Department Stores

Department Stores. Between 1850 and 1890, urban growth spawned giant emporiums that sold vast arrays of merchandise at fixed prices and provided services and amenities that encouraged customers to linger and browse. Rowland H. Macy in New York City (1858), John Wanamaker in Philadelphia (1861), and Marshall Field in Chicago (1865) led this retailing revolution. During their golden age between 1890 and 1940, department stores supplanted small specialized shops in cities large and small. Elaborate store buildings attracted the public with their sheer size, luxurious appointments, and technological innovations. Highly successful as both businesses and cultural institutions, department stores nonetheless wrestled with troubling contradictions.

Resisting the corporate merger movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they tended to remain locally oriented, family‐identified businesses loosely linked through buying and information‐sharing groups as well as trade associations such as the National Retail Dry Goods Association (1911) and the Retail Research Association (1916). Even when department stores merged, as in the formation of Federated Department Stores in 1929, separate stores retained their individual identities and management autonomy. Attractive, ever‐changing merchandise and attentive services combined with functional structures and management innovations, such as systematic data gathering, to make department stores enormously profitable.

Persistent operating problems nevertheless shadowed the giant stores' successes. Buyers who headed merchandise departments insisted that their expertise required autonomy, but the stores' functional organization challenged their authority by subordinating them to managers in charge of service, merchandising, advertising, and accounting. While close supervision hampered buyers' abilities to respond to fashion trends and customer demand, loose control threatened the store's overall image and financial health. Time‐and‐motion studies and employee bonuses enhanced efficiency, but efficiency sometimes undermined customer service. Statistical data failed to enhance predictability and regularity, as the flow of customers fluctuated wildly according to hour, day of the week, season, and weather.

Class and gender differences created other tensions. Male managers struggled to control the behavior of salesclerks and customers who were predominantly female. Working‐class saleswomen, hired as cheap labor yet expected to sell skillfully, might offend or ignore more upper‐class customers. Wealthy female customers used their class prerogatives to push stores into expensive and wasteful practices. Department stores appealed primarily to an affluent minority, but their heavy fixed operating costs compelled them to court working‐class consumers in price‐segregated departments and bargain basements. Sensual appeals encouraged customers to buy but also seduced some into shoplifting or reckless overuse of credit.

The combination of internal contradictions and the decay of central cities after World War II weakened the department store as the flagship institution in the twentieth century's consumer culture. Self‐service replaced skilled selling. Suburban branch stores, rare and small before 1940, proliferated and even eclipsed downtown stores. Beginning in the 1980s, a rash of mergers, bankruptcies, and closings undermined department stores' power as local institutions. Specialty stores, mall‐based chains, discount stores, and catalog merchants grabbed greater market share. Dethroned from their former glory, department stores nonetheless maintained a presence in many downtowns and in shopping centers and malls, wielding a significant if reduced economic and cultural power.
See also Gender; Mass Marketing; Social Class; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Susan Porter Benson , Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940, 1986.
William Leach , Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and Rise of a New American Culture, 1993.

Susan Porter Benson