Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class

INTRODUCTION

Its displays and advertising, its pioneering in selling new goods

influence the public’s buying habits and even its mode of life.

—FRANK M. MAYFIELD, THE DEPARTMENT STORE STORY, 1949

for more than a century the department store occupied a main intersection of American life, initially as an economic powerhouse and then as a cultural force. As a major benefactor and distributor of the fruits of prosperity, it became the nation’s leading retailer in the late nineteenth century, supplying inexpensively the basic material needs of a growing country. During its ascendancy from about 1880 to 1920, American society shifted from rural to urban centers and absorbed more than twenty-three million immigrants. By 1910, over one-fifth of the population lived in a city of at least one hundred thousand, big enough to support several good-size department stores. City people had seemingly inexhaustible needs—for clothing, bedding, household goods, and all manner of things. Sales of consumer goods rocketed upward, roughly tripling in just the twenty years between 1909 and 1929. As department stores’ sales spiraled ever higher, stores expanded and rebuilt, and then expanded and rebuilt again.

And then the department store ceased to be an economic marvel. By the late 1920s, even before the stock market crash, economists saw problems in its rising costs of operation. In fact, they decided, the period of intensive department store growth, when the institution was aligned with industrial productive capacity, had ended right after World War I. The mid-1920s were good years, and there would be a few very profitable periods in the future, but for the most part big stores would face daunting challenges as aggressive competitors rose up, costs increased, and suburban living combined with downtown traffic congestion took away customers.

But the department store was far from finished. Strangely enough, it was precisely as it entered economic decline that its power to influence American society grew strongest. No longer primarily a purveyor of basic necessities, and by now a venerable and trusted establishment in a rapidly changing society, it took on a larger role as arbiter of middle-class taste and lifestyles. From the 1920s into the 1960s, stores exercised an almost moral authority to define in material terms what it was to live as a middle-class American. They poured creative energy into encouraging Americans to trade up, to demand a higher standard of living. Marshaling their enormous promotional resources, they expanded their entertainment and educative roles. They broadened services, upgraded buildings. They emphasized style as never before. In short, department stores deployed their skills in interpreting and managing the symbolic significance of the goods they sold.

What is a department store? The focus of this book is primarily on stores that began as one-of-a-kind, independently owned businesses located in cities and selling a wide range of goods from three major groups: dry goods, clothing, and household goods. They had a characteristic form of organization in which each department was run by its own buyer as though it was a small shop, while the umbrella organization—the store—provided services such as advertising, window displays, and delivery. Profits and losses were figured by department. Departmental organization was a defining feature of the department store and distinguished it sharply from the old-time general store, even one that segregated its goods.

A static picture of the department store, however, belies its most striking characteristic, dynamism. Always closely engaged with consumers, producers, society, and the world, department stores were in a perpetual process of change and adaptation. They absorbed competition, challengers, and critics, integrated vertically, then disintegrated, then integrated horizontally on a larger scale. One of the most massive changes that occurred during the department store’s history was the development of women’s ready-to-wear apparel, a type of merchandise of little significance in the nineteenth century but dominant in the twentieth. Ready-to-wear reconfigured the department store from top to bottom, requiring it to grapple with the alarmingly capricious business of fashion and to admit women into the inner circles of decision making. Another change of great significance in the twentieth century was the rise of corporations and cooperative buying groups that stores joined to increase their capital and buying power.

Department stores were often part of chains or groups, but this book does not include businesses that were true chain stores, such as Sears, Montgomery-Ward, and Penney’s. National chains like these differ significantly from department stores. Until World War I, Sears and Montgomery-Ward were catalog businesses selling to rural customers, with no retail units. When they began opening stores, they rarely chose downtown locations. Originating as units in a chain, each individual store resembled the others and was managed from a central headquarters, giving it less of a local character than department stores, even those owned by holding companies. Chains specialized in standardized, mass-produced goods and were not leaders in the style world. Penney’s, for instance, carried only staple dry goods until 1930. Unlike department stores, chains did not provide early career opportunities to women. They didn’t specialize in window display, nor did they offer a wide range of amenities, services, or in-store entertainment and educational events.

After World War II especially, chain stores, including the new discount retailers, were in fact major competitors with the department stores that are the subject of this book. By 1975, discounters and chain department stores of the Sears and Penney’s sort captured 89 percent of all department store sales. What was known as a department store had radically changed since the 1920s, when few of these enterprises would have been perceived as department stores at all.

At the opposite end of the retail spectrum from mass-marketers such as Sears and Penney’s are specialty department stores, which are included in this book but to a lesser degree than are full-fledged department stores. The large specialty stores, such as Saks and Neiman Marcus, did resemble department stores in many ways, though they handled a more limited range of merchandise. They typically dealt less with staple merchandise and to a higher degree with style goods, particularly women’s apparel. Usually they did not sell yard goods or notions, though they might handle dry goods such as carpeting, linens, and blankets. In household furnishings, their offerings may have included just gifts and fine china and glassware. Perhaps they sold furniture, or handled it through their interior-decorating service, but they did not deal in garbage cans or vacuum cleaners. Some had children’s and men’s clothing, but others did not. Most specialty department stores aimed for a wealthier clientele than the average department store. Like full department stores, high-end specialty stores tended to provide a wide range of services, amenities, and events; women had a chance to rise in them; and the art of display was critical to their business.

The book does not focus on the early decades of the 1870s and 1880s when there were relatively few full department stores, nor does it deal with the ultimate period of decline for downtown stores, after 1970. Legions of stores closed in the late twentieth century, and most of those that survived in malls and shopping centers focused on apparel and accessories. Many contemporary department stores are part of large corporations and no longer bear the name they started with, or even the one from the last merger. As this is written, hundreds of stores are changing their name to Macy’s.

What made the department store a force of history for so long was not its market share or economic power, but the normative social and cultural roles it played as distributor of goods. Along with movies, magazines, and newspapers, it defined what it was to be middle class. Unlike the others, it not only portrayed and enacted the good life—through evocative displays, exhibits, demonstrations, and lectures—but also furnished the goods. Over decades, in a responsive relationship with shoppers, it interpreted wants, steered tastes, and stimulated demand in ways that materially shaped daily life. Under its guidance, the meaning of middle-class status was defined not solely by income, occupation, or educational attainment but just as importantly by having the right towels and lampshades and handbags. It gave material expression to vague ideas of what success, femininity, citizenship, and popularity might mean, as it demonstrated how Americans ate dinner, played with their children, and celebrated holidays. It was effective because it set parameters for normalcy while offering choices: conventionality came in a variety of styles, colors, and materials.

Department stores have often been compared to museums. There was a great deal of mutual admiration between the two kinds of cultural icons, each borrowing from the other ideas of luxury, methods of display, and ways of attracting crowds. For shoppers, like museum-goers, just browsing could mean they were on a cultural expedition. Clerks observed that women of little means in 1903 used the stores as their classrooms. In the words of Susan Porter Benson, author of Counter Cultures, department stores were dynamic museums to a constantly changing way of life. Like museums, they enshrined material objects, transforming mere things into anointed symbols of Tightness. The authors of The Value of Things argue that both department stores and museums structure our relationship to things through narratives that value and interpret them. The narrative of the American department store has been one of progress and plenty, coupled with convenience and beauty.

Department stores were also breeding grounds for consumerism. At a time when historians are finding evidence of consumerism as far back as colonial times, it may be pretentious to claim that department stores created consumers, but they certainly helped develop the consumer way of life in which personal attributes, life experiences, and worldviews are read into and filtered through material possessions. They shifted the whole society to a higher level of consumption by making what had been occasional luxuries— such as cosmetics, toys, and dress-up clothes—everyday necessities. Under their tutelage, consumption was not guilty self-indulgence but was charged with righteous significance as evidence of American abundance and capitalism’s superiority.

Occupying the crossroads was frequently uncomfortable. Because department stores were prominent and highly visible institutions, they often became the stage where social conflicts were played out. They were arenas of disputes about child labor, unions, and the rights of working women and blacks. Other issues, over women’s mode of dress, the national origin of goods, and the kinds of things that stores should sell, revolved around norms of consumption and display, and implicitly acknowledged the power of department stores to award legitimacy. Whether they wanted to or not, department stores also became involved in decisions about American manufacturing and design, respect for the Sabbath, the use of city streets and public transportation, gender roles, the nature and stages of childhood and adolescence, and the welfare of small merchants.

Although department stores did not influence the course of national or international events, they presided over much of the mundane life of the nation by defining, in material terms, the meaning of a middle-class standard of living. As the first mass merchandisers, they helped equalize consumption among formerly stratified social classes by buying in bulk and lowering production costs. For better or for worse, they were important agents in diluting the high culture of Europe and spreading good design far beyond the privileged classes by promoting industrialized art for everyday articles of commerce. They brought beauty and pleasure into the lives of a nation of pragmatic, almost stoical people. They provided services to the broad masses that had once been reserved for elites. They became the stewards of the middle class, shaping, cultivating, and enshrining its aspirations and way of life. Department stores were landmarks of modern urban society and their story is in large part the story of the social and cultural life of twentieth-century America.

CHAPTER 1

BEHEMOTH TO DINOSAUR

Few modern marvels surpass in interest the

great department store.

—HARLOW N. HIGGINBOTHAM, 1906

A Chicago matron, on first hearing of Pearl Harbor, exclaimed:

"nothing is left any more—except, thank god, Wlarshall

field’s."

—MARSHALL FIELD, THE STORE, FORTUNE, DECEMBER 1945

Only 4 Big Stores Built Downtown

in Last Ten Years

—HEADLINE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, NOVEMBER 3, 1957

Around 1900, almost everyone agreed that the department store was a new force to reckon with, but not everyone agreed it was a force for good. In many respects retail selling has been turned entirely topsy-turvy by the department store, wrote the author of a story in Scribner’s Magazine. They are the wonder of modern merchandising, declared another author. But, he added, Whether they promote and build up the best interests of the people and country at large, or are detrimental to them, is a question on which intelligent opinion is largely divided. The big new stores had not yet earned the goodwill that was to become one of their most valuable assets. By the time they did, ironically, they were on the path to extinction. An overview of the American department store from the 1890s to its gradual decline beginning after World War I and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s shows how it grew more influential even as its economic power waned.

The beginnings were rocky. Even the upstanding John Wanamaker made plenty of enemies in the early decades. Small merchants felt that he was trying to steal away their business. They hated how Wanamaker sold merchandise lines outside his expertise (men’s clothing) and far cheaper than they could, all the while accusing them of dishonest practices. In the 1870s, he withstood newspaper attacks and threats from competitors to interfere with his business and even to do him bodily harm. One of his detractors was Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), who took an intense dislike to him in the 1880s after Wanamaker began selling the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant that had been published in part by Clemens and was to be sold only by subscription. Revealing the depths of his antipathy, Clemens referred to Wanamaker privately as that unco-pious butter-mouthed Sunday school-slobbering sneak-thief. Clemens, like others, found Wanamaker’s pontifical moralizing hard to stomach, all the more so because of his aggressive business dealings.

As more department stores came on the scene, they got their share of criticism as well, particularly during the depression of the 1890s. Some in the press depicted the department store as an octopus whose tentacles choked the life out of single-line stores as it added their wares to its bazaar. Small merchants watched helplessly as the big stores began dealing in books, stationery, hats, boots and shoes, earthenware, and confectionery, sometimes annexing entire small shops they had forced out of business. Next department stores began to install savings banks, photography studios, travel bureaus, and restaurants. There seemed no limit to their attempts to dominate retail goods and services. At the present rate of progress, said an editorial in an 1890 issue of Dry Goods Economist, it would not surprise anybody if these big bazaars advertised next that they took in washing, or sold real estate, painted original Corots and Millets in quantities to suit, or personally conducted parties to the Holy Land. The writer thought that these ventures were absurd to contemplate, but in one version or another they would all come to pass.

All the more infuriating to small merchants was how department stores conducted business, frequently slashing prices on one line of goods while making up the losses in other marked-up lines. In Brooklyn, aggrieved grocers fought back by alleging that department stores had no standards and would sell absolutely anything to make a dollar. In the 1890s, a time when the middle class abhorred the idea of public drunkenness, grocers circulated rumors that the big stores intoxicated women customers with liquor by the glass. They tried to create negative associations by claiming that department stores had entered the undertaking business. They also alleged that department stores repackaged stale groceries under their own labels. A newspaper reporter trooped around to New York City stores in 1894 looking into the claims. Department store managers freely admitted they dealt in liquor but sold it only in bottles. Their groceries were fresh, they insisted, and as for undertaking, Lyman G. Bloomingdale could not resist a witticism. Coffins are the last thing we expect to get into, he said.

But small merchants continued to protest and for a time gained a circle of supporters. Furniture retailers pressured wholesalers not to do business with department stores. Grocers pressed for legislation to prevent them from selling liquor. Women in the temperance movement vowed they would not shop at department stores that sold it. Other women criticized the stores for hiring children and making employees work long hours for little pay. Citizen vice squads investigated the morals of underpaid store clerks. In response to the public uproar, legislatures held hearings concerning store working hours, child labor, and the sale of alcohol, and in some states attempts were made to regulate the stores through taxation. By 1900, however, the punitive legislation had been overturned.

Sentiment against department stores was strong in the 1890s but far from universal. Outweighing all the department store negatives was one huge positive fact: millions of people shopped in them. They were the first mass retailers of a growing urban society and they brought more goods at lower prices to a wider range of customers than any other type of store. By the turn of the century, eight State Street department stores in Chicago were doing 90 percent of the city’s retailing business in most lines of merchandise. Who could argue with that? By 1900, almost everyone agreed that, like them or not, department stores were here to stay.

There was still some distance to traverse, though, before department store founders such as Wanamaker would be hailed as merchant princes and their stores recognized as community institutions.

UPSETTING THE APPLE CART

Why did so many people dislike department stores? It’s not hard to see why small merchants had negative reactions. Many did suffer financial loss due to department stores. The economist Paul Nystrom attributed the decline in the number of dealers in books, carpets and rugs, coffee and tea, and crockery and glassware in the early twentieth century as probably due to department store competition in these lines. Also, department stores could be very aggressive. Even the lofty Marshall Field store, some said, deliberately employed bargain sales to drive neighboring businesses to the breaking point.

There was also a feeling among single-line merchants, and some of the public, that department stores often dabbled in things they knew nothing about simply because they were profitable. The opinion presented in a Scribner’s Magazine story of 1897 summed up how many felt about much of the merchandise department stores sold: It is the aggregation of stock and prices which attract the customers, and not the quality and selection of goods displayed. Bicycles and books were often cited as examples of goods about which department stores knew little and cared less. Apart from a few stores that had well-stocked book departments, a typical book section consisted of jumbled bargain tables of cheap reprints or remainders. Critics charged that book clerks were unhelpful and usually illiterate. For many years a story circulated about the customer who was referred to the fur department when she asked for Lamb’s Tales.

Department store owners and managers were aware of these judgments, and some tried to steer a course between satisfying the masses who wanted good, but not necessarily the best, quality at low prices and the customers who demanded high quality and cared less about price. Stores that had grown from prestige dry goods businesses or that aimed for wealthier customers tried to maintain their reputation for quality even as they expanded their wares. Management of the Marshall Field corporation sparred with store manager Harry Selfridge (who would one day open his own department store in London) when he brought in bargain tables like those found in the cheap stores along State Street. Field’s and Wanamaker’s shied away from the loaded word department. Wanamaker’s rejected it as part of its name, while Field’s referred to its departments as sections. Strawbridge & Clothier declared in 1892, at a time when many old dry goods houses were making the transition, that it would not become a general merchandiser—a department store. However, by 1898 it had rescinded the resolution.

But there were also those who distrusted department stores because they represented a new culture, one of fads and free spending and instant gratification that was starkly at odds with the old Protestant-American culture of hard work, thrift, and careful maintenance of material possessions. Bicycles were an example of a fad item. As soon as they showed signs of popularity, department stores whooshed great quantities of them into their stores, offered free riding lessons, and found cheaper makers to produce low-priced models, stoking the craze to a high fever. When it ended, they turned to pianos, the must-have heart of the family entertainment center, and then onto other things. Always stressing bargains, sales, and low prices, department stores seemed to remove all barriers to gratification through the accumulation of material goods.

The Chicago department stores, with the possible exception of Marshall Field, represented what people disliked about new kinds of selling and buying. Although New York had more stores and did a larger business overall, Chicago’s stores were the largest and most aggressive in the country around the turn of the century. Their style of business was poised to take over much of the country (as New Yorkers discovered when the Siegel-Cooper store came to town in 1896). Chicago stores ran pages of large newspaper advertisements, boldly proclaiming the arrival of new merchandise, rock-bottom prices, and never-ending special sales. Often the quality of goods they advertised was misrepresented. The stores were mobbed much of the time, with people scrambling for goods on bargain tables, a scene that was not attractive to old-line Americans. Without doubt, the old-fashioned values of rural America were under siege as raw cities like Chicago sprang up—and cities like this were the nurturing environment of the department store.

The building occupied by the Siegel-Gooper store was built to take advantage of Chicago’s elevated Loop railroad, which ran past it to the north.

THE YOUTHFUL BEHEMOTH

The growth of cities leads the list of changes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that favored the development of the department store, as do advances in urban transportation that allowed masses of people to travel to city centers. As cities grew, existing businesses changed, not only in size but also in type. Wholesaling, which had once been dominant in distributing consumer goods through small-town dealers serving rural populations, lost many of its customers as people moved to cities. Then, wholesalers’ urban retail arms, once a minor part of their business, grew and overshadowed the parent business.

Thanks to extensive trolley lines, around the turn of the century Jordan Marsh drew customers from all of New England.

Although a handful of stores were organized as full-scale department stores in the 1870s, among them Macy’s and Wanamaker’s, the term department store first appeared in a NewYork Times story in July of 1888 in reference to a store about to be opened in Los Angeles. The late 1880s furnished all the ingredients the stores needed to prosper. Technological advances spurred the development of downtown shopping districts. Electric lights on streets and in stores helped attract shoppers, but public transportation was of greater importance. The golden age of the department store neatly overlaps that of the electric streetcar, as well as the elevated railroad and the beginning of subways. New York’s Sixth Avenue elevated begun in 1878 made it possible for the shopping districts on Fourteenth Street and that known as Ladies’ Mile, from Sixth Avenue to Broadway between Eighteenth and Twenty-third Streets, to flourish. Chicago had a cable car by 1882 and an elevated railroad that made a downtown loop in the 1890s, with clusters of department stores at both ends of the loop. The electric streetcar was a commercial reality by 1887, and by 1890 the eight hundred street railway companies of the nation’s largest cities carried more than two billion passengers a year. In Detroit, horse-drawn streetcars had been supplanted by electric trolleys by 1891, the year that J. L. Hudson opened his new eight-story store. Boston’s subway was in operation by 1897, stimulating the retail district. So furiously did business districts grow that by the end of the century, a new word referring to a city’s retail hub would appear in dictionaries: downtown.

The busy State and Madison corner in Chicago, with Mandel Brothers on the left and Garson Pirie Scott on the right.

As rural Americans and immigrants packed into cities, department stores developed rapidly in the 1890s. By 1900, thirty-eight American cities had populations exceeding one hundred thousand, most of them having at least doubled in the twenty preceding years. The announcement that Chicago would host the World’s Columbian Exposition was a great stimulus to the expansion of large-scale retailing and led to a building boom on State Street. New stores were established in many other cities as well. Bamberger’s in Newark, Stix, Baer & Fuller in St. Louis, and William Block in Indianapolis were founded and grew rapidly. In Baltimore, two important stores opened: Hochschild Kohn and the Hub. In New York, the Straus brothers, Isidor and Nathan, took over Macy’s and gained part interest in Abraham & Wechsler, renaming it Abraham & Straus. Strawbridge & Clothier in Philadelphia opened its grand new store in 1898, the same year that a popular department store board game made its debut.

It was around this time that department stores began to make an impression on the public’s imagination. During the 1890s, people began to refer for the first time to the big stores, always with awe, frequently with distaste, and sometimes with admiration. These were the stores that would really shake up retailing and prove that a new era had begun. Unlike earlier departmentalized dry goods stores, the big stores sold just about everything, even fresh meat. The expansion into nontraditional—some said unseemly—lines of merchandise was stimulated by fierce competition in the rocky economy of the last decade of the nineteenth century. But once the economy improved, there was no turning back. Department stores grew bigger and spread like crazy.

FEEDING THE HUNGRY BEAST

Big capital was critically necessary for the creation and expansion of department stores. Despite all the rags-to-riches tales about store founders who accumulated capital as ribbon clerks or itinerant peddlers, few, if any, made it to the megastore stage without the infusion of outside financial backing. Many stores were established by nonmerchants de novo from large-scale investments. The A. M. Rothschild store on State Street, Chicago’s third largest store at the turn of the last century, was begun as a financial investment in 1894. Though run by its namesake, Abram Rothschild, the store was principally owned by his father-in-law, Nelson Morris, a meatpacking giant and investor in the so-called Whisky Trust. Another Whisky Trust magnate, J.B. Greenhut, also went into the department store business, as operator of the Greenhut store on Sixth Avenue in New York City and as a major investor, then owner, of the Siegel-Cooper Big Store opened in 1896 by Henry Siegel.

Gimbels opened in New York City in 1910.

The turn-of-the-century department store was very much caught up in real estate deals as land values shot up. In some cases, urban real estate speculators, frequently with a related interest in a streetcar line, would build a store, then look for an occupant. The Siegel-Cooper Big Store, Henry Siegel’s first department store, moved onto State Street in 1891, occupying the Second Leiter Building, which had been built with Boston’s Jordan Marsh in mind, a deal that fell through. Leiter had formerly been a partner of Marshall Field in the predecessor business, Field & Leiter. When the partnership broke up, he took away a share of State Street real estate that the firm had acquired and also became an investor in the new elevated railroad. The building Siegel moved into was intended as a destination for elevated railroad riders, creating a synergistic relationship between railroad and store. The Emporium, in San Francisco, was also the outgrowth of a late 1890s real estate speculation, as were stores in Ohio and other states.

Expansion in the 1890s and early 1900s was financed by incorporating and selling stock either privately or publicly, or by joining chains that bought department stores outright or acquired a controlling interest. The country’s leading wholesale dry goods company, H.B. Claflin, seeing its wholesale business on the decline and hoping to offset this with profits from retailing, led the merger movement with financing by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1901. Starting with the James McCreery store and the Adams Dry Goods Company in New York, Claflin owned a number of major stores around the country by 1910, including the prize, Lord & Taylor. Often, when a department store’s founder died, Claflin bought the business. Such was the fate of Roots’s in Terre Haute, Joslins in Denver, the Jones Store in Kansas City, and many others acquired before 1914 when the Claflin empire fell. The Gimbels, financed by Guggenheim money, also had early chain ambitions, though in their case they envisioned a string of stores across the land all bearing the Gimbel name. In 1910, they added Gotham City to their existing Milwaukee and Philadelphia locations. After New York they would enter Pittsburgh, but the national chain never materialized. The May Company chain of department stores surged ahead when it got the backing of Goldman, Sachs and Lehman Brothers in 1910. But whatever chain formation activity took place up to the war, it was only a start compared to what would come later.

With the acquisition of Hovey’s in 1925, Jordan Marsh owned all but a corner of its block in Boston.

Local shoppers did not always realize that changes in ownership had taken place or sense any difference in how stores did business. Some deals were kept secret for decades. In Los Angeles, few knew that Arthur Letts, owner of the Broadway department store, also owned Bullock’s, another store resulting from real estate speculation. In later decades, how many knew that the May Company in Cleveland owned its competitor Taylor’s, that Marshall Field owned the downmarket Davis Store on South State Street, or that Filene’s owned its neighbor, White’s? Even when people heard that a store had changed hands, they did not necessarily care. Usually, in the early days of department stores, a store’s management, its name, and its merchandise stayed the same after a merger or acquisition.

BECOMING A PRESENCE, 1900–1930

Operating in the improved economy of the early twentieth century, and primed with financial backing, department stores began a tremendous growth spurt. And, although this was not entirely new, they began to pay attention to their public image. They increased wages and provided club rooms and other amenities for workers. Many upgraded their facilities, building the edifices now recognized as department stores, and improved their merchandise and their ways of doing business. Soon people would begin to praise the modern department store.

Many companies that had grown higgledy-piggledy built their first really major stores in the period from 1900 to World War I. This includes Macy’s (1902), Marshall Field (1902–1907), Stix, Baer & Fuller (1907), Halle’s (1910), Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia (1911), Filene’s (1912), Bamberger’s (1913), Famous-Barr (1913), D.H. Holmes (1913), and many others. By 1929, L. S. Ayres occupied one hundred times as much space as it had at its founding in 1872. When new stores were completed, they were soon expanded with annexes, more stories, and off-site storage facilities. Often a store would no more than erect an addition when it would have to be razed to make way for an all-new store. Woodward & Lothrop opened a new eight-story store in 1902, to be superseded by another only eleven years later. Bullock’s nearly doubled in size in 1912, then expanded in 1917, 1919, 1923, 1924, and 1928. The life of a new store building could be less than a decade, almost always less than two. Meier & Frank in Portland moved into its grand new store in 1898, adding a ten-story annex in 1909. Three years later it demolished the 1898 store and built another, which itself lasted only seventeen years.

Fueling the furious construction programs was a rise in the standard of living of the American people, giving them more money to spend for clothing and household goods and an expanded list of wants that included luxuries such as silks and wristwatches and velvet-covered divans. Improvements in living conditions, diet, and public health lengthened lives and freed up resources once drained by constant illnesses. Expenditures on all the goods carried by department stores rose dramatically. Furniture sales quadrupled between 1909 and 1929 and mattresses more than tripled; sporting goods quintupled; musical instruments and phonographs and radios increased by a factor of more than six; and the sale of perfume and cosmetics increased more than thirteen times. The vast growth in the consumption of women’s ready-to-wear clothing, which reached full scale around 1910, also propelled stores to add more