By Craig L. Barry M
rural and agrarian. If food prices rose too high, farmers would plant and grow their crops or do without. However, this was not the case with tea, as it could not be successfully grown or was not widely cultivated in America, and it was challenging to find a substitute or do without. Despite the rise of coffee drinking, a significant tea culture persisted in America. This gave merchants a degree of leverage when it came to tea. In the late 1850s, a pound of tea sold at retail for the princely sum of $1.
Two Maine men, George Hartford and George Gilman, were operating a finished leather goods shop in New York City. Although both were from Maine, paradoxically, they met in Missouri, decided to work together, and opened shop in New York City in 1856. In 1859, they recognized the potential for profit by buying tea wholesale at $1.75 per five pounds, directly from the Clipper ships it arrived on, and then retailing it at a discounted price. The strategy was twofold: first, to cut out the middleman, and second, to make up for the volume that they surrendered with their lower profit margins. Coffee gained a foothold in post-colonial America when it became unfashionable to drink Tea due to British taxation and their monopolistic control of supply channels, as seen in the Boston Tea Party. However, comparing coffee to tea is difficult purely on a volume basis because a pound of tea goes much farther than a pound of coffee.
In addition, they targeted middle-class New Yorkers instead of going after the more fashionable “carriage trade” made up of the city’s upper crust, which was not as pricesensitive. In this, they were shrewd, as the middle class was surging by the late 1850s, and so was the demand for affordable luxury goods. They opened a warehouse at 31-33 Vesey Street, in a location that was “…filled with tea, coffee and grocery houses. The competition is so brisk so that some stores employed solicitors who stand on the street and invite
THE GREAT ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC TEA COMPANY
any American grocers in the mid-19th century began their business in the tea trade. The Antebellum United States was predominantly
