Department Stores

From its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century to its decline in the 1970s, the department store was the major center for urban American shoppers. A creative sales idea, the department store offered working people attentive service, an elegant place to shop for almost everything they needed, and the chance to buy on credit. Large department stores, usually named for the families that started them, became central fixtures in the downtown areas of their cities. Eventually, they became the foundations of shopping malls (see entry under 1950s—Commerce in volume 3) in the suburbs (see entry under 1950s—The Way We Lived in volume 3). In the 1970s, large, no-frills discount stores began to compete with the popularity of department stores. By the 1990s, many of the distinguished old department stores had gone out of business.

Before large department stores began to develop, shopping had meant waiting for a traveling peddler to drop by with a cart of goods for sale, or going into a small shop and asking the clerk for items kept on shelves behind the counter. In the late 1800s, the development of a national railroad and a more efficient postal system allowed a wider variety of goods to be shipped. Stores began to expand. To increase sales, shop owners began to display goods openly on shelves in the store where customers could look through them. The shop owners hired sales clerks like those who served in upper class shops. Some successful store owners built multistory buildings for their new department stores. Soon these stores were closely identified with their cities, like Rich's of Atlanta, Georgia; Filene's of Boston, Massachusetts; and Gimble's of New York City. In 1924, Macy's department store in New York was the largest store in the world.

Department stores have frequently influenced the culture around them. Mother's Day (see entry under 1910s—The Way We Lived in volume 1) had been a minor Catholic holiday until it was turned into a major gift-giving (and therefore, shopping) occasion by the owner of Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Of course, the primary gift shopping time in the United States is the Christmas season, and department stores have made it their own, beginning with department store Santas, like the one in the film Miracle on 34th Street. In 1939, Robert L. May (1905–1976), an advertising writer for Montgomery Ward, wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (see entry under 1940s—Print Culture in volume 2) as part of the company's Christmas sales campaign. During the 1940s, another department store owner, Fred Lazarus, persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945) to change Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday to allow an extra week of shopping before Christmas.

—Tina Gianoulis

For More Information

Bragg, Arthur. "Will the Department Store Survive?" Sales and Marketing Management (Vol. 136, April 1986): pp. 60–65.

Cohen, Daniel. "Grand Emporiums Peddle Their Wares in a New Market." Smithsonian (Vol. 23, no. 12, March 1993): pp. 22–31.

Katz, Donald R. "The Big Store." Esquire (Vol. 108, September 1987): pp. 107–17.

Leach, William R. "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890–1925." Journal of American History (Vol. 71, September 1984): pp. 319–43.