Posted on 07/15/2023 2:25:54 PM PDT by Twotone
The department store will probably disappear in the next ten to twenty years, according to everyone who still cares about department stores. Writing in the early months of the pandemic, the New York Times predicted that lockdowns would deal the killing blow. If they didn't disappear outright, "there is expected to be an enormous reduction in the number of stores in each chain, which once sprawled across the American continent like a pack of many-headed hydras."
That sort of bleak language – "many-headed hydras" sprawling across a continent – paints a bitter picture of an institution that was once a retail innovation, a game-changing business model as economically crucial as online shopping, fulfillment centres, same-day delivery and instant downloads are today. More than that the department store was, not so long ago, a setting in movies as common and vital as today's cubicle farm or pretentious coffee shop.
By the middle of the last century the department store as shopping destination and workplace was ubiquitous, in films like Miracle on 34th Street, The Big Store, Holiday Affair, Modern Times, Safety Last!, You and Me, There Goes My Heart, The Jackpot, Our Blushing Brides, Employees' Entrance, Bachelor Mother, Who's Minding the Store?, One Touch of Venus, Every Girl Should be Married and many more, if you're just counting Hollywood films.
Strange as it sounds today, as the empty husks of department stores sit at the withered extremities of shopping malls everywhere, the department store was once regarded as not just modern and aspirational, but stood as a microcosm for society as a whole in movies – populous but stratified along class lines, from the budget shoe department in the basement to the perfume counters by the main entrance to the competitively elegant upper floors selling furs and designer dresses.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Oh, THAT Devil in Miss Jones!
That brings back such fond memories (ha!). I worked at the Famous-Barr Department Store in Clayton, MO in high school. The personnel department took one look at me and put me in the Toiletries and Drugs Department next to the bargain basement shoe department. I kept requesting a transfer to Ladies' Shoes, but that fell on deaf ears.
Famous-Barr was owned by May Company, became Federated, and later became Macy's.
The traditional, massive department stores may disappear as we know them to be. Even if they do, I expect a few to still be around. Nothing compares to being in the store with the crowds and all that merchandise. The experience is improved by polite, well dressed and knowledgeable Sales People.
All this adds to what often becomes a heightened state of excitement.
” I expect a few to still be around. Nothing compares to being in the store with the crowds and all that merchandise.”
You can’t have them in areas with ‘diverse’ populations that can’t behave themselves.
The history of department stores is really a very interesting one...from BON MARCHE is Paries, to the LADIES' MILE in Manhattan ( which later moved to Fifth Avenue, to Marshall FIELD'S and CARSON PIERRIE SCOTT in Chicago, to WANNAMAKERS in Philly.
And then there was SELFRIDGES, in London, brought to the fore, by the American, Mr. Selfridge, who had worked his way up and learned the business in Field's!
Today, most younger people aren't "social"; everything is on line, via their phones and/or computers...even "friendships".
Anybody remember Lechmere?
Some of the best days of my life was working there in the late 80’s.
Those times are long gone even for the kids today that are/were my age..
Me, me!
I remember Lechmere in Cambridge, Ma.
Maybe someone could create gargoyles fashioned after “rooftop Koreans” and place them at the corners of the building.
I believe that may have been the first one...
A great place to work and make friends and a GREAT department store too boot.
Most of my remaining friends to this day i met there.
1985-1988..
I worked in the Dedham store.
LOL!!!
Don’t remember that movie.
I did see on called The Devil in Miss Jones which had a very different plot. With many happy endings.
Various novels were set in department stores, too. My favorite department-store novel was Rain in the Doorway, by Thorne Smith.
I sold shoes for JCPenney.
Have watched this movie several times and enjoyed each time. I did not believe the crowd scene at the beach until I googled it and discovered it was a true representation of it.
https://www.coaster101.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/coney-island-1940.jpg
Well, PART of the problem is that it’s a lot easier to get shot or mugged (on a slow day) at a Mall than anywhere else other than the wrong sides of Chicago or Philly or NYC. Oh, and ANY part of San Francisco. ;)
No, thanks!
Steve Martin (of all people!) wrote an interesting novel called, ‘Shopgirl.’
His, ‘The Pleasure of My Company’ is also very good and I loved his bio, ‘Born Standing Up.’
Anyhow, this was sort of ‘shop’-related, LOL!
That’s a lot of people at the beach. No similar scene could be found these days. There’d be a lot more obesity, there’d be fights, and the boardwalk would probabaly collapse.
Precisely what many of us in the southwest imagine the east coast to be like.
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