Popular stereotypes of Rockwellian storekeepers have characterized grocery retailers as backward and resistant to modernizing impulses. Cornering the Market challenges these conventions to show that early grocers were important but unsung innovators, revolutionizing business practices from the bottom, and transforming the grocery trade from local enterprises to a nationwide industry. Although often viewed as quaint holdovers from a mythic past, local grocery stores are shown in this book to have been key agents of a modernizing impulse in American capitalism from the Civil War era to the New Deal. Rich and entertaining detail abounds in this fine-grained historical analysis framed by empathy rather than disdain for how small businessmen set the stage for the 20th-century growth of chain stores such as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and eventually Walmart.