“The Biggest Small-Town Store in America†: Independent Retailers and the Rise of Consumer Culture

The case study of Bresee's Department Store in Oneonta, New York, suggests that small-town department stores were not necessarily fully “modern†by the early twentieth century. This article demonstrates how modern, big-store, business methods came later and documents how earlier modes of trade, such as credit and bartering, persisted into the early twentieth century, even in non-rural, northern contexts. Preliminary findings suggest that eliminating the urban bias in much historiography by including small-town retailing practices may lead to a later periodization of American consumer society.