Dream Merchants : <i> Belle Epoque </i> of Department Stores Lives on in Shoppers’ Hearts
It was 1942. Men were at war, the subway cost a nickel, and nylon stockings were hard as hell to come by.
Few who were there can forget the day that Macy’s, the grande dame of American department stores, suddenly announced a new shipment of nylons. Thousands of women were massing in front of the store, including Sara (Sootie) Hammer, a poor girl from the Lower East Side who was seven months pregnant.
At 10 a.m., the doors swung open and the stampede began. But as the crowd surged forward, Sootie felt faint. Big of belly and gasping for air, she grabbed one of Macy’s columns, blacked out and collapsed on the floor.
“The next thing I knew, there was this wheelchair, out of nowhere,” recalls Hammer, who was then barely in her 20s. “The people in the store took me up to the 11th floor, and it was like a hospital up there. They gave me medicine, they held my hand, and they also gave me cab fare to get home.
“Can you imagine that happening today?” she says. “Today, shopping is so impersonal. Back then, they treated you like a person. That was service.”
Service. The customer is always right. Bargains. Bring the kids.
For millions of Americans, the department stores that once anchored downtowns from Los Angeles to Boston spark rich memories of a time and place that are slipping away. A time when families got dressed up, climbed in the car or took the bus downtown. A place where you could buy everything--sneakers and sofas, chocolate clusters and washing machines--under one big roof.
Today, many shoppers spend their time elsewhere, in cookie-cutter malls and specialty shops that suck away the business once dominated by department stores. Time has passed the behemoths by. And yet--people have not forgotten them.
Ask folks about the grand old stores of their youth, and you’ll trigger a torrent of nostalgia. The sights, smells and sounds come tumbling forth, like some Proustian reverie. Suddenly, you’re lost in a world of toys and tearooms, beauty parlors, creaking wooden escalators and bargain-basement blowouts.
Scratch the surface of memory, and you get stories about birthday presents, kids getting lost, family outings and family fights. Stories that ultimately say more about peoples’ lives than the stores themselves. And it’s no wonder.
“These places were very special because you felt at home in them. They had clerks who knew their customers, like a butcher knew the people in his village,” says Paul Hawken, who runs a $50-million mail-order business in Mill Valley and is an expert on American retail trends.
“They were places you’d never forget. But when people talk wistfully about the old department stores, they’re not really talking about the stores,” he adds. “What they’re really missing is a sense of community. And God knows, that’s something we’re all looking for today.”
The memories started early.
For millions of children, a visit to the local department store at Christmas was like a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Who can ever forget the wonder--the sheer, stupefying wonder--of an entire floor devoted to toys?
That’s what kids remember about Marshall Field’s in Chicago, where the fabled fourth floor in November and December was the eighth wonder of the world. Taking up a whole city block, it had board games, sleds, balls, bats, model planes, ships, Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, science kits, bikes, pedal cars, stuffed animals, dolls of all sorts and, best of all, large model trains that chugged through plastic landscapes dotted with mountains, farms and factories.
In Chicago and other cities, the lengthy line to visit Santa Claus was worth the wait. But it was not all sweetness and light. Inevitably, parents would pry you away from paradise and head for the dungeons of darkness, also known as furniture and kitchenware.
Before you even set out for downtown, chances were that your mother insisted that you wear “nice” clothes, which meant short pants instead of jeans, and gloves with a hat, if you were a girl.
For kids, going to the department store was an early lesson in compromise. But it was nothing compared to the trials and tribulations of adolescence. The drama of Boy Meets Girl played itself out awkwardly in stores across America, especially when clerks weren’t looking.
For guys, stores like the May Company at Wilshire and Fairfax in Los Angeles were a place to buy the jeans, work shirts and boots that became the official uniform of weekend radicals in the 1960s. It was also a great place to make out with girls and sneak your first look at women’s underwear in the lingerie department.
Meanwhile, at stores like Frost Brothers in San Antonio--now closed--girls went from Buster Browns and pinafores to shopping for their first bras. To highlight the experience, an inconspicuous little machine would spray a whiff of perfume at every shopper who passed through the front door. Everyone who passed through the portals of Frost Brothers smelled good for weeks.
As for adults, their love affair with department stores could be summed up in one word: returns. Did the shoes you bought for Aunt Charlotte three months ago scuff her floor? Bring ‘em back, no problem. Is Uncle Herbie getting bored with his green smoking jacket? No big deal, full refund.
Everybody has their favorite stories about returns. One of the most famous comes out of Rich’s in downtown Atlanta. Legend has it that a woman who didn’t like a girdle she bought 10 years earlier took it back and asked for a full refund. The store, which valued her business, didn’t quibble.
It was an older, more gracious era in retailing. Veteran customers remember that, years ago, Atlanta shoppers who had lost a loved one would get a condolence call from the store’s owner. Young couples who had just moved to the area and had no credit at Rich’s could buy roomfuls of furniture for a new house on a handshake and a promise to pay.
But there was also a dark side. Over the years at Filene’s basement in Boston, the dirty business of grabbing bargains off the rack and shoving other customers aside has become an art. Upstairs, the store caters to white-gloved shoppers with pedigrees and pocketbooks. Downstairs, all bets are off.
It’s a place where dowagers with blue hair become snarling adversaries over cut-rate winter coats. A place where members of the posh Harvard Club jostle each other like NBA centers to scoop up cashmere sweaters at bargain prices. After a bare-knuckle night at Filene’s, you’d swear that war is the continuation of shopping by other means.
Department stores also have provided a dignified haven for elderly people with time on their hands and nowhere to go. For many, the elegant tearooms and restaurants in department stores across the nation once offered good company and inexpensive food.
The 52-year-old tearoom at the May Company’s Fairfax District store, which recently closed, was a case in point. People came to schmooze and to play cards several times a week, becoming pals with the waiters who doted on them like grandsons. The fifth-floor dining room resembled a leisurely club more than a restaurant, and patrons were outraged last month when May Company shut down the blush-pink room, saying shoppers these days want fast food instead.
“You had an elegance, a sense of style, at the tearoom,” says Ellen Miller, a Los Angeles resident and longtime May Company customer. “People dressed well there, and you never saw that laid-back California look.
“I think there was a sense of respect and loyalty to the store. It was something from a different time, because you really don’t see that today.”
Respect? Loyalty? Welcome to the modern world, where mall customers come and go like sardines in the sea--and where the clerks attend high school and can’t add or subtract to save their lives.
It’s enough to make you eat your credit card, which is what Sara Chartoff briefly contemplated last year when a confused young clerk at a New Jersey mall sold her five pounds of sliced turkey for a dollar. Chartoff, a veteran New York shopper who recently moved out of the city, likes a bargain as much as anybody. But this was too much even for her.
“Dumber than this they die,” she says with disgust. “I miss the old department stores, where people knew their stuff.”
Words of wisdom. The next time you pass that beleaguered hulk of a department store in the old neighborhood, show a little respect. Attention must be paid, cash or credit, because all of this does matter.
“Do I miss the old stores?” says Chartoff, pounding her chest: “Let me tell you, it hits me right here.”
Also contributing to this story were staff writers Bob Secter in Chicago; Karen Tumulty, Melissa Healy, Ronald J. Ostrow, John M. Broder, Alan C. Miller and Art Pine in Washington; Lee May in Atlanta; David Treadwell, Jane Hall and Barry Bearak in New York, and Shari Roan, Michael Quintanilla and Virginia Tyson in Los Angeles.
