Department store
A department store is a
retail establishment which specializes in selling a wide range of products without a single predominant merchandise line. Department stores usually sell products including
apparel,
furniture, appliances,
electronics, and additionally select other lines of products such as
paint, hardware, toiletries,
cosmetics, photographic equipment,
jewelry,
toys, and sporting goods. Certain department stores are further classified as discount department stores. Discount department stores commonly have central customer
checkout areas, generally in the front area of the store.
Encyclopedia
A
department store is a
retail establishment which specializes in selling a wide range of products without a single predominant merchandise line. Department stores usually sell products including
apparel,
furniture, appliances,
electronics, and additionally select other lines of products such as
paint, hardware, toiletries,
cosmetics, photographic equipment,
jewelry,
toys, and sporting goods. Certain department stores are further classified as discount department stores. Discount department stores commonly have central customer
checkout areas, generally in the front area of the store. Department stores are usually part of a
retail chain of many stores situated around a country or several countries.
History
Hudson's Bay Company in
Canada was the first store to include departments; however, by modern standards, it would not be considered a department store because of the size and range of items that were stocked. The same may be said about
Gostiny Dvor in
St Petersburg, which opened in 1785 and should probably be regarded as one of the first purposely-built
shopping malls in the world, as it consisted of more than 100 shops covering an area of over 53,000 m².
The first true department store was founded by Aristide Boucicaut in
Paris. He founded Bon Marché in 1838, and by 1852 it offered a wide variety of goods in "departments" inside one building. Goods were sold at fixed prices, with guarantees allowing exchanges and refunds. By the end of the
19th century, Georges Dufayel, a French credit merchant, had served up to three million customers and was affiliated with
La Samaritaine, a large French department store established in 1870 by a former Bon Marché executive.
The oldest independent department store in the world, until it was recently purchased by
House of Fraser, was
Jenners in Edinburgh, Scotland, which has maintained its original position on Edinburgh's
Princes Street since 1838.
As Bon Marché evolved into a fully fledged department store in the early 1850s, Delany's New Mart opened in 1853 in
Dublin,
Ireland on Sackville Street . What made Delany's different from most department stores of its time was its purpose-built nature; unlike others it had not evolved gradually from a smaller shop on site. Constructed to a lavish standard on the city's principal street, it was designed to rival the biggest and best in Europe. Acquired by the Clery family in the late 19th century, both the store and Imperial Hotel located in its upper floors were completely destroyed in the 1916
Easter Rising. However the store reopened in 1922, this time across numerous floors, as the famous
Clerys department store that stands today, housed in a striking modern neoclassical building based on
Selfridges of London.
Another claimant to the title of "World's first department store" is Bainbridges in
Newcastle upon Tyne, founded in 1838 as a drapers and fashion shop but on record as collecting its takings by department as early as 1849. The ledger from that year still survives in the archives of the John Lewis Partnership who bought the store in 1952, and retained its original name until 2002 when the store was rebranded as John Lewis Newcastle.
In
New York City in 1846, Alexander Turney Stewart established the "Marble Palace" on the east-Broadway, between Chambers and Reade streets. 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. Though it was clad in white marble to look like a
Renaissance palazzo, the building's
cast iron construction permitted large
plate glass windows. In 1862 Stewart built a department store on a full city block at Broadway and 9th Street, opposite Grace Church, 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. Within a couple of decades,
New York's retail center had moved uptown, forming a stretch of retail shopping from "Marble Palace" that was called the "Ladies' Mile". In 1858
Rowland Hussey Macy founded
Macy's as a dry goods store. Benjamin Altman and
Lord & Taylor soon competed with Stewart as New York's first department stores, later followed by "McCreary's" and, in
Brooklyn, "Abraham & Straus" . ISBN 0-679-40064-8.
- Spang, Rebecca L. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 325 p.
- Whitaker, Jan. Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. ISBN 0-312-32635-1.
External links
- — Long detailed paper describing the history of the department store
