Department Stores

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Department Stores

With the creation of the first department stores at the end of the nineteenth century, came the inception of that most American of diversions—shopping. Though people had always purchased necessities, it was the development of the emporium that turned the perusal of a wide variety of goods, both the necessary and the frivolous, the affordable and the completely out of reach, into a leisure pastime. Between the late 1800s and the 1970s, department stores continued to grow and evolve as the quintessential modern market-place, both elite and accessible. Huge department stores, named for the families who founded them, dominated urban centers, and store and city became identified with each other. Filene's of Boston, Macy's and Bloomingdale's of New York, Marshall Field of Chicago, and Rich's of Atlanta are only a few of the stores recognized nationwide as belonging to their city. The era of the department store is rapidly fading, replaced by consumer choices that are more consistent with modern economics, just as the department stores themselves once replaced their predecessors.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, citizens began to enjoy the benefits of a new cash economy. Improved postal service and a new nationwide rail network allowed for an unprecedented flow of goods. Previously, consumers had been dependent on traveling peddlers, who carried such stock as sewing needles, thread, and fabrics from town to town in bulky packs on their backs or in horse-drawn carts. As these peddlers grew more prosperous, they began to settle in small storefronts. As economic times improved with the modernizations of the late 1800s, savvy shopkeepers began to expand, offering not only a wider variety of goods, but also an air of refinement and personal service that had previously been available only to the very rich. An example of this was Marble Dry Goods, opened by A. T. Stewart in Manhattan in 1846. Stewart set up posh parlors for his female customers with attentive sales clerks and the first Parisian style full-length mirrors in the United States. Thus, department stores drew all classes of customers by making them feel as if they were part of society's elite while shopping there.

Owners of the new department stores were able to undercut the prices of their competitors in the specialty shops by going directly to the manufacturers to purchase goods, bypassing the wholesalers' mark-up. Some even manufactured their own products. Where once stores had been slow, sedate places where goods had to be requested from behind the counter, the lively new department store displayed products prominently within reach and encouraged browsing. To keep customers from leaving, stores expanded to sell anything they could possibly need. Smaller stores responded with outraged protests that the larger stores were employing unfair practices and running them out of business, but they had little success in slowing the growth of the giant emporiums.

As the cities grew, so did the stores, becoming multi-floor edifices that were the primary generators of retail traffic in newly burgeoning downtown areas. Women, who were enjoying some new rights due to the wave of feminism in the late 1800s and early 1900s, began to have more control over the shopping dollar. By 1915, women did 90 percent of consumer spending in the United States, and the department stores catered to women and began to hire them to work as salesclerks.

Stores competed with each other to have the most refined atmosphere, the cheapest bargain basement, the most fashionable tea room, the fastest delivery, and, most of all, the most attentive service—the most important product offered in the grand emporiums.

In 1911, Sears and Roebuck offered credit to their customers for large mail order purchases, and by the 1920s the practice had spread to most of the large department stores. Customers carried an imprinted metal "charge plate," particular to each store. Because they were the only form of credit available at the time, department store charge accounts inspired loyalty, and increased their store's customer base.

In 1946, writer Julian Clare described Canada's famous department store, Eaton's, in MacClean's magazine: "You can have a meal or send a telegram; get your shoes half-soled or buy a canoe. You can have your other suit dry cleaned and plan for a wedding right down to such details as a woman at the church to fix the bride's train. You can look up addresses in any Canadian city. You can buy stamps or have your picture taken." Department stores also developed distinctive departments, with features designed to attract trade. Filene's in Boston made the bargain basement famous, with drastically reduced prices on premium goods piled on tables, where economically-minded customers fought, sometimes physically, over them, and even undressed on the floor to try on contested items. Department store toy departments competed to offer elaborate displays to entertain children, who were often sent there to wait for parents busy shopping. Marshall Field's toy department introduced the famous puppet act "Kukla, Fran, and Ollie" to the Chicago public before they found their way onto television screens, while Bullocks in Los Angeles had a long wooden slide from the toy department to the hair salon on the floor below, where children might find their mothers. Department store window displays were also highly competitive, fabulous artistic tableaux that drew "window shoppers" just to admire them.

Department stores even had an effect on the nation's calendar. Ohio department store magnate Fred Lazarus convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to fix Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, rather than the last Thursday that had been traditional. The extra week of Christmas shopping afforded by the switch benefitted the department stores and, Lazarus assured the president, the nation. John Wanamaker of the famous Philadelphia store created Mother's Day, turning a little-known Catholic religious holiday into another national day of spending. Christmas itself became strongly identified with the stores as thousands of department store Santas were photographed holding future customers on their laps.

In the 1950s, middle class families began to abandon the cities for the suburbs. More and more, only less affluent people were left in the urban centers, and as a result, the great flagship downtown department stores began to lose money. Suburban shopping malls began to spring up, and most department stores opened branches there. For over 20 years it was considered necessary to have a large department store as an "anchor" for a mall, and customers continued to patronize the department stores as their main retail sources. Beginning in 1973, however, the oil crisis, inflation, and other economic problems began to cause a slowing of growth in the department stores. The arrival of bank credit cards such as Visa and MasterCard put an end to customer dependence on department store credit. Discount stores, large stores that offered a wide inventory like the department stores, but without the grand style and attentive service, often had lower prices. In an economy more and more focused on lower prices and fewer amenities, department stores waned and discount stores grew.

Gradually, many of the once-famous department stores went out of business. Gimbals', B. Altman's, and Ohrbach's in New York, Garfinckel's in Washington, D. C., Frederick and Nelson's in Seattle, and Hutzler's in Baltimore are just a few of the venerable emporiums that have closed their doors or limited their operations. They have been replaced by discount stores, specialty chains, fast-growing mail order businesses, and cable television shopping channels like QVC. Huge discount chains like Wal-Mart inspire the same protests that the department stores drew from their competition at the early part of the twentieth century: they are too big and too cheap, and they run the competition out of business, including the department stores. Chains of specialty shops fill the malls, having national name recognition and offering customers the same illusion of being part of the elite that the department stores once did. Mail order houses flood potential customers with catalogs and advertisements—over fourteen billion pieces a year—and QVC reached five billion dollars in sales within five years of its inception, a goal department stores took decades to achieve.

Besides bringing together an enormous inventory under one roof and customers from a wide range of classes to shop together, department stores helped define the city centers where they were placed. The failure of the department stores and the rise of the suburban shopping mall and super-store likewise define the trends of late twentieth century society away from the city and into the suburb. Though acknowledgment of class difference is far less overt than it was at the beginning of the century, actual class segregation is much greater. As the cities have been relegated to the poor, except for those who commute there to work during the day, public transportation (except for commuter rush hours) and other public services have also decreased in the city centers. Rather than big stores that invite everyone to shop together, there are run-down markets that sell necessities to the poor at inflated prices and specialty shops that cater to middle class workers on their lunch hour. There are few poor people in the suburbs, where car ownership is a must and house ownership a given. There too, shopping is more segregated, with the working and lower middle class shopping at the discount houses and the upper middle class and wealthy frequenting the smaller, service-oriented specialty stores. The department stores that remain have been forced to reduce their inventory. Priced out of the market by discount stores in appliances, electronics, sewing machines, fabrics, books, sporting goods, and toys, department stores are now mainly clothing stores with housewares departments.

—Tina Gianoulis