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| Building a temple of consumer culture. |
I'm reading The Ladies Paradise, by Émile Zola, in an excellent translation by Brian Nelson. Remember departments stores? A few survive - Macy's, Bloomingdale's, for example - but many perished even before the advent of online shopping.
But how did the department store itself evolve? This story is a fictionalized - but well-researched - account of the emergence of a modern department store in the heart of Paris, during the Second Empire (1852-1870). But you don't have to know or care anything about the politics or history of the period to enjoy this story. Anti-hero Octave Mouret is an entrepreneur who sees the great wealth generated during this period and the aspirational consumption which that wealth enables. A born salesman, and the manager-owner of The Paradise store, Mouret understands the benefits of innovations such as buying in quantity, the use of "loss leaders" and, enabled by the lower cost of plate glass at this time, the enticement of street-level display windows. Mouret is based on Aristide Boucicaut, the founder of the French department store chain Bon Marché.
Prior to the development of the grand magasins (department stores), the shopper traipsed from small shop to small shop; each retailer specializing in one item or type of goods. One bought dress material from a draper, for example, and then gave the fabric and any trimming to a dressmaker. If you needed an umbrella, you went to the umbrella maker. Even during my youth in Detroit, home of the J. L. Hudson department store, my grandmother would say that "one could go from store to store to buy what was needed, or just go to Hudson's."
Assembling different types of goods - departments - under one roof was revolutionary. Mouret's fictional store was a success, as he added a mail order catalog and home delivery, just as Boucicaut did in the real-life department store. As goods were sold at The Paradise, they were packaged and sent down a chute to the basement dispatch area, for transfer to the delivery trucks:
During big sales especially, the chute would discharge an endless flow into the basement, silks from Lyons, woolens from England, linens from Flanders, calicoes from Alsace, prints from Rouen...
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| J. L. Hudson store (now demolished) with giant flag, downtown Detroit. |
The Ladies' Paradise isn't a dry history though - the story unfolds through the eyes of the protagonist Denise, a penniless young woman, orphaned and fresh from the boondocks, hoping to find employment with her uncle, a Paris shop-keeper. However the uncle's business is slowly being squeezed by The Paradise, and instead Denise finds employment with the enemy, so to speak, becoming a saleslady at The Paradise. Something about her sparks Mouret's interest in a way he finds unsettling, and the development of their relationship will keep you reading. The introduction to the book is excellent too.
There's also a television series, The Paradise, very loosely based on the novel and relocated to England. The series, available on Amazon Prime, is better than reviews indicate, and at any rate the costumes are wonderful. However, while Zola's book is clearly a critique of consumer exploitation and manipulation, the television show mostly celebrates one retail triumph after another, without much insight or reflection.
