Mass retail did not exist in British North America (BNA) prior to Canadian
Confederation. Instead, during the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the colony’s three million inhabitants obtained their goods and services by trading and bartering in small, local markets. In rural areas, where the vast majority of the population lived, people brought furs, flour, dairy products, fish, livestock, poultry, garden produce, and homespun textiles to trading posts and general stores, where they traded these items for other goods. Trading posts located west of Lake Superior were owned by the Northwest Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company (exclusively by the HBC after 1821); general stores were scattered throughout the colony and owned by merchants as well as by local mining, mill, lumber, and other primary and secondary resource companies. Trading posts tended to accept furs and related products in exchange for food, furniture, guns, and other items necessary for life on the frontier. Merchant-owned general stores accepted a combination of goods, credit, and cash in exchange for their products. Company stores paid their workers in truck. Instead of paying their employees wages that they could spend where they pleased, they gave them scrip that they could only spend at their employers’ store, where products tended to be overpriced.
Beginnings: 1800s to 1870s