The Romance of a Great Store [Illustrated with enhanced formatting]

• Table of contents with working links to chapters is included
• The book has been corrected for spelling and grammatical errors
• Illustrated book
Introduction

"Caveat emptor," the Romans said, in their day.

"Let the Buyer beware," we would read that phrase, today.

For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, caveat emptor ruled the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts, a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress, call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call it good business.

Caveat emptor has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she may even be bereft of sight, itself—yet deal in faith and fearlessly.

Caveat emptor is indeed a dead phrase.

How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?

You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the development of the department store as we know it in the United States today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was a plenty of them—men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.

It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with them a competition—bitter and to the end unflinching—which hesitated at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But competition quickly found that the best means—the finest battle-sword—was honest commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade caveat emptor begone.

The great department store around which these chapters are written assumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does assert, and will continue to assert that it was at least among the pioneers in the complete banishment of caveat emptor, that its founder—the man whose name it so proudly bears today—fought for these high principles when the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other direction were most alluring.