American Department Store Research Articles

The Curious Case of the Kitchen Computer: Products and Non-Products in Design History

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer is described in a number of places, particularly on the World Wide Web, as a curiosity—a futuristic computer product that never sold. In fact, the Kitchen Computer was merely a publicity stunt, a spoof, continuing a long line of fantasy gifts offered by the up-market American department store Neiman Marcus. But this fantasy status is by no means the whole story. In reality, what was advertised as the Kitchen Computer was actually designed as a serious mini computer, the H316, produced by Honeywell as a part of its Series 16 family of machines—although, even as a commercial product, it was never really intended to sell. This case raises a number of questions for design historians. What is the definition of a product for design historical purposes? The status of products that actually existed as production items and of products that are ‘vapourware’—product proposals that did not materialize—is sometimes difficult to ascertain. This study explores the notion of products and non-products as subjects of design analyses and argues that even non-products can have significant agency as well as provide valuable insights into a period’s zeitgeist.

The Customer Is Always Wrong: Consumer Complaint in Late‐NEP Russia

T A o earn the public's trust and publicize his firm's commitment to provide customers attentive and courteous assistance, Philadelphia's pioneering retailer John Wanamaker coined the slogan Customer is Always Right. Enshrined as a cornerstone of the capitalist retail ethos, Wanamaker's slogan nonetheless brought no end of trouble to many proprietors and retail employees. As Susan Porter Benson has noted in her study of the development of the American department store, once services had become accepted features of department stores, certain customers demanded special individual attention. To some women of the upper and middle classes, the emphasis on amenity and luxury was not just an invitation to consume in style, but also a blank check for the exercise of their class prerogatives.1 While the image of the customer as queen?or king?continued to reign supreme in the United States, even as trade journals filled with stories of ill-tempered customers who defied the noble ideal, the installation of a socialist government in the former Russian Empire called into question the privileging of the consumer. As Benson's remark suggests, serving the customer connoted an unquestioning deference on the part of sales workers, who were expected to fulfill the personal requests of middleand upper-class female shoppers and indulge their whims. In the Soviet Union, a society founded to uphold the rights of the working class, this unequal relationship symbolized the reenactment of class struggle on the sales floor, and, therefore, would have to be reversed. The process by which the Bolsheviks tried to recreate the retail sector and alter the relationship between workers and consumers, however, was by no means as straightforward as simply inverting class and gender dynamics. Consumers were not always middle or upper class. Neither were workers and consumers always female. Moreover, socioeconomic struggle became only one factor at play on the sales floor. Equally important was the legacy of the pre-1917 retail economy,

The Effect of Women's Rights on Women's Welfare: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper explores whether the welfare of women increased following the extension of women’s rights between 1960s and 1990s. Using individual level data on life satisfaction and focusing on changes in birth control rights in twelve European countries, it shows that the extension of both abortion rights and the pill is strongly linked to an increase in life satisfaction of women of childbearing age. Birth control rights also increased women’s investment in education, probability of working and income. Other women’s rights have proved less beneficial. Mutual consent divorce laws decreased women’s welfare. High maternity protection on the job has negligible effects. What’s college? That’s where girls who are above cooking and sewing go to meet a man so they can spend their lives cooking and sewing. (an advertisement for an American department store in 1950) Modern life is based on control and science. We control the speed of our automobile. We control machines. We endeavor to control disease and death. Let us control the size of our family to ensure health and happiness. (an American family planning poster in the early 1940s) 1 A key issue in public economics is to evaluate the effects of public policies. Between the late 1960s and the 1990s vast and deep changes in social norms and institutions took place in relation to women’s rights. Women as a pressure group became influential in politics and equal treatment and reproductive rights laws were enacted in the majority of Western countries. Their goal was to improve women’s welfare, and similarly to other public policy initiatives, they required funding to implement them. After ten to thirty years of such public policies, we can evaluate their effects. There is no bet a priori on the direction and the size of these effects. With some exceptions, economists generally expect an increase in welfare from policies that remove binding constraints on choices. In the public debate the opinion is fragmented. Some qualitative evaluations report that women ended up with a double burden from being both the primary caregiver in the family and a worker and that ultimately women ‘could not have it all’. The data show that in the last thirty years women had fewer children, studied longer, worked more and earned a higher wage. The positive link between wage, education and welfare is generally assumed. Instead of imposing this assumption, I

Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand: Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930

Department stores emerged as central institutions in the expansion of the consumer culture in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and music played an unusually prominent and varied role in these new palaces of consumption. Over the half century from 1880 to 1930 a wide range of music was presented in the stores, including elegant evening concerts conducted by such luminaries as Richard Strauss and Leopold Stokowski, afternoon programs given by professional and amateur musicians in large in-store concert halls, performances by choruses and bands made up of store employees, background music played by pianists or string quartets, and phonograph demonstrations. Trade papers published for department store retailers reveal the marketing strategies that largely motivated this impressive patronage of music. Music's range of cultural associations worked to the retailers' advantage by investing the stores with excitement and drama, by imbuing commonplace goods with luxury and status, and by encouraging leisurely shopping among women. The commercial setting, in turn, left indellible marks on the music: in the length of concert programs, in the types of works commissioned by the stores, in the mixing of popular and classical repertories, and in the reduction of music to a commodity. The department stores proved a crucial testing ground for the widescale commercialization of music in twentieth-century America.

"Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand": Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930

"Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand": Music in American Department Stores, 1880-1930

The Decline of the Traditional American Department Store

Over the past five years, retailing in the United States has been going through many changes. As a result of these changes the traditional American department store, as an insititution, has been steadily on the decline. We provide an explanation for this devline by focusing on environmental factors an ordganizational changes. Environmental factors include changing consumer attitudes toward mass marketing, demographic changes forcing a suburban as opposed to urban focus, competition and overstoring, and new store social class distinctions. Organizational changes include the introduction of "Just-In-Time" (JIT) as a retail concept, a "trading up" in the merchandise mix, declinging customer services, the increased cost of reaching customers, maintenance of high gross margins, the move from local to regional to national presence, expansion leading to a loss of operational control, and the erosion of consumer trust in the institution.

AN OVERVIEW OF AMERICAN RETAIL TRENDS

Looking beyond and “beneath” the short‐term effects of the 1990‐1991 recession, the general trends taking place in American retailing as it enters the third year of the 1990s are reviewed. These include: the effects of demographic changes, the significance of retailing in the economy, specialisation, “value” retailing, merchandise “scrambling”, the increasing segmentation of retail “offers”, the decline of the American department store, the “hangover” from the 1980s “space race”, the continued decentralisation of retail floorspace, the impacts of LBO debt problems, a return to “basics”, store “localising”, the “internationalisation” of American retailing, and the contributions of information technology. In conclusion, a brief prognosis is given for the remainder of the 1990s.

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology

None-Too-Porous Boundaries: Labor History and the History of Technology PHILIP SCRANTON This article represents an attempt to assess the relationships be­ tween research in labor history and issues of moment in studies of the history of technology. To make this topic manageable, the dis­ cussion will be confined to matters concerning American industrial labor, excluding work in agriculture, extractive sectors, and service trades,1 in order to keep the focus on what might be termed the core of labor history studies, the articulation of the manufacturing base in the United States. The plan of exposition is tripartite, a customary craft practice among mental laborers. Initially, the thematic devel­ opment of American labor history will be summarized, followed by an assessment of elements that have divided and may link labor and technology research, concluding with a bundle of suggestions for fu­ ture inquiry, based on the state of our collective arts. American Labor History: An Overview The historiography of American labor studies breaks readily into two major eras, with a third perhaps at present dawning. The roots of the discipline lie in the Midwest, at the stronghold of institutional economics in the World War I decade, the University of Wisconsin. There John R. Commons erected labor history as an integral element Dr. Scranton is associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers Uni­ versity, Camden, New Jersey. His study of development and decay in skill-intensive manufacturing, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885—1940, will be published in spring 1989 by Cambridge University Press. ■One must, having narrowed the span of the present article, acknowledge that im­ portant work has recently been done in all three of the excluded sectors. For agriculture, see Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land (Urbana, Ill., 1985), and T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecroppers and Sharecropping (London, 1983); for mining, Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal (Philadelphia, 1985); and, in service trades, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890— 1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986), as representative of the current body of published work.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/88/2904-0002$01.00 722 Labor History and the History of Technology 723 in the analysis of industrial economies, assembling first the massive Documentary History ofAmerican Industrial Society, followed by the mul­ tivolume History of Labor in the United States, completed in the 1930s. Befitting adherents of the school of institutional economics, Com­ mons and his followers, most prominently Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, devoted themselves to chronicling the vagaries of American trade unionism, especially the “job-conscious” craft organizations that engendered the American Federation of Labor. This commitment to the study of pure-and-simple trade unions generally passed over the radical initiatives evident in efforts at cooperative, labor-managed production and the transformation-minded struggles by socialist ag­ gregations and the Industrial Workers of the World. It also led to a focus on collective bargaining, interunion rivalries over jurisdiction, and intraunion battles over organizational structure, funds, and power, rather than any emphasis on workplace relationships or the links between workers and their social and political communities. This is not to say that the Commons group operated from ivory towers or that they were indifferent to theorizing. Selig Perlman served the Commission on Industrial Relations as a species of secret agent in 1913—14, investigating labor relations at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the wake of the great 1912 Bread and Roses IWW strike—at some risk to life and limb, as he noted in his reports to the commission staff. In the late 1920s, Perlman also attempted to draw together European and American patterns in his Theory of the Labor Movement (1928).2 Yet, as the literature produced by the third generation, the post-World War II scholars led by Philip Taft, amply demonstrates, institutional studies rooted in labor economics failed to advance be­ yond earlier boundaries. Although they continued to produce large tomes choked with detail, the “old institutionalists” occupied an in­ tellectual dead space even as Taft published the second half of his study of the AFL in 1959 and helped launch...

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940.Susan Porter Benson

<i>Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940.</i>Susan Porter Benson

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. By Susan Porter Benson (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 322 pp.)

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. By Susan Porter Benson (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1986. 322 pp.)

&lt;sc&gt;susan porter benson&lt;/sc&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940&lt;/italic&gt;. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1986. Pp. xvi, 322. $27.50

Journal Article susan porter benson. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1986. Pp. xvi, 322. $27.50 Get access Benson Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1986. Pp. xvi, 322. $27.50. Winifred D. Wandersee Winifred D. Wandersee Hartwick College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue 1, February 1988, Page 242, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.1.242 Published: 01 February 1988

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940

The luxurious appearance and handsome profits of American department stores from 1890 to 1940 masked a three-way struggle among saleswomen, managers, and customers for control of the selling floor. Cultures explores the complex nature and contradictions of the conflict in an arena where class, gender, and the emerging culture of consumption all came together. Counter Cultures is a path-breaking and imaginative social history. Benson has made an original and sophisticated contribution to the study of the work process in the service sector. -- Journal of American History Counter Cultures advances our understanding of the history of women and work, and it does so in an engaging way that should command the attention not only of historians but of a general readership as well. -- Women's Review of Books

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Manager, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890-1940

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Manager, and Customers in American Department Stores 1890-1940

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. By Susan Porter Benson. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Pp. xvi, 322. $27.50.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. By Susan Porter Benson. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Pp. xvi, 322. $27.50. - Volume 47 Issue 3

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940

The Traffic in Subservience: Public-Contact Service Work

Review of Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 edited by Susan Porter Benson; The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Labor history at the crossroads: the mid-life crisis of working-class studies in america

Susan Porter Benson. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xvi + 322 pp. Susan G. Davis. Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 248 pp. Illus. Richard Jules Oestreicher. Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xix + 263 pp. Robert A. Slayton. Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. xiv + 278 pp. The project of rewriting and reconceiving the development of the American working class is now barely two decades old. Yet advances in our knowledge have been considerable, just as the disciplinary boundaries fencing in the study of labor, once constructed of labor economics and bits and pieces from the outposts of history and sociology, have been broken down, expanding the possibilities for those concerned to take the working-class experience seriously. As these volumes reveal, urban studies, sociology, folklore and communications are now receptive to historical analyses of class formation, while much of the most innovative writing in historical inquiry addresses the nature of class relations.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. By Susan Porter Benson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xvii + 322 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $27.50.

Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940. By Susan Porter Benson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. xvii + 322 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $27.50.

Palace of Consumption and Maching for Selling: The American Department Store, 1880–1940

Palace of Consumption and Maching for Selling: The American Department Store, 1880–1940