Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1912 — DEPARTMENT STORE FACTS [ARTICLE]

DEPARTMENT STORE FACTS

Vast Retail Commercial Institutions Pay Out Millions Yearly in Wages Alone. The department store of today first saw ‘pie light in the sunny land ot France 42 years ago—in to W | exact—when a venturesome Parisian divided a large building Into numer* ous departments, each of which was I devoted to the sale of a special class of goods. Paris looked and gasped, then admired, and finally patronized the departure. It succeeded, and then just to prove that imitation Is the sinew- M est flattery a number of similar stores sprang into being. . 1 Two or three years later the first department store in this country was born in Boston. Associated with the enterprising proprietors, says Harper’s Weekly, was that pirate of fOP-. tune known at that time as plain Jim Fisk; he had not then become a colonel, nor had he hoisted the black flag on the* financial seas that beat around Wall street He was a clever, hustling, Yankee peddler who had driven a gaudy and gorgeous peddler's wagon up and down New England. After Boston, Chicago entered the field; New York was a bad third, although Philadelphia dispates the claim. Then like mushrooms department stores sprang up all over the country until today there Is not an overgrown town anywhere that does not boast of an establishment in humble imitation of the great metropolitan palaces of commerce. "It takes as much generalship to organize a business like this as to organize an army,” said President ■ Grant at the opening of a department store In Philadelphia in 1877. This statement today seems to be almost modest when it Is borne in mind that J there are now two stores in this country in which the salaries paid at certain periods are at the rate of sls,- / 000 a day, or $90,000 a week, equal to ’ $4,500,000 a year—a sum approximating one-fifteenth of the public debt of the United States in 1792. These figures include of course the salaries paid not only to the sales people whom one sees but also to the “dead help,” the delivery people, office peopie, drivers, watchmen, etc., whom | one never sees. ploy from 4,000 persons at slow time up to 8,000 during the Christmas hdß> days and have payrolls averaging $lO,000 a day or $3,000,000 a year. There Is one store which at Christmas, 1910, had a population tn two cities of 14,- : 700. That would indicate a payroll of more than $20,000 a day for that period, or at the rate of more than $6,000,000 a year. What is the value of the stock that the pretty salesgirls and their dlploma tic colleagues deftly persuade ths public to -buy? From $5,000,000 to $7,000,000, the latter being the valuation about Christmas time. The stock contains anything from a spool of cotton costing a penny to a piece i? of antique lace costing SI,OOO a yard, 4 from a five-cent scarfpin to a $50,000 necklace, from a fur piece costing one dollar to a sable wrap worth $15,000.