Abstract
The wholesale was to overcome the structural limitation of the medicine retail business—by shifting to high-volume trade, by seizing on the opportunities arising from the changing rural market.
To finance the wholesale trade, the shop owner set up a deposit-taking scheme. High interest earnings were paid out, and cash was channelled to holding stocks and to service the credit offered to the retail customers. With the high costs of borrowing, and the incursion of big suppliers, the wholesale business eventually collapsed.
As the business evolves, structural circumstances pick their winners and losers. The demise of the High Street shop is a case of Schumpeter’s creative destruction: entrepreneurship is romantic and tragic, and innovation rewards some and punishes others.
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Notes
- 1.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row, 1950.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 3.
Souchou Yao. The Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016.
- 4.
Jomo K.S. Growth and Structural Change in the Malaysian Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990, p. 38.
- 5.
Clifford Geertz, ‘The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing’, The American Economy Review 68 (2), 1978, p. 28.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 30
- 10.
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976, p. 178.
- 11.
Joseph Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 52.
- 12.
The idea of destruction as capitalism’s inner logic is dispersed over Marx’s work. An apocalyptic version is given in The Communist Manifesto where he and Engels wrote: ‘It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the whole of bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of existing production, but also of previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.’ ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Mamenka, New York: Viking Penguin, 1983, p. 210.
- 13.
Joseph Schumpeter. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 82
- 14.
Ibid., p. 132.
Bibliography
Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 1978. ‘The Bazaar Economy: Information and Search in Peasant Marketing’. The American Economy Review 68 (2): 28-32.
Jomo K.S. 1990. Growth and Structural Change in the Malaysian Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marx, Karl and Frederic Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Mamenka, New York: Viking Penguin, 1983, pp. 203-241.
Schumpeter, Joseph. 1950. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
Yao, Souchou. 2016. The Malayan Emergency. Copenhagen: NIAS Press.
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Yao, S. (2020). Wholesale: The Road to Ruin. In: The Shop on High Street. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2031-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2031-0_8
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