Here’s my weird, USPS-adjacent opinion:

Between roughly 1895-1915, the formation of the U.S. Post Office Domestic Parcel Post service and Sears Roebuck & Co. led to the industrial development that handed the US the 20th century.

Here’s the basic story. You had a time period that featured a transition from agriculture to manufacturing, saw the railroads spread across the continent, and introduced not just electrification and mass manufacture but corporate management for the first time recognizable to us.

We look back and see the technological innovation in production and infrastructure, but we rarely talk about the demand and distribution side. (Who is we? I don’t know. It just sounds good to assert that.)

Sears Roebuck & Co. (with a crucial assist from the U.S. Post Office for delivering catalogues and merchandise) marketed the heck out of all kinds of things: clothing (where they invented the concept of a “size”), bicycles, basically everything.

Richard W. Sears would go to a guy with a whatever factory and ask if the guy could produce 1,000 whatevers. The guy would be like “Uh, 1,000? Per what? Year?” And Sears would be like “No, per week. Here are the specs, and here is the capital you need to do it. Are you in?”

People who study Economics mostly abstract away from what we call Marketing. If Say’s Law says that supply creates its own demand, then Sears’s Law says that demand creates its own supply. Harnessing the demand of a growing nation unleashed the supply of the growing nation. FIN