Department stores by country
From its origins in the fur trade, the Hudson's Bay Company is the oldest corporation in North America and was the largest department store operator in Canada until the mid-1980s, with locations across the country.
Other department stores in Canada are: Canadian Tire, Ogilvy, Les Ailes de la Mode, Giant Tiger, Co-op, Costco and Holt Renfrew.
Brazil's economic instability and the growing dominance of the internet in the retail market make it difficult for a wide variety of department stores to exist in the country, with only more consolidated chains such as Lojas Americanas, Magazine Luiza and Havan prevailing.
In the twentieth century these eventually gave way to stores such as Felix B. Maduro, Sarah Panamá, Figali, Danté, Sears, Gran Morrison and smaller ones such as Bon Bini, Cocos, El Lider, Piccolo and Clubman.
In Puerto Rico, various national department store chains have operated over the years on the island, such as Sears, Woolworth, JC Penney, Macy's, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Marshalls, Burlington Coat Factory, T.J. Maxx, Costco, Sam's Club and others.
Some of its stores were oriented to motorists – set apart from existing business districts amid residential areas occupied by their target audience; had ample, free, off-street parking; and communicated a clear corporate identity.
They included Higbee's (1860), Bailey's (1899), the May Company (1888), Taylor's (1870), Halle's (1891), and Sterling Lindner Davis (1845), which collectively represented one of the largest and most fashionable shopping districts in the country, often compared to New York's Fifth Avenue.
Recognized as an emporium for high-quality fashions, 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.
In 1925, Arnold, Constable merged with Stewart & Company and expanded into the suburbs, first with a 1937 store in New Rochelle, New York and later in Hempstead and Manhasset on Long Island, and in New Jersey.
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.
In 1862, Stewart built a new store on a full city block uptown between 9th and 10th streets, with eight floors and nineteen departments of dress goods and furnishing materials, carpets, glass and china, toys and sports equipment, ranged around a central glass-covered court.
The other department store that has been established lately is Hyperstar that invested by Carrefour's license holder, Majid Al Futtaim Group, in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan.
It operates 17 retail outlets across the country and offers a wide selection of imported international brands in fashion and apparel, perfumery, cosmetics, accessories, housewares, electronics, appliances and food.
The most well-known department stores in Singapore are BHG (formerly known as Seiyu), Isetan, John Little, Marks & Spencer, Metro, Mustafa, OG, Robinson & Co., Takashimaya and Tangs.
Notable department stores are Odel, the Food City chain by Cargills (Ceylon) PLC and the Arpico Super Centre operated by David Pieris & Co.
[101] A novelty shop called Au Bon Marché had been founded in Paris in 1838 to sell lace, ribbons, sheets, mattresses, buttons, umbrellas and other assorted goods.
The entrepreneur Aristide Boucicaut became a partner in 1852, and changed the marketing plan, instituting fixed prices and guarantees that allowed exchanges and refunds, advertising, and a much wider variety of merchandise.
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.
[106] The Grands Magasins Dufayel was a huge department store with inexpensive prices built in 1890 in the northern part of Paris, where it reached a very large new customer base in the working class.
It educated workers to approach shopping as an exciting social activity not just a routine exercise in obtaining necessities, just as the bourgeoisie did at the famous department stores in the central city.
The design and function of department stores in Germany followed the lead of London (specially Harrods), Paris (Galeries Lafayette, Printemps, Bon Marche), Chicago (Marshall Fields) and New York (Macy, Siegel, Cooper & Co).
GUM was designed to advance the Bolsheviks' goals of eliminating private enterprise and rebuilding consumerism along socialist lines, as well as democratizing consumption for workers and peasants nationwide.
In trying to create a socialist consumer culture from scratch, GUM recast the functions and meanings of buying and selling, turning them into politically charged acts that could either contribute to or delay the march toward utopian communism.
The business dates back to 1838, when Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge went into partnership with William Alder Dunn and opened a drapers and fashion shop in Newcastle's Market Street.
[129] 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.
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.
By the mid nineteenth century, many British cities had flourishing department stores, with pioneers in London including James Shoolbred (est.1820), George Hitchcock Williams & Co (est.1841), Swan & Edgar (est.1812), Dickins & Jones (est.1790), Marshall & Snelgrove (est.1837) and Harrods (est.1834), while in Scotland, there was the firms of J.
Lewis's built up the largest chain of stores in the country, opening branches in Manchester (1877), Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Hanley, London, Blackpool, Bristol and Leicester.
[146] Debenhams, who by 1919 controlled Marshall & Snelgrove and Harvey Nichols, felt threatened as they would lose the sales to these new combined groups from its extensive wholesale business, and in 1927 agreed a deal to purchase the Drapery Trust from Hatry.
[179] House of Fraser was saved from administration on the 10 August 2018 by Sports Direct, when they agreed to buy the assets of the business, the stores, brand and the stock, for £90 million in cash on a pre-packaged insolvency basis.
