American Department Stores Used to Be Downtown Palaces — So What Happened to Them?

For about a hundred years, the American department store was not just a store. It was the grandest building in town: elevator men in white gloves, tea rooms on the top floor, cash flying through tubes in the ceiling, and Christmas windows people drove hours to see. Today most of them are gone. So what happened to them? I'm Hal Whitmore. I taught American history for 36 years, and in December 1965 my mother put on her white gloves and took me downtown to the big store in Columbus. In this video I walk you through the Marble Palace and the invention of the fixed price, the services nobody remembers, the shopgirls behind the counter, the Christmas season the stores invented (including the year a department store moved Thanksgiving), the Wish Book, and the bargain basement. Then I count down the five things that emptied downtown, and the biggest one is not the one you think. This video is history and education.