This article analyzes recent developments in a burgeoning American consumer industry in the light manufacturing sector during the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of demand, soft-toy, or “plush,” production provides insights into impulse buying by a variety of income groups in a postindustrial economy, and it suggests the volatile nature of American consumer interest in low-value, disposable commodities. On the supply side, plush offers a particularly good example of an industry that has been sensitive to changes in cost, moving production around Third World countries while using information technology to improve distribution and to retain design control at home. The industry thus illustrates the response of American entrepreneurs to the internationalization of both supply and demand.

When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of underdeveloped sections of the American West provides a different emphasis. The following article traces the history of T. C. Power & Bro.—a small, family-run department store in Montana—before the early 1900s. The article demonstrates that the firm's service was tailored to the economic and social needs of urban and rural settlers on the western frontier, helping to create a consumer society in the West.

Child labor in the U.S. economy declined significantly between 1880 and 1920. This case study of the fruit and vegetable canning industry examines variations in laws, technology, and income across states and time to assess the relative importance of legal and economic factors in reducing the employment of children. The authors find that economic factors, especially a technologically driven shift toward a greater demand for adult labor, were relatively more important. While economic development was often a precondition for legal restrictions on child labor, compulsory schooling and child labor laws restricted the employment of children in technologically backward canneries.