Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 28 March 2013

“Technical Memories (Part 49) –Store Pressures”

“On the one hand, is the great store with a large staff, a complex organisation and detailed systems; on the other, is the small business with the individual proprietor and a few assistants. In the imperative need for more trade, for ‘volume’, the departmental store, the multiple shop, and the mail order business are extending their activities into the most remote quarters of the land, and the fear is sometimes expressed that the day of the small business is over” (S A Williams, London).

In the last of the papers at the Irish Technical Education Association Congress, held in the Crawford Municipal Technical Institute on 13 June 1930, Mr S A William, Principal, School of Retail Distribution, London gave a paper on the changing nature of retail distribution: Education for retail business was a new development and presented several important issues for consideration. William’s remarks were set in a context of the rise in shopping malls in the United State and the continuing rise of the department store in Britain.

Modern “car-friendly” strip malls developed from the 1920s, and shopping malls corresponded with the rise of suburban living in many parts of the Western World, especially the United States, after World War II. From early on, the design tended to be inward-facing, with malls following theories of how customers could best be persuaded in a controlled environment. Similar, the concept of a mall having one or more ‘anchor store’ or ‘big box stores’ was pioneered early, with individual stores or smaller-scale chain stores intended to profit from the shoppers attracted by the big stores. In Britain, the department store was the pioneer of mass consumerism. It was the product of an enormous movement in the class system with the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the commercial and industrial middle class. Many stores were dependent on low mark-ups and high turnover. In 1900, the department store sector had between one and two per cent of the total retail trade in Britain rising to between three and four per cent by 1920 and c.11 per cent of all sales by 1947. Despite the uncertainties of war, department stores in Britain rose from 175-225 stores in 1914 to about 475-525 in 1938 (William Lancaster, 1995, The Department Store, A Social History).

On the rise of the department store, S Williams noted in his Cork paper that the large organisation had many advantages. It possessed great purchasing power; it had developed into a first class organisation of buying, selling and despatching goods. He argued that experience showed that there was still room for the well-managed single shop, with a good variety of the particular merchandise it stocked. It was less crowded than the multiple shop. The great asset of the single shop he noted “is its individuality and its personal interest in the customer, both of which make a great appeal to many people. In spite of the growth of the large store, the number of people engaged in the small business is still greatly in excess of those employed in large organisations”.

Williams described that it was not usually practical to establish separate schemes of training for the employee of the department store or single shop. He felt that the wide field of knowledge and practice was common to both large and small organisations, with common and broad principles of retailing and of general application. Williams divided the work of retail distribution into four main groups-merchanising, which entailed providing for the consumer the right merchanise; publicity, presenting the shop and the merchandise in such a way that would build goodwill and bring shoppers to buy; shop or store management, ensuring proper service by means of intelligent selling, a comfortable shop and efficient delivery, and financial control, recording financial transactions and control expenditure.  “These functions are performed in every retail business, the only difference between the large and small organisations being that in the latter, one individual may carry out several functions”;

Williams advocated for store assistants to have a course of education, educating them in the experiences of others and enabling them to profit from the best examples of modern retailing; “It is quite possible to arrange courses of instruction, which will meet the needs of workers in both large and small organisations.  There are many aspects of retailing, which lend themselves to courses of instruction, e.g. transport systems, staff control, hire purchase systems, mail order systems, accounting, advertising and display, etc.”.

In the discussion which followed the paper, Mr McGuigan (Dublin), said there was a growing demand for retail work and for classes in connection with retail distribution. In Dublin they hoped to set classes going for paid shop assistants. There, as elsewhere, the selection of boys for the distributive shops was done by the employers themselves, but it was found that when the boys came along and filled the forms that the majority of them were from the country. Eighty per cent of the apprentices in the drapery trade in Dublin were, he supposed, from the South of Ireland, and many of them were of a very high standard of education.

To be continued…

Caption:

684a. Debenhams (formerly Roches Store) and Brown Thomas (formerly Cashes); both buildings were opened in 1927 and both designed by Daniel Levie, following the burning of Cork in 1920 (picture: Kieran McCarthy, 17 March 2013)