Passage
Until well into the nineteenth century, the price of most goods sold in a city shop was settled between shopkeeper and customer at the counter. The familiar explanation for the arrival of the marked, non-negotiable price credits the buyer. As towns grew, shops served strangers rather than neighbours, and bargaining rewards whichever party knows the trade better; a customer who did not know it found haggling slow and faintly humiliating. On this account the fixed price was a convenience the public wanted and the shopkeepers, in time, supplied.
The chronology does not cooperate. Where the change has been reconstructed trade by trade, marked prices appear first in shops with many employees and only afterwards in shops with few — and the pattern holds along a single street, where every shop faced the same passers-by. A draper employing thirty assistants adopted the practice a generation before the ironmonger opposite, who stood at his own counter. Had unfamiliar buyers been the cause, the small shop should have moved first, or at least moved together with the large; instead it moved last, and it was the last to hire.
The regularity points to a problem inside the shop rather than in front of it. A proprietor who concedes a shilling concedes his own; an assistant who concedes one concedes his employer's, and an owner in the back office cannot tell a reduction that rescued a sale from one that bought the assistant a friend, or a share of the difference. A marked price replaces a judgment that has to be supervised with a rule that can be checked: the day's takings ought to equal the ticketed price times the count of goods gone. Bargaining did not become unpopular. It became unauditable.
None of this requires that any draper thought of himself as solving a problem of supervision, and the fixed price was advertised from the first as a courtesy to the customer — above all to the customer who could not bargain. The advertising is worth noticing, because it is where the older explanation comes from. A trade's account of its own motives has been read as a finding about its conduct.
