While the factories were always the center of the labor market, they were often on the city's periphery. In spreading the factories even farther, the automobile may not have changed to any great extent the growth pattern of the cities. Even the loss of hotel business to the outskirt's motel has been relatively painless; the hotel-motel demarcation is becoming harder to find every year. What hurts most is the damage the automobile has done to central-city retailing, especially in those cities where public transit is feeble.

Some retailing, of course, always spreads with the population -- grocery stores, drugstores, local haberdasheries and dress shops, candy stores and the like. But whenever a major purchase was contemplated forty years ago -- a new bedroom set or a winter coat, an Easter bonnet, a bicycle for Junior -- the family set off for the downtown department store, where the selection would be greatest. Department stores congregated in the ``one hundred per cent location,'' where all the transit lines converged. These stores are still there, but the volume of the ``downtown store'' has been on a relative decline, while in many cities the suburban ``branch'' sells more and more dry goods. If the retailer and hotelman's downtown unit sales have been decreasing, however, his dollar volume continues to rise, and it is dollars which you put in the bank.

In most discussions of this phenomenon, the figures are substantially inflated. No suburban shopping-center branch -- not even Hudson's vast Northland outside Detroit -- does anything like the unit volume of business or carries anything like the variety of merchandise to be found in the home store. Telephone orders distort the picture: the suburbanite naturally calls a local rather than a central city number if both are listed in an advertisement, especially if the local call eliminates city sales tax. The suburban branch is thereby credited with a sale which would have been made even if its glass doors had never opened. Accounting procedures which continue to charge a disproportionate overhead and warehouse expense to the main store make the branches seem more profitable than they are. In many cases that statement ``We break even on our downtown operation and make money on our branches'' would be turned around if the cost analysis were recalculated on terms less prejudicial to the old store. Fear of the competition -- always a great motivating force in the American economy -- makes retailers who do not have suburban operations exaggerate both the volume and the profitability of their rival's shiny new branches. The fact seems to be that very many large branch stores are uneconomical, that the choice of location in the suburbs is as important as it was downtown, and that even highly suburbanized cities will support only so many big branches. Moreover, the cost of operations is always high in any new store, as the conservative bankers who act as controllers for retail giants are beginning to discover.