Quote:
Originally Posted by steve B
It's a bit amazing just how much ATC controlled.
Outside of that control, just my thinking on distribution. I'd have to really get very far into who was who and how distribution happened in that industry at the time to have much confidence.
I think outside of the ATC influence if there was any outside of that at all, each factory producing a small brand would have a distribution area. Sort of like how some large businesses today have distributors with a territory.
So Red Sun being packed and shipped from a Louisiana factory would have been sent/sold to the distributors for that factory.
If I was running the brand, I'd also want to line up distributors in major cities people local to my region might travel to since they might want to buy a familiar brand on say a trip to NY or Chicago or DC. But not to distributors in smaller cities or towns outside the usual area.
The larger brands would have more national distribution, so no matter what factory produced them, Piedmonts would get shipped to ATC distributors nearly everywhere.
There wouldn't be much reason to pack differently for different distributors. It's much more efficient to pack everything the same. The only exception would be the really interesting T206 note saying packing for not the Philadelphia area.
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From what I can tell from the Tobacco journals of the period, factories didn't have set areas of distribution.
There do not seem to be distributors tied to a factory, or distributors at all for the most part. Jobbers are ordering direct with ATC or ATC's subsidiary holding firms like Continental, Lorillard, Anargyros and using an internal network. They seem to have had control of distribution themselves. ATC control of distribution and their network seems to have been one of the major headaches they gave the few independent firms that were still around.
From what I can find, there was national (or at least, broad eastern) distribution of most brands. The exceptions seem to be new brands; where they are given a test market for a limited time to see how they perform and then they either disappear or go widespread (geographically, some of them don't seem to move a whole ton of orders).
It would certainly be easiest to pack the same for everywhere. We have the note about Philadelphia, as I recall Pat has shared some articles before indicating local laws that might have posed problems. Some SP'ing patterns may be indicative of geographic differences (like the racial short printing in T226 Red Sun). I wouldn't say that this is the case, it might be. I'm not compelled that they went to the trouble to issue, say, T206 minor leaguers only in the area of those minor leagues. I don't think anyone has claimed that, but that logic seems to be the only basis for Red Sun being limited geographically (with no evidence whatsoever for the Louisiana exclusive distribution).
03-17-2023, 01:00 PM
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