The store was founded in 1868 and stretched along Eighth to about Ninth and along Eighth to Filbert. Wanamaker Success Spurs Imitators Strawbridge and Clothier was one of three large department stores in the area. The underlying belief was that a happy employee would more pleasantly serve the customer – and that service, as an expression of Christian feeling or as a substitute for it, allowed the newly middle-class shopper to buy a little more without feeling hedonistic. Fair treatment of staff was emphasized by cutting work hours and establishing clinics, clubs, and summer camps. Nearly all emphasized that their job was not simply to sell, but to offer a high level of customer service. Wanamaker and others presented their stores as not simply businesses but as community institutions. His advertising – he is credited with the first full-page newspaper ad – emphasized the goods on sale but often contained moral aphorisms he wrote, such as saying his “New Kind of Store… came to life at the cry of human need… It rehabilitated the people in their rights by the new deal we instituted.” Wanamaker, a devout Presbyterian, represented many of the conflicts between commerce and piety produced by the new consumer culture. Seeing opportunities in the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, which would draw people to rail depots around City Hall, Wanamaker purchased an old freight depot southeast of Centre Square and opened his “Grand Depot.” By fair’s end, Wanamaker and his store were becoming nationally known. By 1871 his men’s store was the largest in the country. In 1861 Wanamaker became a partner in Oak Hall, a manufacturer and retailer of men’s clothing at Sixth and Market Streets, and saw success in manufacturing clothing for Civil War soldiers. Stewart (1803-1876), the New Yorker whose Marble Palace was a Manhattan landmark. John Wanamaker (1838-1922), who grew up in Grays Ferry, dreamed of becoming a merchant prince in the manner of Alexander T. The development of City Hall at Broad and Market Streets and the surrounding railroad stations in the 1870s and 1880sthen pulled retailing west, although Eighth and Market remained the eastern anchor of department stores into the late twentieth century. department stores grew out of dry-goods stores, which in 1860s Philadelphia centered on two main areas – on Second Street, and on Market and Chestnut Streets west from Eighth Street. In the late nineteenth century, Market Street became home to the “Big Six” department stores. Department stores learned to make use of decoration and pageantry, not only lifting shopping out of the mundane but solidifying their roles as community institutions. Shoppers flocked to Wanamaker’s store and its imitators locally and around the nation, drawn by low prices, vast merchandise, and innovations such as charge accounts and tea rooms – the latter among the stores’ most fondly remembered elements. As the United States became a land of immigrants and cities, department stores displayed how Americans lived, or how they might live, while giving them choices about exactly how to do so. In addition to filling immediate wants, the stores created enticing windows, in-store displays, and advertising that fueled shoppers’ aspirations. The department stores’ preeminence came not just from their size, but from how they influenced culture. Also important were elevators, fast newspaper presses, and improvements in shipping fashions from London and Paris to foreign shores. New technologies, especially mass transportation, made department stores possible as trolleys, elevated rail lines, and later subways brought massive numbers of shoppers to “downtowns” – also a new word. The name “department store” first appeared in the mid-1880s. ![]() ![]() The department store – an emporium selling different kinds of merchandise organized into separate departments with their own accounting – was a Parisian invention of the 1850s that underwent further refinements in the United States. But while the big stores seemed at their height in the 1950s and 1960s, they were already starting to succumb to new competitors and lifestyle changes, and each decade eliminated one or more of the institutions that once seemed impregnable. As the suburbs grew before and after World War II, department stores expanded into developing areas, from the affluent Main Line to working-class Northeast Philadelphia. ![]() Led by John Wanamaker, whose store was a national model, Market Street became home to the giant stores known as the “Big Six,” which were close to rail terminals and subway stations. ![]() Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You BackĪs department stores became central to retailing in American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Philadelphia played a major role.
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