Newspaper Advertisements (La Minerve, 31 December, 1829).
The day-to-day commercial transactions of the early nineteenth century were quite different from those of today. The merchants, who were frequently both wholesalers and retailers, did not sell pre-packaged goods as is the practice nowadays; the barrel was in universal use and only middle-men sold in smaller quantities. Product specialization was almost non-existent, apart from dry good establishments that deal in textile fabrics and related merchandise. Both F.A. Larocque and Irvine, Leslie and Company sold foodstuffs, wines and spirits and hardware in bulk. Their advertisements list a range of products and show what the main imports were at the time. When advertising, merchants would give details of ships' arrival times and specify their cargo; sometimes they repeated the same advertisement until the recently arrived stocks were exhausted. The Larocque advertisement for instance was first inserted on July 27,1829 and specified that claret was ready for unloading on that date. We can only wonder at the usefulness of repeating the information some five months later.
