E. LEVASSEUR
The Paris Department Store
The rise of large department stores marked a new era in commercial retail, mechanized production for consumer goods, and the way in which men and women spent their leisure time. More than just a convenient emporium for purchasing a wide variety of goods, department stores strove to create a glamorous environment in monumental spaces that made shopping itself an experience. Department stores epitomized bourgeois consumerism. The following passage from 1907 examines the early history of department stores and the commercial strategies by which they revolutionized urban shopping.
It was in the reign of Louis-Philippe that department stores for fashion goods and dresses, extending to material and other clothing began to be distinguished. The type was already one of the notable developments of the Second Empire; it became one of the most important ones of the Third Republic. These stores have increased in number and several of them have become extremely large. Combining in their different departments all articles of clothing, toilet articles, furniture and many other ranges of goods, it is their special object so to combine all commodities as to attract and satisfy customers who will find conveniently together an assortment of a mass of articles corresponding to all their various needs. They attract customers by permanent display, by free entry into the shops, by periodic exhibitions,
by special sales, by fixed prices, and by their ability to deliver the goods purchased to customers' homes, in Paris and to the provinces. Turning themselves into direct intermediaries between the producer and the consumer, even producing sometimes some of their articles in their own workshops, buying at lowest prices because of their large orders and because they are in a position to profit from bargains, working with large sums, and selling to most of their customers for cash only, they can transmit these benefits in lowered selling prices. They can even decide to sell at a loss, as an advertisement or to get rid of out-ofdate fashions. Taking 5-6 per cent on 100 millions brings them in more than 20 per cent would bring to a firm doing a turnover of 50,000 francs.
The success of these department stores is only possible thanks to the volume of their business and this volume needs considerable capital and a very large turnover. Now capital, having become abundant, is freely combined nowadays in large enterprises, although French capital has the reputation of being more wary of the risks of industry than of State or railway securities. On the other hand, the large urban agglomerations, the ease with which goods can be transported by the railways, the diffusion of some comforts to strata below the middle classes, have all favoured these developments.
As example we may cite some figures relating to these stores, since they were brought to the notice of the public in the Revue des Deux-Mondes.
The Bellejardini&e, starting as a modest shop set up by Mr. Parissot near the Petit-Pont, was moved to the Cit6 in 1856 near the Pont-Neuf on a plot of 3,400 metres: in 1893 it did business of 38 millions, realizing a net gain of 6.3 per cent. Le Louvre, dating to the time of the extension of the rue de Rivoli under the Second Empire, did in 1893 a business of 120 million at a profit of 6.3 per cent. Le Bon-Marchg, which was a small shop when Mr. Boucicaut entered it in 1852, already did a business of 20 million at the end of the Empire. During the republic its new buildings were erected; Mme. Boucicaut turned it by her will into a kind of co-operative society, with shares and an ingenious organization; turnover reached 150 million in 1893, leaving a profit of 5 per cent. La Samaritaine, which had its most modest beginnings in 1869, today occupies the third rank among department stores of this kind by the number of its employees; it seeks its customers principally among the small consumers and makes great use of credit coupons.
It is worthy of note that the creators of these great department stores have arisen from the ranks of small shop assistants; they have succeeded because of their ability. The commercial organism shaped by them runs true to one type: strongly concentrated general authority, division of labour by departments and responsibility by each departmental head, individual effort of each employee in buying and selling stimulated by profit sharing or commission, etc.
According to the tax records of 1891, these stores in Paris, numbering 12, employed 1,708 persons and were rated on their site values at 2,159,000 francs; the largest had then 542 employees. These same stores had, in 1901, 9,784 employees: one of them over 2,000 and another over 1,600, their site value was doubled (4,089,000 francs).