retail

In the online era, brick-and-mortar book retailers have been forced to redefine themselves.

A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction.

The indoor suburban shopping center is a special kind of abandoned place.

The Robinson-Patman Act was supposed to prevent price discrimination — but consumers wanted cheap goods.

Walmart did not invent or import the idea. In fact, it was among the last of the discount department stores to experiment with the concept.

Once derided as cesspools of Reagan-era consumerist excess, the shopping mall somehow became an unlikely sort-of quasi-public space that is now disappearing.

What is now an object of nostalgia was once a symbol of soulless corporate creep.

100 years ago, a mail-order retail giant moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever.

The iconic retail giant turned thrift into profit, but couldn’t keep pace with modern consumer culture.

Nostalgia has always been harnessed or packaged to sell things.

What our mannequins say about us.

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

From kosher butchers, fruit peddlers, and herring dealers on the Lower East Side to supermarket innovators across the country

“The Bookshop” tells the story of American bookstores in thirteen types. Its true subject is not how bookstore can survive, but how they should be.

On the life and times of Jason Epstein, cofounder of “The New York Review of Books.”

The evolution of women's sportswear.

Cardboard boxes hold a world of meaning that spans from Amazon to the Container Corporation of America.

Americans have always borrowed, but how exactly did their lives become so entangled with the power of plastic cards?

Pneumatic tubes offered a leap forward in business and communications, in the office and across the city.

The history of a familiar, useful, and troublesome object.

How a style steeped in American elitism took over the world.

On Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900–1930.”

A never-before-published tranche of letters reveals the white-collar racism that prevented the world’s most popular athlete from selling Fords.

Activists established politically informed shops to offer alternatives to the consumer culture of chain stores, mass production, and multinational corporations.

The retail giant’s mail-order business reigned supreme for more than a century, offering everything from quack cures to ready-to-build homes.

Alexandra Lange's "Meet Me by the Fountain" recovers the forgotten past and the still hopeful future of the American shopping mall.

The emergence of the supermarket was used as a key piece of anti-communist propaganda early in the twentieth century against the alternative of grocery co-ops.

Bodegas serve as lifelines and community centers, yet have faced heinous violence. Here is the story of the New York City bodega.

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conqueror.

The reasons have to do with the complexity of the transaction, but also with the industry’s explosive growth in its early years.