Department Store

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2017

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Flamboyant American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge introduced Londoners to a whole new shopping experience, one honed in the department stores of late-19th century America. He swept away previous shopkeepers’ customs of keeping shopper and merchandise apart to one where “just looking” was positively encouraged. In the full-page newspaper adverts Selfridge took out when his eponymous department store opened in London in the early 1900s, he compared the “pleasures of shopping” to those of “sight-seeing”. He installed the largest plate glass windows in the world – and created, behind them, the most sumptuous shop window displays. His adverts pointedly made clear that the “whole British public” would be welcome – “no cards of admission are required”. Recognising that his female customers offered profitable opportunities that competitors were neglecting, one of his quietly revolutionary moves was the introduction of a ladies’ lavatory. Selfridge saw that women might want to stay in town all day, without having to use an insalubrious public convenience or retreat to a respectable hotel for tea whenever they wanted to relieve themselves. As Tim Harford explains, one of Selfridge’s biographers even thinks he “could justifiably claim to have helped emancipate women.” Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Images: Selfridges Christmas shop window, Credit: Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford
0:11.2	No, I'm just looking.
0:19.7	These are words most of us have said at some point when browsing in a store and approached
0:24.0	politely by a shop assistant.
0:29.0	Most of us will not then have experienced the assistant snarling, then op it mate.
0:34.8	Hearing those words in a London shop made quite an impression on Harry Gordon's Selfridge.
0:44.4	The year was 1888 and the Flamboyant American was touring the great department stores of
0:49.2	Europe in Vienna and Berlin, the famous Bonn-Marshe in Paris and now Manchester and London.
0:56.4	To see what tips he could pick up for his then employer, Chicago's Marshall Field.
1:02.6	Field had been busily popularising the aphorism, the customer is always right.
1:08.5	Evidently this was not yet the case in England.
1:16.2	Two decades later, Selfridge was back in London, opening his eponymous department store
1:21.3	on Oxford Street.
1:22.9	Now a global mecha for retail, then an unfashionable backwater but handily near a station on a newly
1:30.1	opened underground line.
1:32.8	Selfridge caused a sensation.
1:35.4	This was due partly to its sheer size, the retail space covered six acres.
1:41.0	Plate glass windows had been a feature of high streets for a few decades but Selfridge
1:45.2	installed the largest glass sheets in the world and he created behind them the most
1:50.5	sumptuous shop window displays.
1:53.3	But more than scale, what set Selfridge's a part was attitude.
1:58.6	Harry Gordon's Selfridge was introducing Londoners to a whole new shopping experience,
	...

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