The Great American Shopping Experience

The History of American Retail from Main Street to the Mall

Stephen H. Provost

• Editorial: Craven Street Books
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781610353915
• Categoría: Betriebswirtschaft
• Categoría: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

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 orchestra—the 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 unmade—and takes a fond look back at the great times and amazing deals we had along the way.

1HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

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 weren’t 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 wasn’t practical to take a trip to “the city” (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.

Autumn leaves have drifted onto the inset entryway to the old Globman’s flagship store on Church Street in Martinsville, Virginia. The building now houses a furniture outlet. Stephen H. Provost, 2019.

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 “elixir,” and they became even more indispensable with the advent of the telephone. It’s hard to imagine in an era when handheld smartphones are the rule rather than the exception, but there was a time when most people didn’t 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 $400—enough to pay for merchandise to stock a new store, along with the first month’s rent on a 2,000-square-foot building in downtown Martinsville. The town in south-central Virginia wasn’t as big as Fresno (fewer than 3,000 people lived there at the time), but there was plenty of opportunity for an entrepreneur like Globman—if 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.

“They told me I needed an endorser, and I knew no one in this town,” Globman told his grandson, Barry Greene, who would later lead the company. “I had just gotten off the train myself, so I went back to the store, sat on a box of shoes, and cried.”

Those shoes turned out to be his salvation: “In walked a local farmer with thirteen children in tow, all in need of—that’s right—shoes. I sold him anything I could to get that $28, and when he left, I was in business.”

Globman married Mamie “Masha” 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 Wanamaker’s Grand Depot, an old railroad station he transformed into the city’s first true department store in 1876. The palatial building was the successor to Wanamaker’s Oak Hall, a men’s clothing store he had founded in 1861.

Along with A.T. Stewart’s six-story Iron Palace in New York (built in 1862), Wanamaker’s represented the dawn of the modern department store age, and men like Globman and Gottschalk built upon the foundations laid by these early entrepreneurs.

John Wanamaker’s Grand Depot, seen here in an 1876 illustration, was housed in an old train station. Wanamaker later moved the business into an even more elaborate building. Public domain.

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 “palaces” 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 goods—and 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 York’s 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 peddlers—carrying 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 year’s 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.

Nate and Maurice Goldblatt opened a department store on Chicago’s West Side in 1914. Branching out from its origins as a family-owned grocery store and butcher shop, the business eventually became a chain of forty-seven stores operating in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. It thrived during the Depression by offering products at a discount to the Midwest’s immigrant communities, people who were barely scraping by. But the Goldblatts themselves lived high on the proverbial hog: Nate Goldblatt owned a mansion in Chicago that featured an indoor pool and décor that included an Egyptian mummy; younger brother Joel owned a 150-foot yacht.

Maxwell Kohl’s 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 Milwaukee’s south side in 1927, and nearly two decades later, he built the city’s first true supermarket. By the time he opened the first Kohl’s department store, he already operated the largest supermarket chain in the Milwaukee area. (Kohl’s would be one of the few department stores to survive the department store meltdown of the 1990s.)

The Gimbel Brothers store in Philadelphia became one of the East Coast’s major department store “palaces” during the first decade of the twentieth century. Public domain.

GLMBELS AND MACY’S

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 ship’s 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 end—supposedly 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 display—and 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.

Gimbels’ 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, they’d opened another store, this time in Philadelphia. The brothers’ famed New York City store opened in 1910 at Herald Square, just a block south of the store that would become their famed rival, Macy’s.

Gimbels’ biggest rival was, of course, Macy’s. 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 they’d all failed to turn a profit, so he set his eyes on the nation’s biggest city. Macy had worked on a whaling ship before entering the dry-goods business, and during his time as a seaman, he’d gotten a red star tattooed on his hand. He adopted this as the store’s logo, and it remains prominent in the store’s iconography in the twenty-first century.

But it wasn’t 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 Macy’s outright in 1887, a decade after R.H. Macy’s death. They also ...