Category: default || By jt3y

In Our Fair City it was Cox's, in Washington, it was Lang's and Caldwell's, and in Greensburg it was Troutman's. Every city with pretensions to importance had a fancy department store. Those that actually were important had several; Youngstown, for instance, had Strouss's and McKelvey's. Pittsburgh had Kaufmann's, Joseph Horne Co., Gimbels, and others.

Remember the bells that used to call clerks to various departments? Bong. Bong-bong-bong-bong. It meant someone was needed in department 14. Those bells are playing a funeral dirge right now.

Naturally, the news that Downtown Picksberg's last remaining department store, Kaufmann's, is about to be swallowed by Macy's is sending a few people into spasms. And if you think Pittsburghers are upset, in Chicago --- where they're liable to lose Marshall Field's, a name that is as synonymous with the Windy City as the Cubs --- they're practically in apoplexy.

The problem is that the department stores have lost their relevancy, and while I've read a lot of things this week blaming Wal-Mart, Target, and the other usual suspects for the decline and fall of great names like Kaufmann's, as far as I'm concerned, Federated Department Stores and May Department Stores have no one to blame but themselves.

Appropriately for a guy who's writing a history of G.C. Murphy Co., I've always been interested in retailing, and I've read histories of Macy's, Dayton's, Hudson's, Gimbels and the others. These department stores always competed with the "discounters" of their eras --- Woolworth's or Murphy's or McCrory's --- and their prices were always higher. The reason their prices were higher, as Max Hess of the Hess's Department Store chain in Allentown explains in his book "Every Dollar Counts," was that they offered ridiculously high levels of service.

A customer who approached a counter at Macy's or Gimbels or Hess's back in the old days could count on being swarmed with attentive clerks. Hapless husbands would enter the lingerie department, tell the salesgirl "my wife is about your size," and she'd devote an hour to finding exactly what he wanted. Clerks kept files on the sizes and style preferences of their regular customers, so they didn't have to guess what they wanted --- they knew. Lose your credit card? Horne's would look up the number. Need a suit in an emergency after store hours? Chances are that someone at Kaufmann's would open the store for you. All of the bigger stores offered personal shopping services; many also had travel agencies, and some even offered rental cars.

There's a famous story about a fire in a Neiman-Marcus store that destroyed a bunch of wedding gowns on a Friday night --- hours before the brides were supposed to pick them up for their Saturday weddings. Neiman-Marcus flew in seamstresses and gowns from other stores and fitted them to the brides on Saturday morning, with time to spare.

Do you think that would happen today? Maybe at Neiman-Marcus, which like Nordstrom's on the West Coast, still has a reputation for going above and beyond the call of duty. But I was in a Kaufmann's not long ago, looking for a small gift for a lady friend. It was an effort to tear the clerk at the jewelry counter away from her telephone call, and then it was an effort to get her to show me anything. Her attitude was --- can't you see it from the aisle way? Not at those prices, no, I couldn't.

And good luck finding a salesperson in men's wear or any of the other departments where items are "on the rack," so to speak. Gee, Kaufmann's: If I've got to find the clothes myself, and schlep them to the counter, and you're not going to do any alterations, then I might as well go out to Syms and save 25 percent off of your prices, huh? (Lordy, lordy, do I miss Kadar's, where Len and Dorothy knew my sizes, my tastes --- or lack thereof --- and alterations were always free.)

A lot of the services in these department stores disappeared, I suspect, when the names on the front doors ceased to mean anything. The clerks at Cox's were responsible to "Mr. Robert" and "Mr. William" (William and Robert Cox, that is), not to a nameless board of directors in Cincinnati or St. Louis. The decline of Gimbels can be directly traced to the time when the last of the Gimbel family left the company and it was sold to British-American Tobacco; and I'll wager that the decline of Kaufmann's, Horne's, and all of the others began when the founding families gave up control.

The stockholders want higher profits; overhead, like attentive clerks, eats up profits. So they've laid off much of the help and replaced the old-time clerks with younger people who can be paid less money, and who have less invested in the store. They've also cheapened the merchandise to the point where the shirt you buy in Kaufmann's isn't necessarily better than the one you can get out at Kohl's or Target. The problem is they haven't lowered the prices commensurately with the drop in service or quality. As a result, the department stores have shot off their own feet.

The other problem is that the conglomeration of little chains into May Department Stores and Federated Department Stores --- which is not a new trend; it dates to the 1930s --- has left individual stores standing for absolutely nothing distinctive.

For a long time after Kaufmann's became a part of the May Company, and Horne's became part of Associated Dry Goods, the stores maintained their individuality. A Kaufmann's store in Pittsburgh didn't look like a May Company store in Los Angeles, and Lazarus in Columbus, Ohio, was different from Goldwater's in Phoenix. That's because these stores maintained their own local buyers and marketers, and they tailored their stores, their merchandise, and their advertising to their communities.

But all that individuality cost money, too. So the chains eliminated it. Now an L.S. Ayres looks like a Hecht's looks like a Kaufmann's. Take a look at the websites for the different May Company stores if you don't believe me; they're identical except for the names. And they're all identically dull.

Thus, under the thumb of Wall Street pension fund managers, actuaries, accountants and other bean-counters, all of those once-great department stores have become bland and overpriced. This may have helped the stock prices of Federated or May --- for a little while, anyway --- but dull and expensive is not a sustainable business model. It didn't even work for Rolls-Royce, which has been split up and sold piecemeal to the Germans.

While I can get nostalgic for the old department stores, I have no nostalgia for the present state that they're in. They're not dying; in point of fact, they died 20 years ago and just haven't been buried yet.

Perhaps the corpses of Federated's and May's old soldiers --- Marshall Fields and Hecht's and yes, Kaufmann's --- can still be reanimated, but some how, I doubt that consolidating these massive, faceless companies into an even bigger conglomerate is the jolt of electricity that is going to do the job.