The name P.G. Wodehouse normally does not spring to mind when talking about futurists. Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and Alvin Toffler certainly, but Pelham Grenville quite definitely not!

Wodehouse is someone one would associate with Bertie Wooster and the inimitable dolichocephalic, fish-eating Jeeves. Some may conjure up visions of the muddle-headed Lord Emsworth and his magnificent beast the Empress of Blandings.

But the die-hard Wodehouse fan will also tell you about Rupert Psmith and his other schoolboy stories. Though often ignored and somewhat hard to find, many unusual nuggets lurk in these innocuous tales.

It is to one of these that I would draw attention. Titled An International Affair, it was published in The Captain in 1905, and can be found in the Project Gutenberg free eBooks collection called The Politeness of Princess and Other Stories’.

The story is rather prescient it reads like the classic tale of the neighborhood mom-and-pop store facing the giant retailer. You could easily substitute the latter today with Walmart or Carrefour.

Oliver Ring, the American owner of Ring’s Come-one Come-all Up-to-date Stores, happens to be passing through the lazy English countryside town of Wrykyn, home to the boy’s school bearing the same name. The shop windows in Wrykyn resemble those in every other country town in England, having no initiative and none of that quality that would arrest the pedestrian’s progress.

In America, Mr Ring reflected, they did these things better, and then it dawned upon him that this was the perfect place for setting up one of his mega stores.

We are told that of Mr Ring’s Come-one Come-all Up-to-date Stores are well known all over the world, with offices in Broadway, New York and others in Chicago, St. Louis and St. Paul within America. Overseas offices exist in London, Paris and Berlin which basically amounts to saying everywhere in the world.

In Mr. Wodehouse’s words, The peculiar advantage of Ring’s Stores is that you can get anything you happen to want there, from a motor to a macaroon, and rather cheaper than you could get it anywhere else.

Of course, what he was describing was the early twentieth century, when one can only guess where these multitudes of products are produced. Not China, perhaps.

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