This is Sleepy History. Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To listen ad-free, get access to bonus episodes, and support the ongoing production of this show, check out our premium feed. An engineer around the corner, whenever you need, British Gas have over 6,000 en route at speed. Fixing lights that won't light or have started to blink, a pipe with a leak, and that weird smell under the sink. If your boilers can put and your blue furnace rinsed, we've got your back to stop that cold water wince. You don't need to be a customer, we can help you too, taking care of things. It's what British Gas do. TSNC supplies 6,000 engineers correct as of Jan 2026. From small shops where women could browse fabrics without chaperones, to mega-plexes where consumers could watch a movie, dine, or even buy an elephant, the rise of the department store was precipitous. It's a tale full of rags to riches lore, although it's also tied up with the emergence of the middle class, a large group of financially comfortable people that didn't exist through much of history. We'll dive into this world of consumerism and invention, advertising and escalators tonight. So just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of department stores. There are various contenders for the title of first department store, and various companies claim to be the first in the world, their country, or their city. There are also competing and at times conflicting assertions as to who were the earliest pioneers of the world. The truth is probably the truth of the world. The truth is probably the truth of the world. The truth is probably the truth of the world. The truth is probably more complicated than it usually is. Different entrepreneurs and workers likely came up with similar concepts and innovations separately. Many also surely drew inspiration from one another and even built on earlier traditions that may have been lost to time. Regardless of the exact details and timeline, it is widely accepted that modern department stores grew out of the industrial revolution and the emergence of the middle class in Europe and the United States. Spurred on by these developments, alongside the growth of modern urban centers in these areas, department stores evolved into a recognizable form over the course of the 1800s. The industrial revolution had spawned a new middle class of people who had money to spare for luxuries like fashionable apparel. These were not the rich or traditional aristocracy whose wealth came from owning land, nor were they peasants, farmers, or the urban poor. They were the managers, secretaries, and other office workers in the new factories and businesses of industry. With the industrial revolution came a new proliferation of goods for sale and middle class customers to buy them. Fashionable clothing, accessories, and other consumer goods were becoming more accessible at the same time that more people had money to spend on them. Smaller shops started growing into larger ones and the most innovative amongst them quickly took on aspects of the modern department store. Many people cite Ubon Mauchet in Paris as the first real department store. It grew from a small shop to a megastore over the middle period of the 1800s. Not surprisingly though, other entrepreneurs pioneered similar concepts in rival businesses elsewhere during the same period. Of course, the roots of the department store trace back farther. Arguably they trace all the way back to the world's earliest shops or trading posts where humans first exchanged money for goods. That said, we won't go back that far. But let's just step back to the end of the 1700s as the new middle class was starting to make its mark. In London, a shop called Harding, Howell, and Company's grand fashionable magazine opened in 1796, with magazine obviously holding a different meaning than it does today. Harding, Howell, and Company divided their wares into four departments. One department offered furs and fans, another jewelry and clocks, a third stocked hats, and the fourth department was haberdashery, meaning menswear. Notice that three of the four departments focused on women. And indeed, that was the shop's core clientele. Harding, Howell, and Company catered to newly well-off middle class women who wanted a safe and respectable place to shop for stylish wardrobes without chaperones. Shops like this were the precursors of the modern department store, but the stores wouldn't take on a recognizably modern form until a bit later, during the second half of the 1800s. Now back to Au Bon Marché, nowadays known as Le Bon Marché. Starting around 1852, a very entrepreneurial couple ushered it from a small affair into a modern marvel. They were Gareed Boussico, the son of a Normandy hatmaker, and his wife Marguerite. Aristide had moved to Paris to work as a shop salesman before working his way up to become a leading retailer. The couple achieved enormous success through innovations based on a shrewd understanding of their customers. To start, they sold items that affluent middle class women craved, like hats, gloves, stockings, ribbons, and lace. Located on Paris' left bank, their Bon Marché eventually added more goods, ranging all the way from perfume and stationery to carpets and toys. Along the way, the store grew from 12 workers until it employed an impressive 1,788 people by 1877. As their business grew, the Boussico's expanded their building several times, with Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame even contributing to one of the enlargements. The expanded store encompassed multiple floors with many different departments that showcased themed shopping collections. In the middle of the new building, there was a monumental staircase, which would later be replaced by escalators. Huge display windows were another of the store's features that would come to be a hallmark of modern department stores. Arrested and margarite introduced novel business practices that also became central to this new type of store. For example, they decided to offer better merchandise for more affordable prices by lowering their profit margins. They also rotated their stock frequently and held special sales at specific times of year. Some of their biggest innovations marked a significant change in the customer experience. Under the couple's leadership, the Bon Marché welcomed shoppers to browse with no obligation to purchase, quite a novelty at the time. It also gave fixed prices for the items available in the store, which was a big change from the common practice. Traditionally, merchants and customers engaged in bargaining, and there was no guarantee that the seller would offer the same starting price to different clients. With these novel concepts, Arrested and Margarite created a store that began to resemble today's department stores, which can feel almost like quasi-public spaces that draw in people and tempt them into purchases. To lure customers, the store began showing off its wares and enticing displays. Where products might previously have been kept under counters or in storerooms until being shown to an exclusive clientele, they were now displayed prominently to attract new customers. This kind of display marketing has since grown to an art form in the present day. In other countries touched by the Industrial Revolution, numerous shops were also opening to meet the growing needs and opportunities of the new age. For example, an Englishman named Samuel Lord had opened a dry goods store in New York City in 1826. He soon brought in his wife's cousin, George Washington Taylor, as a partner, and the business became Lord and Taylor. Over time, the partners grew their establishment to become one of the United States' earliest department stores. They opened a second location and then a third by 1860. Around the same time period, an Irish immigrant to the United States named Alexander Terny Stewart built a wholesale and retail empire, also based in New York City. Stewart has been credited with pioneering the ideas of fixed prices for products, the same innovation that the Bon Marché was adopting with great success across the Atlantic. And in Boston, a shop opened in 1841 that was to become that city's first department store, Jordan Marsh. It bore the last names of its two founders, like most businesses at the time. That was the case as well for another shop that's endured as a household name. It was R. H. Macy and company, what we know today as Macy's. It was started by a man named Roland H. Macy, who first opened a dry good store in New York City in 1858. It wasn't just his name that he gave to the store, however. He apparently had a star tattoo, which inspired the company's famous red star logo. The company grew over the years and a Macy cousin named Margaret Getchell in particular, helped to build the brand into a retailing colossus through advertising after the U.S. Civil War. Macy's New York City Herald Square Store was the largest in the United States for many years. A major rival to Macy's for some time was Gimbles, another big New York City department store. The rivalry is remembered today as a key plot element of the hit 1947 Christmas movie, Miracle on 34th Street. Like the others, Gimbles was also named for its founder, who had started out as a peddler before opening his first shop in Indiana in 1842. Incidentally, Gimbles' company would later partner with Horace Sacks to open Sacks Fifth Avenue. But Gimbles itself finally went out of business in the 1980s. But for now, let's head back to mid-1800s London. There, in 1851, Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, opened a huge fair called The Great Exhibition. It took place in a specially constructed building in Hyde Park called The Crystal Palace. The palace was a cutting edge marvel of soaring domed windows. It was built from 300,000 panes of plate glass, a new invention at the time. Its light and airy interior would be echoed in later years in the grand atriums of some of the original department stores. The exhibition showcased inventions and new products from all over the world. These ranged from steam engines and cotton mules or spinning machines to chewing tobacco and false teeth. Millions came to see these wonders of the new industrial era, which would drive the up-and-coming consumer age and the rise of the department store. Among those who visited The Great Exhibition was a 20-year-old from Yorkshire in the north of England. His name was William Whiteley. The exhibition inspired him to create one of London's early department stores, according to the Whiteley Company history. Four years after seeing the exhibition, William was back in London with 10 pounds in his pocket, or so goes the company lore, ready to open up a small draper shop. Draper's were cloth merchants who sold fabric and textiles. At a time when women made their own clothes or employed dressmakers to sew them, draper shops were essentially the equivalent of clothing stores today. Within five years, by 1867, Whiteley Store had expanded to 17 departments selling a whole array of merchandise. William Whiteley is cited as claiming that he could provide anything from a pin to an elephant. When a customer decided to put that claim to the test, the doubter reportedly got an oversized delivery to his stables the very same day. The heart of the department store was always women's fashion, though, not elephants or pins. And indeed, drapers also founded some of the other early department stores. These include, for example, John Lewis and partners in London, famous for its never knowingly undersold price match guarantee. On a side note, fashion legend Coco Chanel later got her start working in a draper shop. But that's a story for another night. At any rate, stores catering to the new middle class and female customers in particular continued to grow in size and scope over the second half of the 1800s. During that period, many new establishments proliferated as well. In 1849, for example, tea merchant and businessman Charles Henry Herrod opened a single room tea and grocery store in Knightsbridge in London. Over the coming years, Herrods expanded into a high-end department store that sold just about everything under the sun. The now legendary store's motto is a Latin phrase that means, all things for all people everywhere. And indeed, Herrod's merchandise became so broad-ranging that for a great many years it even had a whole department selling pets, including wild animals such as tigers, lions, and, like rightly, elephants. It was at Herrods that two young men almost a century later bought a lion cub they named Christian and later let it free in Africa. The moving story was captured in a documentary whose scenes have garnered tens of millions of views online. During its early decades in the later 1800s, Herrods pioneered the practice of having cashiers located throughout large department stores. The company placed cash desks at various convenient spots in 1884. Until then, retailers commonly ferried money to and from one cash station as customers made purchases around their stores. Runners or mechanical devices carried the buyer's money to the cash station and their change back to them. Herrods also included one of the first escalators in the world in 1898. The store reportedly provided Brandy to calm customers down as they rode the frightening new contraption. Meanwhile, back in the United States, an entrepreneur named John Wanamaker was making innovations of his own. He'd bought a train depot in Philadelphia in 1875 and turned it into an early department store. Its name, of course, was Wanamakers. Wanamaker adopted various new ideas that would become standard in modern department stores. For example, sources credit him with inventing the price tag. This cemented the move from bargaining to fix prices that Alexander Turnie Stewart had pioneered in New York. Although Stewart had perhaps already been marking his products with prices before Wanamaker started using price tags. At any rate, the price tag was obviously a retail innovation that stuck. But Wanamaker's use of it was reportedly rooted in his Christian faith and an egalitarian outlook, as well as marketing savvy. A religious Presbyterian, Wanamaker held that all people were equal before God, and so all people should get an equal price. Wanamaker also promoted the idea of applying the Golden Rule in business. He advertised his stores as places customers could trust or get their money back. Wanamaker adopted various other novel ideas and modern conveniences that would become department store standards. He sent buyers to Europe regularly, where they must have taken inspiration from and perhaps shared inspiration with pioneering stores like the Bon Monchay. He opened a restaurant in his store in 1876 and reportedly also put in electric lights as early as 1878. Then in 1889, he added elevators. These were a modern wonder that another American store, Pallet & Company, had tried in the 1850s, only to remove their elevator after customers refused to use it. In addition, Wanamaker advertised heavily for his stores, setting a trend that's continued to this day. He joked that half of his company's advertising spending was a waste, but that he could never figure out which half. Department stores like Wanamakers grew their businesses by taking out advertisements in newspapers, as well as printing flyers and cards promoting their wares. Outside of the cities, Americans were still mostly shopping at small dry goods stores. But in the final decades of the 1800s, more small towns grew into local urban centers and department stores spread across the country. Retailing was becoming centralized. The department stores initially sold clothing, dry goods, and household goods. Over time, they added more, though few expanded to elephants or lions. Clothing and accessories increased to additional offerings, while housewares expanded to cover furniture, silverware, and beyond. Department stores followed the model that the Bon Moché was using in Paris, making money by keeping prices low enough to sell a lot of goods to a lot of people, rather than selling a little to the few at a high profit. Another big development at the emerging department stores was the introduction of ready-to-wear clothing made in factories. Traditionally, people sold clothing at home themselves or paid dressmakers to sew it for them. The new factory-made clothes offered better prices and selection than ever before. Department stores still sold fabric, as well, but the ready-made clothing was a major novelty and draw. Leading department stores also drew in customers with guarantees to give them their money back if they were not happy with their purchases. This echoes on in the present day when the option to return purchases for a refund is a key element of retail shopping. The second half of the 1800s also saw the growth of the mail-order catalog, the 19th and early 20th centuries version of online shopping. Businesses like Montgomery Ward in Chicago published catalogs from which rule and other customers could order a dizzying array of goods. These began as a single-page listing products and prices. By 1880, Montgomery Ward's catalog was more than 500 pages long and it showcased over 24,000 items for sale. In 1900, it had grown to 1,000-plus pages. Montgomery Ward was getting up to 35,000 orders each day. These orders were for items ranging from clothes to guns, kitchen appliances, sewing machines, and much more. Sears was another major mail-order business and successful department store. Impressively, the Sears catalog even offered houses for order. Mind you, assembly was required and there was no task-rabbit at the time. During the early 1900s, Sears offered more than 400 styles of mail-order houses and sold between 70,000 and 75,000 of them. The company had started from humble beginnings just about two decades before. In 1886, a railroad freight agent named Richard W. Sears had bought 500 watches from a Chicago watchmaker. Sears paid $12 per watch, then sold them along his railroad route for $14 each. Soon afterwards, Sears took on a partner named Alba Robuck, leading to the name of Sears Robuck & Company. They produced a mail-order catalog offering watches and soon added related goods like jewelry. Like other successful retail endeavors at the time, Sears promised money-back guarantees. The company wisely also offered installment plans so customers could pay for purchases over time. Within just a few years, by 1893, the Sears & Robuck Company was publishing a 196-page catalog and making annual sales of over $400,000. That's the equivalent of somewhere in the neighborhood of $14 million today. And after a few more years, in 1899, the company brought in almost $11 million in sales, which equates to nearly $420 million now. At the same time, physical stores were also luring record numbers of in-person shoppers to their ever-expanding urban spaces. And putting up tantalizing window displays increasingly played a key role in enticing customers inside and getting them to make purchases. A young American named L. Frank Baum was part of the movement to use displays for marketing purposes. Baum founded a journal in 1897 called The Shop Window, which encouraged stores to create displays to attract customers. A few years later, Baum would make his fortune by writing the children's book The Wizard of Oz. In addition to advertising and display marketing, department stores were also successful in large part because they sold mass-produced goods affordably, as we've seen, alongside luxury products. These cheap industrial-era goods also drove the development of the 5 and 10 store, like the Woolworths chain founded by Frank W. Woolworth, another element of the new consumer world. Interestingly, it was Woolworth who brought Christmas tree ornaments to the United States after encountering them while traveling in Europe. Grocery store chains, the precursors of today's supermarkets, also proliferated as the 1800s rolled towards the 20th century and the world of present-day retail. During this period, customer service became another mainstay of the retail industry and the burgeoning department stores in particular. A partner at Marshall Fields Department Store in Chicago introduced the now-famous phrase, the customer is always right. It was an ethos that led the store to great popularity with consumers. The partner's name was Harry Gordon Selfridge, an American entrepreneur who would later give his name to the legendary establishment in England. Selfridge is said to have come up with the slogan, only X or Y shopping days until Christmas. This concept still drives retail sales in the final quarter of each year to this day. Harry Gordon Selfridge was born in Wisconsin. He left school at the young age of 14 and then worked his way up at Marshall Fields. But it was across the Atlantic that he would leave his biggest legacy. In 1906, Selfridge visited London and found the city's department stores lacking, in his opinion, compared to their American and French counterparts. So he decided to fill the gap. He hired an architect who'd worked for Marshall Fields and who had also designed much of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The architect's team planned a palatial building with a wall of windows at the west end of Oxford Street in London. Called Selfridges, the massive store opened in 1909. Selfridge the man brought the same pithy populism to his namesake endeavor that he'd exhibited back in the US. Telling his first London customers, everyone is welcome. The store had 100 retail departments staffed by well-trained salespeople. It also had a roof garden, restaurants, and even rooms for reading and writing. In 1920, Selfridges introduced singing lift girls who crooned the floor names in harmony as customers rode the elevators, also known as lifts. All this conspired to make the store more than just a place to acquire goods. It was a destination in itself, much like the modern shopping mall or like some of its rivals in the golden age of department stores. In the early to mid-20th century, department stores were places where ladies could do it all. They could get their makeup done and their hair set. They could buy fashionable clothing and have it altered to their exact measurements. They could order home furnishings or register for wedding gifts. And then they could lunch comfortably with friends or recover with a cocktail, all inside the department store's roomy interior. It was a time when numerous department stores continued to get their start, to grow and to flourish around the world. In 1901, for example, Wallin and Nordstrom opened in Seattle. The second partner's name was John W. Nordstrom, a Swedish immigrant who had moved to the United States at just 16 years old. John Nordstrom worked in mines and logging camps for a time before making $13,000 in the Alaska Gold Rush. Today that would be worth almost $500,000 and it was enough to go into business with a shoemaker named Carl Wallin. The two partners grew their brand and then in time, Julie retired. When they did, both sold their shares to John Nordstrom's sons, leading to the store's modern incarnation as Nordstrom. Even the Communist government of the new Soviet Union got in on the department store act. Under Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union opened a state department store called GUM in Moscow in 1921. It was located along one side of Red Square, at the site of a former pre-communism shopping area called the Upper Trading Rose or Upper Trading Arcade. These were covered shopping streets modeled on Parisian passages that had in turn been inspired by the great covered bazaars of Istanbul, the Damascus and other Middle Eastern cities. They had opened in 1893 but were shut down after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Moscow State Department Store was part of Lenin's vision for socialist consumerism. It didn't work out, however, and the new Communist leader, Stalin, closed it down within the decade. He turned it into offices. The GUM eventually opened up again as a department store in the early 1950s, though. Customers would line up across Red Square outside its doors, waiting for their turn to shop. In the meantime, in Germany, a pair of German Jewish retailers named Ziemann and Salman Schocken had built large department stores in several cities during the 1920s. They employed modernist architect Eric Mendelssohn to design cutting-edge building to house their establishments. The new Schocken stores employed dazzling electric lights inspired by American cities' skylines at night and were viewed as leading architectural innovations. Ziemann perished in a car accident, leaving his brother Salman in charge of a thriving chain until the Nazis came to power. They forced Salman out and he left Germany to immigrate to Palestine. That didn't stop the spread of the architectural movement embodied in the Schocken stores, however. In 1935, a new Peter Jones department store opened in London with an ultra-modern look reminiscent of Mendelssohn's masterpieces. In Helsinki, Finland, another department store, the Stockman store, opened in 1930 in a stylish building of glass and brick. After their rise around the Industrial Revolution, department stores became central drivers of modern consumption and important shared spaces in societies around the world. In the process, they also became icons of popular culture that have found their way into books, movies, and television. As early as 1883, the department store was immortalized in literature with French writer Émile Zola's Au Bagnere des Dames, published in English as The Lady's Paradise. The fictional book explored the dark side of the new phenomenon. It recounted a store modeled on the Bon Moche that was a shopping paradise but that causes small businesses to collapse and whose staff suffer greatly. Department stores were also drafted as settings for classic comedy, from Charlie Chaplin's The Floorwalker in 1916 to the Marx Brothers film The Big Store, released in 1941. Later, the English TV series Are You Being Served? showcased the farcical dramas of a fictional department store and its staff. The show ran from 1972 to 1985. In the new millennium, the English television show Mr. Selfridge has told the story of the man behind the megastore. Based on a biography called Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge, the series has fascinated viewers with the entrepreneur's dramatic tale. Nowadays, his namesake department store remains a shopping and entertainment destination, boasting its own movie theater and skate bowl alongside its massive retail space, restaurants, and bars. Paris's first department store, Le Bon Moche, still draws crowds of shoppers too with its spacious premises and its selection of designer clothing, beauty products, home goods, children's wear, and so much more. In places like Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates, mega malls draw countless shoppers and tourists to what are more like amusement parks mixed with clothing shops and restaurants. Across the world, department stores survive in cities big and small, even as online marketplaces and shopping malls of smaller stores tempt customers away. Much like early department stores once drew customers from small shops and like the mail order catalogs once grabbed their share of the consumer market, retail shopping and consumption will no doubt continue to shift and evolve in the future as they have done in the past. But the history of department stores will surely keep influencing and shaping that landscape for many years yet to come. The department stores will be open to customers from all over the world, including the local government, and the local government.
