TABLE 1. 
Area. 
London .. a. .. 
Bristol and South Wales. . 
Birmingham ‘x “3 
Liverpool vs ‘n 
Manchester an .. 
Yorkshire .. .. 
Scotland .. 
Total All Areas 
Towns. 
Administrative County .. a ; 
3ristol, Cardiff, Newport, Swansea .. 
dirmingham, Wolverhampton .. . 
-iverpool, Birkenhead .. .. ce 
Manchester, Blackburn, Bolton, Wigan . . 
Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield ‘8 - 
Fdinburgh, Glasgow 3 i 
Number of 
Shops 
Visited. 
546 
399 
333 
211 
573 
441 
115 
2018 
As the required information as to volume of sales could not be 
obtained with sufficient accuracy, no attempt has been made to 
“weight ” the returns from individual shops according to this 
measure, or the samples of groups according to their relative 
importance. On those questions in which there is marked divergence, 
generalisations have been avoided and the results have been presented 
separately. 
Classification of Shops. 
For the purpose of analysis, the shops visited have been classified 
according to type of organisation and class of trade. 
In regard to organisation, the term independent has been taken to 
refer to a firm with a single shop ; this first group of 1,330 shops 
constituted about 46 per cent. of the total and included five large 
department stores. The second group included branches of co-opera- 
tive societies, multiple grocers and dairies. The multiple grocery and 
provision group may be roughly sub-divided into local multiple, where 
the branches are confined to a particular area ; and non-local multiple 
with branches in more than one area, thus including organisations 
with branch shops in all parts of the country. Of the 1,588 shops in 
the second group, about 40 per cent. were of the local multiple 
and co-operative types, 45 per cent. were non-local. and 15 per cent. 
were dairies. 
)