1890- 1900
1890
Mr Robert Dickie
Manager of Glasgow House in the 1890s)
The move of the Glasgow warehouse to West Nile Street, where it is known as Glasgow House, is followed by a half-century of intensive wholesale activity, with branches opened all over Scotland.
Menzies stock from the 1890s.
From the 1890s a few daily and weekly newsagents' lists have come to light and they are a revelation for the quantity and diversity of the reading matter wholesaler's clients asked for.
So many hundreds of small items, at individual costs so miniscule, all requiring separate handling... where did the profit lie?
This random order, for one customer at one tiny corner newsagent's on that notorious south side of Glasgow, has to be multiplied many times for many other customers before we can see what it was the wholesalers were fighting about:
Such orders were fulfilled morning and evening, daily, weekly and monthly, through little shops by the thousand and larger shops by the hundred, every item funnelled through the wholesaler's warehouse and dealt with at speed, while the cities slept.
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