Cottage Industry
By: Davis Boyd and Justice Buford
Define
The Cottage Industry is an industry in which employees work in their own home using their own equipment. Like a person who grows corn and sells the corn for money.
Detail
Causes
The first known use of the Cottage Industry is 1921. The Cottage Industry involved families running their own industry. Cottage Industry required less power consumption and had minimum investment. It also allowed families to stay together instead of being separated by different hours of working in a factory. That 75% of the population were living off the land and this meant many families didn't have much work during the winter so they used this time to make things to help them during the times when they worked fields and this created the Cottage Industry.
Characteristics
- The Cottage Industry involved many thousands of individual manufacturers. With different regions specializing in different products. For example metal production was big in the midlands and coal mining in the North-East.
- On January 1, 2013, California passed the California Homemade Food Act which allows people to sell certain homemade food items that are less susceptible to bacterial growth and don't require refrigeration to stay fresh
Significance
People are still affected today by the Cottage Industry because people like to buy homemade goods and they some people prefer homemade items over mass produced items from a large cooperation. Also the website https://www.etsy.com/ is a online site where you can purchase items that are homemade from people around the world. This is one of the many ways the Cottage Industry is still relevant today.