The Great A&P And The Struggle For Small Business In America - Plot & Excerpts
Walter, forty-seven, was a railroad man, a laborer for the Boston & Maine. Bertha, two years younger, had spent her working life at a laundry. Their new two-story home on Jefferson Street, built in 1722, would serve as more than just a place to live. It offered a way for a working-class couple to move up in the world, for the west side of the ground floor had been remodeled into a storefront. Soon after they moved in, the Abbotts opened a grocery store.1 Walter and Bertha Abbott were following a well-worn path. Selling food at retail may have been America’s most popular career in the early decades of the twentieth century, drawing millions of workers searching for a secure living and a reputable profession. The retail trade was easy to enter, and while the workday was long, the tasks at hand were safer and less strenuous than stoking the boiler of a locomotive or digging ditches for the country’s rapidly spreading networks of water and sewage pipes. Owning a grocery store, a bakery, or a butcher shop offered a certain status as well, because such people were often significant figures in the neighborhood, familiar to all who lived nearby.
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