A fully staffed butcher shop decorated for the holiday season fills this exceptional cabinet card interior view, photographed at a Chicago establishment at the corner of State Street, the photographer's imprint reading "Corner State and [illegible] St., Chicago." Two prominent trade signs are clearly legible on the rear wall: one for Armour's High Grade Butterine, Chicago, Always the Best, For Sale Here, and one for Booth's Oysters. The combination of Armour and Booth advertising places this firmly in Chicago's meatpacking and food trade orbit of the 1890s, when both companies were dominant forces in the national food supply.

Five staff members pose among the merchandise: two men in white aprons and butcher's coats at left holding cleavers or knives, a woman in a dark dress at center behind the cutting block, a mustachioed man in a white coat at right, and a woman in dark dress at the far right. Whole carcasses hang in a dense row along the left wall, and the right wall displays an elaborate holiday arrangement of dressed poultry and game birds decorated with white paper frills. Bone saws hang from the ceiling, a large hanging scale occupies the center background, and a globe gas lamp illuminates the scene from above.

Armour and Company, founded in Chicago in 1867 by Philip Danforth Armour, became one of the largest meatpacking operations in the world by the 1890s and pioneered the distribution of branded packaged food products including Butterine, a butter substitute, through retail grocers and butchers nationwide. The mount is a green-bordered cabinet card with the photographer's imprint partially legible at the lower right as Corner State and [illegible] St., Chicago.