The history of the shopkeepers of Athens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is narrated in this book, is composed of disparate elements: the fire in the old market in 1884 and the Evangelicals in 1901, the movement in Goudi in 1909 and the establishment of the GSEVEE in 1919, the opportunities for one to start their own business in a city that was constantly growing as well as the high mortality rate of small enterprises.

The establishment of the Sunday holiday and the crackdown on profiteering, the credit system and the rental market, the bakers' strikes and the protests of the coachmen against the first automobiles, the marketplaces of the shops and their dispersion throughout the city, the patron saints of the unions and the feasts in the countryside on their feast day, the fireworks that shopkeepers threw during election campaigns, the sounds of the mazurka in family dances and the slaps in the Karagiozis.

The wave of mustache cutting after the First World War and the guarding of the "dignity" of the housewives. The thread that guides us in the study of all these is the highlighting of the conditions for the existence of the traditional petty-bourgeois class and the way they changed during the period.