Abstract
Retail pioneers in the mid-1800s revolutionized shopping by offering good-quality products with stated prices and without chicanery, instead of the old merchants’ insistence upon charging different prices to individual consumers after protracted haggling. The new-style retailers also created dream worlds of consumption. Despite these benefits, critics found plenty to criticize about these palaces of consumption, including concerns regarding the chastity of women shoppers and clerks. The pioneering retailers often treated their workers better than employers in other industries.
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Notes
- 1.
French and Popp provided several unflattering depictions of traveling salesmen.
- 2.
J.P. Johnston’s Twenty Years of Hus’ling, written in 1888, mocked the commercial travelers. Johnston bragged about his ability to “hustle” instead of wasting time “getting acquainted.” Johnston’s method involved pushing ahead, fast pitch, quick sale, and, presumably, rapid disappearance (Spears 1995, 103; Johnson 1908).
- 3.
Uriah Heep might have made a cracker-jack sales clerk.
- 4.
Barry Levinson’s movie Tin Men, depicted a variation of this stunt whereby the aluminum siding salesman would casually drop a $5 bill on the ground, pick it up, and say to the prospective customer, “Did you drop this?” By establishing his reputation for “honesty,” the salesman prepped his customer/victim.
- 5.
Takatoshi Mitsui ran a kimono shop in Japan during the 1670s. He presaged Stewart’s tactics of cash-only sales. He also set fixed prices and eliminated haggling; this policy proved quite popular (Yamamura 1973, 178).
- 6.
Some historians attributed the one-price policy to John Wanamaker, but a Wanamaker biographer made the distinction that Stewart originated and Wanamaker “established” the policy (Appel 1940, 53–59).
- 7.
The author of this book would argue the department store and its kin can be more aptly described as extractive industries. They serve to extract money from wallets and purses; the escalators are eerily reminiscent of the conveyor belts in mines.
- 8.
Ward often emphasized the fact that he bought direct from the producer, saving money for his customers and himself (Montgomery Ward & Co. 1972, 12).
- 9.
Why Sears restrained himself from using, say, “The Cheapest Supply House in the Galaxy,” is an interesting question?
- 10.
Sears employed another subterfuge in his watch business. He sent out thousands of postcards in facsimile handwriting. He relied upon his customers’ credulity in thinking the handwriting was real. On the other hand, the prose in his ad copy proved effective (Hoge 1988, 21).
- 11.
The author worked for a retail drug store; the price code used the word, “REPUBLICAN,” which in addition to representing the owners’ political persuasion, also stood for the digits 0–9.
- 12.
For a more flattering description of Field, see Darby (1986, 25, 36).
- 13.
The commission system afforded sales clerks an opportunity to escape a working-class standard of living, but clerks undoubtedly had to bite their tongues or turn the other cheek in dealing with obstreperous customers, and such customers were apparently plentiful in the nineteenth century (Miller 1981, 91–92).
- 14.
In film director Ernst Lubitsch’s charming Shop Around the Corner with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, the two stars are bickering clerks in a small shop in Budapest. At a key point in the film, the owner, Matuschek, summarily dismisses the Stewart character—whom he mistakenly suspects of having an affair with his wife.
- 15.
Selfridge learned from Marshall Field, whose slogan was, “Give the lady what she wants (Wendt 1952).”
- 16.
Bowlby noted, “This apparently foolproof recipe—his fury, your tears, a nice meal, a ‘fresher, happier’ you, then finally his conversion—is an interesting lesson in that much-vaunted nineteenth-century feminine power of ‘influence.’” The advice “comes from woman to woman, not from a man, and involves first bypassing and then mollifying a male authority (Bowlby 1985, 22).”
- 17.
Militant suffragists went on a rampage and broke windows in March 1912; they did not distinguish between anti- and pro-suffrage retailers. Those retailers who supported suffrage and whose windows were smashed, carried on without comment (Cox and Hobley 2014, 122).
- 18.
Cox and Hobley described how difficult it was for store staff and detectives apprehend upper-class females (Cox and Hobley 2014, 75).
- 19.
At least the contemporary had the self-control not to add “where she [the female shoplifter] will suffer the torment of the damned,” or some similar dramatic denouement.
- 20.
See Emma Goldman’s similar tirade (Shteir 2011, 41).
- 21.
Hoffman and his sidekicks pulled off one amusing stunt, though, when they went through the New York Stock Exchange and tossed money, most of it play money, among the traders, some of whom scrambled for the loot (Rubin, Do It, 117).
- 22.
In a sense, the philosophy was reminiscent of playground morality: It’s okay to steal, if the other party stole first!
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Surdam, D.G. (2020). Rise of the Big Retail Merchants. In: Business Ethics from the 19th Century to Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37169-2_7
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