Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

¹¹¹ The market share reflected the department stores’ backward step: in 1900 co-ops held between 6 and 7 per cent of the retail market, while department stores accounted for less than 2 per cent. By 1910 that had crept up to slightly under 3 per cent, but when the increase in population was taken into account the figures showed a fall in real terms.¹¹²

      Gordon Selfridge, an American, smelt opportunity. There were not many opportunities he had missed in his life. In 1879 he had started work as a stock boy at Marshall Field in Chicago; he was promoted to travelling salesmen, then to counter clerk; by 1887, only eight years after his lowly entry, he was the shop’s retail general manager, and by 1890 he was a junior partner. His development of Marshall Field followed the now familiar pattern: he opened departments for specialist goods—shoes, children’s clothes—and then offered services like glove-cleaning, a tea room, a restaurant. His main contribution, however, was in advertising and promotion: window displays were not simply to convey information about stock to passers-by, he said, but to create desire. He announced the creation of an annual sale—and with typical bombast also announced that he had invented it.¹¹³

      This was demonstrably not true. The ‘old draper’ in 1872 recounted how in his youth—probably in the 1820s—when some stock accidentally burned, his employer decided to use this as an excuse to clear the overstock that had accumulated. ‘In the first place some large yellow poster bills were struck off, headed, “Fire!!! Fire!!! Fire!!!” which informed the public that in consequence of the fire which took place on Wednesday, the 6th instant, the damaged stock, much of which was only slightly singed, would be cleared out at a great reduction, together with other surplus stock, sale to commence on Monday next.’ After closing, the staff quietly singed goods that had remained unharmed. The next morning, ‘People bought goods of every description that were at all likely to suit them…Critical old women, that under ordinary circumstances would have spent a long time…examining a pair of stockings, bought the same goods, instantly, at full prices, when slightly singed at the tops.’ By the end of the day it was found that ‘we had actually cleared off whole piles of goods that would have taken us several weeks to have sold under ordinary circumstances, while nearly all the jobbish goods bought for the occasion had been cleared out.’ He claimed that it was this fire sale that was ‘the commencement of the “selling off” system in London’.¹¹⁴ That was unlikely too, but it definitely pre-dated Selfridge’s ‘invention’ of the sale by three-quarters of a century.

      Selfridge’s passion for advertising broke new ground. As with so many innovators, it was not that he did anything particularly novel, but that he took many novel ideas of the period and worked them together, increasing their force by his passion and commitment. Much of his advertising turned on the value of shopping (particularly of shopping at Marshall Field), on shopping as social good, on the benefits shopping conferred on humanity and so on. Marshall Field’s restaurant was promoted by the aspiration ‘A department store should be a social center, not merely a place for shopping.’ He was among the first to hire professional copywriters and set up an ‘institutional advertising style’, which sold Marshall Field, and shopping at Marshall Field, rather than promoting separate items. He instituted ‘free gifts’, he mounted special promotions.¹¹⁵ In 1904 Selfridge suddenly resigned, either because he had been refused a senior partnership or because when the store was incorporated in 1901 he had received what he considered to be an inadequate share allocation. Whatever the reason, by 1906 he was in London. With money from a British shopping magnate, after an abortive start he began to build: Selfridge’s was the biggest store ever to be built entirely from scratch, rather than by expansion.

      Selfridge had plans for London. He brought over three colleagues from Chicago: one to control the merchandise, one to design the store and its fittings, and one to be in charge of window displays. The buyers were now subordinate to the merchandise manager. No longer were there dozens, if not hundreds, of separate little fiefdoms, each buying to suit itself, with no overall sense of the customer base; nor were buyers any longer entirely responsible for their own staff; nor did they design their own displays, laying out their merchandise as they each thought best. Everything was centralized. Even the flow of information was unified: instead of floorwalkers who led customers to the appropriate departments, based on each individual’s opinion of how best to fulfil a customer’s request, there was a central information desk. (Marshall Field had had one from early in the 1890s.) Everything was to be coordinated: carpets, wrapping paper, delivery vans, bill heads—even the string used to tie the parcels was in the same colours, with the same design. It was the embodiment of Selfridge’s credo: everything and everyone in the store were all working to fulfil a single vision—Selfridge’s own.¹¹⁶

      The opening of the shop, in 1909, was planned as carefully as any theatrical premiere—in fact that was what it most closely resembled, and was clearly intended to resemble. The silk curtains that covered the windows before opening day, said the Daily Chronicle, ‘[suggested] that a wonderful play was being arranged’. When they were drawn back, they revealed a radical departure. Harrod’s and Whiteley’s both had windows stuffed brimful with as many goods as they could hold. Selfridge’s windows were completely different: they displayed unified, thematically coherent images, showing how the consumer might hope to wear a dress or live with the goods on show. The Retail Trader understood that this sense of a single vision came from the novelty of having one man solely dedicated to putting goods in the windows. Equally, it understood the theatricality that was aimed at: ‘Just as the stage manager of a new play rehearses and tries and retries and fusses until he has exactly the right lights and shades and shadows and appeals to his audience, so the merchant goes to work, analysing his line and his audience, until he hits on the right scheme that brings the public flocking to his doors.’¹¹⁷

      The public flocked, all right. The shop claimed 1 million visitors in its first week, and, even if the figure needs to be divided in half to allow for pardonable exaggeration, it is a startling number. Other shops became frantic: Waring and Gillow, Swan and Edgar, Peter Robinson,

      Maple’s, Shoolbred, and D. H. Evans all decided to show their new spring lines that same week; Harrod’s promoted its diamond jubilee, a mere four years early, with afternoon concerts to be given by the London Symphony and the band of the Grenadier Guards.¹¹⁸ But it wasn’t enough. The most important thing was advertising, and here Selfridge outshone the others. He was the first to use blanket coverage. He spent £36,000 on press advertising in the run-up to the opening. (Thomas Lipton, as a comparison, was spending between £50,000 and £60,000 a year on advertising—for more than 400 shops.)¹¹⁹ Selfridge commissioned thirty-two cartoons from artists and caricaturists, including Bernard Partridge, Linley Sambourne, Walter Crane, Lewis Baumer, Leonard Raven-Hill and Fred Pegram, all of whom worked for Punch (Crane was a renowned children’s illustrator in addition). The resulting 104 full-page advertisements ran for a week in 18 national newspapers.¹²⁰ Selfridge’s great insight, however, was not simply the motivating power of advertising. It was, more crucially, the weight that advertising carried with newspapers. He was the first to see that if an advertiser was paying thousands of pounds to a newspaper or periodical, and there were likely to be many thousands of pounds more to come, the newspaper would support the advertiser editorially too, if stroked the right way. Selfridge made it his business to cultivate those at the top—in particular, Lord Northcliffe, the owner of the Daily Mail, and Ralph D. Blumenfeld, the editor of the Daily Express—as well as more humble journalists: he hired one of their own as a publicist; he gave journalists’ dinners; he staged a special, pre-opening evening with a private tour of the store; he told them they could always use the telephones in Selfridge’s, without charge.¹²¹

      These