20 Sneaky Tricks Old Department Stores Used To Keep You Shopping All Day

Edward Filene ran the William Filene’s Sons department store in Boston. In 1909, he introduced his Automatic Bargain Basement. It sold off merchandise that hadn’t been purchased on higher floors. Prices were lowered according to a schedule, getting cheaper every few days. At the end of a month, any remaining inventory would be donated. People kept returning, scouring the display tables in hopes of finding just the right item to buy moments before it was marked down again.

The flagship Macy’s on Manhattan’s Herald Square got a strange addition in 1904 after New York’s new subway system, the IRT, was extended nearby. The store constructed an underground tunnel that connected the station’s platform directly to the store’s basement selling floor, allowing people to exit the trains and enter the store without stepping outside at all. Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia replicated the concept with its own subway concourse a few years later.

American retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened Selfridges on Oxford Street in London in 1909, broke from store convention the moment customers stepped through the door. Whereas other stores placed their perfume and cosmetics counters toward the rear of the store, Selfridge placed them at the front entrance, where they were brightly illuminated and heavily scented, so that their look and scent would be noticed almost immediately. Shoppers who had been walking briskly down the sidewalk often found their pace slowing the moment they stepped inside.

In the early 1900s, mechanical escalators made by companies like Otis Elevator were installed throughout department stores, and floor planners soon discovered that placing the down escalator on the opposite side of the floor from the up escalator made shoppers walk the whole length of the store before they could ride down. If you didn’t want to walk the whole store, you could always use the elevator or the stairs.

John Wanamaker of Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia purchased a large pipe organ constructed for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and installed it in the store’s multi-level Grand Court in 1911. It has since grown to over 28,000 pipes, and remains the largest playable pipe organ in the world. Recitals were played daily, and crowds would flock to the balcony railings, with shoppers standing there throughout a whole concert.

Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of the London department store Selfridges, opened a free nursery and playroom on the store premises in 1909, staffed by trained nurses and attendants. Previously, mothers would have to cut short their shopping excursion, but now they left their children with the store’s attendants and nurses at no cost and shopped the clothing departments on the top floors. Soon, other flagship department stores in Europe and the United States would offer similar supervised nurseries.

In 1924, engineer Willis Carrier introduced centrifugal chillers for large buildings that made commercial air-conditioning feasible. That same year, the J.L. Hudson Company department store in Detroit spent $250,000 to install Carrier’s air conditioner. Since air conditioning wasn’t yet available in homes, summer temperatures used to cause a decline in retail sales, and so stores started to advertise their cool interiors as an attraction. Tired from the heat, people came in for the cool, but ended up staying for hours.

The first pneumatic tube cash system was installed in John Wanamaker’s Philadelphia store in 1880 by the Lamson Cash Carrier Company. A clerk put money into a brass capsule and sealed it, then sent it off by suction to the cashier’s booth in the center of the store. The customer could expect change within one to five minutes. The system was intended to ensure that money would be safely secured and centralized for accounting purposes, but it did give customers time to browse while they waited.

In 1907, the Chicago department store Marshall Field’s opened the Walnut Room, its fine-dining tea room, which served meals and pastries for little profit. At the time, there were not many polite places to eat, so the Walnut Room allowed respectable women shoppers to spend the whole day in the building rather than go home for lunch. Northern flagship dining rooms gave women shoppers greater access, but department store lunch counters in the South remained racially segregated for many years after the Walnut Room opened.

The visual merchandisers of the day observed where people walked most often and installed tall, fancy mirrors at the end of main aisles, on elevator landings, and at the top and bottom of escalators. While a shopper paused to check a hat or coat, gloves and scarves were sitting right beside the mirror, ready to catch their eye.

Retail planners once published booklets full of rules about how to stack a multi-story store, and they actually encouraged merchants to place popular “destination” services like women’s shoe salons, dress alteration rooms, tailoring, and seasonal toy departments on the top floors. The idea was that shoppers who stopped by for a specific reason, such as a fitting or a new pair of shoes, would have to go through multiple floors of irrelevant departments before they got there.

In the 1930s and during the construction boom of the 1950s, storefronts were redesigned with large glass display cases at street level, but all of the upper-level shopping areas were blocked off by masonry walls or heavy curtains. The stores no longer had any way of indicating to customers if the sun was going down or if a storm was brewing, since there were no windows to the outside world. There were clocks at information counters and in elevators, but not in the form of a window.

Store planners even played with the flooring. The ground floor was all marble or terrazzo to speed up foot traffic, while the upper floors, where they sold furs and lingerie and haute couture, had thick, plush carpet. The soft flooring slowed the pace, cushioned tired feet, dampened noise, and created an atmosphere of quiet luxury.

Women’s public restrooms and rest areas were scarce in downtown shopping centers during the 1800s and early 1900s, but flagship department stores provided rest lounges in sumptuous decor featuring velvet couches, makeup stations, desks, and powder rooms. Women shoppers could rest, adjust their appearance, and recuperate without leaving the store, then continue shopping.

Store executives also wanted their flagship buildings to function as small cities, and so they entered into arrangements with government and utility offices to operate real postal counters on their sales floors. These counters sold stamps and money orders, took payments for utility bills, and offered telegraph service and theater tickets. A customer could mail a letter, pay a bill, and buy a dress all in one stop.

Shoppers in heavy coats and carrying lots of bags often got tired more quickly indoors and headed home sooner than planned. To remedy this, flagship stores installed free coat checks and parcel-holding areas at their entrances, exchanging customers’ outerwear and any early purchases for a receipt. Relieved of these burdens, browsers could shop longer than they might otherwise.

In 1903, the New York department store Ehrlich Brothers staged the first recorded department store fashion show in the US. Marshall Field’s, Neiman Marcus, and Selfridges followed suit, turning their tea rooms into catwalks and sending models back and forth between tables where customers were eating, calling out the prices as they paraded past. Lunch became a show, and orders were frequently placed before the dessert arrived.

Library systems were not yet popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and some department stores took matters into their own hands. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia and Selfridges in London both set up wood-paneled reading rooms next to their book departments, allowing customers to check out novels, read the newspaper, and settle into an armchair for a modest subscription fee. No purchase necessary, just something to do.

In the 1930s and 1940s, managers wired up loudspeaker networks to provide instrumental music as background noise for the whole store. It was called Muzak after the company that began supplying such recordings in 1934. The point was to eliminate dead silence, reduce street and machinery noise, and create a calm, friendly environment shoppers wouldn’t consciously notice. Unlike Wanamaker’s organ recitals, this music wasn’t meant to be noticed at all.

In 1928, David Jones, a department store chain based in Sydney, Australia, opened an art gallery inside its flagship store in order to host national exhibitions. The idea had its roots decades earlier in Philadelphia, where Wanamaker’s founder John Wanamaker opened a Paris buying office in the 1880s to import French Salon paintings. Those paintings went into a permanent gallery on an upper floor. Shopping was now almost like visiting a museum. It could be done for an entire afternoon without buying anything at all.

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