Big stores and corner shops: retailing and the development of manufacturing in Sydney, 1880–1939

In the late 19th century, new retail forms emerged in Australian cities and spread to regional towns. The department store, the mail order house, and the chain store were all identified by Schumpeter as examples of ‘the competition that matters’ in the retail trade. Their emergence was intimately tied to industrialisation: mass production and mass distribution co-evolved to produce the mass market. This article uses Sydney as a case study to explore the relational dynamic between shops and factories, the role of creative destruction in the evolution of Australia's retail trade, and the spatial morphology of these changes.