Department Store
Flamboyant American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge introduced Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-19th century America.
Flamboyant American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge introduced Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-19th century America. He swept away previous shopkeepers’ customs of keeping shopper and merchandise apart to one where “just looking” was positively encouraged. In the full-page newspaper adverts Selfridge took out when his eponymous department store opened in London in the early 1900s, he compared the “pleasures of shopping” to those of “sight-seeing”. He installed the largest plate glass windows in the world – and created, behind them, the most sumptuous shop window displays. His adverts pointedly made clear that the “whole British public” would be welcome – “no cards of admission are required”. Recognising that his female customers offered profitable opportunities that competitors were neglecting, one of his quietly revolutionary moves was the introduction of a ladies’ lavatory. Selfridge saw that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. As Tim Harford explains, one of Selfridge’s biographers even thinks he “could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women.”
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Images: Selfridges Christmas shop window, Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
Last on
Sources and related links
Lindy Woodhead - Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge, Profile Books, 2007
Frank Trentmann - Empire of Things London: Allen Lane 2016
Steven Johnson - Wonderland New York: Riverhead Books 2016
Harry E. Resseguie - Alexander Turney Stewart and the Development of the Department Store, 1823-1876, The Business History Review, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 301-322
Broadcasts
- Sat 1 Jul 2017 02:50GMT鶹Լ World Service except Online, Australasia, News Internet & UK DAB/Freeview
- Sat 1 Jul 2017 19:50GMT鶹Լ World Service except East and Southern Africa, News Internet & West and Central Africa
- Mon 3 Jul 2017 03:50GMT鶹Լ World Service Online & UK DAB/Freeview only
Podcast
-
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
The stories of inventions, ideas and innovations which helped create the economic world