Department Store

Certain department stores are further classified as discount department stores. Discount department stores commonly have central customer checkout areas, generally in the front area of the store. Department stores are usually part of a retail chain of many stores situated around a country or several countries.

Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was the first store to include departments; however, by modern standards, it would not be considered a department store because of the size and range of items that were stocked.

The first true department store was Le Bon Marché in 1838, and by 1852 it offered a wide variety of goods in "departments" inside one building. Goods were sold at fixed prices, with guarantees allowing exchanges and refunds. By the end of the 19th century, Georges Dufayel, a French credit merchant, had served up to three million customers and was affiliated with La Samaritaine, a large French department store established in 1870 by a former Bon Marché executive.

The oldest independent department store in the world, is 'Austin's' in Derry, Northern Ireland, which has maintained its original position on The 'Diamond' in Derry's city centre since 1830.

As Le Bon Marché evolved into a fully fledged department store in the early 1850s, Delany's New Mart opened in 1853 in Dublin, Ireland on Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street).

What made Delany's different from most department stores of its time was its purpose-built nature; unlike others it had not evolved gradually from a smaller shop on site. Constructed to a lavish standard on the city's principal street, it was designed to rival the biggest and best in Europe. Acquired by the Clery family in the late 19th century, both the store and Imperial Hotel located in its upper floors were completely destroyed in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Another claimant to the title of "World's first department store" is Bainbridges in Newcastle upon Tyne, founded in 1838 as a drapers and fashion shop but on record as collecting its takings by department as early as 1849. The ledger from that year still survives in the archives of the John Lewis Partnership who bought the store in 1952, and retained its original name until 2002 when the store was re-branded as John Lewis Newcastle.

Within a couple of decades, New York's retail center had moved uptown, forming a stretch of retail shopping from "Marble Palace" that was called the "Ladies' Mile". In 1858 Rowland Hussey Macy founded Macy's as a dry goods store. Benjamin Altman and Lord & Taylor soon competed with Stewart as New York's first department stores, later followed by "McCreary's" and, in Brooklyn, "Abraham & Straus."

Le Bon Marché department store in Paris, 1867.Similar developments were under way in London, in Paris and in Chicago, where department stores sprang up along State Street, notably Marshall Field and Company, which was the second-largest department store in the world prior to converting to Macy's. In 1877, Wanamaker's opened in Philadelphia.