Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Retiring from Marshall Field, Selfridge moved to Britain and at the age of fifty founded the London department store that bears his name. Though most British observers felt certain that such a crassly commercial undertaking would never succeed in London, it not only thrived but made Oxford Street into London’s premier shopping thoroughfare. Selfridge was obsessively devoted to his store. He concerned himself with everything from the sharpness of sales clerks’ pencils to the quality of their teeth. Something of his dedication to work is evidenced by a vacation he took in 1914. He left London by train on a Saturday morning and by noon the next day was on the skating-rink of a Swiss hotel. He skated vigorously for four hours, packed up his skates and stocking cap, caught a train back to London and was at his desk at 8 a.m. on the Monday morning. That was his idea of a holiday.

  But with the death of his wife in 1918, something snapped inside him. He began to go nightclubbing, fell in with a pair of Hungarian-American vaudeville stars known as the Dolly Sisters and neglected his business. He bought racehorses, gambled and lost spectacularly at Monte Carlo, chartered aeroplanes to bring the Dollys cartons of ice-cream and breasts of chicken for their lapdog, bought a castle on England’s south coast, at Highcliffe in Hampshire, and laid plans to build a 250-room, $15 million estate near by.

  In ten years, he ran through $8 million. Unfortunately, not all of it was his. Unable to pay back the debts he owed to his own store – for a decade he and the Dollys had been helping themselves to whatever they fancied without troubling to pay for it – he was ignominiously retired from the Selfridge’s board of directors and given a pension of $25,000 a year (later cut to $12,000 and then to $8,000), from which he was expected to pay back debts of $2 million. He lost his houses and his Rolls-Royce, took a small flat in Putney and travelled by bus. On 8 May 1947 he died nearly destitute and virtually forgotten, and how many times have we heard that story before?

  Rather more successful at keeping his hands on his money was Frank W. Woolworth. Where Selfridge had created the bargain basement as a sideline – a useful way of generating money from otherwise unsaleable goods – Woolworth had the idea of building a store that was in effect nothing but a bargain basement. He opened the first Woolworth’s store in Utica, New York, in 1879. Everything cost five or ten cents – a proposition scarcely less incredible then than it would be now. The store was immediately successful, and by 1900 Woolworth had fifty-nine stores with annual sales of over $5 million. By 1913, he was so rich that he was able to fund the construction of the $13.5 million Woolworth Building in New York with cash.3 By then people everywhere were shopping at bargain counters (an expression first used in 1888) and five and tens or five and dimes (1905).

  Actually, not everywhere. In the early 1900s, America was still a largely rural country. Farm families and small-town folk longed to consume and possess like everyone else, but for years there was no way to reach them. Then in 1872 an organization formally called the Patrons of Husbandry but better known as the Grange (an old English word, etymologically related to grain and signifying a farmstead) began offering a mail-order service to its members. It, too, was a huge hit and by the 1890s its catalogue contained over 24,000 items, bringing a new world of choice and possibility to thousands of rural consumers. The Grange eventually evolved into Montgomery Ward, but in the mean time it was overtaken by one of the most successful companies America has ever seen: Sears, Roebuck and Company.

  Founded in 1886, the enterprise was named for its two original partners, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, though the latter sold out in 1893. Sears’s rise was little short of phenomenal. By 1900 it had surpassed the Grange in size and by 1906 it was so mammothly successful that it needed 2,000 workers to process the 900 sackloads of orders it received each day. Such was the volume of business that the railways, telegraph companies and Post Office all opened branch offices at the company’s Chicago headquarters.4 Sears’s success is all the more remarkable when you consider that in its early days it was not terribly noted for scruples. In one early ad, it offered a sewing-machine at the exceptional price of $1. Customers who responded received a needle and thread.5 In 1899 it ran ads offering, for the next sixty days only, a luxuriously upholstered sofa and two matching chairs for just ninety-five cents. Thousands sent in their orders – and received three pieces of doll’s house furniture.

  Despite these stunts, people became hugely devoted to Sears. In rural areas especially, they relied on Sears for everything from shoes to sewing-machines. By the early 1900s it was possible to buy a car (called, naturally, the Sears) or even a house and all its furnishings from the company. The biannual receipt of its catalogues was among the high points of the year. The people of one North Dakota town were so taken with the company that they renamed their community Seroco, for Sears Roebuck & Co., and would have been more explicit had the US Postal Service let them.

  The quarter of a century or so from 1885 saw the refinement of another venerable component of American retailing: the brand name. Although a few durable brand names date from even earlier – Smith Brothers Cough Drops from 1866, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda from 1867, Ivory Soap from 1878 – the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth saw the birth of a positive blizzard of famous products: Coca-Cola (1886), Log Cabin Syrup (1887), Aunt Jemima pancake mix (1889), Shredded Wheat (1892), Tootsie Rolls and Cracker Jack (1896), Jell-O gelatin (1897), Pepsi-Cola (1898), Fig Newtons (1900), Animal Crackers (1902), Post Toasties (1904), Planters Peanuts (1906), Sunkist fruit (1907), and Life Savers (1911).

  What made all this possible, in large part, was the development of secure packaging such as the National Biscuit Company’s patented (and much misspelled) In-er-Seal wrap, which not only ensured freshness but also enabled manufacturers to turn from selling in bulk out of boxes and barrels to providing small, individualized packages. Often the packaging was all that stood between success and failure. Clarence Crane, the father of the poet Hart Crane, invented Life Savers in 1911, punching them out on a pharmacist friend’s pill-making machine, but they were a flop because the mints quickly went stale inside their paper wrappers and tended to absorb the flavour of the glue with which the wrappers were sealed. Only after a New York businessman bought the company and began wrapping the mints in tin foil did Life Savers take off – and take off they did. In just over a decade his initial investment of $1,500 in the company had become worth $3.3 million.

  As foods and other household products became individually wrapped and more conveniently transportable, it was only a matter of time before someone thought of a new way of selling them. In 1916 Clarence Saunders of Memphis, Tennessee, hit on a novel proposition that he patented under the name the Self-Serving Store.

  The first well-known grocery store chain in America was the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, founded in 1859. As the name suggests, it began as a tea importer, but it was stocking groceries as early as 1865. By the outbreak of World War I, A&P, as it was by then known, had 2,000 stores all over America.6 They were, however, stores of the old-fashioned type in which clerks fetched requested items from high shelves.

  Clarence Saunders changed all that with his Memphis store. He called it a Piggly-Wiggly. When asked why he had given it such an odd name, he replied: ’That’s why – because it makes people curious!’ Customers entered through a turnstile, picked up a basket, made their selections and eventually arrived at the ‘settlement and checking’ desk, where the selections were ‘checked up’ and wrapped. A reporter for the New York Times, clearly agog at this revolutionary concept, described how a customer ‘rambles down aisle after aisle, on both sides of which are shelves. The customer collects his purchases and pays as he goes out.’ The motivation behind the stores was not so much to provide a convenience for the customers as to deal with a shortage of clerks occasioned by World War I. It soon became evident, however, that shoppers liked being able to squeeze the bread and handle the soup cans, and the idea took off in a big way.

  Saunde
rs lost control of Piggly-Wiggly while playing the stock market in 1923 and devoted his remaining years to an even more ambitious, but ultimately hare-brained, scheme called Keydoozle (for which read: ‘key does all’) Markets, a kind of automated grocery store in which the customers would make their selections by inserting keys into slots beside a specimen product. Behind the scenes an absurd assortment of clattering machinery and flapping conveyor belts would sort the products and carry them, bagged and ready to take home, to the checkout counter. The system never really worked, and no more was heard of Clarence Saunders.7

  In one important respect, Saunders’s stores represented no advance on the old-style grocery stores. They were small, often no more than 1,500 square feet, with no more than three or four aisles. The credit for creating the first true supermarket is usually given to Michael Cullen, who opened a ‘grocery warehouse’ or ‘food market’ – he used either name freely – in Jamaica, New York, in 1930. It wasn’t the first big food store in America. As early as 1923 San Francisco had a grocery store called the Crystal Palace with parking for 4,350 cars*26 and 68,000 square feet of retail space. However, Cullen did offer several features that would become standard in the business – evening opening, self-service, strident advertising, and a practically irresistible impulse to put a misspelled word in the title. He called it King Kullen. The first company to use the word supermarket in its title appears to have been Albers Super Mkts., Inc., of Cincinnati, which registered the name in 1933.8 The same decade saw the development of an appliance to help shoppers deal with the increasing volume of goods on offer: the shopping trolley. Although a grocery store in Houston had for years been offering its customers the use of children’s wagons with a basket attached to help them manage their purchases, it wasn’t until 1936 when a store owner in Oklahoma City named Sylvan Goldman invented the modern shopping trolley which he called a basket carrier that bulk-buying became a possibility. (At first, customers showed great reluctance to use the new contraptions. Only when Goldman employed half a dozen people to push the carts around all day, pretending to shop, did others begin to imitate them.)

  In terms of numbers, supermarkets were relatively slow in taking off. As late as 1955, 95 per cent of America’s 360,000 grocery stores were mom and pop corner businesses or medium-sized stores known as superettes. Although supermarkets accounted for just 5 per cent of grocery outlets, they already had half of America’s food sales.9 In most communities the days were numbered not only for mom and pop stores and superettes (though a few unexpectedly survive, such as the A-1 Superette off Waikiki Beach in Honolulu), but for bakeries, butchers, delicatessens and all kinds of other stores.

  Supermarkets not only changed the way America shopped but the way America ate. As women increasingly went out to work, convenience foods took on an ever more important role. Frozen foods were developed by a small company called Birds Eye, which took its oddly unappetizing name from Clarence Birdseye, a naturalist from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who accidentally discovered the potential of flash-freezing food while out ice-fishing. The first Birds Eye frozen foods came on to the market in 1930, though they weren’t called that. They were sold as frosted foods because it was thought that frozen would suggest flesh-burns and other spoilage. It quickly became apparent that people were even more baffled by frosted – they weren’t sure if it meant partially frozen or even that the food was covered in some kind of icing – and frozen food it became. Birdseye’s first range of frosted/frozen offerings consisted of a range of eighteen meats, three seafoods, two vegetables and three fruits. Suddenly in the middle of January America’s housewives could, as the ads gushed, buy ‘June peas as gloriously green as any you will next Summer’.10

  Frozen prepared foods followed just before the outbreak of World War II. Baked beans were the first, rather improbable, offering, though soon you could get more exotic dishes like chicken à la king and lobster Newburg. The first frozen dinners were produced in 1945, for use by the army, and a year later the concept was offered to the public under the buckle-your-seatbelt name of Strato Meals. Another early competitor made Frigidinners before C. A. Swanson & Sons swept all before it with its TV Brand Dinners, launched in 1954.11

  The phenomenon that made supermarkets bloom – namely, the rise of suburbia – was responsible for another development without which modern life for millions would be unendurable: the shopping mall.

  Malls of a sort have been around for a long time. The first began as arcades (from the Italian arcata, ’arch’) in Europe, starting with the Burlington Arcade in London in 1819 and soon followed by the Galeries Saint Hubert in Brussels and the cathedral-like Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which Mark Twain found so enchanting that he declared he would happily live in it for the rest of his life. It is still probably the most beautiful shopping centre in the world. The fashion soon spread across the Atlantic. By the 1830s, beginning with the Weybosset Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, most large American cities could boast an arcade or two.

  Arcades never became anything but an incidental feature in American retailing. For most Americans shopping implied department stores and smaller businesses inhabiting the ground floors of downtown office buildings. Often these went through certain linguistic vogues. Cafeteria, as we have already seen, spawned a host of like forms – baketeria, bargainteria, camerateria and so on. In the 1920s and ‘30s -teria gave way to -orium: suitatorium, shavatorium, corsetorium, hairitorium, shoetorium, pantatorium, even hot-dogatorium. These in turn were followed by brief fashions for -rama (Shop-a-Rama, etc.) and -ette (washerette, superette, drugette) before the infatuation with odd terminations ran its course in the 1950s.

  As America spread into the suburbs, businesses naturally followed. Soon every residential area had a row of little businesses – a barber-shop, a corner grocery, a drugstore perhaps – standing beside popular streetcar stops as a kind of prototype shopping centre. These early assemblages of suburban stores were known variously as shopping strips, string streets, or taxpayer blocks (so called because they were often intended only as temporary improvements, the hope being that they would generate enough revenue to pay the taxes on the land until something grander could be erected).

  Such was the proliferation of strips, triangles, squares and other collections of retailers that the argument over who built the first true shopping centre in America is all but unanswerable. As far back as 1907 a Baltimore businessman named Edward H. Bouton erected a development of six stores that was slightly set back from the street, with space for parking at the front, and which he called the Roland Park Shopping Center. The National Register of Historical Places recognizes Market Square, built in 1916 in Lake Forest, Illinois, as the first planned shopping mall.12 Others give the honour to Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, built by J. C. Nichols in 1922 as part of a huge housing development. It was the first to contain a few areas exclusively for the use of pedestrians, though its layout was otherwise strictly conventional with the stores facing on to the street. Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas, built in 1931, was the first to completely segregate shoppers and motorists by turning its back on the street. With the exception of the Roland Park Shopping Center, most of the early complexes were called neither shopping centers nor malls, but something rather cosier, usually incorporating in their titles the words square or village, as with the Highland Park Shopping Village, Suburban Square (built in 1928 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania), and Hampton Village (erected in St Louis in 1941).

  The shopping centre was, however, essentially a 1950s phenomenon. By the close of World War II there were just eight shopping centres in America and as late 1949 no more than a dozen. Then in 1950 came the Northgate Center in Seattle, followed the next year by Shoppers’ World in Framingham, Massachusetts, and the floodgates opened. Shopping centres began to go up everywhere. Such was the rate of development that by 1956, Business Week was headlining a story ‘Too Many Shopping Centers’ and noting with alarm that in just two months of 1956 more shopping-centre space
opened in America than in the eight preceding years.13 In the generic sense for shopping centre, mall is not recorded until as late as 1967. The word has a curious history. It comes from a game popular in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Called palla a maglio (’ball to mallet’) in Italy and pallemaille in France, it became in England pall-mall (but pronounced ‘pell mell’). The game involved knocking a wooden ball along a leafy alley and chipping it through a hoop – a sort of early hybrid of golf and croquet. By the mid-eighteenth century it had fallen out of fashion, but the name lives on in two London streets: Pall Mall and the parallel avenue called the Mall (which by analogy ought to be pronounced ‘mell’ but isn’t). The Mall in particular became associated with aristocratic strolling. By 1784 mall had found a place in the American lexicon as a fashionable name for any green place suitable for perambulations, notably for the sweep of grass that features in the centre of Washington, DC.

  The man responsible for the layout and ambience of the modern shopping centre was not an American but a Viennese named Victor Gruen, who had fled the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and arrived in America with just $8 in his pocket. Within twelve years he had become one of the country’s leading urban planners. Ironically, Gruen’s intention was not to create a new and more efficient way of shopping but to re-create in America something of the unrushed café-society atmosphere of European city centres. Shopping centres – or shopping towns, as he preferred to call them – were to be gathering places for the neighbourhood, focal points of the community where people could stroll and meet their friends, dally over a coffee or an ice-cream and only incidentally shop. Gruen was convinced that he was designing a system that would slow suburban sprawl and tame the automobile. How wrong he was.