Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge (6 page)

It has always been said that Harry Selfridge worked on the shop floor, but his son Gordon claimed he never did: ‘My father did not start in retail as a clerk. He was in unofficial charge of the advertising department.’ Perhaps that is why Field – while acknowledging that Selfridge was articulate and in tune with the media – never thought of him as a true merchant. That accolade was reserved for Mr Shedd, already on the path to becoming ‘heir apparent’. Selfridge was the store’s ‘ideas man’ and if those ideas made money, that was all well and good. Selfridge took his role as copy-writer seriously. His copy seems dated now but for the time it was enormously refreshing. Field ads didn’t lie; they were always honest, perhaps a touch self-important – but above all, they were reassuring about quality, value, respect and
commitment to service. As Chicago boomed, the message went out to the public that Field & Leiter was a comforting place to be.

For all Field’s lack of charisma, he was polite, calm and dignified, exuding a quiet confidence. He prided himself on caring for the customer and drilled his staff never to hustle or harass. Walking through the store one day he found an assistant quibbling with a customer over a return. ‘Give the lady what she wants,’ Field remarked. He was equally calm when ousting Leiter, his partner of fourteen years, who exited the business with a cheque for nearly $3 million, leaving Harry Selfridge to write ads that announced the store would henceforth be called ‘Marshall Field & Co.’.

Levi Leiter took to his forced retirement rather well, moving his wife and family to Washington and setting up home in a Dupont Circle mansion, where he nurtured his property portfolio while his wife nurtured marital ambitions for her three young daughters. Despite their handsome dowries, not even Mrs Leiter could have predicted the glittering future of her eldest daughter Mary, who married George Curzon in 1895. When her husband subsequently took up his appointment as Viceroy of India, Lady Curzon, as Vicereine, occupied the most important position ever held by an American in the British Empire.

Back in Chicago, Harry Selfridge would prove Levi Leiter wrong. The future lay not in wholesaling but in retailing. The real consumer revolution had begun.

‘Remember always that the recollection of quality remains long after the price is forgotten.’
Harry Gordon Selfridge

H
arry Selfridge had a deep-rooted belief in the power of advertising. To him, it was the engine that drove the retail machine, and his faith in it never wavered. Through good times and bad, the Selfridge policy was to spread the word through the media.

His first aim was to get people through the doors. ‘Getting them in’ became his mantra. Once they were inside he believed in giving them comfort, courteous service and, above all, entertainment as an enticement to buy. If, having reeled them in like fish on a line, he lost some, he reckoned he could always catch them another time.

Harry was brash, bold, impulsive and imaginative, qualities which did not go down well with Marshall Field’s incumbent retail general manager, J. M. Fleming, to whom Harry was appointed as personal assistant in 1885. Harry’s brief from Marshall Field was to propose – and subsequently implement – new ideas. Mr Fleming was of the old school, formal in manner, traditional in outlook, bowing to every ritual and rule that had ‘built the business’. Harry thought him stubborn and old-fashioned.

A year or so earlier, Harry Selfridge had been to New York – a trip apparently taken at his own expense by way of a working holiday and one which had a profound effect on him. He noted the uniformed greeters at Lord & Taylor, saw the crowds hunting for bargains at
Macy’s and admired the fashionable clothes at the Bloomingdale Brothers’ East Side Bazaar. All had benefited in one way or another from the influence of Alexander Stewart (though his own business had, after his death in 1876, subsequently collapsed). Convinced he could make his own mark on Marshall Field, Harry looked at what was already there and set about improving it.

He had a good base on which to build. Field himself had embraced the era’s new technology, removing the old-fashioned gas lamps and wiring the six-storey store for electricity in 1882. He had even installed telephone lines, albeit only five for the whole building. The store also had a fine reputation in the community. Field’s promoted their ‘fair price’ policy, always claiming they offered good value.

Realistically, very few consumers had the faintest idea how much goods were worth. For most, the acquisition of non-essential goods was such a new adventure that if they had the money, they willingly paid the price. In many instances – particularly for luxury items – the store buyers were encouraged to set prices at what they thought the market could afford to pay. Prices were intended to cover all costs and they included an additional 6 per cent paid to the wholesale division – from whom the retail store sourced most of its goods – and a charge levied by Mr Field against the rental value of the space each department occupied. When all these costs were covered, departmental heads then had sales targets to meet, above which they made a bonus.

The store was also becoming much more service-orientated. Free local deliveries had already been introduced, as had a ‘storing’ point where parcels were kept while customers browsed in other departments. There were still only two elevators, but each was as comfortable as a private Pullman car, with plush bench seats, carved panelling and ornate mirrors. Otherwise customers used the impressive sweeping staircase which was twenty-three feet wide and easily accommodated the ‘back-bustle and train’ dresses then in fashion. Staff called customers ‘Madam’ or ‘Sir’. They weren’t allowed to hustle for sales, eat, spit, swear or chew tobacco on the shop floor. In reality, they enjoyed the status their jobs conferred as much as customers
enjoyed the status of shopping there. But the refined atmosphere was too rarefied to suit Selfridge who, at 29, was young enough to crave change, and astute enough to know it was waiting to happen.

His first target was lighting. Despite the large central skylight and new electric lighting, the store, replete with vast amounts of mahogany panelling, was gloomy, so he quadrupled the number of hanging globes. Then, maximizing the wonder of electricity, uniquely for Chicago (and very possibly any other retail store in the world), he lit the windows when the store was closed at night, bringing evening ‘window shopping’ to the city. Considering communication crucial, he increased the number of telephone lines, installing a central switchboard operated by female telephonists, with extensions into each major department.

Next he turned his attention to the fixtures. Shopping, he reasoned, should be both a visual and a tactile experience, one best enjoyed in a moment of private self-indulgence and enjoyment and not requiring a sales clerk to unlock a cabinet. So he put central displays in the aisles, folding stock on tables so women could touch and feel a cashmere shawl or a pair of fine kid gloves that they were thinking of buying. He lowered the old-fashioned wall units and ripped out the steep shelves, installing instead back fixtures that staff could reach without ladders. He also reduced the height of the counters, bringing them down to customer-friendly levels, with deep drawers for storage underneath to save staff wasting time making trips to the stock room.

Field may not have appreciated the significance of these moves, but Chicago’s acclaimed architect Daniel Burnham certainly did. Burnham – best known today for his iconic Flat Iron building in New York – was the man who helped shape late nineteenth-century Chicago. He also became Selfridge’s hero. Harry – whose greatest hobby was collecting architectural drawings – called him ‘Uncle Dan’, and it was he who later helped visualize the Oxford Street store. Just after Burnham’s firm had completed a massive new development for Marshall Field & Co. in 1908 (a dream job that largely created the
building that exists today), he wrote to Selfridge in London with news of their solution to the shop-fitting: ‘the fixture question, which I am sure has been solved in this, as in no other store in the world, owes much to your early efforts’.

There was no stopping the man staff called ‘mile-a-minute Harry’. He printed souvenir booklets for the 1884 Presidential Conventions held in the city and invited all the delegates to visit the store, reminding them that their shopping would be delivered to their hotels. When the city began to pay school teachers by cheque, he set up a special in-store bank to cash them – ignoring criticism from the media that he was enticing teachers to ‘spend more freely in the store as they had cash in their purses’.

Ever the publicist, he also more than quadrupled the store’s newspaper advertising budget and booked Chicago’s first ever full-page advertisements. The advertisements always had a story – aggressive advertising never interested Harry Selfridge. He preferred to use persuasion, and the text of the advertisements was peppered with his quaint, quirky and deeply felt moral opinions. Nor would he use lurid headlines or false offers on prices. A typical trick of the day was to advertise delivery of ‘a special line at exceptional prices’. When customers arrived, they invariably found that what they wanted had mysteriously sold out but that there was something similar at a higher price. Harry Selfridge never endorsed such trickery. He never promised more than the store could provide and he focused on ‘service with a smile’.

Shoppers responded to what they felt was sincerity, feeling they were part of the equation in making a choice about their purchases. In truth, women are instinctively shrewd shoppers, but in choosing Field’s they were acknowledging that they found subtlety more seductive than bullying. Selfridge told the staff to treat customers ‘as guests when they come and when they go, whether or not they buy. Get the confidence of the public and you will have no difficulty in getting their patronage.’ He was right.

His message to both the public and the staff was that there was
contentment, even fun, to be found in shopping (and working) at Marshall Field. His critics sneered at him, laughing about his ‘little notices’ pinned on the wall in the canteen which set ‘daily targets’:

‘To do the right thing at the right time in the right way’

‘To do some things better than they were ever done before’

‘To know both sides of the question’

‘To be courteous; to be a good example; to anticipate requirements’

‘To be satisfied with nothing short of perfection’

In reality, his methods where hugely motivational, and this at a time when – particularly in England – store staff were more likely to read a notice outlining cash fines levied for being late on the floor or for being seen by the floor-walker to miss a sale.

Selfridge himself was never a bully, but he was a disciplinarian. He liked to think of himself as a great general marshalling his troops: he once famously said at a staff meeting that he endorsed the idea of uniforms and ‘wouldn’t mind wearing one himself’. He drilled the staff constantly about the need to be polite and clean (nails, shirt collars and shoes were randomly checked), and if he found a dusty surface when touring the store, he would simply scrawl HGS on it – a sure signal for staff to get out the dusters. He never raised his voice and he never reprimanded anyone in public. He didn’t crack jokes and he never, ever gossiped. But he had an aura. Just being around him was heady stuff. Homer Buckley, who worked in the shipping department at Field’s, still remembered the impact Selfridge made on him over sixty years later: ‘he would drop in at your desk, sometimes all of a sudden, sit there and talk ten minutes, ask about this and that, never talk down to you – the result was you’d be thrilled for a week. I would literally walk on air after he’d done this at my desk. I never met a man capable of putting such inspiration into his employees.’

In 1885, having already instigated the first twice-yearly mark-down sales, Harry implemented a real coup in convincing Marshall Field to open the lower ground floor as the store’s ‘bargain basement’.
Shoppers today are so used to discounts that it is hard to imagine what an impact it had. Chicago’s wealthy were regular customers, but by now the city’s population had grown to 700,000 and Selfridge longed to give ordinary people what the rich enjoyed. He didn’t just target those on low incomes making a special purchase – perhaps lace for a Confirmation dress, or ribbons to trim a hat to wear at a wedding – he also believed that customers from the young, professional classes, making their way on $15 or $20 a week, would soon be able to ‘move upstairs’. The bargain basement was much more than a vehicle to shift slow-moving retail stock, although of course it helped to clear the shelves, creating an aura of exclusivity around the store’s core merchandise. Promoted as offering ‘even better value’ – Selfridge abhorred the word ‘cheap’ – the bargain basement rapidly became a destination for thrifty shoppers who could buy special lines that were subsequently introduced to complement the full-priced merchandise on the upper floors. The new floor was so successful that by 1900, it had a sales turnover of $3 million and had inspired a raft of competitors to copy the idea.

Originally, when presenting his case for the bargain basement, Selfridge had argued the cause of aspirational immigrants, who had an acute sense of ‘Sunday Best’. This was a step too far for Field, who had a deep mistrust of immigrants and shuddered at the idea of them shopping in his store. To Field and his cronies, mass immigration, especially from Germany, meant the spreading of socialism, with its inevitable demands for workers’ rights, reduced hours and higher pay. Though Field treated his own staff well, he abhorred the idea of unions. Staff who showed signs of militancy were dismissed immediately.

By the mid-1880s, there were well over a thousand staff at Field’s. They worked a minimum nine-hour day, six days a week, ate well in the staff canteen and received a 6 per cent discount on their own purchases – not that many of them could afford to shop there. Field’s paid less than average: a starting salesman received a weekly wage of $8, the elevator boys $4 and the cash boys $2. But a job at Marshall Field’s had cachet, and the store staff considered themselves infinitely
superior to the city’s factory, sweatshop and railroad workers. When Chicago’s railwaymen had rioted during the great railroad strike in 1877, Field staff were mobilized and issued with rifles to use against the threatening ‘rabble’ if they had to.