The Independent Grocer’s Alliance (IGA) was one such organization. The hundreds of IGA stores that dotted cities across the nation, including upstate New York, based their very name on the concept of the independent merchant. The alliance was first formed in Poughkeepsie, New York, in August 1926, when seventy-six retailers joined with a wholesaler to form a cooperative group. Their purpose was to eliminate price competition with chain stores and maximize collective buying power. IGA founder J. Frank Grimes was an outspoken critic of the chain store movement and defended the rights of the independent merchant in almost mythical terms. At an address to the Advertising-Selling Leauge of Omaha, Nebraska, Grimes played up the specter of faceless, absentee bureaucrats associated with the chains. “I say to you,” he roared, “if the chain stores start in the state of Nebraska until they cover every avenue of retail endeavor, I say to you that Omaha will suffer, and it will suffer severely.” Only the smaller merchant was responsive to the needs of consumers in smaller cities such as Omaha. Big business and chain stores were too detached from the area and made no effort to get to know the community. Grimes echoed generations of populist protestors who saw the world as a conflict between eastern capital and western consumers. “Men, sitting back, managing these big corporations in the eastern states, send their stores here to break down the individual in business; they don’t understand what the west or any other part of the country wants, or how it really lives or how it exists.”
Excerpted from Sales & Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940 by Sarah Elvins. Published by Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 2004.
I love this photo. Maybe my favorite you’ve posted.