Swift faced a lot of opposition to his plan—not only from butchers and wholesalers whose business he threatened, but also from the railroads, which already had extensive investments in cattle cars and feeding stations. As a result, he was forced to build his entire distribution system from scratch. His initial successes gave him the wherewithal to expand into sales. He quickly built a network of wholesale facilities with refrigerated storage space and a sales staff to market the meat to local stores. In addition, by buying rights to harvest ice from the Great Lakes and setting up ice houses along his routes, he protected himself against costly bottlenecks that could have damaged both his product and his business. As a consequence of his skill in system building, Swift‟s enterprise grew rapidly. Later, this became an ogilopolistic structure, but these problems were also sorted out.
• The Great Merger Movement: Most capital intensive industries in the late nineteenth-century were