Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. the merchant navy.

1958		H. Ellison Deadly Streets (1983) 19: I’ll be shippin’ out inna Merch Marine next Summer.
1984		(con. WW2) T. Jones Heart of Oak [ebook] There’d be nothing— nothing at all, to stop her [...] making sodding mincemeat out of the whole fucking Andrew ... and then her mates Prinz Eugen and Scharnhorst and the rest of’em come out and mash up the merch.
1997		(con. 1950s) D. Farson Never a Normal Man 177: I joined the merch and it was a right disillusionment.
2023		R. Milward Man-Eating Typewriter 184: All the sweat I’d splurted in service to the [...] Merch Navy.

2. merchandise, merchandising.

1992		G.P. Pelecanos Firing Offense 6: I traded retail clichés (‘Katie, Bar the Door,’ ‘Passin’ Them Out Like Popcorn’) with Fisher, the company merch manager.
2005		E. Weiner Big Boat to Bye-Bye 63: The merch was sitting on the shelves and not moving.
2011		J.J. Connolly Viva La Madness 307: You won’t need a loan if we sell this merch back to the Zambrano Family.
2011		J. Callaway ‘Misirlou’ in Pulp Ink [ebook] ‘What about the merch, Ashley?’ ‘Well, there wasn’t a whole lot’.
2015		http://selinakray.net/ 17 Apr. 🌐 If he hadn’t negotiated that vital percentage of the merch, he would have watched the studio print money off his ideas.
2020		G. Armstrong Young Team 137: [S]talls sellin glowsticks n merch.
2020		D. Winslow ‘Sunset’ in Broken 197: ‘He hasn’t fenced the merch’.