Who invented the first department store

The first retail stores take up the mantle a bit further down the line. By BC in ancient Greece, people had developed markets with merchants selling their wares in the Agora in the city center. Joe C. Thompson, the manager of the plant, started selling milk, eggs, and bread from an ice dock on Sundays and evenings when the grocery stores were closed.

Nevertheless, as new varieties of smartphones were unveiled, different app clients were introduced. What was the first ever store invented? Savvy retailers like Harry Gordon Selfridge and Rowland Hussey Macy made these stores a seeming extension of the home in order to assure women that shopping there would not harm their reputations. Staffed largely by women, the stores featured luxurious, but homelike furnishings like carpets, lounge chairs and comfortable private dressing rooms.

Prices were fixed, so women were not expected to haggle or, in some cases, even handle money. Retailers soon realized that the more homelike the atmosphere, the more likely a woman was to linger. In response, they outfitted their stores like plush extensions of home. The Emporium in San Francisco, for example, contained a nursery, an emergency room, a post office, a beauty parlor and a library.

And separate smoking rooms and even entrances offered men a place to enjoy themselves without disturbing or endangering the women within. Shopping soon became a popular way for women to get out of the house. Retail palaces had big plate glass windows with rotating displays and window shopping was born. Suddenly, it was socially acceptable for women to be out on the street. Restaurants and theaters that once were closed to women realized that shopping women could be customers, too.

They began catering to women and even offered alcohol to drink—an innovation that did away with another social taboo. More women began to use public transportation, frequent hotel lobbies, even go to banks. A crowd of shoppers on an escalator inside a department store in New York City, With that newfound mobility came economic power, too.

No purchase necessary. And if they had buyer's remorse — too small, too big, too expensive — they could exchange or return the item for a full refund. A gathering space for the female bourgeoisie. There, monied wives could spend an entire day daydreaming and socializing, independent of their husbands.

So department stores became women's spaces, and that was really significant. The business model is still to get as many people through the door as possible, and get them to stay. The business model was much the same then as it is now: to get as many people of the socio-economic spectrum through the door as possible — and get them to stay.

The fact that they could go in there freely and that somebody would wait on you was not something to be taken for granted. Patrons of the arts. The Boucicauts also understood the importance of customer loyalty and time spent inside the store.

After buying out the Videau brothers and taking complete ownership in , the couple expanded the space and added new features and services that were deemed game changers at the time: a reading room for waiting husbands, a salon offering complimentary food and refreshments, billiard room, hairdressing salon, travel office and live concerts events. The Boucicauts understood the importance of customer loyalty and time spent inside the store. Another claim to fame? Gustave Eiffel was one of the contributing engineers who helped design the building's steel structure.

But one of the Boucicauts' biggest legacies, which is given special honor to this day, is their support of the fine arts. Avant-gardists, the couple opened an art gallery in within the department store, offering artists who had been turned away by the Paris Salon -- the official art exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris -- a home for their works and a large public audience, Burckhardt wrote.

Stroll through the store today years later, and you'll note that paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures — a contemporary art collection curated over the last 30 years — line store walls and are placed strategically amidst the luxury goods.