Department store


A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store under one roof, each area specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, department stores emerged in the mid-19th century, reshaping shopping habits and the definition of service and luxury. Similar developments were under way in London, in Paris and in New York City.
Today, departments often include the following: clothing, cosmetics, do it yourself, furniture, gardening, hardware, home appliances, houseware, paint, sporting goods, toiletries, and toys. Additionally, other lines of products such as food, books, jewellery, electronics, stationery, photographic equipment, baby products, and products for pets are sometimes included. Customers generally check out near the front of the store in discount department stores, while high-end traditional department stores include sales counters within each department. Some stores are one of many within a larger retail chain, while others are an independent retailer.
Since the 1980s, department stores have faced increasing competition from discount retailers, and later from e-commerce businesses in the 2000s.

Types

Department stores can be classified in several ways:
Some sources may refer to the following types of stores as department stores, even though they are not generally considered as such:
  • Hypermarkets
  • Variety stores, also known in the U.S. as five and dimes, or dollar stores

    History

Origins in England, 1700s

One of the first department stores may have been Bennett's in Derby, first established as an ironmonger in 1734. It continued trading in the same building until its administration and closure in 2019. However, the first reliably dated department store to be established, was Harding, Howell & Co., which opened in 1796 on Pall Mall, London. The oldest department store chain may be Debenhams, which was established in 1778 and closed in 2021. It is the longest trading defunct British retailer. 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. It is fitted up with great taste, and is divided by glazed partitions into four departments, for the various branches of the extensive business, which is there carried on. Immediately at the entrance is the first department, which is exclusively appropriated to the sale of furs and fans. The second contains articles of haberdashery of every description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves, &etc. In the third shop, on the right, you meet with a rich assortment of jewelry, ornamental articles in ormolu, French clocks, &etc.; and on the left, with all the different kinds of perfumery necessary for the toilette. The fourth is set apart for millinery and dresses; so that there is no article of female attire or decoration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion. 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.

This venture is described as having all of the basic characteristics of the department store; it was a public retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different departments. Jonathan Glancey for the BBC writes:
Harding, Howell & Co was focused on the needs and desires of fashionable women. Here, at last women were free to browse and shop, safely and decorously, away from home and from the company of men. These, for the main part, were newly affluent middle-class women, their good fortune – and the department store itself – nurtured and shaped by the Industrial Revolution. This was transforming life in London and the length and breadth of Britain at a dizzying pace on the back of energetic free trade, fecund invention, steam and sail, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of expendable cheap labour.

This pioneering shop was closed down in 1820 when the business partnership was dissolved. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, most major High Streets in British cities featured flourishing department stores. Increasingly, women became the main customers. Kendals in Manchester lays claim to being one of the first department stores and is still known to many of its customers as Kendal's, despite its 2005 name change to House of Fraser. The Manchester institution dates back to 1836 but had been trading as Watts Bazaar since 1796. At its zenith the store had buildings on both sides of Deansgate linked by a subterranean passage "Kendals Arcade" and an art nouveau tiled food hall. The store was especially known for its emphasis on quality and style over low prices giving it the nickname "the Harrods of the North", although this was due in part to Harrods acquiring the store in 1919. Harrods of London can be traced back to 1834, though the current store was built between 1894 and 1905. Opened in 1830, Austins in Derry remained in operation as the world's oldest independent department store until its closure in 2016. Lewis's of Liverpool operated from 1856 to 2010. A concept devised by retail entrepreneur David Lewis, the world's first Christmas grotto opened in Lewis's in 1879, entitled 'Christmas Fairyland'. Liberty & Co. in London's West End gained popularity in the 1870s for selling Oriental goods. In 1889, Oscar Wilde wrote "Liberty's is the chosen resort of the artistic shopper".

Origins in Parisian ''magasins de nouveautés''

The Paris department stores have roots in the magasin de nouveautés, or novelty store; the first, the Tapis Rouge, was created in 1784. They flourished in the early 19th century. Balzac described their functioning in his novel César Birotteau. In the 1840s, with the arrival of the railroads in Paris and the increased number of shoppers they brought, they grew in size, and began to have large plate glass display windows, fixed prices and price tags, and advertising in newspapers.
A novelty shop called Au Bon Marché had been founded in Paris in 1838 to sell items like lace, ribbons, sheets, mattresses, buttons, and umbrellas. It grew from and 12 employees in 1838 to and 1,788 employees in 1879. 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. By 1880 half the employees were women; unmarried women employees lived in dormitories on the upper floors.
Au Bon Marché soon had half a dozen or more competitors including Printemps, founded in 1865; La Samaritaine, Bazar de Hotel de Ville ; and Galeries Lafayette. The French gloried in the national prestige brought by the great Parisian stores. The great writer Émile Zola set his novel Au Bonheur des Dames in the typical department store, making it a symbol of the new technology that was both improving society and devouring it.

First Australian department stores

Australia is notable for having the longest continuously operating department store, David Jones. The first David Jones department store was opened on 24 May 1838, by Welsh born immigrant David Jones in a "large and commodious premises" on the corner of George and Barrack Streets in Sydney, only 50 years after the foundation of the colony. Expanding to a number of stores in the various states of Australia, David Jones is the oldest continuously operating department franchise in the world. Other department stores in Australia include Grace Bros founded in 1885, now merged with Myer which was founded in 1900.

First American department stores (1825–1858)

was the first American department store. It was founded in 1825 as a small dry goods store on Pine Street in New York City. In 1857 the store moved into a five-story white marble dry goods palace known as the Marble House. During the Civil War, Arnold Constable was one of the first stores to issue charge bills of credit to its customers each month instead of on a bi-annual basis. 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. Financial problems led to bankruptcy in 1975.
In New York City in 1846, Alexander Turney Stewart established the "Marble Palace" on 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 that permitted major seasonal displays, especially in the Christmas shopping season. In 1862, Stewart built a new store on a full city block uptown between 9th and 10th streets, with eight floors. His innovations included buying from manufacturers for cash and in large quantities, keeping his markup small and prices low, truthful presentation of merchandise, the one-price policy, simple merchandise returns and cash refund policy, selling for cash and not credit, buyers who searched worldwide for quality merchandise, departmentalization, vertical and horizontal integration, volume sales, and free services for customers such as waiting rooms and free delivery of purchases. In 1858, Rowland Hussey Macy founded Macy's as a dry goods store.