Brick and mortar (also bricks and mortar or B&M):
in its simplest usage describes the physical presence of a building(s) or other structure. The term brick-and-mortar business is often used to refer to a company that possesses buildings, production facilities, or store for operations.
More specifically, in the jargon of e-commerce businesses, brick-and-mortar businesses are companies that have a physical presence and offer face-to-face customer experiences.
(Wikepedia)
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The expression brick-and-mortar business is mainly used in contrast to internet commerce.
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Ngram does not seem to provide much help as it traces the expressions at least from the beginning of the 19th century.
Questions:
When did "brick-and-mortar" become an "antonym" of e-commerce?
Was it also used with that connotation before e-commerce developed, when catalogue merchant sales became popular?
Best Answer
As far as I could find the phrase brick and mortar meaning the provision of services in a building with human staff as opposed to computer-based service provision gained currency in the 1970s, mainly in the banking industry. Use of phrase in opposition to mail-order business appears to have started slightly later, even though mail order had been around for a long time. This Ngram shows brick-and-mortar branch and electronic bank taking off in the early 1970s (earlier instances of electronic bank refer to data banks); brick-and-mortar store does not take off before the mid 1990s. The earliest instance of brick-and-mortar in this modern sense I could find is from 1971, but applied to libraries though. And a charming thought it is:
Then, still in the realm of education, there is this one from 1974, or maybe later. When Google has several volumes or issues of a magazine together they give the date of the first issue.
It was in the banking industry though that the phrase came to be more widely used. From the early 1970s banks started to offer banking services from ATMs and CBCTs (costumer-bank communication terminals) often away from their brick-and-mortar branches:
The phrase pops up several times in U.S. Congressional hearings on the new electronic banking. This exchange took place in a hearing before the 94th Congress, so no later than 1976:
Early in 1977 Toni Wiseman reported on further hearings in “EFT Unit Asks Limit on Federal Access,” Computerworld, Vol. XI, No. 9, February 28, 1977 [full access]:
Four years later, some people had grater expectations from e-business already. Here’s Desmond Smith, “Info City―New York Is Now the Information Capital of the World,” New York, February 9, 1981 [full access]:
The earliest unambiguous instance I could find of brick and mortar as opposed to mail-order is from 1980 in Dun's Review (I checked here that the date is correct). There’s a possible instance from 1975, but I didn’t manage to check the context or the date itself. So it looks as though the phrase gained currency in the banking industry in opposition to computer-based service provision, and was then borrowed into the mail-order business context.
This idea that computer technology was going to reduce the need for brick-and-mortar was around in the 1960s already, but for a different reason: computer technology required less labour, and hence smaller facilities. So in the following quote brick-and-mortar is not used in the modern sense of alternative to e-business. But there is an opposition between computer-intensive and brick-and-mortar-intensive production systems that likely paved the way for the modern use of the phrase. The snippet Google shows is incomplete, so I combined it with the main output page. I checked here that a Univac III computer was delivered to Esquire Inc. in August 1963, so the Google date is correct: