Department Store Shopping Then and Now

When I was a child in the 1950s, shopping was limited in the small town in which I lived, but there were usually four or five trips a year to Columbus or Cincinnati to go to the dentist and to buy new school clothing. The dental excursions invariably took place on Easter Monday, which comprised our spring vacation,  and then once again before school started in the fall. The fall trip also was the major “new school year” outing. These went to Columbus, a two-hour drive from our home in Sidney, over country roads. A special trip once or twice a year took us to Cincinnati, also a two-hour car ride, but with patches of interstate; this trip combined a visit to a family friend, the college roommate of my maternal grandmother. In between the longer trips to Columbus and Cincinnati, we would drive forty miles to Dayton for any shopping needs that we could not fill in Sidney.

Our destination shopping target was not a big-box, one-level, suburban Target department store (the one with a capital T): it was a real multi-level, downtown Department Store (one with a capital D for Department): Lazarus, Shillito’s, or Rike’s. All three of these stores are gone now, and my mind does not make much of a distinction between the three , but walking into any one of them was walking into a special world for the day, with more luxury than I had ever experienced in my young life. 

They had escalators to take you from one floor to another, and there were six or more stories, and even something called a mezzanine. For one of them, you parked and entered in a lower floor and took the escalator “Up to the Basement.” If there was time, we would take the elevator all the way to the top of the store and take the escalators down through each floor, briefly seeing the extent of the offerings. We did not need all the various departments on the several floors; since we were only four girls we could bypass the boys’ and men’s departments easily—but we did span the children’s, teens, and occasionally the women’s clothing departments. And shoes, although we had a decent shoe store in Sidney and found it much more fun to buy shoes there, where we could look through a machine and see whether our feet bones fit nicely into the shoe or were crowded.

I always looked forward to the reward after the clothes-buying was done: the book department, for there was no bookstore in Sidney. I was always allowed to buy the next book in the series that I currently was reading. I went through The Happy Hollisters; Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess; and Cherry Ames in all her nursing adventures. Notable throughout the stores was the level of service: there was always a person to help you find what you were looking for, whether it was to search to see if the right book was stacked under the counter, or to check on you in the dressing room and run out to get the same thing in a different size  or color so you didn’t have to get dressed and do it yourself.

The very special event, however, was lunch in the department store dining room. I remember the carpeted dining rooms at Rike’s and Lazarus—when we came to Cincinnati we usually had lunch instead with the lawyer husband of Nana’s friend at The Cincinnati Club. The Cincinnati Club was very fancy, almost uncomfortably so for young girls, and there was entertainment in the dining rooms at Rike’s and Lazarus. There were fashion shows! Women would come into the dining room and parade between the tables wearing the newest styles, and either a loudspeaker or the individual models themselves would tell you about what they were wearing as they swirled their skirts or opened their jackets to reveal the matching blouse or sweater underneath. My sisters and I enjoyed watching the models while we waited for our chicken a-la-king in the white ceramic covered chicken dish to be brought to the table. And then after the main course we had to make decisions about dessert—an extra special treat since we did not usually have desserts at our house. Nancy usually had a “snow ball”—a scoop of vanilla ice cream encased in coconut, but I almost always opted for the Baked Alaska pie—peppermint ice cream  on graham cracker crust, with a meringue top with chocolate sauce. 

After lunch we probably still had a few items to search for, but our last stop was invariably Will Call, the department on the parking level where all our purchases from throughout the day had been collected for us so we did not have to carry them around ourselves. We would get in the car, present the receipts which entitled us to free parking for the day, and drive home.

~~~~~~~~~~

We have been doing a lot of shopping with my sister-in-law over the past ten days. We have gone to several places that call themselves department stores—Meijer, Kohl’s, Sears, and Macy’s—but none of them can be considered a big “D” Department Store from the old days. They all have multiple departments, and Kohl’s is even on two levels, and Macy’s (at Tri-County) four, but none has the broad selection of the old department stores, and certainly not the style.

Service is noticeably absent; you can look all over for a checkout counter at Sears and Macy’s, and checking out is just about all you can do there. Knowledge of the product does not reside in the head of any sales attendant—whatever knowledge exists is what is printed on the package, which is why we bought underwear from two stores and then returned underwear to two stores when we could not figure out the proper sizing. The only real help from a sales associate came in the intimates department at Macy’s, who did a quick measure above, below, and across (the ladies will know what I am talking about here) before going into the fitting room, then brought the one garment that fit the requirements, and left us on our own. I moved in and out of the fitting room to change sizes for the customer and then expand the purchases to nightwear. Then when we were ready to drop a couple hundred dollars at the checkout desk, we still had to wait for more than ten minutes for attention. They didn’t have the six undergarments we wanted and had to order them to be sent to the house—and that process took at least 10 more minutes.

There is, of course, no quiet, refined, carpeted dining room at the Macy’s in Tri-County. Outside of the store and far down the mall walk there is a food court with at least ten “restaurants” – all with uninspiring choices, all self-service, and all sharing tables in a crowded, noisy, messy hall.

The only advantage that the shopping experience of the 21st century has over the shopping experience of the mid-20th century that I can see is the transportation: virtually every big-box store offers scooters for sitting and navigating around the warehouse-like interior; so does the mall, and even Kohl’s offers rolling shopping carts for those who want support to lean on while they search out, select, and collect their purchases.