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Supermarket Use and Exclusive Clauses, Part Three — Horrendous World War Remolds the American Supermarket

To avoid the problems shopping center landlords and tenants face as a result of poorly drafted use and exclusive clauses, lease negotiators need to draft clauses that accurately and appropriately regulate the tenant’s business operations. To get there, they obviously need to learn what the tenant’s business is — but not only that. They need to anticipate the twists and turns the tenant’s business might take in the future. That’s the tough part. Our best guide to future shifts in retail operations is to trace the history of a retail enterprise from its origins to the present. Long-term trends in product mix, store size, and sales techniques can provide insightful clues into potential future changes. Retail enterprises are in constant flux. Merchants change their sales methods. They introduce new products, and they discard others. Sometimes the shift works well and boosts sales and profits — but not always. Yesterday’s discarded technique often bounces back with a new name and becomes the fresh, new, and exciting way of doing business. Retailers change their ways in response to external events over which they have no control. Their success depends on fulfilling the public’s needs in good times and to continue doing that when circumstances change. To survive and thrive hey must serve the public’s needs despite dramatic technological and sociological changes, through recessions and depressions, through inflation and deflation, and through war and peace. In particular, the American supermarket could not have existed without the invention of the automobile and the transformation of American roads from unpaved winding trails to the highly-efficient paved roads and highway on which we travel today. Its birth responded to the great depression, and its business model was repositioned in reaction to World War II. This article, one of six (originally planned as five) installments, traces the changes wrought on the supermarket business model by the rekindling of the U.S. economy between September 1, 1939 and December 7, 1941 as America mobilized to prepare for World War II.