One of greatest retail innovations was the 19th century creation of the department store. Until their arrival, shopping was a never-ending trek to different stores for different things. These brick-and-mortar behemoths ruled the retail universe until the advent of malls, discounters like Wal-Mart and online giants like Amazon.
Gary Hoover, founder of Hoover’s Data had a long and successful career in retail before founding the American Business History Center where in a recent post he wrote “As someone with a passion for the department store industry, I’ve found its present state to be particularly distressing. But I don’t believe all is lost: There are opportunities to create stores that come closer to what shoppers experienced in the department stores’ glory days.”
In other words, if you’re looking to start a business, or fix one, look at business models that fell out of favor. It’s often because they were so successful that those in charge thought they couldn’t fail and didn’t need to change when a little rethinking might have made all the difference. Examples abound: Saturday Night Live revived the nearly dead variety show concept by addressing a different audience, a later time slot and very different content targeted at young adults. The Apple Store proved that people would stand in line to buy computers in a retail setting after Radio Shack and other PC sellers failed. Even Amazon, had a predecessor: the now defunct Sears, where you could buy almost anything and have it delivered. Jeff Bezos made the model work again.
Mr. Hoover’s excellent post Can We Build a Department Store for the 21st Century? Is not just about department stores, but the hard thinking that attends the creation, and continuation of any successful business.
If you’d like an entertaining and educational example of retail entrepreneurship, stream PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre series of a few years back “Mr. Selfridge” that chronicles how American Harry Selfridge created the iconic British department store that persists to this day.
