Susan V. Spellman, "Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business" (Oxford UP, 2016)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Sep 1, 2021 · 1h 2m

In this episode for the Economic and Business History channel, I interviewed Dr. Susan V. Spellman, Associate Professor of History at Miami University. She is the author of Cornering the Market Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business (Oxford University Press, 2016). In popular stereotypes, local grocers were avuncular men who spent their days in pickle-barrel conversations and checkers games; they were backward small-town merchants resistant to modernizing impulses. Cornering the Market challenges these conventions to demonstrate that nineteenth- and…