15.

Department Stores

No, I’m just looking”: these are words most of us have said when browsing in a store and being approached politely by a sales assistant. Most of us will not have then experienced the sales assistant snarling, “Then ’op it, mate!”

Hearing those words in a London shop made quite an impression on Harry Gordon Selfridge. The year was 1888, and the flamboyant American was touring the great department stores of Europe—in Vienna and Berlin; the famous Bon Marché in Paris; and Manchester, and now London—to see what tips he could pick up for his employer, Chicago’s Marshall Field. Field had been busily popularizing the aphorism “The customer is always right.” Evidently, this was not yet the case in England.

Two decades later, Selfridge was back in London, opening his eponymous department store on Oxford Street—now a global mecca for retail, then an unfashionable backwater, but handily near a station on a newly opened underground line. Selfridge & Co. caused a sensation.1 This was due partly to its sheer size—the retail space covered six acres. Plate-glass windows had been a feature of storefronts for a few decades,2 but Selfridge installed the largest glass sheets in the world—and he created, behind them, the most sumptuous shop window displays.

But more than scale, what set Selfridge’s apart was attitude. Harry Gordon Selfridge was introducing Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-nineteenth-century America.

“Just looking” was positively encouraged. As he had in Chicago, Selfridge swept away the previous shopkeepers’ custom of stashing the merchandise in places where sales assistants had to fetch it for you—in cabinets, behind locked glass doors, or high up on shelves that could be reached only with a ladder. He instead laid out the open-aisle displays we now take for granted, where you can touch a product, pick it up, and inspect it from all angles, without a salesperson hovering by your side. In the full-page newspaper advertisements he took out when his store opened, Selfridge compared the “pleasures of shopping” to those of “sight-seeing.”

Shopping had long been bound up with social display: the old arcades of the great European cities, displaying their fine cotton fashions—gorgeously lit with candles and mirrors—were places for the upper classes not only to see, but to be seen.3 Selfridge had no truck with snobbery or exclusivity. His advertisements pointedly made clear that the “whole British public” would be welcome—“no cards of admission are required.” Management consultants today talk about the fortune to be found at the “bottom of the pyramid”; Selfridge was way ahead of them. In his Chicago store, he appealed to the working classes by dreaming up the concept of the “bargain basement.”4

Selfridge did perhaps more than anyone to invent shopping as we know it. But the ideas were in the ether.

Another trailblazer was an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart. It was Stewart who introduced to New Yorkers in the mid–nineteenth century the shocking concept of not hassling customers the moment they walked through the door. He called this novel policy “free entrance.”

A. T. Stewart & Co. was among the first department stores to practice the now ubiquitous “clearance sale,” periodically moving on the last bits of old stock at knockdown prices to make room for new. Stewart offered no-quibble refunds. He made customers pay in cash or settle their bills quickly; traditionally, shoppers had expected to string out their lines of credit for up to a year.

Another insight Stewart applied at his store was that not everybody likes to haggle; some of us welcome the simplicity of being quoted a fair price and told we can take it or leave it. Stewart made possible this “one-price” approach by accepting unusually low markups. “[I] put my goods on the market at the lowest price I can afford,” he explained. “Although I realize only a small profit on each sale, the enlarged area of business makes possible a large accumulation of capital.”

This idea wasn’t totally unprecedented, but at the time it was considered radical. The first salesman Stewart hired was appalled to hear that he would not be allowed to apply his finely tuned skill of sizing up the customer’s apparent wealth and extracting as extravagant a price as possible: he resigned on the spot, telling the youthful Irish shopkeeper he’d be bankrupt within a month. By the time Stewart died, over five decades later, he was one of the richest men in New York.

The great department stores became cathedrals of commerce. At Stewart’s “Marble Palace” the shopkeeper boasted: “You may gaze upon a million dollars’ worth of goods, and no man will interrupt either your meditation or your admiration.”5 They took shopping to another level, sometimes literally: Corvin in Budapest installed an elevator that became such an attraction in its own right that the store began to charge for using it. In 1898, Harrods in London installed a moving staircase that carried as many as four thousand people an hour.6

In such shops one could buy anything from cradles to gravestones (Harrods offered a full funeral service, including hearse, coffin, and attendants). There were picture galleries, smoking rooms, tea rooms, concerts. The shop displays bled out into the street, as entrepreneurs built covered galleries around their stores. It was, the historian Frank Trentmann says, the birth of “total shopping.”7

The glory days of the city center department store have faded a little. Even before the rise of online shopping, widespread car ownership brought the out-of-town shopping mall, where land is cheaper. Tourists in England still enjoy Harrods and Selfridge’s in London, but many also head to Bicester Village, a few miles north of Oxford, an outlet that specializes in luxury brands at a discount.

But the experience of going to the shops has changed remarkably little since pioneers such as Stewart and Selfridge turned it on its head. And it may be no coincidence that they did it at a time when women were gaining in social and economic power.

There are, of course, some tired stereotypes about women and their supposed love of shopping. But the data suggest that the stereotypes aren’t completely imaginary. Time-use studies suggest women spend more time shopping than men do.8 Other research suggests that this is a matter of preference as well as duty: men tend to say they like shops with easy parking and short checkout lines, so they can get what they came for and leave; women are more likely to prioritize aspects of the shopping experience, like the friendliness of sales assistants.9

Such research wouldn’t have shocked Harry Gordon Selfridge. He saw that female customers offered profitable opportunities that other retailers were bungling, and he made a point of trying to understand what they wanted. One of his quietly revolutionary moves: Selfridge’s featured a ladies’ lavatory. Strange as it may sound to modern ears, this was a facility London’s shopkeepers had hitherto neglected to provide. Selfridge saw, as other men apparently had not, that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves.

Lindy Woodhead, who wrote a biography of Selfridge, even thinks he “could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women.”10 That’s a big claim for any shopkeeper.

But social progress can sometimes come from unexpected directions. And Harry Gordon Selfridge certainly saw himself as a social reformer. He once explained why, at his Chicago store, he’d introduced a nursery where young children could be dropped off during a shopping trip: “I came along just at the time when women wanted to step out on their own,” he said. “They came to the store and realized some of their dreams.”