form "clubs" and submit bulk orders by mail. Prices were one-third cheaper than compet.i.tors offered, the ads promised, and the organizer of the order would receive a free gift of tea. Great American sent a club's entire order in a single express s.h.i.+pment, so even after customers paid s.h.i.+pping costs, they could expect a fresher product at a lower cost than their local stores could offer. The ads even ill.u.s.trated just how orders might be written out, easing timid consumers into the novel task of ordering their tea and coffee all the way from New York City. The company sometimes reproduced these club orders in its advertis.e.m.e.nts, both to serve as examples and to demonstrate the breadth of its customer base.23 George H. Hartford's role in these unusual developments will never be known for certain. The version of history long promoted by his sons credited him as the marketing genius behind the Great American Tea Company's early success, but this was likely not the case at all. Hartford described his profession successively as "clerk," then "book-keeper," then "cas.h.i.+er," then "treasurer," strongly suggesting that he focused on collecting money and paying bills, not on promotion. He was described later as "a quiet, dignified, gentleman, somewhat reserved in manner," "progressive, but never aggressive," "kindly, courteous, and affable"-in short, as a sober businessman, not as a close student of P. T. Barnum's.24 The credit for turning an obscure tea dealers.h.i.+p into a company people noticed thus rests solidly with the founder, George F. Gilman. Gilman's drive, imagination, and flamboyance distinguished Great American from the dozens of other tea companies in New York. His unique approach to marketing made the company grow very fast. But as it expanded, with new locations, new products, and a growing volume of mail-order sales, Great American would soon outrun its founder's abilities. George H. Hartford's managerial and financial skills would become critical.

3.

THE BIRTH OF THE GREAT A&P.

By the end of the Civil War, the Great American Tea Company was flouris.h.i.+ng. Sales and profit figures have not survived, but tax records show that George Gilman paid 1866 federal excise tax on an enterprise valued at more than $1 million-a considerable valuation for the time. Great American had five retail stores in New York in 1865 and had expanded to fill three buildings on Vesey Street with offices, shops, warehouses, and a plant for grinding coffee.1 The Vesey Street location indicates Gilman's aspiration to market to the great, and rapidly growing, middle cla.s.s. In this he followed his compet.i.tors. Rather than pursuing the carriage trade, which tended to concentrate in more fas.h.i.+onable precincts farther uptown, he was going after the largest, most sought-after market. "Vesey street is almost filled from end to end with tea, coffee and grocery houses," the New York World told readers. "The compet.i.tion is so brisk that some of the stores employ solicitors, who stand on the sidewalk and urge pa.s.sers-by to step in and purchase, pretty much as the retail clothiers do in Chatham street. For the same reason, goods are generally sold cheaper in Vesey street than in other parts of the city." The prices were good, but the deals often were not: a professor hired by the newspaper found that Great American sold short weights of tea, adulterated its tea with willow leaves, and mixed chicory into its ground coffee-practices followed by most of the other merchants on the street as well.2 Gilman was a believer in what modern executives would call "image." His ceaseless promotion aimed at portraying Great American as a substantial company worthy of the consumer's trust. In April 1865, to celebrate the opening of its first shop in Brooklyn, Great American filled the entire front page of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle with advertis.e.m.e.nts, a practice unheard of at the time. In May 1867, the s.h.i.+pping and Commercial List, the bible of New York importers, reported, "The recent large purchases of the GREAT AMERICAN TEA COMPANY have taken the trade by surprise." According to the paper, Great American had, in a single week, purchased two cargoes of tea worth $1.5 million, which "indicates the extensive nature of the company's business." The article shows every sign of being a plant: the name Great American appeared in uppercase letters; the newspaper's own reports showed no arriving tea cargoes corresponding to the ones Great American supposedly bought; and the purported value of the purchase was improbably large for a firm with only half a dozen stores. Those details were meant to persuade potential suppliers and customers that Great American had an "extensive" business. Gilman then reprinted the s.h.i.+pping and Commercial List article in a fake newspaper, The Commercial Enterprise, which Great American handed out to customers. The front page of The Commercial Enterprise carried the prominent line "Entered according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1867," crafted to make the publication seem as if it enjoyed government approval. The front-page article discussed Chinese matchmaking, but the remaining three pages were pure advertising, promising "Customers can save from 50 to $1 per pound by purchasing their Teas of THE GREAT AMERICAN TEA COMPANY."3 George H. Hartford prospered along with the company. He married in July 1861, shortly after his arrival in New York. Hartford and his new wife, Josephine, moved to 52 Powers Street in Brooklyn, a short ferry commute from Manhattan. Their first daughter, Maria Josephine, called Minnie, was born a year later, their son George Ludlum in 1865. When he was called for military service in February 1865, the thirty-one-year-old Hartford, like almost all Union conscripts, avoided service by paying one of the many intermediaries that arranged subst.i.tutes; Peter Bruin, a Scottish-born merchant seaman with a "florid" complexion, joined the U.S. Navy in Hartford's stead. Hartford stayed with Great American, winning a promotion from clerk to bookkeeper and then, in 1866, to cas.h.i.+er, a position of responsibility. His promotions brought pay raises. Hartford reported annual income of $688 in May 1864 and $800 one year later, wages well above what a simple clerk would make, but far short of a manager's pay. In 1866, Hartford moved his family to Orange, New Jersey, nestled at the foot of the Orange Mountains eighteen miles due west of New York City.4 Orange was then a bustling and diverse suburb of Newark, New Jersey's largest city. It suited Hartford because, riding the Morris & Ess.e.x Railroad to Hoboken and then catching a ferry across the Hudson River, he could reach his office on Vesey Street in under an hour. In addition to convenience, Orange had glamour and gentility. The women's rights advocate Lucy Stone had made it famous in 1857 when she declined to pay her property tax bill because women had no representation in government; the tax collector promptly sold two of her chairs, four tables, one stand, and two pictures at a widely publicized auction. Orange's leading citizen, Samuel Colgate, owner of the fast-growing New York soap and starch company started by his father, occupied a redbrick mansion called Seven Oaks on twenty-nine acres on the south side of town, and many other New York bankers and merchants called Orange home. In the summer, there was a modest resort business as families from the city came to enjoy the cool heights of nearby Eagle Rock. Yet Orange was not simply an elite suburb. It was becoming an important manufacturing town, its hat factories providing work for thousands of Irish and German immigrants. The town had a small African-American population as well. This ethnic mix would be the dominant factor in the town's political life for decades to come.5 The Hartfords soon moved into a sprawling house with stained-gla.s.s windows on Ridge Street, directly across from the new St. John's Roman Catholic Church. Ridge Street was on the unfas.h.i.+onable northwest side of town, in between the south-side estates occupied by local aristocrats like Colgate and the suburban villas going up in the carefully planned development of Llewellyn Park, a few blocks west. Shortly after moving there, George H. converted to Catholicism in the first baptism at St. John's. The Hartfords were affluent enough to have an Irish-born live-in servant, Mary Hughes. An eighteen-year-old named Mary Ludlam-perhaps Josephine's sister-also was living with the Hartfords at the time Edward, George and Josephine's third child, was born in 1870.6 As the cas.h.i.+er of one of New York's many tea companies, Hartford was not counted a particularly distinguished personage during his first decade in Orange. He does not seem to have been involved in any local civic organization. His time apparently was devoted almost entirely to the tea business, which was expanding by leaps and bounds. By the end of the 1860s, Great American had eleven shops in addition to its thriving mail-order operation. No photographs survive, but it may have been at this time that Gilman's Barnumesque showmans.h.i.+p was introduced into the retail stores. The Brooklyn Daily Times, perhaps with financial inducement, described the store at 133 Grand Street in Brooklyn as "new and magnificent," reporting that it "was literally run down with customers, and thronged until the hour of closing." The company now had more than 175 employees, and George H. Hartford, one of the earliest employees, had taken on an important role in its management.7 * * *

On May 10, 1869, the ceremonial placement of a "golden spike" in Promontory, Utah, completed one of the most difficult engineering feats of the age, the transcontinental railroad. America went mad with enthusiasm. Previously, the trip from the East to California meant months of uncomfortable travel by wagon train from Missouri or by sea around the tip of South America. Now the journey took only a few days by rail. George Gilman, never one to miss a marketing opportunity, figured out how to profit from the nationwide celebration of the new link between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In 1869, he launched a new business, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company. It was destined to become the biggest retailer in the world.8 The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was a most unusual sort of venture. It presented itself in its first advertis.e.m.e.nts, in the autumn of 1869, as an entirely new business, "an organization of capitalists for the purpose of Importing Teas and distributing them to Merchants throughout the country at Importer's prices." Its connection to the Great American Tea Company was a closely guarded secret. Great American solicited mail orders at 3133 Vesey Street, Great Atlantic & Pacific at 8 Church Street-and it took a bit of detective work for the historian Roy Bullock to ascertain that these were two different addresses for a single corner building. George H. Hartford maintained the charade for decades, contending that he became a.s.sociated with the Great Atlantic & Pacific when it began in 1869, when in fact Great Atlantic & Pacific was simply a front for an enterprise with which he had worked much longer. Someone in Hartford's household told a census taker in 1870 that he was "with Great American Tea Company," one more indication that Great Atlantic & Pacific was not a distinct company. Nor is it true, as A&P later claimed, that the Great American Tea Company was renamed the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in 1869. Coffee and tea drinkers continued to order by mail from Great American until well into the twentieth century.9 The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company was what was later called a "banner," not a company. Gilman's motivation for starting it is uncertain. One reason may have been to fend off imitators. The Great United States Tea Warehouse at 30 Vesey Street, directly across the street from Great American, initiated advertis.e.m.e.nts much like Great American's, promising low prices to customers who formed buying clubs and ordered by mail. Bertram, Bradford & Company at 26 Vesey Street advertised the fixed prices at which it would sell tea to small-town wholesalers, just as Great American did. Gilman's marketing strategy, which had been distinctive in the early 1860s, was routine by the end of the decade, and he needed to find a way to stand out in a crowded marketplace. He also seems to have believed that his firm could generate more sales by appearing in various guises. Two further Gilman fronts, Consumers' Importing Tea Company and Centennial Tea Company, were soon soliciting mail orders. None of the four Gilman tea dealers.h.i.+ps ever disclosed its link with any of the others.10 The widely advertised creation of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company threatened established interests in the tea trade, and they reacted strongly. On September 15, 1869, within a few weeks of the new ent.i.ty's birth, one Professor John Darby launched American Grocer as a newspaper for the grocery business. Almost immediately, the publication went on the attack against George F. Gilman's supposed dominance of the tea business. "One man in particular, with a dash of intellect, has broken through the conventionalisms of contracted ideas which fast bind others in the line, and has far outdistanced all compet.i.tors," American Grocer wrote. This individual, who was not named by the newspaper but was almost certainly George Gilman, "has purchased in one morning no less than thirty-six thousand chests of tea for his parcel agencies and retail counter trade." This claim is highly improbable, implying that Gilman acquired 9 percent of all U.S. tea imports for 1869 in a single day, but exaggeration served the purpose of raising alarm. The newspaper declared itself on the side of "the ma.s.ses of the trade," and promised to teach readers how to do a better job of selling tea so families will not "send to monster establishments in order to suit their requirements."11 American Grocer, of course, was not a disinterested party. Great American's advertising consistently attacked the importers, tea merchants, and wholesale grocers who extracted profits from the tea trade while delaying the delivery of fresh tea to the consumer. Those middlemen were American Grocer's advertisers, whose business was being undercut by mail-order sales.

The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company developed into an entirely different sort of business from its precursor. Great American's mail-order business and its eleven tea shops in New York dealt entirely in bulk teas and coffees, indistinguishable from those of its compet.i.tors. Great Atlantic & Pacific, in contrast, startled the tea trade in 1870, a few months after its creation, by launching a radically different product, a branded tea. Thea-Nectar was said to contain a unique mixture of teas that were dried on porcelain, with no coloring or impurities. Unlike other teas, which came loose, Thea-Nectar was sold prepackaged, in half-pound or pound boxes. It was supported by an unusual marketing campaign, with newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nts far larger than the standard few lines of agate type. "Thea-Nectar is a pure black tea with the Green Tea flavor," the ads proclaimed. Unlike any other tea on the market, Thea-Nectar was exclusive, available only from the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company.12 A brand-name tea was an extraordinary product to bring to market in 1870. At the time, consumers had access to few branded products of any sort, save patent medicines. Almost everything offered in grocery stores, from flour to pickles, was purchased by the shopkeeper in bulk and sold from barrels or canisters, with the store clerk measuring out the quant.i.ty the customer desired. The widespread sale of brand-name foods in sealed packages was still two decades in the future. It was only in 1870 that Congress enacted a law allowing businesses to register and protect trademarks such as Thea-Nectar-and when it did so, advertis.e.m.e.nts announced that "the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company have secured by congress the exclusive right to sell in this country, Thea-Nectar," distinctly implying that its product enjoyed some special imprimatur. With his branded tea, George Gilman was once again on the leading edge of a revolution in marketing.13 And once again, the reaction from those threatened by Gilman's marketing prowess was swift. In the autumn of 1870, American Grocer published a four-part article purporting to reveal the truth about the "unprincipled monopolists" seeking "to control the vast retail business throughout the country." Without naming names, American Grocer dissected a Great Atlantic & Pacific advertis.e.m.e.nt claiming that company representatives visited the tea-growing districts of China and j.a.pan to oversee the selection and curing of the choicest teas. In fact, said the newspaper, it had found no record of this company ever importing a single cargo of tea. "By diligent inquiry, we have ascertained that this Company never personally visited any tea district except that in the immediate vicinity of Wall and Water streets of this city, and the auction sales where damaged teas are disposed of." Fewer damaged teas are coming to auction than in the past, American Grocer claimed; instead, these "wet and damaged teas" are bought directly from importers for as little as seven cents a pound, "and afterward dried, colored and repacked, and sold to the consumer for ninety cents." The result, the newspaper claimed, was "to draw away the trade which rightfully belongs to the retail merchant in the different towns where these teas are sold."14 Some of those allegations almost certainly were true. There is no evidence that Great American and Great Atlantic & Pacific imported anything during this period, much less that they had "correspondents in China and j.a.pan," as their advertis.e.m.e.nts stated. As Abram Wakeman recalled later, Gilman bought most of his teas through the New York house where Wakeman worked. The claim that Gilman sold adulterated teas is credible because adulteration was extremely common, but there is no reason to think Gilman's teas were notably less pure than those offered by the wholesalers advertising in American Grocer. If the teas were inferior, customers seem not to have noticed. Yet if its complaints about the quality of Gilman's products were exaggerated, American Grocer's grasp of the implications of his business strategy was insightful. "If this can be done so successfully with teas ... it can be done in other lines of goods of universal demand," the newspaper warned. On that score, the newspaper would soon be proved right.15 Around 1871, Gilman unveiled yet another innovation in marketing: the premium. Chromolithographs-ma.s.s-produced colored pictures-had been invented in the 1830s, and after the Civil War they became wildly popular in America, decorating many kitchens and parlors. Great American and Great Atlantic & Pacific began offering chromos as gifts with every purchase of tea or coffee. When other tea companies followed suit, the compet.i.tion escalated from individual chromos to series on themes such as sporting events and U.S. presidents. The wealthy sometimes framed them, the poor simply tacked them to the walls. But collecting chromos soon lost its novelty. "People do not go there [to the tea store] so much any more, and I think that probably one reason why is, that the pictures are becoming too common," wrote a Pennsylvania schoolgirl in an 1877 essay. Gilman upped the ante again, offering coupons that could be collected and redeemed for china or gla.s.sware. The coupons, soon to be known as trading stamps, would be a staple of food-store marketing for a century.16 George H. Hartford was almost certainly not the inspired genius behind his company's novel approach to marketing. It is likely that the new tea company, the brand-name tea, and the premium with every purchase all emanated from the mind of George F. Gilman. But in 1871, Hartford's own managerial talents finally came into public view. On October 8, fire devastated the fast-growing city of Chicago. Hundreds of people died, seventeen thousand buildings were destroyed, and food supplies were laid waste. Great Atlantic & Pacific immediately sent staff and food supplies to Chicago. Hartford, in New York, located a map of Chicago, selected a site for a store, and directed the purchase of a property at 114116 West Was.h.i.+ngton Street. Within days, the still-hot bricks were removed and the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company opened its first store outside the New York area, accompanied by the usual flamboyant marketing. The Russian grand duke Alexis was touring the United States at the time, attended by great publicity. Ahead of Alexis's arrival in Chicago on December 30, the Great Atlantic & Pacific advertised, "Go where you can see Alexis" and "The Grand Duke will be most happy to receive his friends at no. 114 West Was.h.i.+ngton street." According to company lore, so many customers flooded in that the rear wall had to be knocked out to make more room. Those who managed to squeeze inside and purchase tea received a "splendid tinted lithograph" of the grand duke.17 The Chicago store was so successful that Gilman and Hartford decided to expand aggressively. By 1875, the Great Atlantic & Pacific had tea and coffee stores in sixteen cities as far-flung as Boston and St. Louis. Each was inaugurated with flair. To celebrate the opening of a "magnificent" store in Boston, aglitter with crystal chandeliers, eight "richly harnessed" black horses pulled a wagon laden with 125 chests of tea through the city's snow-clogged streets. The team and wagon traveled to store openings in seven other New England cities; in each, onlookers were invited to guess the ensemble's weight in hopes of winning $500 in gold. By May 15, when the official weighing determined that the horses, cart, and tea chests weighed 11,122 pounds, some fifty thousand people had entered the compet.i.tion. Great Atlantic & Pacific was not the first retail chain, but it was the first retailer with a presence across mu