‘History of department stores: introduction’

KEYWORDS:

• Department stores
• retail history
• mass retailing

When I was working on my history of the American department store industry, I wished for a book-length global study of department stores that united all the stories of retail development and their diverse historical contexts around the world. I am still waiting. Most historical research and analysis of the subject takes place within a single national framework. Given the intricacies of law and policy that shape the direction of retail development in different countries, as well as the important role of culture in all things commercial, national studies make sense. The practicalities of research also favour national studies. Transnational projects require broader training and sometimes additional language skills, as well as international access to archives. While we are still waiting, this special issue of History of Retailing and Consumption takes us closer. As I hope readers will agree, it demonstrates the rich and diverse path of mass retailing around the globe, covering Eastern Europe, the Americas, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Each article focuses on a single country, but together they contribute to our understanding of the international history of this important social institution. The special issue documents cross-cultural influences in retailing, highlighting the influence of the United States across the world, but moving beyond the more well-known Anglo-American networks. Many similarities are evident across national borders, but vastly different political and economic contexts resulted in unique retail environments, shaping labour and consumption in divergent ways.

In the Western context, department stores originated in the nineteenth century. The term ‘department store’ became current in the 1890s in both Britain and the United States, though it was more narrowly applied in Victorian Britain than it was across the Atlantic. One provincial English department store, Browns of Chester, even objected to the term.¹ While historians have documented early opposition to the new retail mode on both sides of the Atlantic, customers embraced it.² Perhaps sooner and to a greater extent in the United States than in Britain, department stores expanded the contours of consumer culture. As has been well documented in North America, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century these department stores made mass consumption possible through their low prices and wide variety of goods under one roof. They also spread a consumer ethos through mass advertising and branding, new merchandising and sales methods, lavish interiors and attractive amenities.³ Nineteenth-century American department stores were harbingers of the rise of a national commercial society and consumer ethos. In Alan Trachtenberg’s words, they ‘stood as a prime urban artifact of the age, a place of learning as well as buying: a pedagogy of modernity.’⁴

Much of the historiography that addressed the North American and Western European experience has focused on department stores’ development and operation as business enterprises, as well as their broader role as social or cultural institutions. Significant early works included Michael Miller’s 1981 monograph on what is arguably the first department store, Paris’s Bon Marché, and William Lancaster’s 1995 study of British department stores.⁵ Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain’s edited volume on European department stores extended the geographic reach of this research, though keeping the focus on the rise of the department store and its early heyday, as have most books on the subject.⁶ The American historiography of department stores began with Susan Porter Benson’s 1986 monograph, which drew on the fields of United States women’s history and labour history to explore the gendered nature of shopping and saleswork.⁷ Department stores also were at the heart of broader studies, such as William Leach’s Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993) and Erika Rappaport’s Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (2000). Over the last twenty years or so, a growing number explored not only their role in creating class and gender identities, but also a sense of place tied to region, nation, and ethnicity.⁸ While it is widely accepted that the modern American department store shaped retailing across the world,⁹ exactly how and to what degree this took place in different national contexts is less well-known. Pioneering early work on non-Western department stores analysed the spread of American and European retailing modes and the adaptations that emerged.¹⁰ Anglo-American retail networks, however, have received more attention.¹¹

Other scholars have focused on department stores’ place within the built environment, writing about them in their spatial contexts. By the end of the nineteenth century, massive department stores were prominent downtown/city centre attractions in many countries, including the United States, Britain, and Germany.¹² In the United States, for example, Philadelphia’s Market Street was home to the Big Six, which included N. Snellenburg & Co., Frank & Seder, Lit Brothers, Gimbel Bros., Strawbridge & Clothier’s and the famous John Wanamaker’s, allegedly the originator of the policy ‘the customer is always right,’ the money-back guarantee, and the one-price system.¹³ Independent department stores became longstanding mainstays of smaller communities, from Main Street America to the British High Street.¹⁴ Architectural historians documented their impact on the American commercial landscape, revealing department stores to be drivers of suburban development.¹⁵ This was less the case in Europe, though out-of-town shopping centres have contributed to ‘the death of the High Street’ phenomenon in recent years.¹⁶ Not surprisingly, department stores were key historical actors in works focused on urban and suburban development, political economy, and citizenship in American cities, but also in London, Paris, and Moscow.¹⁷ My own work documents the rise of a national department store industry in the United States by World War One, comprised of individual merchants, department store executives and trade organisations that pushed for specific legislation and generally worked together to refashion downtowns across the nation. Their embrace of post-World War Two urban renewal, suburban branch expansion, and shopping centre development encouraged automobility and facilitated suburban sprawl.¹⁸

With their long history, department stores have also been sites of conflict. In both the United States and Britain, class and gender conflicts between shoppers and salesclerks, and tensions between different types of merchants have led to resistance and protest.¹⁹ Most prominently in the United States, however, department stores were part of a consumer landscape built upon racial inequality and white racism. Downtown department stores and shopping mall developers took part in destructive post-World War Two urban renewal initiatives that damaged black neighbourhoods in city centres across the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, American retailers raced to the suburbs, undermining their traditional downtown markets. This decentralization was tied to racial inequality in ways highly specific to the history of American public policy. Historians have documented how African Americans resisted, appropriated, and transformed American consumer culture, building a department store movement that demanded economic rights.²⁰ In spite of the successes of the post-1954 civil rights movement, racial discrimination continues in retail settings, as scholars have recently demonstrated.²¹

This special issue of History of Retailing and Consumption thus builds upon a rich and varied historiography. Like many of the works detailed above, the articles published here engage with questions of origin, American influence, and modernity. Some consider public policy and the role of the state. Others deal with department stores as social institutions, shaped by social and cultural norms. However, most break with this historiography’s distinctly Western, even American focus, extending its geographic reach considerably. The issue as a whole highlights new areas where the American department store industry shaped other nation’s retail practice, but perhaps more importantly, it illuminates the ways in which it diverged. Looking beyond the dominant Anglo-American corridor, it becomes clear department stores connected with and helped construct versions of modernity that were bounded by very diverse national frameworks.²²

James Woodard’s study of Brazilian business elites complicates the concept of emulation that has been central to consumer culture historiography focused on Europe and early America. Woodard sees department stores as part of North American consumer capitalism, as cultural institutions parallel to cinema, radio, television, supermarkets, advertising magazines, and malls. Rather than being agents of cultural imperialism, however, he suggests they were central to the making of a Brazilian modernity that stood apart from the United States. Looking at stores like A Exposição Modas run by Lauro de Carvalho out of Rio de Janeiro, Woodard details a complex back and forth exchange between Brazilian elites and the American department store industry. Between 1920s to the 1960s, Brazilian managers and store owners adopted American-style merchandising, changing not only the way middle-class Brazilians shopped, but also introducing new consumer traditions, such as Mother’s Day.

Questions of influence also apply to Evan Roberts’s piece on management and work culture in New Zealand department stores. Looking at a number of stores in New Zealand, such as Farmers’, Smith & Caughey, Kirkcaldie & Stains, Ballantyne’s, and several others, Roberts finds that American and Australian practices significantly influenced local managers. There were many differences as well, including highly specific environmental factors such as the country’s vast distance from manufacturing centres and export markets. Labour relations and wage structuring diverged from American practices, with the New Zealand government supervising collective bargaining in special courts. Work culture varied greatly as a result. The differently gendered environment of department stores also played a role. The small size of New Zealand stores allowed for heterosocial work culture to emerge, in stark contrast to the homosocial world of department stores painted by Susan Porter Benson in the United States (1986).

Brent McKenzie’s piece on Tallinna Kaubamaja, Estonia’s department store, reveals some similarities to the American pattern, but the differences that emerge are much more striking. The periodization of the rise of this retail format in Estonia was uniquely patterned by Eastern European politics and economics. Independence movements, occupations, war and economic crisis drastically remade the business over time. Unlike most of the firms examined by authors in this special issue, Estonia’s department store arrived much later on the retail scene, in 1960, and was state-owned until the re-independence of Estonia resulted in the privatization of the enterprise in the 1990s. Tallinna Kaubamaja, McKenzie argues, was then central to the development of a consumer orientation in Estonian culture as the firm modernized and modelled itself on Western practices. In spite of its unique trajectory, the author suggests it can serve as a potential model for understanding commercial practices in other ‘countries in transition.’

Variations were more common than one might think, even within the United States itself. Sarah Elvins’s piece is the only one in the special issue to centre on the United States. Exploring the development and meaning of department store escalators in American culture, she draws attention to regional disparities. Technological modernizations took place not only at different times across the country, but also carried different meanings. Elvins connects with older questions about the origins and nature of modernity in a consumer society, shedding new light on the concept with her attention to the senses, a subject of growing historiographic interest. From the mid-nineteenth-century prototypes coming out of amusement parks, to the modern Otis escalators in big city stores at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the local department stores in smaller cities and towns across the country in the following decades, moving stairs technology connected to the senses. Escalators provided new visual stimulation and an exciting feeling of speed. Consumers had to learn to escalate, and not all embraced the efficient technology.

In this special issue, Jon Stobart continues his 2017 investigation of the highly varied origins of English provincial department stores, focusing here on the role that newspaper advertising played in market formation. Retailers outside cosmopolitan London used advertising to differentiate class-based markets in sophisticated ways. Stobart points to the contradictory historiographic treatment of provincial department stores, which in some accounts are portrayed as modernizing agents, and in others, as more traditional enterprises, especially when compared to American counterparts. Through close analysis of newspaper advertising for two Manchester stores, Kendal, Milne & Co. and Lewis’s, Stobart assesses previous class-based categorizations. The study affirms the dynamic character of provincial department stores during their heyday.

Department stores remain a relevant subject, one that constantly makes international news. Challenges to brick and mortar retailing, brought about in part by ecommerce and changing consumer habits, are felt in many nations. Longstanding firms that in the past weathered war, economic depression, and major technological transformation have now closed their doors. The prominent American chain department store, Sears, founded in the nineteenth century as a mail order firm and the nation’s largest retailer for many decades, filed for bankruptcy in 2018, shuttering most outlets. In the United Kingdom, Debenhams department store was liquidated in 2021 after trading for almost two and a half centuries. From the British High Street to the American shopping mall, closures have literally and figuratively left holes in diverse communities. Despite declining sales and the bankruptcy of prominent firms, the department store continues to be an important place for work around the world. In the United States, retail workers in department stores numbered 535,000 in 2018.²³ In the United States they generated sales in 2019 of nearly 135 billion U.S. dollars, down from 142 billion registered a year earlier.²⁴ In the United Kingdom, 1.2 million people were employed in non-specialized stores in 2019, a much larger category that included department store workers. UK department store sales in 2019 totaled 34 billion British pounds, down from 35.6 billion British pounds in 2016.²⁵ Ironically, after contributing to their declining retail position, the ecommerce giant Amazon is moving experimentally into the format, with plans for 30,000 square foot stores selling clothing and household items, and facilitating product returns and exchanges.²⁶

Despite their declining numbers, department stores and the shopping malls they anchor continue to be cultural signifiers. Popular accounts of famous merchants like Harry Selfridge continue to engage audiences, even spurring television series.²⁷ Since the 1980s, their loss has generated feelings of nostalgia, expressed across a wide variety of media and in internet communities.²⁸ With all of this popular attention and rich historiography, however, there is still more to do. Comparative work, whether done individually or collectively in volumes like this, provides a way forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vicki Howard

Vicki Howard is Co-editor of History of Retailing and Consumption.

Notes

1 Ian Mitchell, “The Victorian provincial department store: a category too many?,” History of Retailing and Consumption. Vol. 1.2 (August 2015), 152; Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 31; On Browns, see Mass Observation study: Whitlock (ed.) Browns of Chester (1947). Thanks to Jon Stobart for this reference; Jon Stobart details the challenges of classification and definition in “Cathedrals of Consumption? Provincial Department Stores in England, c. 1880-1930,” (December 2017) Enterprise & Society 18 (4):810-845.

2 For a discussion of the retail wars of the 1890s, see Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of New American Culture (Pantheon Books, 1993); Erika Rappaport documents opposition to the department store merchant Whitely in London in “The Halls of Temptation: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London,”(1996) 58–83.

3 Leach, 1993; Howard, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

4 Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture & Society in the Gilded Age (Hill and Wang, 1982), 131.

5 Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (1981); Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (1995).

6 Crossick and Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939 (Ashgate Publishing, 1999).

7 Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (University of Illinois Press, 1986).

8 Miller et al’s Shopping, Place and Identity (Routledge, 1998); Elvins, Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920–1940 (Ohio University Press, 2004); Belisle, Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (University of British Columbia Press, 2011); Lerner, The Consuming Temple: Jews, Department Stores, and the Consumer Revolution in Germany, 1880–1940 (Cornell University Press, 2015); Hilton’s Selling to the Masses: Retailing in Russia, 1880–1930 (University of Pittsburgh, 2011) was one of the first to look at department stores in Eastern European settings.

9 Fujioka and Stobart, “Global and Local: Retail Transformation and the Department Store in Britain and Japan, 1900-1940,” 251–280; Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (Leicester University Press, 1995).

10 MacPherson, ed., Asian Department Stores (Routledge, 1998).

11 Peter Scott and James Walker, “The British ‘failure’ that never was? The Anglo-American ‘productivity gap’ in large-scale interwar retailing-evidence from the department store sector,” (2012): 277–303; Scott and Walker, “Sales and Advertising Rivalry in Interwar American Department Stores,” (March 2011): 40–69; Scott and Walker, “Advertising, promotion, and the competitive advantage of interwar British department stores,” (November 2010)1105–1128.

12 Howard, 2015; Crossick and Jaumain, 1999.

13 Department Stores, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (2011), https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/department-stores

14 Howard, 2015; Stobart, 2017.

15 Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (University of Pennsylvania, 2004); Longstreth, The American Department Store Transformed, 1920–1960 (Yale University Press, 2010).

16 “High-Level Group on Retail Competitiveness: Report of the Preparatory Working Group on SME’s,” European Union, July 2015, p. 7; On department store architecture, also see Robert Proctor, ‘Constructing the retail monument: the Parisian department store and its property, 1855-1914’, Urban History, 33 (2006), 393–410; and Morrison, English Shops and Shopkeeping: an Architectural History New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

17 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, 2004); Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2005); Remus, A Shoppers’ Paradise: How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown (Harvard University Press, 2019); Parker, Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Hilton, 2012.

18 Howard, 2015.

19 For example, see nineteenth-century protests against the London department store, Whiteley’s in Erika Rappaport, “The Halls of Temptation: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London,”(1996) Journal of British Studies: 58–83; Abelson, When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford University Press, 1990); Scott, “The Booster, the Snitch, and the Bogus False Arrest Victim: Retailers and Shoplifters in Interwar America and Britain,” (June 2021): 1-26.

20 Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Howard, 2015; Parker, 2019.

21 Bay and Fabian, Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

22 Important work on Japan has already begun to do this. For example, see Fujioka and Stobart, “Global and Local: Retail Transformation and the Department Store in Britain and Japan, 1900-1940,” (2018): 251–280; Fujioka, “Western models and Eastern influences: Japanese department stores in the early twentieth century: Routledge,” (2019): 477–494.

23 Anderson, “Retail Jobs Among the Most Common Occupations,” United States Census Bureau (September 8, 2020) https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/profile-of-the-retail-workforce.html

24 Statista, 2021.

25 Statista, 2021.

26 Cohan, “Yawn: Department Stores Won’t Fix Amazon’s 13% Growth Problem,” (August 20, 2021) https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2021/08/20/yawn-department-stores-wont-fix-amazons-13-growth-problem/?sh=4166abcf3dec

27 Woodhead, Seduction, Shopping, and Mr. Selfridge (Profile Books, 2007); Émile Zola's 1883 department store novel Au Bonheur des Dames also inspired a British television series, ‘The Paradise,’ which premiered in 2012.

28 Howard, 2015.