If you own and operate a small retail business, this guide will give you a proven system for marketing your store, allowing you to compete with online merchants and big-box stores alike. Full of fresh and innovative ideas for promoting small stores, it will show you how to create a great in-store experience and build loyal, long-lasting relationships with customers.

In the late nineteenth century, San Francisco's merchant princes built grand stores for a booming city, each with its own niche. For the eager clientele, a trip downtown meant dressing up--hats, gloves and stockings required--and going to Blum's for Coffee Crunch cake or Townsend's for creamed spinach. The I. Magnin empire catered to a selective upper-class clientele, while middle-class shoppers loved the Emporium department store with its Bargain Basement and Santa for the kids. Gump's defined good taste, the City of Paris satisfied desires for anything French and edgy, youth-oriented Joseph Magnin ensnared the younger shoppers with the latest trends. Join author Anne Evers Hitz as she looks back at the colorful personalities that created six major stores and defined shopping in San Francisco.

The book builds an original argument for the department store as a significant site of design production, and therefore offers an alternative interpretation to the mainstream focus on consumption within retail history. Emily M. Orr presents a fresh perspective on the rise of modern urban consumer culture, of which the department store was a key feature. By investigating the production processes of display as well as fascinating information about display-making's tools and technologies, the skills of the displayman and the meaning and context of design decisions which shaped the final visual effect are revealed. In addition, the book identifies and isolates 'display' as a distinct moment in the life of the commodity, and understands it as an influential channel of mediation in the shopping experience. The assembly and interpretation of a diverse range of previously unexplored primary resources and archives yields fascinating new evidence, showing how display achieved an agency which transformed everyday objects into commodities and made consumers out of passersby.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "How Department Stores Are Carried On" by W. B. Phillips. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

"This is the first beautifully illustrated book on department stores, with photographs and ephemera from all over the world. Born in the Gilded Age in France, the department store grew up thanks to the industrial revolution, the rise of the middle class, and the invention of steel-frame architecture and the elevator. Spectacular entrances led to marble staircases and floor after floor of merchandise and amenities. These emporiums also inspired a whole new way of merchandising: shopping became an entertainment rather than a laborious grind; posters and advertisements were made by the great artists of the time; and elaborate shop windows attracted thousands of people during the holidays. The department store quickly spread through Europe and Asia and then the New World, and great architects were employed to build these temples of consumerism, where dreams were created and then fulfilled"--

Publisher Description