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 that 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 were 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 floorwalker 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 marshaling 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 markdown 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 seven hundred thousand 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 fifteen or twenty dollars 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 three million dollars 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 percent 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 eight dollars, the elevator boys four dollars and the cash boys two dollars. 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.
A decade later, when McCormick’s workers walked out and mob violence swept the city, Chicago’s burgeoning—and sometimes brutal—police force didn’t need assistance from amateurs. Field himself watched the growing influence of the unions with unease. He reluctantly allowed his delivery men to join an emergent new transport union—the embryonic group that would evolve into the mighty Teamsters—but he nurtured a deep-rooted dislike of what he called “lawless strikers,” so much so that union leaders who came to shop in the store were asked to “take their business elsewhere.” His protégé Harry Selfridge likewise mistrusted—and avoided—unions throughout his career.
Chicago’s rich generally showed a blissful disregard for the poverty of their workers and continued their pursuit of extravagance. They ensured their details were recorded in the Bon Ton Directory, whose pages listed “the Most Prominent and Fashionable Ladies Residing in Chicago.” Among them was Mrs. Perry Smith, wife of the Chicago & North Western Railway vice president, who delighted in showing guests visiting her new mansion the butler’s pantry, which was equipped with three taps—one for hot water, one for cold, and one for iced champagne. Such material excesses rather appealed to Sarah Bernhardt. When the celebrated actress swept into town to perform at McVicker’s Theater, she was accompanied by a hundred pieces of luggage, her pet tiger cub, and her lover of the day, a handsome young Italian known only as Angelo. Chicago’s grand dames refused to receive her, but despite their snubs she said she “found the city vibrant and exciting.” Not everyone agreed. George Curzon, touring America in 1887, thought Chicago “huge and smoky and absorbed in the worship of Mammon in a grim and melancholy way,” though that did not prevent him from subsequently marrying Levi Leiter’s daughter.
By 1887, having driven Mr. Fleming to early retirement, Harry Selfridge was appointed retail general manager of the store. His increased salary enabled him to move his mother from Jackson to Chicago, and they both settled into a house in the city’s Near North Side. Mrs. Selfridge now had a maid to do her housework. She also had a carriage, whose groom drove a pair of matched chestnut horses to take her around town. The carriage was nowhere near as glamorous as Potter Palmer’s imported French char-à-banc with its leopard-skin-covered seats, nor as distinctive as the brothel owner Carrie Watson’s famous snow-white equipage with bright yellow wheels that was pulled by a team of four glistening black horses, but for Lois Selfridge, it was more than she had ever dreamed possible.
Her son meanwhile made impressive improvements to his own habitat within the State Street store, where he furnished a spacious office. By contrast, Field’s office was so small and bleak that George Pullman called it a “cubby hole.” Field’s routine never varied. He arrived by carriage each morning—setting down two blocks away so he could be seen walking to work—and spent most of the morning going through paperwork before touring the sales floors. He lunched at the Chicago Club, sitting at the “millionaires’ table” with friends such as George Pullman and Judge Lambert Tree, and would then wal
k to the Merchants Loan and Trust Bank—an enterprise in which he held most of the shares—before calling in at the wholesale headquarters, housed in a magnificent seven-story building covering a whole city block.
For all his tacit support of the retailing enterprise, it was the wholesale division that interested Field the most—mainly because it made the most money, but also because his traveling sales force reported back from far-flung towns in the Midwest on everything from the state of transport to local politics, land prices, and immigration. Distilling this information gave Field an invaluable insight into commercial progress in rural America, which proved crucial to the investment strategy of his own portfolio. On most days, Field would spend an hour with John Shedd, by now manager of the wholesale department and already, in Field’s eyes, a masterful merchant.
In 1888, John Shedd and Harry Selfridge were sent on a two-month business trip to Europe. They went to Germany, France, and England, where Marshall Field now had offices in Nottingham as well as Manchester. For Selfridge the trip was a catalyst. He was impressed beyond measure with Au Bon Marché in Paris, where he filled two notebooks with ideas, and captivated by the merchandise on sale at Liberty’s, particularly the ultramodern, floaty chiffon “tea gowns” and other aesthetically inspired embroideries much loved by Liberty’s more bohemian customers. In fact he was so entranced by the Arts & Crafts movement that when he returned to Chicago, he badgered Marshall Field to allow him to open a William Morris department.
In London, the two men lunched at the Criterion, dined at the Café Royal, attended the famous Gaiety Theatre and visited several English stately homes. It seems likely they went to Compton Verney in Warwickshire, where Marshall Field’s daughter Ethel lived with her husband, Arthur Tree, and their young family in a mansion rented from Lord Willoughby de Broke. Here Harry Selfridge could stroll in gardens laid out by Capability Brown and admire the distinctive hand of Robert Adam, who had remodeled the property in 1762. It was all a far cry from Chicago, not to mention Ripon, Wisconsin, and it almost certainly marked the beginning of what would ultimately become his grand passion for living in “the stately homes of England.”
Back in Chicago, Selfridge determined to make sweeping changes and dreamed of opening branches in New York, Paris and, most important, London. Field indulged him—up to a point—but he refused to entertain any ideas of expansion abroad. He did, however, extend the store in Chicago, acquiring three buildings along State Street between the original store and the Central Music Hall, enabling Selfridge to open major new departments. The first was dedicated to children’s wear and was partly inspired by the “Kate Greenaway” collections that Selfridge had seen in Liberty’s and by the middle-class trend for formal children’s clothes spawned by the runaway success of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s bestseller Little Lord Fauntleroy. Next came “Fine Shoes” (mass-produced quality shoes were a recent innovation thanks to the American invention of a “last-cutting” machine), which stocked shoes and boots in colored leathers as well as basic black. The store also started to sell paintings, gifts, and picture frames, and Selfridge opened service departments to clean customers’ gloves, mend their glasses, and restring their pearls.
The only thing missing was somewhere to sit, which Selfridge resolved by persuading Marshall Field to agree to an in-store restaurant. Given that there were so few places in Chicago where women could eat out by themselves, it isn’t surprising that the store “tea room,” as it was first called, was a runaway success. Originally set up with just fifteen tables served by eight waitresses, within the year it was enlarged to cope with the twelve hundred customers who ate there daily. It did not make a profit in the strict sense of “numbers,” but the add-on value in terms of service and keeping the customer in the store was incalculable. The lunch menu, devised by Selfridge with the assistance of a young Chicago cook named Harriet Tilden, was simple but delicious: chicken pot pie, chicken salad, corned beef hash, codfish cakes, and Boston baked beans, and orange fruit salad served in the orange shell. When the original kitchens could no longer cope with demand, Miss Tilden coordinated a group of home cooks who pre-prepared the dishes and delivered them each morning. As the in-store restaurant expanded, so did the kitchen space, but Harriet Tilden’s cooks were later put to good use when she opened her own business called “The Home Delicacies Association,” which catered for parties, receptions, and society dinners throughout Chicago.
The restaurant was busy from the minute it opened for coffee in the morning, and the ritual of “Afternoon Tea” at Field’s became ever more fashionable. Tiny sandwiches were served in a basket trimmed with a ribbon bow, and the menu included gingerbread slices and the house specialty, Field’s Rose Punch (ice cream with a berry sauce), which came with a red rose on each plate. This was a typical Selfridge touch. The symbolism of flowers was an important part of nineteenth-century sentimentality. Magazines and the endlessly popular etiquette manuals were full of features on “the meaning of flowers,” and the most admired flower of the day was the full-blown, gloriously rich and sexy red American Beauty rose, named after the equally curvaceous, gloriously proportioned stage star Lillian Russell.
The increased activity in the store soon paid dividends. During the six years of Harry Selfridge’s management, retail turnover increased from $4 million to $6.7 million. This, Selfridge reasoned, was fine for Mr. Field, but he now wanted more for himself. Emboldened by his success, he audaciously asked Field to make him a partner in the business. The atmosphere in Field’s office must have been electric as the elderly, reserved owner faced his cavalier, conceited young manager. Realizing “mile-a-minute Harry” might otherwise leave, Marshall Field bowed to the inevitable. He made Selfridge a junior partner and personally lent him the $200,000 needed to “buy himself in,” while allocating him a share of just under 3 percent of the total annual profits and increasing his annual salary to $20,000. The combined package meant that at the age of thirty-three Harry Selfridge was now making today’s equivalent of $435,000 a year.
Harry reveled in his new position. He had always been beautifully dressed, but now his frock coats with their silk-faced lapels became even more immaculately tailored. He loathed dirty shirts, changing his at least once and sometimes twice a day. He had special high-cut wing collars made to disguise his unusually thick neck and he always wore the widest possible silk tussore ties with a very large, soft knot. A gold fob watch on a chain, a gold-rimmed pince-nez and a rose boutonnière, carefully chosen from the vase of fresh blooms placed on his desk each morning, completed his outfit. Some of his colleagues found him unbearably conceited—indeed, the only modest thing about him was his height—but he was still head and shoulders above most people working in the retail business.
Selfridge’s private life at this time remains a mystery. His mother was his main companion and they were often noted in the press as “attending the theater.” Who else kept him company we do not know, but it seems likely that he paid for his sexual pleasures. Vice in Chicago being organized with the same efficiency that characterized more legitimate activities, there were any number of extremely elegant “houses” that men like Harry Selfridge could frequent without the slightest scandal ever being attached to their name. Any of the celebrated Carrie Watson’s twenty girls would have been delighted to welcome him, as would those working at Lizzie Allen’s famous “House of Mirrors” or “The Arena,” blatantly operating on Michigan Avenue where the local millionaires—and their sons—could make convenient visits.
Then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Harry became engaged to Rosalie Amelia Buckingham. His bride-to-be has been described as a “Chicago debutante.” She was indeed a debutante when a teenager, but by the time she met Harry she was nearly thirty and had spent several years working as a successful property developer. Rosalie had learned her craft from her father, the property investor Frank Buckingham, who was also a member of the exclusive Chicago Club. Mr Buckingham had died in the early 1880s, leaving his twenty-three-year-old daug
hter enough money to venture into development herself.
In partnership with her brother-in-law, Frank Chandler, Rosalie bought land on Harper Avenue in Hyde Park, then a rural outpost of the city. This was no small venture. Rosalie planned and oversaw the building of forty-two villas and “artists’ cottages,” the villas each with a forty-five- or fifty-foot frontage and a driveway to reach the stabling at the rear. It was an enlightened development, including a business block with a drugstore, a family grocery store, a café, a reading room and even a public hall for lectures and concerts. The houses looked out on the park lagoons and lake, with the east side of the development being built sixty feet away from the railroad tracks, which the railroad company was expected to landscape in harmony with the general plan. The architect for the development was Solon S. Beman, the designer of the famous “Pullman model town,” where George Pullman corraled his employees. But Rosalie’s villas were not intended for factory workers. They were elegant, spacious, middle-class homes in what was the area’s first planned community. Miss Buckingham was no giddy debutante.
Harry and Rosalie married on November 11, 1890. He was thirty-four and she was thirty. Harry Selfridge was not a religious man in the conventional sense. Brought up a Presbyterian, as an adult he leaned toward Unitarianism. He believed deeply in “salvation through good character and hard work” and championed “improvement through education”: his favorite motto was “Life is what you make it.” In Rosalie, he found a like-minded spirit. The wedding ceremony gave her a foretaste of what life with a showman would be like. It was held at the nondenominational Central Church, housed in the Central Music Hall, just down the road from Marshall Field and one of the few venues in Chicago capable of seating the thousand guests on the happy couple’s list. A choir of fifty—whose musical program was conducted by the Director of the Chicago Musical College, Dr. Florenz Ziegfeld—sang to the sound of the music hall’s impressive organ, backed up by an orchestra of strings and harps. A display team had labored to create the central aisle and roof as an exact replica of Ely Cathedral—a romantic curiosity the newspaper reports failed to investigate, but that they would have discovered was in honor of the bride’s ancestors who had arrived in America from Cambridgeshire—and the hall was filled with the scent of five thousand roses. More roses and a mass of lilies and foliage were wired around the pillars and the tiered boxes. The whole event was as spectacular as those later staged by Ziegfeld’s son—also called Florenz—when he became the impresario behind Ziegfeld’s Follies in New York. Indeed, many at the wedding thought the whole thing was a folly, but Harry Selfridge loved every glorious minute of it. His bride wore an ecru duchesse satin gown with exquisite antique lace cuffs falling from elbow-length sleeves. It wasn’t made by Worth, but it was a beautiful dress, set off by an impressive necklace of blue diamonds—her gift from the bridegroom.
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge Page 5