DEPARTMENTAL STORE

DEPARTMENT STORE

The definition and the  role of departmental stores accross the globe in the day to day services or provision of human needs cannot be over emphasized, as it offers a varieties of merchandise and services and organised in separate departments.
A department Store can be define as a Large retail store having a wide variety of merchandise organized into customer-based departments. A department store usually sells dry goods, household items, wearing apparel, furniture, furnishings, appliances, radios, and televisions, with combined sales exceeding $10 million.


A Department Store is also seen as a Retail establishment that sells a wide variety of goods. These usually include ready-to-wear apparel and accessories, yard goods and household textiles, housewares, furniture, electrical appliances, and accessories. In addition to departments (supervised by managers and buyers) for the various categories of goods, there are departmental divisions to handle, for example, merchandising, advertising, service, accounting, and financial strategy.

A department store is a retail  establishment which specializes in satisfying a wide range of the consumer's personal and residential durable goods/ product needs; and at the same time offering the consumer a choice multiple merchandise lines  at variable price points, in all product categories. Department stores usually sell products including  apparel,electronics,home appliances,etc, and additionally select other lines of products such as paint,hardware, toiletries, photographic equipment, cosmetics,toys,sporting materials,jewelry,  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.


BRIEF HISTORY OF DEPARTMENT STORE
Bainbridge (now John Lewis) Newcastle upon Tyne, is the world’s oldest Department Store, and is still known to many of its customers as Bainbridge despite the recent name change to 'John Lewis'. This much-loved Newcastle institution dates back to 1838 when Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge was aged 21 when he went into partnership with William Alder Dunn and opened a draper’s and fashion in Market Street, Newcastle. In terms of retailing history, one of the most significant facts about the Newcastle Bainbridge shop, is that as early as 1849 weekly takings were recorded by department, making it the earliest of all department stores.

This ledger survives and is kept in the John Lewis archives who bought the Bainbridge store in 1952. John Lewis retained its original name of Bainbridge until 2002, when the store was re branded as John Lewis Newcastle. That it sorted goods out into Departments in 1849, three years before Le Bon Marche in Paris did the same, there is a strong case for Bainbridges being the world's original department store.
Aristide Boucicaut founded Le Bon Marche  in Paris 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.

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