If you were to walk into a general store in the early 1800s — the store from which most people bought things — it would seem almost alien to you today. You’d generally find a very small storefront with a proprietor behind the counter, with whom you would negotiate a price for whatever goods he or she might happen to have on hand, and you would have no expectation of the store having anything you wanted. In some cities, you might find larger stores in a sense, even ones where there were different departments, but you would still find yourself having to ask people at desks whether they had goods that you wanted and negotiate for prices.
Contrast that to today, where you can wander through enormous well-lit stores with goods on display everywhere with clear prices and you can find them in almost every city and town of any size in the country, and if they don’t have what you want, then you can just go online and find practically anything you can imagine.
Who were the innovators who took us from the general store of the 1800s to today’s climate of discount stores, supermarkets and online shopping? Four people stand at the forefront of these changes and, believe it nor not, you’ve probably only heard of one of them before.
The first person worth noting is John Wanamaker, who founded the extremely influential Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia in the late 1800s. His store was the first to have fixed prices on goods throughout the store. He also innovated the idea of newspaper advertising and grocery fliers so you would know the goods that were for sale at Wanamaker’s, as well as the prices. His store also introduced the concept of seasonal sales, with different items seeing reductions in their fixed prices at various times during the year.
Still, the experience at Wanamaker’s would be unusual to most shoppers today. You would have to couple Wanamaker’s innovations with those of another person, Harry Gordon Selfridge, who managed the Marshall Fields department store in Chicago in the late 1800s and then moved on to open the very influential department store Selfridges in London in the early 1900s.
What did Selfridge bring to the table? His store was the first to display everything for sale in the store. Before this, many stores would only display a few examples of the items for sale, if any, and you would have to ask a clerk to retrieve the items for you. Selfridge put all of the items out on the floor so that customers could see the actual item they were buying and take it to the cashier themselves. Selfridges was also the first store to have an internal telephone system, so departments could easily contact each other.
These innovations formed the basic model of the department store, grocery store and the “five and dime” as they existed throughout most of the 20th century. The next major leap came in the form of discount department stores, and the person behind most of the innovation there was Sam Walton, the proprietor of Wal-Mart.
Although several discount stores came into prominence at roughly the same time in the years immediately following World War II, Walton offered many innovations beyond the other discount stores, innovations that others copied to varying degrees of success.
Walton’s biggest innovation was behind the scenes: Rather than relying on companies to deliver products for him, he developed his own fleet of trucks, enabling him to buy goods from manufacturers more cheaply because he handled all of the delivery to individual stores.
This allowed a great deal of control over what was on sale in each store. The end result? Wal-Marts everywhere began to feel very identical, from their layout to the goods they carried. This type of “cookie cutter” store was something that didn’t really exist before, as individual stores often had very different layouts and different goods on the shelves. Since stores now had a very specific “recipe,” Walton began to move his stores into progressively smaller communities, ones that would never have been able to have a department store in the past.
The fourth innovator worth noting is Michael Aldrich. Aldrich was largely responsible for the invention of online shopping. He developed a system for online shopping in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the U.K., coupling it with several computer innovations. People using Aldrich’s various systems experienced something not too different from online shopping today — they navigated a series of menus until they found items they wanted and then used a credit card to order items that could either be picked up locally or even delivered. Virtually all e-commerce today is merely a modification of the system Aldrich invented.
No matter where you shop these days, you’re experiencing innovations brought to you by these four individuals. Things as common as having a standard price on an item, being able to see the items you’re buying, having consistent items from store to store and being able to buy an item using your smartphone all trace their origins back to these four people.
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4 People Who Created the Modern Shopping Experience originally appeared on usnews.com
