John's Meat Market Case Study

John’s Meat Market

In contrast to the millions of people that relocated to obtain jobs constructing roads, or building ships, or were prematurely cast into the role of managing a farm, substantial numbers of people continued working at their prewar occupations. Nonetheless, the war altered their lives as commodity shortages and rationing affected everyone; even imposing adjustments to the daily operations of main street businesses as inconspicuous as John’s Meat Market in Almelund, Minnesota.

Traditionally, John’s merchandise included various cuts of beef and pork, along with chicken, and butter. His customers either purchased the goods with money, or bartered for credit with live chickens or hogs, which John could butcher and sell to his patrons. However, with the advent of the war and the subsequent rationing, consumers also needed government issued food stamps to procure butter and the majority of meat products.

John’s meat suppliers, Swift and Armour, allowed John to enter their trucks and select the cuts of meat that he desired. Nevertheless, frequently during the war, the trucks carried no beef and John resorted to offering his customers lamb or mutton as a substitute. His customers accepted lamb. However, mutton, meat from mature sheep, has a gamey taste and consequently, a

This one involved a “Japanese fire balloon.” Hoping to set the forests of North America on fire, the Japanese launched several thousand balloons equipped with incendiary bombs aloft from their homeland into the prevailing west to east jet stream. During 1945, the peak of activity, hundreds of balloons reached the western regions of Canada and the United States.29 Since the providence of nature endowed the western forests of North America with abundant snow and rain that year, the Japanese fire balloons did little