Who opened the first Department Store?
The first DEPARTMENT STORE was the Marble Dry Goods Palace opened on Broadway by Alexander Turney Stewart in 1848. Stewart had been a poorly paid schoolmaster in Ireland before he emigrated to New York in 1823 and set up his own business. At the time of its erection the Marble Dry Goods Palace was the largest shop in the world, extending the whole length of a city block. By 1876, the year of his death. Stewart’s company had an annual turnover of $70 million a year, and his personal fortune was estimated at $80 million. A man of few personal attractions, he was never known to have given away any of his vast wealth.
Both Kendal Milne of Manchester and Bainbridge’s of Newcastle upon Tyne had been departmentalized by 1850, but sold only articles of wearing apparel. the true instigator of the modern department store in Britain was William Whiteley, who started the Bayswater, London, enterprise later to be known as the ‘Universal Provider’ in 1863 with a staff of three. He is said to have been inspired with the department-store idea by seeing so much merchandise under one roof at the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1867 ne opened a jewelry department, and thus became the first British retailer to break away from drapery and haberdashery in a departmentalized store. A ‘foreign department’ selling Oriental novelties followed three years later, an estate agency and a restaurant (the first in a store) in 1872, a cleaning and dyeing department in 1874 and a hairdressing saloon in 1876. Whiteley’s slogan ‘Anything from a Pin to an Elephant’ was borne out when the supplied the latter article to a Church of England clergyman. Like his American counterpart A.T. Stewart, Whiteley secured an unenviable reputation for personal meanness, matched only by his vanity. In 1879 he had several hundred cabinet-sized photographs of himself put on sale at 2s 6d each, a venture that resulted in only four purchases. He was eventually murdered in 1907 by a man who claimed to be his illegitimate son.
The first department store in Britain to be built as such was the Bon Marche at Brixton, which James Smith erected in 1877 with the £ 80,000 he had accrued the previous year when his horse Rosebery won both the Cesarewitch and the Cambridgeshire.
The first Department Store with a self-service food department was Wood-ward’s of Vancouver, Canada in 1919.
