LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,055
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
In a way, they already are all but extinct. The modern "department store" has much more in common with the suburban discount-store model that became common in the fifties than with the urban department stores of the prewar era. The old department stores were located downtown, in multi-story buildings, and were service-oriented -- every individual department in the store had its own staff, including clerks and floorwalkers, to ensure that merchandise was kept organized, that inventory was carefully managed, and customers received personal service. Merchandse you purchased was rung up directly in the department where you selected it.
The idea of a "self-service" department store, in which you load your goods into a carriage as you wheel thru the store and then carry your stuff to a checkout counter at the front of the store came out of the supermarket grocery model, and didn't really catch on until the postwar era. These were primarily discount stores, where slashed personnel and reduced pay for the staff who remained allowed the sale of name-brand merchandise for lower prices, and were built in plazas convenient to suburban shoppers. While there are still vestiges of the old style department stores left, most of them disappeared within the last fifty years, and the minimally-staffed discount chain store has become the default mode for what people think of as a "department store."
