Made In America - Bill Bryson [136]
By 1900, Marshall Field was serving as many as 250,000 customers a day, and had become one of Chicago’s biggest employers with a staff of 8,000. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia took orders twenty-four hours a day. Its Crystal Tea Room could handle 10,000 customers at a time. America had embraced with both arms conspicuous consumption, a term coined in 1899 by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class, and much required ever since.
One man more than any other was responsible for the modern look of department stores. He was Harry G. Selfridge, a Wisconsin native who took a job as a stock boy with Marshall Field in 1879 and quickly rose through the ranks. One of his first acts was to take goods down from the high shelves and put them on counters and tables where customers could peer at them, touch them and, as critics noted, shoplift them (though this was by no means a new activity; shoplifting has been part of the English vocabulary since 1680). Among Selfridge’s many other innovations were the bargain basement, annual sales, gift certificates, the practice of reminding customers how many shopping days were left till Christmas, the custom of keeping the ground-floor windows lighted at night, thus encouraging evening strollers to browse and plan their next day’s shopping, and the now universal practice of putting the perfumes and cosmetics departments on the ground floor by the main entrance where they would sweeten the atmosphere and act as a magnet for passers-by.
Retiring from Marshall Field, Selfridge moved to Britain and at the age of fifty founded the London department store that bears his name. Though most British observers felt certain that such a crassly commercial undertaking would never succeed in London, it not only thrived but made Oxford Street into London’s premier shopping thoroughfare. Selfridge was obsessively devoted to his store. He concerned himself with everything from the sharpness of sales clerks’ pencils to the quality of their teeth. Something of his dedication to work is evidenced by a vacation he took in 1914. He left London by train on a Saturday morning and by noon the next day was on the skating-rink of a Swiss hotel. He skated vigorously for four hours, packed up his skates and stocking cap, caught a train back to London and was at his desk at 8 a.m. on the Monday morning. That was his idea of a holiday.
But with the death of his wife in 1918, something snapped inside him. He began to go nightclubbing, fell in with a pair of Hungarian-American vaudeville stars known as the Dolly Sisters and neglected his business. He bought racehorses, gambled and lost spectacularly at Monte Carlo, chartered aeroplanes to bring the Dollys cartons of ice-cream and breasts of chicken for their lapdog, bought a castle on England’s south coast, at Highcliffe in Hampshire, and laid plans to build a 250-room, $15 million estate near by.
In ten years, he ran through $8 million. Unfortunately, not all of it was his. Unable to pay back the debts he owed to his own store – for a decade he and the Dollys had been helping themselves to whatever they fancied without troubling to pay for it – he was ignominiously retired from the Selfridge’s board of directors and given a pension of $25,000 a year (later cut to $12,000 and then to $8,000), from which he was expected to pay back debts of $2 million. He lost his houses and his Rolls-Royce, took a small flat in Putney and travelled by bus. On 8 May 1947 he died nearly destitute and virtually forgotten, and how many times have we heard that story before?
Rather more successful at keeping his hands on his money was Frank W. Woolworth. Where Selfridge had created the bargain basement as a sideline –