Flow: A Brief History of Warehousing
"The last thing a manufacturer really desires to do is to store anything. Storage, with him," wrote a Cleveland-based expert on warehousing, in 1925, "is thought of as an evil, to be shunned wherever possible." This paper recounts the birth of the warehousing industry, and explains how the warehouseman came to realize that he needed to inspire new "habits" among his clientele in manufacturing by fashioning himself not only as a landlord, a peddler of square footage, but also as a "banker of merchandise" and a merchant of "flow."