London's Pall Mall hosted the first reliably dated department store in 1796
Behind glazed partitions on Pall Mall, shoppers in 1809 could move from furs and fans to silks and lace, then jewellery, French clocks, perfume and finally dresses. Harding, Howell & Co. had opened there in 1796, giving fashionable, newly prosperous women somewhere to browse freely, away from home and male company.
Rival claims stretch back further. Bennett's in Derby started as an ironmonger in 1734 and traded from the same building until 2019, while Debenhams, dating from 1778, may have been the oldest chain before closing in 2021. The Pall Mall pioneer itself shut in 1820 when its partners split, but by the later 19th century most big British high streets had thriving department stores, and women had become their core customers.
Paris took the idea furthest. Its roots lay in novelty shops, the first of them opened in 1784, which grew once railways brought crowds in the 1840s and added plate-glass windows, fixed price tags and newspaper advertising. Au Bon Marché expanded from 12 staff in 1838 to 1,788 by 1879, with a reading room for husbands, entertainment for children and six million catalogues. Émile Zola set a novel in such a store, portraying it as a machine that both improved society and devoured it.
Across the Atlantic, Arnold Constable opened as a small dry-goods shop in New York in 1825 and became the first American department store, later issuing monthly charge bills during the Civil War. Alexander Turney Stewart's Marble Palace of 1846 invited everyone in freely and used cast iron to allow vast display windows. In Sydney, David Jones opened in 1838 and still trades, making it the longest continuously operating department store anywhere.
Types now range from full-price mainline stores such as Macy's and Nordstrom to discount chains like TJ Maxx and Kohl's. Since the 1980s they have battled discounters, and from the 2000s online retailers too.
Source: Department store
