Hercules Poirot would have to enlist C.
Auguste Dupin, Inspector Maigret, and the whole Paris police force to
establish with absolute certainty the identity of the world's first
department store - even if it was a French store, as it almost surely must
have been. There are many suspects in this retailing detective story, but
few solid clues. England's Equitable Pioneer's Society Ltd., which opened
in Rochdale, England, in 1844, has been nominated by a few writers, but
Equitable probably didn"t evolve into a true department store until much
later. The same applies to New York's A. T. Stewart's, founded in 1826,
New York's Lord & Taylor, which opened in the same year, and at least
fifty other early stores.
The department store does not derive
directly from the medieval fair or the bazaar, despite the fact that it is
composed of a number of 'stores" gathered in one place. As Ralph Hower put
it in his groundbreaking study of Macy's:
"In contrast with those amorphous
antecedents, the department store is not a haphazard agglomeration of
independent enterprises. It is a formally created and managed
organization, with a hierarchy of control culminating in one man or, at
most, a mere handful of executives. It has an intricate and responsive
nervous system and an alert brain, so that it can adjust quickly to new
situations and ideas. It anticipates public demand and tries to direct it
into certain channels. The fair and the bazaar . . . were essentially
passive retailing institutions, depending on the active participation of
the consumer to determine what goods should be offered and the prices at
which they should be sold. The modern department store is far from
passive. By means of skilled advertising, special exhibitions, and
tempting bargains, it actively attempts to influence our behavior."
There may have been true department stores in the shadows of the pyramids,
in ancient Corinth, or perhaps around the corner from the Forum on the
banks of the Tiber. Cleopatra may have bought her aphrodisiacs for Antony
at a bargain sale in an Alexandria department store. But that is all
guesswork. As far as anyone knows, the first true department store arose
in France in the mid-nineteenth century. The best evidence ascribes its
beginnings to Bon March"of Paris. Founded as a small shop in 1838, Bon
March"began to assume the proportions of a department store by the early
1850s. Paris even at that time had a long history as a retail and fashion
center, its Mercer's Bazaar, called The Pardis des Femmes and very similar
to a modern shopping center, dating back to 1300. According to Thomas
Costain in his novel The Moneyman, a department store existed in France as
early as 1450, but the store he describes was probably just a large
specialty shop. Even at the time Bon March"was founded, Paris was noted
for these large retail stores employing up to 100 people and going by such
colorful names as The Lame Devil, The Poor Devil, The Little Sailor, The
Two Maggots, The Iron Mask, and the Beautiful Farmer's Wife.
Bon March" whose name means "cheap" or a
bargain in French, was started by Aristide Boucicaut as a small retail
shop selling piece goods. Little is known about Boucicaut, but journals of
the day say that he founded the store with hardly any capital. The son of
a fairly prosperous hat-maker, Boucicaut was employed by a manufacturer of
novelties and worked as a clerk in a large dry goods store on the Rue du
Bac before he and his friend Paul Videau pooled their limited resources to
open a small shop on the same street. This little man, no bigger than
Napoleon and ultimately much more successful, was destined to lay the
foundation for the world's enormous department store industry. He was
nearly forty-three when he went into business for himself - an old man for
the day - but from the very beginning he proved a source of fresh,
innovative ideas. Since the neighborhood was a poor one, Boucicaut gave
away needles and thread to lure customers into the store. Little by
little, saving, purchasing wisely, and organizing with rare intelligence,
he built his shop into a great emporium that did an annual volume of over
$1,400,000 by 1862. All the while he had added to the scope of his
operation, branching out from piece goods to women's coats and dresses,
underwear, millinery, and shoes until, sometime in the early 18450s, the
store assumed the characteristics of a department store.
Boucicaut stuck to his principles at a time
when the respected Journal des Economistes denounced the selling of
"diverse goods" such as stockings and handkerchiefs in the same store as
"horrible." But his timid partner Videau grew frightened of the expansion,
agreeing with other retailers that Boucicaut's new ideas were too radical
and romantic. "I prefer to leave you to continue your experiments alone,"
he told his partner. Boucicaut was forced to buy him out in 1863 with
money borrowed from another far-sighted French merchant named Maillard -
not with the help of Jesuits as some petty shopkeepers whispered.
Aristide Boucicaut's innovations were
revolutionary for retail stores of the era; he was far ahead of his time,
and when people finally realized he was right, they said, as they usually
do, that it was obvious all the while. To begin with, he let customers
come in and browse about without any moral obligation to buy. This was a
radical idea in an age when merchants commonly instructed their clerks
never to let a customer leave without purchasing something; if a customer
resisted all blandishments, a clerk was often expected to block his way
until the proprietor came to the rescue with more propositions. A vestige
of this custom remains today in the superstition some small merchants have
that the first customer who enters a store when it opens must be sold
something, even if the merchant only breaks even on the deal.
Boucicaut wisely allowed his customers to
exchange merchandise they bought or get their money back. His "money-back
guarantee" was a new concept that built up his trade substantially, and he
reversed the prevalent practice of taking a high profit on goods that
turned over slowly. The presiding genius of Bon March'sole his
merchandise at a small markup, depending on a rapid turnover of goods to
make his profit. Furthermore, he clearly marked all his goods with fixed
prices and permitted no haggling between customers and clerk. This was
heresy to some shopkeepers; indeed, as late as the eighteenth century, the
distribution of handbills by a few daring retailers advertising sales at
fixed prices had actually been prohibited by French law, just as merchants
had earlier been forbidden by the state to sell more than one kind of
merchandise in their shops.
John Wanamaker, who followed in Boucicaut's
footsteps, once commented on the uncertainty of trading that prevailed in
America before the democratic fixed price. "The law of trading was then
the law of the jungle" he said, "take care of number one. The rules of the
game were: don't pay the first price asked; look out for yourself in
bargaining; haggle and beat the seller as hard as you can. Naturally the
purchaser felt that the concessions he secured from the shopkeeper were so
much money made for himself. But how little he knew! Most assuredly the
storekeeper, butcher or grocer, always added to the price enough to cover
what he had learned was what the customer would beat him down to. And when
a thing was once sold, it was sold - no returns. Exchanges of goods were
rare and discouraged; the return of money was never admissible unless for
goods damaged when purchased."
It would be misleading to say that Boucicaut
originated fixed prices and all the other new retail techniques he used.
The incubation period between the conception of an idea and its
realization can be centuries and was almost always at least decades in
those days, so no one can say with any assurance that Boucicaut invented
marked and fixed prices, low markup and rapid turnover, the money-back
guarantee, freedom of entrance for customers, and the display of a wide
variety of goods in distinctly separate departments. In the last of these
innovations we know that he was certainly anticipated by trading posts,
general stores, and cooperative trading societies, while several
contemporary merchants fixed prices before him. The hazy origin of the
fixed price show just how difficult it is to establish "firsts" for ideas.
An undated business care of A. T. Stewart & Company, which could have been
issued as early as 1827 or as late as 1841, advises that the firm's prices
are "regular and uniform." Adam Gimbel guaranteed fixed prices at his
Indiana trading post in 1840, and several New York merchants were
advertising one-price as early as 1842. Finally, Quakers Potter Palmer (an
early partner of Marshall Field), Rowland Macy, and the founders of
Strawbridge & Clothier established one-price cash policies long before
their stores became department stores, perhaps because Quaker leader
George Fox had urged his followers to eschew sharp bargaining two
centuries earlier. Daniel Defoe, in his retailing history The Compleat
English Tradesman (1826), observes that English Quakers "resolved to ask
no more than they would take upon any occasion whatsoever and chose rather
to lose the sale of their goods, though they could afford at some time to
take what was offered, rather than abate a farthing from the price they
had asked."
Massachusetts law had regulated the price of
shoes as early as 1676, and during the Revolutionary War, Rhode Island
passed a law fixing prices on many commodities to provide for "the better
supply of our troops in the army." Nevertheless, by making fixed prices
and other innovative ideas firm policies in his store, Boucicaut created
the first true department store, even though his lines of merchandise were
at first limited to clothing apparel and textiles. It is interesting to
note that Zola visited Bon March"to research Au Bonnheur des Dames, his
novel about department stores. When Boucicaut died in 1877, his childless
widow Marguerite immediately sold the shares of the business to his
employees, who continued its expansion under her guidance until her death
a decade later. For many year Bon March"remained the grea**** department
store in the
Department Store">
world - it did a total business of over $30 million in 1897 - and not a
franc's worth of its stock was held outside the people in the store; the
leadership of the strictly cooperative venture was vested in three persons
elected from the heads of departments by the employees. With Bon March"
began a new thing under the sun, the age of les grands magasins in Paris,
with great stores like the Printemps joining its ranks. At Les Grands
Magasins du Louvre, founded in 1855, which was inspired by Boucicaut's
success but catered to a higher class clientele, home furnishings
departments and others were added, and soon three were practically no
restrictions on what the department store could sell. Indeed, so
successful did Bonn March"become that stores all over the world actually
adopted its name!