Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(4):687-728; doi:10.1093/es/khp017
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The Birth of the North American Home Improvement Store, 1905–1929
RICHARD HARRIS is an urban historical geographer at McMaster University, Canada
Contact information: School of Geography and Earth Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8S 4K1. E-mail: harrisr{at}mcmaster.ca.
The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of the modern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. The most important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.
RICHARD HARRIS is an urban historical geographer at McMaster University, Canada. He has written about segregation, housing, and suburban development in the United States, Canada, and Australia. His latest book is Creeping Conformity, How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960 (Toronto, 2004). Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is writing a book about the rise of the home improvement industry, 1905–1960. He is also researching British colonial housing policy in India, East Africa, and the West Indies in the twentieth century.
I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright Scholar Program) for their financial assistance. Reggie Blaszczyk, Michael Mercier, and three anonymous readers offered valuable comments on an earlier draft.