A weary sense of inevitability about legacy retail’s demise should not obscure how traumatic a development it is
all its modern crises, America has looked to its merchants for leadership. In 1914 John Wanamaker, the greatest retailer of the age, made headlines by dispatching 2,000 tons of food aid to Belgium—then suggesting America buy the little country to make the peace.
Online ones are thriving but unloved. The biggest, Amazon, is battling damaging headlines over its patchy service and treatment of workers. Traditional retailers are meanwhile looking into the abyss. This week J.Crew filed for bankruptcy. JCPenney, whose low-cost innovations helped it survive the Depression and proved inspirational to one of its employees, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, is also struggling under a heavy debt load.
The emergence of palatial, multi-line stores in New York, Chicago and other big cities in the mid-19th century was a first-world phenomenon, pioneered in Europe. Yet merchants such as Wanamaker, who opened his first department store in Philadelphia in 1876, added American characteristics. Their stores tended to be bigger than European ones and packed with extravaganzas; Wanamaker’s flagship store boasted 2m square feet and the world’s biggest organ.
Such stores’ impact on cities surpassed even their footprints. They feminised and commercialised them. They fostered civic identity as well as consumerism. To be from Philly was to know and shop at Wanamaker’s. Thereby the great downtown stores became synonymous with the forces that had fuelled their growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, democratisation.
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