The History of American Retail from Main Street to the Mall
Stephen H. Provost
This is a test
This is a test
Share book
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Great American Shopping Experience
The History of American Retail from Main Street to the Mall
Stephen H. Provost
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
A fun, nostalgic look at the great American stores of yesteryear and their rise and fall.
The wealthy and leisured lady of the 1920s shopped in a palatial downtown department store with a restaurant, beauty parlor, movie theater, and live orchestraâthe harried suburban mom of today rushes her purchases through the self-checkout at the big box store. The Great American Shopping Experience explains how this transformation happened in a fascinating and entertaining history of the growth and decline of America's massive retail empires.
From the humble 19th century dry goods store to the majestic department stores of the early 20th century to the shopping malls and outlet stores of today, The Great American Shopping Experience tells the romantic story of Americans' relentless pursuit of the better bargain, surveying the changing fashions, social ideals, and marketing innovations that created shopping as we know it.
The Great American Shopping Experience also takes a nostalgic look back at the stores we loved, from the small regional stores that were gobbled up to the big chains that still survive today. If you've ever wondered what happened to your favorite store, The Great American Shopping Experience has the answers.
A popular history that is both fun and compelling, The Great American Shopping Experience tells an epic story of capitalism's powers of creative destruction, the repeated transformation of American society, fortunes made and unmadeâand takes a fond look back at the great times and amazing deals we had along the way.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Great American Shopping Experience an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Great American Shopping Experience by Stephen H. Provost in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Betriebswirtschaft & Wirtschaftsgeschichte. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
If you want to know the origins of the department store, you need look no further than the general store, the one-stop-shop for rural America during the nineteenth century. Back then, most of America was rural, so there were a lot of general stores. Most towns had one, just the way most towns had a newspaper. There werenât enough people in a country town to support a row of specialty retailers, but there were enough who needed the basics: food on the table, tools for the woodshed, dinnerware for the table, coats for the winter, and stationery for writing letters to relatives back east.
Before the age of the motorcar, it simply wasnât practical to take a trip to âthe cityâ (whether it be New York, Boston, Richmond, or Chicago) to procure these items. The food would spoil by the time you got it back home, and the bumpy, dusty cart paths might leave you with broken dishes and ripped or dirty clothing by the time you made it back.
The general store filled a much-needed niche by collecting all the necessities under a single roof (along with a few minor luxuries), and it naturally became a gathering place for the townsfolk and those in the surrounding area. General stores might even give you a stool to sit on and serve you a sandwich or an âelixir,â and they became even more indispensable with the advent of the telephone. Itâs hard to imagine in an era when handheld smartphones are the rule rather than the exception, but there was a time when most people didnât even have a landline in their homes. They had to travel down the road to the general store to place or receive phone calls, because it had the only phone for miles around.
These general stores, immortalized (at least for my generation) in TV shows like The Waltons and Petticoat Junction, were the forerunners of two distinct but related retail phenomena: the department store and the five-and-dime. Insofar as there was any specialization, it occurred in larger cities, where grocers and hardware stores were often separate from so-called dry-goods establishments that carried clothing, textiles, cosmetics, and personal hygiene products.
The dry-goods industry gave rise to a number of department stores, many of which were founded by immigrants seeking to make a living in their new home. In 1890, a Jewish immigrant from Germany named Emil Gottschalk moved from Sacramento to Fresno, California, then a city of about 15,000 people. He got a job at a dry-goods store and worked his way up to become manager there, only to quit when the owner reneged on a promise to give him a share of the business after ten years.
That setback, however, turned out to be temporary. On a visit to the barbershop one day, Gottschalk overheard a local developer say he was looking for a tenant to occupy the ground floor of a four-story project he was building downtown. Gottschalk approached the developer and secured a lease for 30,000 square feet, where he would launch E. Gottschalk & Co. in 1904.
Seven years later, a Russian Jew named Abe Globman arrived in Philadelphia. At first, Globman (born Abo Gleibman) earned what he could by selling shoelaces and handkerchiefs from a cart, but he soon abandoned that enterprise and went to work at a dry-good stores for $3 a week.
Globman moved to Virginia in 1913, where he earned a better salary ($5 a week) working for a friend and managed to pull together $400âenough to pay for merchandise to stock a new store, along with the first monthâs rent on a 2,000-square-foot building in downtown Martinsville. The town in south-central Virginia wasnât as big as Fresno (fewer than 3,000 people lived there at the time), but there was plenty of opportunity for an entrepreneur like Globmanâif he could get his new store off the ground. He hit a snag, however, almost immediately. After paying rent for the building and buying the merchandise to stock it, he had just $12 left. Unfortunately, that was $28 short of the freight charge to ship the merchandise from Philly to Martinsville.
âThey told me I needed an endorser, and I knew no one in this town,â Globman told his grandson, Barry Greene, who would later lead the company. âI had just gotten off the train myself, so I went back to the store, sat on a box of shoes, and cried.â
Those shoes turned out to be his salvation: âIn walked a local farmer with thirteen children in tow, all in need ofâthatâs rightâshoes. I sold him anything I could to get that $28, and when he left, I was in business.â
Globman married Mamie âMashaâ Zimmerman in 1915, and the pair took just one day for a honeymoon before they got to work, spending twelve to sixteen hours in the store every day but Sunday.
FROM PEDDLERS TO PRINCES
Being from Philadelphia, Globman may have been inspired by John Wanamakerâs Grand Depot, an old railroad station he transformed into the cityâs first true department store in 1876. The palatial building was the successor to Wanamakerâs Oak Hall, a menâs clothing store he had founded in 1861.
Along with A.T. Stewartâs six-story Iron Palace in New York (built in 1862), Wanamakerâs represented the dawn of the modern department store age, and men like Globman and Gottschalk built upon the foundations laid by these early entrepreneurs.
As these early endeavors demonstrated, the evolution from general store to department store was far from linear. It naturally occurred faster in big cities than it did in the countryside. Places like Philadelphia and New York City were large enough to support such retail âpalacesâ long before they appeared in towns like Fresno and Martinsville. But even though that evolution progressed at different speeds in urban and rural America, the process itself was remarkably similar: As populations grew, so did the demand for a variety of goodsâand the number of entrepreneurs willing to meet that demand.
The profile of these entrepreneurs was also similar. Stewart and Wanamaker were exceptions. The Irish-born Stewart had turned to retail after abandoning plans to be a minister, eventually amassing a fortune surpassed only by the fortunes of the Vanderbilt and Astor families among New Yorkâs elite. Wanamaker, the son of Swiss-born parents and a devout Christian, had been born in Philadelphia.
But most of the pioneers in this burgeoning new retail industry were men like Gottschalk and Globman, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to America to seek their fortunes. Many of them, like Adam Gimbel, started off as peddlersâcarrying goods such as textiles and watches from one place to another, foreshadowing the door-to-door sales techniques used to hawk encyclopedias, Avon cosmetics, and Fuller brushes. Such peddlers had been common in Europe, not only in Jewish but also in Roma communities, since the Middle Ages, when they camped outside towns in wagons they shared with the goods they sold. In the United States, there were 16,000 peddlers in 1860, according to that yearâs census, and their names revealed that most of them were Jewish.
Some immigrants got their start in the grocery business, like the Goldblatt brothers in Chicago and, later, Maxwell Kohl to the north in Milwaukee.
Maxwell Kohlâs foray into the department store business came much later, in 1962. By that time, however, he already had thirty-five years of experience in retail. The Polish immigrant had started with a small corner grocery store on Milwaukeeâs south side in 1927, and nearly two decades later, he built the cityâs first true supermarket. By the time he opened the first Kohlâs department store, he already operated the largest supermarket chain in the Milwaukee area. (Kohlâs would be one of the few department stores to survive the department store meltdown of the 1990s.)
GLMBELS AND MACYâS
Other immigrants, however, got their start in dry goods. Seventeen-year-old Adam Gimbel earned passage to the United States from his native Bavaria in 1835 by working as a shipâs hand and began life in his new country as a dock worker in New Orleans. There, he took note of the peddlers who worked the river, carrying large waterproof packs on their backs and offering various goods for sale to rural farmers in the Mississippi Valley.
Intrigued, Gimbel decided to try his hand at the retail game. He purchased some needles, thread, and cloth and produced handbills advertising his goods for sale, which he nailed to trees along the river route. In 1842, his life as an itinerant peddler came to an endâsupposedly thanks to a bout of diarrhea that forced him to stop in Vincennes, Indiana. There, he rented a hotel room where he put his merchandise on displayâand sold it all in the span of a week. He restocked and rented a room from a local dentist to establish what he called the Palace of Trade. When the dentist retired, Gimbel took over the entire house.
Gimbelsâ children (he had fourteen of them) carried on the retail tradition. His seven sons opened the first Gimbel Brothers store in Milwaukee, a four-story shop that featured carpets and dry goods, in 1887. Before a decade had passed, theyâd opened another store, this time in Philadelphia. The brothersâ famed New York City store opened in 1910 at Herald Square, just a block south of the store that would become their famed rival, Macyâs.
Gimbelsâ biggest rival was, of course, Macyâs. The business had been founded by a Massachusetts Quaker named R.H. Macy, who had moved to New York City to set up shop in 1858. He opened four dry-goods stores in the previous twelve years, but theyâd all failed to turn a profit, so he set his eyes on the nationâs biggest city. Macy had worked on a whaling ship before entering the dry-goods business, and during his time as a seaman, heâd gotten a red star tattooed on his hand. He adopted this as the storeâs logo, and it remains prominent in the storeâs iconography in the twenty-first century.
But it wasnât Macy who built the company that bore his name into a true retail powerhouse. That task fell to the sons of a Jewish immigrant named Lazarus Straus, who immigrated to the United States in 1852 and teamed up with a Jewish peddler to open a Georgia dry-goods store. His sons Nathan and Isidor joined him two years later, but the family moved north in 1865 amid rising anti-semitism at the end of the Civil War. Instead of founding another dry-goods store, Straus and his sons formed an import business called L. Straus & Co. in New York. This led, in 1874, to a deal with Macy to run his chinaware and glass department.
The department became so successful that the Strauses could afford to buy Macyâs outright in 1887, a decade after R.H. Macyâs death. They also ...