Made In America (40 page)

His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, who was a dab hand at calligraphy, drew up the florid italic logo that Coke uses to this day. Pemberton viewed his invention not as the refreshing thirst-quencher that the world has come to love, but as an efficacious tonic for hangovers and other ills of the upper body.
³¹
(It was also discreetly hinted that it was a potent aphrodisiac.) Pemberton, alas, failed to see Coca-Cola's true potential. In 1887, he sold a two-thirds interest in the company for the curiously precise but decidedly short-sighted sum of $283.29. It took another Atlanta pharmacist, Asa G. Candler, to capitalize on Coca-Cola's true possibilities as a money-making refreshment. Just before the turn of the century he bought the formula from its new owners for $2,000 and with canny marketing converted his investment into a fortune. By 1919, when the company was sold again, this time to a consortium of Atlanta businessmen, Candler's $2,000 outlay had grown in value to $25 million.

Such success naturally encouraged imitation and soon American purchasers could try competing brands like Co Kola, Coke-Ola, Coke, Koke, Klu-Ko Kola, Afri-Cola, Okla-Cola, Carbo-Cola, Sola Cola, Pepsi-Cola and even Celery-Cola. Many copied not only Coca-Cola's famous name and italic logo, but also its distinctive bottle. Coke took
them all to court. By 1926 it had resorted to law no fewer than seven thousand times to protect its trademark, including one fight that went to the Supreme Court. Not only did it destroy almost all its challengers, but in 1930 it won the exclusive right to its alternative name, Coke, making it the world's only successful product with two names.
³²

The one competitor it notably failed to quash was Pepsi-Cola, invented in 1898 by Caleb D. Bradham and so called because it was intended to combat dyspepsia. Despite going bankrupt twice in its formative years, PepsiCo is now actually a larger company than Coca-Cola thanks to its diversifications – it owns, among much else, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which is why you needn't bother asking for Coke there – and by having the good sense not to tamper with its formula as Coke did, with disastrous results, in 1985, when it introduced New Coke. (Marketing disasters are something of a tradition at Coke. It once launched Coca-Cola flavoured cigars, with results not unlike those that greeted New Coke.)

Despite its occasional setbacks Coke has long been a symbol of American culture in a way that Pepsi has never managed. As long ago as 1950, it inspired a word for the American cultural takeover of the planet:
Coca-Colonization.
Today, Coke is sold in 195 countries (giving it a bigger following than the United Nations, with 184) and is claimed to be the second most universally understood term in English, exceeded only by OK – an expression that conveniently carries us back to the nineteenth century and the start of the next chapter.

In 1846 an Irish immigrant in New York named Alexander Stewart opened a business on Broadway called the Marble Dry-Goods Palace and in so doing gave the world a new phenomenon: the department store. Never before had a single enterprise tried to bring together such a range of merchandise under one roof. The business thrived and soon it covered a whole block on Broadway and had a staff of two thousand. Even that was not enough, however. In 1862 Stewart relocated to an eight-storey building near by, and renamed it A. T. Stewart’s Cast-Iron Palace. It was, and for many years would remain, the largest retail operation in the world.

In its wake came scores of other similar emporia – Field, Leiter & Co. (later Marshall Field) in Chicago, Jordan Marsh in Boston, John Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Hudson’s in Detroit, R. H. Macy’s, E. V. Haughwout’s and Lord & Taylor in New York.

We don’t know when people started calling them department stores. The term isn’t found in print until 1893 (in
Harper’s Magazine),
but, as so often, the context makes it clear that it was already widely used and understood: ‘They [Brooklyn stores] compare favourably with the best and largest department stores of New York.‘
¹

What is certain is that department stores transformed the
shopping experience for millions of urban Americans.
Palace
was scarcely an exaggeration for these new establishments. They offered not only an unprecedented range of goods, but also levels of comfort, luxury and excitement previously unknown to consumers. Three things made this possible: the development of cast-iron architecture, allowing the construction of more open interiors, the arrival of the safety elevator, giving stores the option of expanding upwards, and, above all, the increasing prosperity of Americans.

Compared with previous retail establishments, these new bazaars were airy and spacious and marvellously self-contained. Almost from the start they boasted restaurants, tearooms, rest-rooms and other conveniences, eliminating the need to go elsewhere for anything. As early as the 1850s, Stewart’s emporium was entertaining shoppers with fashion shows and organ recitals. You could, as millions remarked in wonder, spend a whole day there. But what truly distinguished department stores was that they were the first grand commercial enterprises that were open to everyone. In the words of Émile Zola, they ‘democratized luxury’.
²
A secretary or clerk might live a lifetime in a city and not once enter a swanky hotel or restaurant, never see the inside of a concert hall or opera house, or venture into a fashionable milliner’s. But such a person could experience something of the same intoxicating whiff of elegance and possibility in a department store, and mingle on equal terms with what was known in the business as
the carriage trade,
those wealthy enough to arrive in their own conveyances.

Department stores offered millions their first look at wonders of the age like the passenger elevator (the world’s first permanent safety elevator was installed in the Haughwout Department Store in New York in 1857), electric lighting, public telephones, and escalators (the last so novel and giddying that some stores stationed nurses at the top to minister to those made light-headed by the experience). By
the turn of the century the department stores’ services were almost limitless. They had post offices, branch libraries, lost-and-found departments, hair salons, roof gardens, first-aid stations, information bureaus, ‘silence rooms for nerve-tired shoppers’, even their own in-store radio stations. They would sew on missing buttons, bandage a cut, amuse a lost child, answer any question – and all without charge. Some put on lectures, concerts and plays. Most provided demonstrations of new products. Shopping had become a social experience.

By 1900, Marshall Field was serving as many as 250,000 customers a day, and had become one of Chicago’s biggest employers with a staff of 8,000. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia took orders twenty-four hours a day. Its Crystal Tea Room could handle 10,000 customers at a time. America had embraced with both arms
conspicuous consumption,
a term coined in 1899 by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his
Theory of the Leisure Class,
and much required ever since.

One man more than any other was responsible for the modern look of department stores. He was Harry G. Selfridge, a Wisconsin native who took a job as a stock boy with Marshall Field in 1879 and quickly rose through the ranks. One of his first acts was to take goods down from the high shelves and put them on counters and tables where customers could peer at them, touch them and, as critics noted, shoplift them (though this was by no means a new activity;
shoplifting
has been part of the English vocabulary since 1680). Among Selfridge’s many other innovations were the bargain basement, annual sales, gift certificates, the practice of reminding customers how many shopping days were left till Christmas, the custom of keeping the ground-floor windows lighted at night, thus encouraging evening strollers to browse and plan their next day’s shopping, and the now universal practice of putting the perfumes and cosmetics departments on the ground floor by the main entrance where they would sweeten the atmosphere and act as a magnet for passers-by.

Retiring from Marshall Field, Selfridge moved to Britain and at the age of fifty founded the London department store that bears his name. Though most British observers felt certain that such a crassly commercial undertaking would never succeed in London, it not only thrived but made Oxford Street into London’s premier shopping thoroughfare. Selfridge was obsessively devoted to his store. He concerned himself with everything from the sharpness of sales clerks’ pencils to the quality of their teeth. Something of his dedication to work is evidenced by a vacation he took in 1914. He left London by train on a Saturday morning and by noon the next day was on the skating-rink of a Swiss hotel. He skated vigorously for four hours, packed up his skates and stocking cap, caught a train back to London and was at his desk at 8 a.m. on the Monday morning. That was his idea of a holiday.

But with the death of his wife in 1918, something snapped inside him. He began to go nightclubbing, fell in with a pair of Hungarian-American vaudeville stars known as the Dolly Sisters and neglected his business. He bought racehorses, gambled and lost spectacularly at Monte Carlo, chartered aeroplanes to bring the Dollys cartons of ice-cream and breasts of chicken for their lapdog, bought a castle on England’s south coast, at Highcliffe in Hampshire, and laid plans to build a 250-room, $15 million estate near by.

In ten years, he ran through $8 million. Unfortunately, not all of it was his. Unable to pay back the debts he owed to his own store – for a decade he and the Dollys had been helping themselves to whatever they fancied without troubling to pay for it – he was ignominiously retired from the Selfridge’s board of directors and given a pension of $25,000 a year (later cut to $12,000 and then to $8,000), from which he was expected to pay back debts of $2 million. He lost his houses and his Rolls-Royce, took a small flat in Putney and travelled by bus. On 8 May 1947 he died nearly destitute and virtually
forgotten, and how many times have we heard that story before?

Rather more successful at keeping his hands on his money was Frank W. Woolworth. Where Selfridge had created the bargain basement as a sideline – a useful way of generating money from otherwise unsaleable goods – Woolworth had the idea of building a store that was in effect nothing but a bargain basement. He opened the first Woolworth’s store in Utica, New York, in 1879. Everything cost five or ten cents – a proposition scarcely less incredible then than it would be now. The store was immediately successful, and by 1900 Woolworth had fifty-nine stores with annual sales of over $5 million. By 1913, he was so rich that he was able to fund the construction of the $13.5 million Woolworth Building in New York with cash.
³
By then people everywhere were shopping at
bargain counters
(an expression first used in 1888) and
five and tens or five and dimes
(1905).

Actually, not everywhere. In the early 1900s, America was still a largely rural country. Farm families and small-town folk longed to consume and possess like everyone else, but for years there was no way to reach them. Then in 1872 an organization formally called the Patrons of Husbandry but better known as the Grange (an old English word, etymologically related to
grain
and signifying a farmstead) began offering a mail-order service to its members. It, too, was a huge hit and by the 1890s its catalogue contained over 24,000 items, bringing a new world of choice and possibility to thousands of rural consumers. The Grange eventually evolved into Montgomery Ward, but in the mean time it was overtaken by one of the most successful companies America has ever seen: Sears, Roebuck and Company.

Founded in 1886, the enterprise was named for its two original partners, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck, though the latter sold out in 1893. Sears’s rise was little short of phenomenal. By 1900 it had surpassed the Grange in size
and by 1906 it was so mammothly successful that it needed 2,000 workers to process the 900 sackloads of orders it received each day. Such was the volume of business that the railways, telegraph companies and Post Office all opened branch offices at the company’s Chicago headquarters.
⁴
Sears’s success is all the more remarkable when you consider that in its early days it was not terribly noted for scruples. In one early ad, it offered a sewing-machine at the exceptional price of $1. Customers who responded received a needle and thread.
⁵
In 1899 it ran ads offering, for the next sixty days only, a luxuriously upholstered sofa and two matching chairs for just ninety-five cents. Thousands sent in their orders – and received three pieces of doll’s house furniture.

Despite these stunts, people became hugely devoted to Sears. In rural areas especially, they relied on Sears for everything from shoes to sewing-machines. By the early 1900s it was possible to buy a car (called, naturally, the
Sears)
or even a house and all its furnishings from the company. The biannual receipt of its catalogues was among the high points of the year. The people of one North Dakota town were so taken with the company that they renamed their community Seroco, for
Sears Roebuck & Co.,
and would have been more explicit had the US Postal Service let them.

The quarter of a century or so from 1885 saw the refinement of another venerable component of American retailing: the brand name. Although a few durable brand names date from even earlier –
Smith Brothers Cough Drops
from 1866,
Arm & Hammer Baking Soda
from 1867,
Ivory Soap
from 1878 – the closing years of the nineteenth century and opening years of the twentieth saw the birth of a positive blizzard of famous products:
Coca-Cola
(1886),
Log Cabin Syrup
(1887),
Aunt Jemima pancake mix
(1889),
Shredded Wheat
(1892),
Tootsie Rolls
and
Cracker Jack
(1896),
Jell-O
gelatin (1897),
Pepsi-Cola
(1898),
Fig Newtons
(1900),
Animal Crackers
(1902),
Post
Toasties
(1904),
Planters Peanuts
(1906),
Sunkist
fruit (1907), and
Life Savers
(1911).