Department store
In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic appearance in the middle of the 19th century, and permanently reshaped shopping habits, and the definition of service and luxury.
[1] Today, departments often include the following: clothing, cosmetics, do it yourself, furniture, gardening, hardware, home appliances, houseware, paint, sporting goods, toiletries, and toys.
However, the first reliably dated department store to be established, was Harding, Howell & Co., which opened in 1796 on Pall Mall, London.
An observer writing in Ackermann's Repository, a British periodical on contemporary taste and fashion, described the enterprise in 1809 as follows: The house is one hundred and fifty feet in length from front to back, and of proportionate width.
The fourth is set apart for millinery and dresses; so that there is no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion.
This concern has been conducted for the last twelve years by the present proprietors who have spared neither trouble nor expense to ensure the establishment of a superiority over every other in Europe, and to render it perfectly unique in its kind.
These, for the main part, were newly affluent middle-class women, their good fortune – and the department store itself – nurtured and shaped by the Industrial Revolution.
This was transforming life in London and the length and breadth of Britain at a dizzying pace on the back of energetic free trade, fecund invention, steam and sail, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of expendable cheap labour.
All the major High Streets in British cities had flourishing department stores by the mid-or late nineteenth century.
[12] At its zenith the store had buildings on both sides of Deansgate linked by a subterranean passage "Kendals Arcade" and an art nouveau tiled food hall.
[19] A novelty shop called Au Bon Marché had been founded in Paris in 1838 to sell items like lace, ribbons, sheets, mattresses, buttons, and umbrellas.
Boucicaut was famous for his marketing innovations; a reading room for husbands while their wives shopped; extensive newspaper advertising; entertainment for children; and six million catalogs sent out to customers.
[22] The great writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) set his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1882–83) in the typical department store, making it a symbol of the new technology that was both improving society and devouring it.
Expanding to a number of stores in the various states of Australia, David Jones is the oldest continuously operating department franchise in the world.
During the Civil War, Arnold Constable was one of the first stores to issue charge bills of credit to its customers each month instead of on a bi-annual basis.
The store soon outgrew the Marble House and erected a cast-iron building on Broadway and Nineteenth Street in 1869; this "Palace of Trade" expanded over the years until it was necessary to move into a larger space in 1914.
He offered European retail merchandise at fixed prices on a variety of dry goods, and advertised a policy of providing "free entrance" to all potential customers.
[30] In 1877, John Wanamaker opened what some claim was the United States' first "modern" department store in Philadelphia: the first to offer fixed prices marked on every article and also introduced electrical illumination (1878), the telephone (1879), and the use of pneumatic tubes to transport cash and documents (1880) to the department store business.
The company's innovative marketing promoted the radical notion of shopping for pleasure rather than necessity and its techniques were adopted by modern department stores the world over.
[38][39] In 2017, over 12,000 U.S. stores closed due to over-expansion of malls, rising rents, bankruptcies, leveraged buyouts, low quarterly profits other than during holiday peak periods, delayed effects of the Great Recession of 2008-9,[39] shifts in spending to experiences rather than material goods, relaxed dress codes in workplaces, and the shift to e-commerce[40] in which Amazon.com and Walmart dominated versus the online offerings of traditional retailers.
[citation needed] Click-and-collect services at department stores had been increasing during the 2010s, with many creating larger, distinctly signed, designated areas.
Some of the more elaborate ones included features such as reception and seating areas with coffee served, computers with large screens for online shopping, and dressing rooms.
[41] With the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, most U.S. retailers offered a curbside pickup service as an option on their websites, and a dedicated area at one of the store entrances accessible by car.
