Bloomingdale's (Photo credit: vpickering)
In Charles Morris' excellent book, The Dawn of Innovation, he observes that "the 1866 Bloomingdale's catalog--160 pages containing 1,700 products from ladies' corsets to pistols--advised clients to send a follow-up inquiry if they had not received an order confirmation within ten days after they had posted the order, but to allow fifteen days if they lived on the West Coast. As Morris points out, billions of dollars in supply chain investments underlay that offer. Just twenty years before, at the end of the CIvil War, there were only a few hundred miles of railroad track west of the Mississippi. Even by the 1870s, vast regions of Bloomingdale's 1866 catalog market had been reachable only by wagon train.
But by 1866, the backbone of the national rail system was already in place, along with fast-freight forwarding companies, telegraph-based delivery tracking and financial settlement systems, insurance and newly invented bills of lading that guided a delivery through the railroad maze.
And therein lies the secret of the American surge in per capita growth. It wasn't advanced technology. Throughout the nineteenth century, American were students to the British in steel making and most other science-based industries. Where the American wrote the rulebook, however, was in mass production, mass marketing, and mass distribution. The great nineteenth century American economic innovation, in short, was the first mass-consumption society."
So in the twenty odd years from 1870 to 1866, we see the birth of America's supply chain as we know it today--mostly rail and water then, but providing the ability deliver packages coast to coast. I can remember driving into Boston to pick up a TV shipment that came from Sears by Railway Express in 1969. The agent walked out the door and retrieved it from a box car on the siding. How far we have come...
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