To Retail, With Love. A Texan Explores Retail Therapy And Her Love Of Great Stores

How Has Shopping Changed Since The Glory Days Of Retail Palaces? With The Controversy Surrounding Dallas’ Downtown Neiman Marcus Store Fate, We’re All Thinking About It More

By Lori Duran

One of my favorite memories was the annual “Crazy Days” end-of-summer sales in my hometown in the Midwest. I had some spending money set aside for shopping, and the stores all had their merchandise marked down to clear out space for fall and winter apparel. There was a festive atmosphere with retail clerks dressed up in silly costumes, and the entire downtown turned into something like a street festival. I visited my favorite stores and walked away with some great bargains…this is amazing considering that today, a town of 11,000 doesn’t usually have much in clothing stores beyond Walmart and thrift shops.

I’ve always loved wandering around a store as if it were a museum to American fashion’s hopes and dreams. I have shopped just for the fun of it and not just during sales. I have one thing in common with Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. That is, I like to see my investments hanging in my closet. Shopping used to be fun for almost everyone I knew. My friend, who didn’t like it, was a 6’3” female basketball player, and it was disappointing for her to go to the mall. Because clothing manufacturers don’t provide a lot of variety of inseams in pants, she needed a much longer inseam than she could find.

However, I recall when saleswomen in dress shops were very helpful, and not just at the more expensive boutiques. Stores made shopping pleasant. They would bring clothes into the changing room, including the same item in different sizes or colors, as well as items they wanted to suggest based on your taste. Some of the smarter saleswomen I’ve known would remember what I liked and my favorite styles and colors.

When I was a child, I loved walking through the toy department of my grandparents’ store. I would learn what was new and popular for toys. Their store was primarily a hardware store, but it was so much more than that. It had a housewares department and a toy department, and after the town’s only clothing store closed, it carried some work clothes that farmers would buy. Their store also sold and installed appliances such as washing machines and dryers. Besides all that, it was a community gathering place. People regularly visited with their neighbors, as they did at the other stores and cafés on the block.

My hometown had fantastic women’s clothing stores: The Woman’s Shop was my favorite. They had some stylish options for younger women, and some of them were within my price range. There was the ritzy House of Dorelle. Their merchandise was too expensive for me, but I marveled at their stylish merchandise and decor. There was the old-fashioned Poole’s House of Fashion, where you would describe what you were looking for, and then you sat down and waited for the saleswoman to bring out some choices that fit what you were looking for. It was very nice, but a little too personal for a shy teenager.

I’ll never forget how uncomfortable it was when the sales lady wanted to measure me for my correct bra size in the dressing room. But since I’m practical, I still shopped there during Crazy Days. Those stores are long gone. In the next town to the north of us was the popular Three Sons Clothier, which featured preppy styles by Ralph Lauren and other youthful clothing. Their clothes were expensive, but they were very trendy, and they had great sales. Plus, they had all kinds of “University of Okoboji” apparel, which represented a local tongue-in-cheek, fictional college with various sports programs and advertising that seemed to encourage a lot of beer drinking.

Surprisingly, my town also had a branch location of the Younkers Department Store Chain, out of Des Moines, which was odd for a small town. I loved buying clothing and Estée Lauder products there. I bought all kinds of their products, which just seemed like the height of elegance to me when I was a teen. Their products were well-packaged in appealing bottles and boxes. The box alone was so lovely; I felt guilty for throwing it away when I took the product out of it.

When I look at the Estee Lauder counters at Macy’s or Dillard’s today, I don’t see as many products as they used to have. I was told that our town had a Younkers only because of our town’s proximity to West Lake Okoboji, where every summer an influx of affluent people from Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Omaha, and other nearby cities built large summer homes around that lake. They came, stayed for a while, and had time to shop. West Lake Okoboji is a scenic, glacier-dug lake fed by springs, and it’s described as a blue-water lake. It attracted a population of people with disposable money, making the Younkers branch location and the locally owned stores profitable during my youth.

It wasn’t just my town. Other small towns in the Midwest had nice stores. I remember Hope’s Fashion Farm, in another small town to the south, was a shopping destination for us. One year, my mother entered a sew-it-with-wool contest, and my sister and I wore garments that she had sewn and put together for a fashion show at Hope’s. Miss Iowa showed us how to walk on the runway for that show. I was 13 years old and thrilled about it. I think that experience jump-started my interest in fashion and stores. The small-town stores weren’t usually multi-level department stores, but some of them had the elegance and fine clothing you might be surprised to find there.

I loved the department stores in the bigger cities in the Midwest, Texas, and on the East Coast. I didn’t get to visit department stores in the West, but I’m sure I would have loved them too. The humongous department stores had jaw-dropping choices and a wide range of departments. I visited the pet department in the flagship Macy’s store in New York City nearly 40 years ago. I loved seeing the huge store and everything it had to offer. I recall that Joske’s in San Antonio had a stamp department for collectors, allowing them to purchase rare and valuable stamps, as well as the books and pages used to store and display their collections. I don’t see those departments in stores anymore today. I enjoyed visiting department stores in cities such as Philadelphia, New York City, Kansas City, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Duluth, Sioux Falls, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and Austin.

Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia was the most amazing store. I’ll never forget the wall organ playing holiday music during the Christmas shopping season. That store had an incredible interior that was featured in the movie Mannequin, starring Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall. There were other great stores in Philadelphia, and I visited all the stores I could in my few trips to New York City, mainly in the 1980s when I visited Bergdorf Goodman, Macy’s, and Gimbels. I visited Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Dayton’s in Minneapolis, and Donaldson’s in Duluth.

There were plenty of other stores I never visited because I didn’t travel to those cities. Still, I was familiar with them through fashion magazines, especially Glamour, Seventeen, Mademoiselle, and Vogue. I’ve always loved magazines, and I paid attention to the department store ads, which were sometimes the best part of the magazine’s fashion coverage because they weren’t trying too hard to be avant-garde or artsy with some of the fashion articles and spreads. The stores understood the importance of showcasing their clothes in the best light, and they ran well-photographed ads for clothing, perfume, makeup, and accessories.

By the 1970s, with suburban sprawl, the good stores were already dwindling, and the shopping scene had undergone significant changes by the end of the 1980s. The economy was dragged down by inflation and rapidly increasing oil prices, as consumers prioritized lower prices over a shopping experience. By the end of the 1980s, many of the better apparel and department stores were gone, and then came the discount and thrift stores. But until that happened, things looked beautiful, and it’s always fond to remember the golden days of retail in America.

Sadly, The Woman’s Shop owner had to declare bankruptcy, and it was right after they had moved into a better, elegantly styled building. There was a going-out-of-business sale there, and when I went, bank employees were in charge of the cash register. The bank was going to ensure that it got every dime out of that failed enterprise that it could. Poole’s and House of Dorelle only lasted a few years before the economy changed, and they closed. Three Sons has survived, perhaps buoyed by online shopping, as they offered a great selection of products there.   

In New York City, Bonwit Teller went out of business in 1990 and was subsequently torn down, replaced by a high-rise in Manhattan. In Chicago, Marshall Field’s was acquired by Macy’s, which has since acquired a significant number of regional stores and remains in operation, offering both brick-and-mortar stores and online shopping. All of the big store survivors have an online presence. Bergdorf Goodman remains in New York City and maintains a substantial online shopping presence. Gimbels closed in the 1980s. Mergers, acquisitions, restructuring, and rebranding were sometimes followed by bankruptcy, and in one way or another, store names that I was familiar with, such as Dayton’s, Donaldson’s, Marshall Field’s, Younkers, and many more, disappeared from our lexicon and no longer appear on store buildings or well-decorated shopping bags. There were other stores all over the country that I had never visited before, but it was too late. And then there was Sakowitz, the fabulous department store chain from Houston that was gone by 1990. Sadly, its marble-clad flagship store in the downtown is now a parking garage.

I recall visiting the flagship Neiman Marcus store, which remains in downtown Dallas, just a few years ago. Stanley Marcus, the legendary owner, said that in the past, salesmen could sell suits and earn enough to buy a house and provide for a family. Now, working in a retail store doesn’t offer the same lifestyle. The pay rate is notoriously low, and there’s a lot of staff turnover. Today, stores may still look well-furnished and staffed, but things have changed. When we were at Neiman Marcus, we ate at the Zodiac room, which had once been the chic tearoom and restaurant run by the famous Helen Corbitt. It was the best of all for the department store’s in-house dining. In its heyday, celebrities visiting Dallas would stop there. After those glory days were over, I saw a lovely oasis of good food and hospitality. However, during my visit, I suspect the other restaurant patrons I observed were tourists, like me.

Shopping today, with its numerous avenues to explore, whether online, at vintage shops, or at grand retail palaces, will always offer unique opportunities to enjoy the art of living a stylish life.  

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