Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. The Palace of Consumption
Chapter 2. Creating an Industry
Chapter 3. Modernizing Main Street
Chapter 4. A New Deal for Department Stores
Chapter 5. An Essential Industry in Wartime
Chapter 6. The Race for the Suburbs
Chapter 7. The Postwar Discount Revolution
Chapter 8. The Death of the Department Store
Epilogue. Remembering Downtown Department Stores
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Promotional Information

Richly illustrated with archival photos, this comprehensive study of the American department store industry traces the changing economic and political contexts that brought about the decline of downtown shopping districts and the rise of big-box stores and suburban malls.

About the Author

Vicki Howard is Lecturer in History at the University of Essex. She is author of Brides, Inc.: American Weddings and the Business of Tradition, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and editor of the journal History of Retailing and Consumption.

Reviews

"Howard's book is essential reading. . . . From Main Street to Mall makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of retailing and of business more broadly in the U.S." (American Historical Review) "From Main Street to Mall is an important, insightful, and informative work that succeeds in charting and analysing the rise and fall of the department store and how this process was mediated by interactions between the department store industry, other business interests, local and national politics, and wider long-term changes in American society. This [could] serve as the standard U.S. reference work on this sector for many years." (Economic History Review) "Howard's book is a highly valuable complement to the current body of literature on department stores . . . Rather than acquiescing to the commonly accepted inevitability of market forces leading to the decline of department stores, Howard traces the various private and public actors and political processes that have consciously contributed to their decline." (Journal of Urban Affairs) "From Main Street to Mall is a welcome and excellent addition to the literature on mass retailing in the United States." (Business History Review) "From Main Street to Mall succeeds admirably in providing a rich history of the US department store, synthesising various perspectives-social, economic and political-to produce a highly readable account of its development and decline." (Consumption Markets & Culture) "From Main Street to Mall offers sharp analysis of American retailing from a new vantage point, advancing our understanding of the department store beyond Macy's and Marshall Field's. Historians of consumer culture have always known of smaller stores in smaller cities, but nobody paid attention to them until Vicki Howard. A significant contribution." (Susan Strasser, author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market) "Combining deep historical research and vivid description, Vicki Howard lucidly explains how, when, and why the department store came to dominate American commercial culture and how the democratization of consumption, changing public policy, and the forces of globalization contributed to its transformation and demise. A must-read for researchers of American consumer culture and for anyone who loves to shop." (Regina Lee Blaszczyk, author of The Color Revolution)