Department stores

In Émile Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), a delivery wagon painted green, yellow, and red carries the name of a great Paris store through the streets. Across the road, the owner of an old cloth shop turns pale as he watches it go. Zola studied real stores closely. Opening day of the great sale comes from this book.

Some of the new methods were older than the big stores. In 1673 the merchant Mitsui Takatoshi opened a kimono-cloth shop called Echigoya in Edo (now Tokyo). Its sign promised sales for cash at fixed prices, with no bargaining; in 1683 it moved to Suruga-cho. In Paris, Aristide Boucicaut worked from 1834 at the Petit Saint-Thomas, a shop that already used fixed prices, mail orders, delivery, and sales. In 1852 he joined Paul Videau in a shop called the Bon Marché. Its sales grew from 450,000 francs to 7 million in ten years. From 1869 Boucicaut built new halls of iron and glass, with ironwork by the firm of Gustave Eiffel. The architects Alexandre Laplanche and Louis-Charles Boileau joined the buildings into one whole. When he died in 1877 the store had 1,788 employees. The Louvre store opened in 1855, Printemps in 1865, and the Samaritaine in 1870.

The Paris stores let anyone walk in and look. Prices were fixed and marked, so no one bargained. The stores bought from makers directly, paying cash. They took small profits but sold a great deal, and they took back goods, delivered, sent out catalogs, and advertised. The Bon Marché housed unmarried women employees in dormitories on its top floor. It also offered a reading room for men and a tea room.

Who was first depends on the definition. The Fondation Napoléon's history site calls the Bon Marché the first of the great Paris stores, and the store says the same of itself. New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission says A. T. Stewart started "the city's first department store" in his marble building on Broadway, opened in 1846. Stewart sold at one price.

Zola's plans for the novel foresaw the big store ruining the small shops around it. A study by the French national library finds that small shopkeepers of the time felt more worry than actual ruin, since bankruptcies stayed fairly low. It also notes that critics found Zola's small shops heavily overdrawn.