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  Stewart negated all the previous haggling that retail shopping had entailed with his one-price rule. Although the one price–no haggling rule was unpopular at first, Stewart soon became known as an exceptional and honest judge of the value of goods. His price was almost always lower than the price of the same goods anywhere else.

  Stewart was able to sell his items at a lower cost because he always paid cash for the merchandise he bought from suppliers—another of what would become his long-standing rules for his retail business. Paying cash gave him the advantage of buying goods and materials in large quantities at the best price. Stewart bought much of his merchandise at auctions, not relying on credit. His cash-only policy also made him the buyer of choice with sellers and distributors who were trying to sell off their merchandise quickly. By paying only cash, Stewart often realized a 2 percent discount. In the beginning Stewart dealt with a limited amount of merchandise, which made the 2 percent discount seem inconsequential, but as Stewart increased his volume, the discount produced substantial profits. Moreover, when sellers were intent on liquidating a product, they knew that turning to Stewart first would supply them with an immediate infusion of funds. And Stewart tended to pass his savings onto his customers, always maintaining a minimal markup, preferring instead to profit from volume.

  “In that way I limit competition and increase sales; and although I realize only a small profit on each sale, the enlarged area of business makes possible a large accumulation of capital and assures the future,” Stewart said.

  His formula for retail success was sound, simple, and successful. Soon, most of the women in New York City became faithful and loyal customers.

  He, in turn, served them fairly and honestly. Along with his one-price and cash-only rules, Stewart prided himself on another important rule, which was absolute integrity when selling merchandise in his store. He never let any merchandise be misrepresented in order to sell it at a higher price, such as mislabeling domestic merchandise as imported. No damaged or faulty items were sold without full disclosure to the customer. And regardless of the shopper’s station in life, from the wealthiest heiress to the poorest household servant, no one was taken advantage of or overcharged. Word of mouth spread quickly through the city. Only one year went by before Stewart’s store became too small to accommodate all the business he enjoyed and he made plans to move.

  In September 1825, a small advertisement appeared in the Daily Advertiser announcing the sale of “a general assortment of fresh and seasonable dry goods,” at A. T. Stewart’s on Broadway.

  In 1826, Stewart moved his base of retail operations to a larger store at 262 Broadway and began to hire salesmen and saleswomen to handle the vast number of customers. He interrogated each of his salespeople personally, to make sure they lived up to his highest expectations of honesty and integrity. Stewart was keenly aware that one bad salesperson could reflect poorly on his business, and he was not averse to firing those who did not meet his expectations. Despite how quickly his business grew, Stewart gave every aspect of his retail operation his personal attention, and his enterprise prospered accordingly.

  Short in stature and lean, A. T. Stewart had watery blue eyes and a reserved demeanor. He dressed plainly, although fashionably, and shunned personal extravagances such as rings, stickpins, watch chains, or any other form of jewelry. He was known for being practical in his dress and his habits. He awoke early and worked well into the evening. He seldom celebrated holidays and spent little time on leisure or recreation. He was religiously devoted to the day-to-day operations of his business, a trait that did not diminish even as his empire spread throughout New York City and the world.

  In 1823, he married Cornelia Mitchell Clinch, a young woman he had met while he was a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. A mutual friend from the church had introduced them when Stewart first arrived in New York in 1918. Cornelia was one of nine children of Jacob and Susanna Clinch, a modestly wealthy and well-connected New York City family. Jacob Clinch was a partner in the ship chandler firm of Jones and Clinch. The Stewarts had two children, John and May. John was born in 1834 and died as an infant. May died at birth in 1838. The Stewarts had no other children and no heirs to the growing family fortune.

  The retail business of A. T. Stewart expanded, making the establishment of a wholesale arm mandatory. While many retail concerns set their course by establishing specialty markets, Stewart gambled on providing a wide assortment of wholesale and retail products. He sold everything from his store, especially as it related to women’s fashion and household needs.

  Stewart became a major importer, personally developing a series of business relations throughout the world in order to replenish his retail stock with only the finest and most up-to-date goods. Although these various arrangements were suitable for a time, they did not meet Stewart’s needs in the long run. The manufacturers he dealt with often could not provide Stewart with the correct merchandise he was looking for—either the color, quantity, or quality of the various stock he desired would be unavailable. He subsequently turned to manufacturing, allowing him to create for his stores unique product lines, including fabrics that no other seller in the city could reproduce.

  His business acumen led him to realize tremendous profits within a short span of time and compelled him to move his base of operations again within just a three-year period, from 262 Broadway to a larger venue at 257 Broadway. There, the operations would remain for more than fifteen years, until he purchased a city lot at Broadway and Chambers Streets in 1846 and built his famous Marble Palace.

  The Marble Palace became the retail hub of Stewart’s vast department store empire. The new building had a distinctive white Tuckahoe marble that set it apart from the otherwise drab sandstone structures surrounding it. This crisp, bright look alone was astonishing in a city otherwise dominated by sandstone and earth tones, and gave the Stewart store a landmark identity that other establishments lacked. The Marble Palace was four stories high. The ornate Italian style of design incorporated by the architects, Trench & Snook, gave the building an air of social majesty.

  Inside the store were two ornamental columns representing the twin pillars of “Commerce and Plenty.” There was a seventy-foot-wide rotunda with a balcony gallery overhead. High atop the building was a glass dome. Stewart planned his store so that it included distinct departments, with a vast and varied inventory from which to choose.

  The Marble Palace sold imported European merchandise to women, provided fashion shows displaying the most recent styles and trends, and featured a lushly ornate “Ladies Parlor” on the second floor, where women could lounge, talk, and refresh themselves. The parlor was replete with full-length mirrors—another department store first initiated by Stewart.

  exquisitely chaste, classic and tasteful … the most splendid dry goods store in the world.

  —James G. Bennett, New York Herald, 1846

  When we visited the store … we found a line of carriages drawn up in front reaching from Chambers to Reade streets. Crowds of fashionable people were passing in and out, and all were warm in their expressions of gratifications of all the beautiful and tasteful arrangements and architecture of this whole building.

  —New York Herald, 1846

  “our aunt’s availing herself of the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart’s and then come back for us; the ladies’ great shop, vast, marmoreal, plate-glassy and notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street.”

  —FROM “A SMALL BOY,” by Henry James

  The marble palace of A.T. Stewart & Co. has lately been enlarged, and it is now probably the most spacious and the handsomest store of the kind in the world. With its dimensions thus extended, it is 175 feet deep and 165 feet wide. 350 men are employed in it; 100 sewing mac
hines are kept constantly busy, and 150 women earn their daily bread by taking work from the establishment. Carpets from Persia, England and France, shawls from Cashmere and from China, silks from all the celebrated manufactories of Europe, curtain draperies and ormolu furniture from Paris, and exquisite laces from Brussels and Mechlin are here brought together as if by a fairy wand … the multitudinous assemblage of humanity,—men, woman, and children,—numbering between five and six thousand, who daily throng the immense bazaar, and weary the attentive salesmen with their various errands of business or of fashionable extravagance and pleasure.

  —SUPPLEMENT TO THE Hartford Courant, September 18, 1858

  Stewart was one of the first American retail merchants to understand that a department store was a public institution and more so that shopping was a civic event that entailed a degree of pomp and circumstance. The Marble Palace was built with these two ideas in mind. The store included a dome and a rotunda, two types of structures that had previously been used almost exclusively in public buildings like libraries and government offices. In fact, City Hall, located southerly from the new Stewart department store, served as a model for his store, since it too was constructed of marble and had a dome and a rotunda. According to Mona Domosh, in her book, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-century New York and Boston, Stewart intended his new store to add “cultural legitimacy to the commercial impulse.” According to Domosh, “the Marble Palace was not only a functionally designed merchandizing structure but also a cultural adornment to the city.”

  Stewart desired his new store to be an appropriate setting for commercial enterprise: a suitable, safe, and comfortable place for women shoppers to spend their time. The store included organized displays of merchandise and a host of facilities designed specifically for women. The walls and ceilings were adorned with elaborate frescoes. A huge, flamboyant chandelier hung over the vast grand hall, and on the farthest wall on the first floor were huge imported mirrors, which made the room appear much larger than it truly was. A flight of stairs led to a shopping gallery on the second floor, where a range of marble and mahogany shelves displayed an array of new merchandise. Stewart showcased his goods in the building’s giant plate-glass windows. By 1850, the Marble Palace was the largest store in the city and known not only for its merchandise and selection, but also its distinctive style.

  There had been other high buildings but none so stately and simple. And even now there is, in its way no finer street effect than the view of Stewart’s buildings as seen on a clear blue brilliant day, from a point low of Broadway.

  —Harper’s Magazine, 1854

  “I have known persons who always bring in luck. I sometimes open a case of goods and sell the first from it to some person who is unlucky, and I am sure to lose on it in the end. I frequently see persons to whom I would not sell at all if I could avoid it.”

  —A. T. STEWART, 1848

  An anecdote about retailer extraordinaire A. T. Stewart conveys that he was so superstitious that, when he decided to move his flourishing mercantile store from one location to another, he paid the old woman who sold apples and peanuts outside of his original store to relocate to the front of his new store. The old woman, Stewart contended, had brought him luck, and Stewart was a firm believer in luck, despite his vast business acumen. The street vendor, who had stood in front of Stewart’s store for years, dressed in layers of rags, smoking an old clay pipe in the corner of her weathered, toothless mouth, was astonished to learn that Stewart wasn’t glad to be rid of her. On the contrary, Stewart considered her such a good luck charm that he went so far as to carry the old wooden box in which she kept her wares to the location in front of his new store on Chambers Street. He made her promise to continue her business there on the sidewalk and vowed to supplement her income if she agreed to remain there. To no one’s surprise, the wizened old woman maintained her point of sale in front of Stewart’s new store. Stewart was not the first businessman to amass a fortune in America through the development and growth of his department store empire, but his surely was one of the most lucrative. By 1848, Stewart was a multimillionaire. He was only forty-five years old.

  Although A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace was considered the first real American department store, in point of fact, it was a transitional model since it did not include the variety of merchandise so readily associated with the modern American department store. Still, it was a first and remains one of three major developments in the overall growth of the retail business in America, along with Montgomery Ward’s creation of the mail order catalog business (1872) and the F. W. Woolworth low-cost 5 and 10 cent store (1889).

  But it was Stewart who changed the concept of the specialty store into a general merchandise outlet, and it was Stewart who first built a specially designed store from which to sell his merchandise. The result was that Stewart made shopping easy, expedient, and enjoyable—in other words, he created the concept of the one-stop shopping venue.

  Another of Stewart’s innovations was maintaining the principle of selling in volume. He sustained a small markup on his merchandise because he was able to sell so much. “I study to put my goods on the market at the lowest price I can afford and secure a reasonable profit. In that way I limit competition and increase my sales,” Stewart said.

  Dishonesty by any of his sales staff was punished with immediate dismissal, while customer and company loyalty, integrity, and ability were rewarded with promotions and increases in wages. According to Stewart’s policies, a young man who began work at one of his stores as an usher at a mere five dollars a week could earn, within a short period of time and through his own initiative and honesty, twenty-five dollars a week as a sales clerk. And there were opportunities well beyond those available to industrious employees. Meanwhile it became widely circulated that, if any sales clerk within Stewart’s employ was caught misrepresenting the intrinsic value of any merchandise, they would be fired. News of this traveled fast within the buying public and served as a great notice for the store. Word of mouth among customers spreading the high standards employed at Stewart’s was advertising that Stewart couldn’t dream of paying for. Stewart would regularly line up his salesmen and lecture to them on the way they should conduct themselves.

  “You will deal with ignorant, opinionated, and innocent people,” he told his employees. “You will often have an opportunity to cheat them. If they could, they would cheat you, or force you to sell at less than cost. You must be wise, but not too wise. You must never actually cheat the customer, even if you can. If she pays the full figure, present her a hank of dress-braid, a card of buttons, a pair of shoestrings. You must make her happy and satisfied, so she will come back.”

  Cultural historian Harry Resseguie’s extensive examination of the development of the American department store during the period 1860 to 1880 identifies eleven characteristics that are associated with the retail department store. They are:

  A central location

  Many departments under a single roof

  A variety of free services, including the return of merchandise for a refund or exchange

  One price for all patrons

  Low markup

  Cash sales

  Aggressive, specialized advertising

  Large volume

  Centralized nonselling functions

  Purchasing inventory for cash

  Selling of old stock though bargain sales.

  A. T. Stewart adhered to many of these as early as 1846. On the issue of the one-price-for-all policy, Stewart was a leader often credited with originating such policies within the network of department stores. Once again, as far back as 1846, Stewart had adopted the one-price for everyone policy within his store.

  “He was, I believe, among the first to establish the one-price principle,” Thurlow Weed, an intimate friend of Stewart’s told the New York Tribune, fol
lowing Stewart’s death in 1876.

  According to Resseguie, “One of the most important and least appreciated policies on which the American department store system is based is the unrestricted right of the would-be customer to enter the store, inspect the merchandise, price it and purchase it or not without being inopportune to do so, and without interference from clerks or store executives.”

  Stewart’s “open door” policy for customers truly changed the American retail business. In effect, Stewart gave birth to the concept of “browsing.” Prior to Stewart’s innovative policy of free entrance, shoppers would be hounded by salespeople and seldom ever left to peruse the store unattended. A sale was expected, and customers were often browbeaten into making a purchase. According to Stewart, his free entrance policy allowed shoppers to “gaze upon a million dollars’ worth of goods and no man will interrupt either your meditation or admiration.”

  Stewart was also credited with being the first retailer to incorporate the clearance sale. During the various economic downturns beginning in 1837, when his business was housed in the Broadway location, Stewart put his high-priced inventory on sale in order to liquidate his old stock and make room for the new. But Stewart did not use clearance sales in his stores only during economic crises. Stewart himself checked his inventory daily, and slow-moving products were reduced in price.

  “Let us see if people will take them at that,” Stewart was noted as saying when he ordered markdowns on his products.