Britain's Most Dynamic Sector? Competitive Advantage in Multiple Food Retailing

The explosive growth of the retailing sector has been one of the most important changes to have taken place within the British economy in the postwar era. It is not simply that the shopping experience has changed beyond recognition. The revolutionary impact, upon business organization, of changes occurring within the retailing sector is a regular theme within the literature [Akehurst and Alexander, 1995, p. 4; Birchall, 1994, p. 142; Gardner and Sheppard, 1989, p. 14]. Simultaneously, weare also led to believe that post-war changes in consumption and reta'fling have had an enormous anti-revolutionary social impact, defusing class tensions in "a culture of consolidation" [Benson, 1994, p. 227]. Business historians have, until recently, had litfie to say regarding modern retailing. The focus of much of the literature is upon the predominance of small scale, family-owned and -run operations, and often even itinerant, independent shopkeepers in the nineteenth century. These were increasingly undermined by the emergence of multiple retailing organizations, variety, and department stores along with Co-operative retailing by the midtwentieth century [Davis, 1966; Jeffreys 1954; Mathias 1967; Winstanley 1983]. More recently, however, business historians interest in organizational capabilities and the nature of competition have led to a focus upon the growth of retailer's own-brands [Williams, 1995], logistics and distribution [Sparks, 1995], market structure [Molt and Dawson, 1990; Winstanley, 1994] and the post-war challenge to manufacturer-imposed resale price maintenance [MoreIll, 1997]. One area of consensus within the literature is on the ability of large scale retailing organizations to rapidly develop innovative solutions to the growing complexity of modem retailing [Akehurst and Alexander, 1996]. The large multiple food retailers, in particular, have proved to be highly innovative in their response to changing pattems of consumer demand. The abolition of resale price maintenance saw multiple food retailers attempt o redraw the balance between price and non-price competition in the 1960s [Eliot, 1988; Morelli, 1997]. This approach was combined with a widening of firms' product