Shopper

“ The little shops pull at one's heart, so simple is their merchandise. A little window beckons us through which we peer with misted eyes. For narrow shops are often kind to tiny folk scarce counter-high. Above a shop, behind a blind, I've heard a little baby cry. Above a shop, I've often seen a mother's anxious face appear. How many customers have been? The closing hour is drawing near. Great shops, like temples dedicate to merchandise from every mart, are over-lords of their own fate—but little shops tug at the heart! ”

“ He was in a mean shop, whose whole contents had been displayed in thick festoons, of jackets, shirts, and pantaloons, on the outside, where a man was pacing to and fro upon the pavement, whose vocation it was to accost and convert into a purchaser every passer-by who chanced even to look, at his goods. ”

“ I make bold to say, there is not a trader any where who does not keep his confessor. The creature haunts the shop, till he almost seems the Genius of the Place, to the grievous prepossession of newspapers, and, what is more intolerable still, to the exclusive occupation of the ear of the worthy shopkeeper himself. ”

“ Dealers had erected booths and stalls on the pavement, and overspread them with scanty awnings, beneath which they stood, vociferously crying their merchandise; such as shoes, hats and caps, yarn stockings, cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes of a religious Character, and a few French novels; toys, tinware, old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes, biscuits, sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and ends, which we see no object in advertising. Baskets of grapes, figs, and pears stood on the ground. ”

“ The youth himself stands prompt and alert behind his counter, never idling for a moment, nor permitting his shopboy to idle, but both busy, cutting, and brushing, and bustling about, whether there be any thing to do or not. If but an old lady be seen looking up at the window, or glancing in through the avenue of cheap prints that forms the doorway, what an angler-like eagerness in the mind of the trader that she would but walk in!—nothing more required—were she once within the shop, no fear but she is well done for. ”

“ Gentlemen consider it a very irksome task to go on shopping expeditions, and their ill-concealed impatience becomes equally irksome to you.
If you have given the salesman or saleswoman unusual trouble in showing you articles which you find not to suit, make some compensation, by at least one or two small purchases before leaving the store; for instance, linen to lay by as a body-lining for a future dress, gloves, mits, a neck ribbon, cotton spools, pins, needles, tape, black sewing-silk, &c.,—things that will always come into use. ”

“ Men of that ilk methinks may be likened to the sort of small shopkeeper who hangs out in the slums or suburbs of the town and does a little now in the bakery line, now in the grocery line, now in the apothecary line and now in general retail business—in fact, a little bit of everything and nothing good in anything. ”

“ When the shop is filled with well-dressed ladies, as is usually the case from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon, there is a bewildering splendor about the scene, and one might almost fancy, that a species of fascination, calculated to make the customer an easy prey to the shopkeeper, is at once the object and the end of these devices. ”

“ O'Finnigan sells peanut candy in her shop upon the sidewalk near the site of Corporal Thompson's Broadway Cottage, in the midst of the gay spectacle of a summer day. And within a stone's-toss of her stand how many fine houses you will see, and how many other fascinating shops! Our English ancestors were called a shopkeeping nation by Napoleon; but it is his own Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who have the true secret of shopkeeping. They make shops fascinating. They have made shopkeeping a fine art. ”

“ But to descend more into detail, there are still among its at any rate a limited number of shopkeepers who like to do their business on good, safe, and steady lines, and keep together a nice respectable connection by upholding the dependable quality of their wares. Some of these shopkeepers do not make much of an outward show, but I have reason to know that many of them in a quiet undemonstrative manner do a snug and prosperous trade without fuss or display. ”

“ It was observed that upon entering a shop here the customer invariably removes his hat out of respect to the store-keeper, whether man or woman, and remains thus uncovered while perfecting his purchase. ”

“ The shopkeeper sits on the floor of his shop, surrounded by his various goods. He never rises to customers, for everything is within reach of his hand. [402] Women never meddle with trade, which is solely in the hands of the men. ”

“ The current of our daily life, the springs of our activity or fortitude, may be supplied as well from hope as fear, from ‘cheerful and confident thoughts’ as the apparition of famine stalking just behind us. The merchant attends to his business, settles his accounts, and answers his correspondents as diligently and punctually as the shop-keeper. The shop-keeper minds his customers, and puffs off his goods, tells more lies, is a greater drudge, and gets less for his pains than the merchant. ”

“ When a customer enters a shop the proprietor, a grey-headed man perhaps, but conveying by his well-dressed person a profound appearance of old-established honest trading, will slowly and calmly set down his pipe on the polished counter, or push aside his cup of tea, and then inquire politely the nature of his customer's demands. ”

“ The shops are numerous, but not overstocked with commodities, and the shopkeepers always recommend their goods, not only to us, but to their countrymen, by saying they are “English,” which is too true: they are the spoils of our merchants. ”

“ A LITTLE SHOPPING
As he spoke, we came suddenly out of the woodland into a short street of handsomely built houses, which my companion named to me at once as Piccadilly: the lower part of these I should have called shops, if it had not been that, as far as I could see, the people were ignorant of the arts of buying and selling. Wares were displayed in their finely designed fronts, as if to tempt people in, and people stood and looked at them, or went in and came out with parcels under their arms, just like the real thing. ”

“ The retail tradesman of the towns, for example—once a fairly homogeneous class throughout Europe—expands here into vast store companies, and dwindles there to be an agent or collector, seeks employment or topples outright into the abyss. ”

“ Your grocer and his wife, who eat behind the shop in a sanded and comfortless space walled off, and on Sunday afternoon go out, neatly arrayed in well-fitting but dowdy and serviceable garments, have tidy fortunes stowed away, while their flashy, splash-loving brethren of the British Isles, with their dog-carts, bicycles, and up-to-date attire turned out by fashionable tailors, dressmakers, and milliners, are pulling the devil by the tail and stupidly patronising their betters, who are contented with less display. ”

“ To end with a brief classification, it may be noted that there are dealers whose shops have private rooms in the rear where trade can be carried on in the same way as with a dealer who has no shop. From this double-faced form we pass to the real shopkeeper, the vaster class ranging from the vendor who can afford to fill his window with the choicest samples down to the modest curio shop, the benevolent harbour of the humbler modes of expressing art. ”

“ The warm and humming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging from the murmur of invisible gnats and midges, to the impetuous whirring of the great Libellulae, large almost as swallows, and hawking high in air for their food. Swift butterflies glance by, moths flutter, flies buzz, grasshoppers and katydids pipe their shrill notes, sharp as the edges of the sunbeams. Busy bees go humming past, straight as arrows, express-freight-trains from one blossoming copse to another. ”

“ But, happening to look up while we both stood silent, the lady examining the handkerchiefs, and I doing nothing till she should have made up her mind, I caught sight of the eyes of the shop-walker, as they call the man who shows customers where to go for what they want, and sees that they are attended to. He is a fat man, dressed in black, with a great gold chain, which they say in the shop is only copper gilt. ”

“ On the right, perhaps, would be a shop all open to the road, where, cross-legged upon a kind of daïs, the merchant sat among his piled wares, unenterprising and unsolicitous, serenely confident in the balance-sheet of fate. ”

“ The proprietor of the shop looks calmly on with apparently no interest in the business, but it is more than likely that some understanding with the itinerant vendor exists, and that when the purchaser has departed the shopkeeper will get a commission for the use of his premises. ”

“ Thus one, attracted by a specimen in a shop window, may become an interested listener to a conversation in which the beauty of the said piece and its phenomenal cheapness are the theme. It probably never occurs to the dupe that the respectable-looking lady and gentleman are in the employ of the shopkeeper, and that their conversation was arranged entirely for his benefit. ”

“ The very shopkeeper who may have done you an ill turn in business (just as a child with a stick hits you joyously and without malice) will retire to the tiny scrap of a place behind his premises, and, as if whirled away on the wonderful carpet of the Arabian Nights, he is another man, in another world, instantly ”

“ Man stepped out of a place that I learned later was a kind of store where they sell things, and the new Mr. Man took our box and set it in front of his store, and put a card on it with some words that said, 'For Sale,' and threw us in some green stuff to eat, and there we were, among ever so many things that we had never seen before. ”

“ Such ribbons and shawls! and two such elegant young men behind the counter, each in a clean collar and white neckcloth, like the lover in a farce. As to the proprietor, he did nothing but walk up and down the shop, and hand seats to the ladies, and hold important conversations with the handsomest of the young men, who was shrewdly suspected by the neighbours to be the ‘Co.’ We saw all this with sorrow; we felt a fatal presentiment that the shop was doomed—and so it was. ”

“ Go into a store for a pair of gloves, even, mention the size you desire, and the salesman will show you every variety in kid, French dogskin, cloth, and leather; for soiree, promenade, driving, travelling, and every species of use, and different styles and kinds for each use. The salesmen understand their business, which is to sell goods; they are polite, they suggest wants, they humor your merest whim in hue, pattern, style, or fancy; they make no rude endeavor to force goods upon you, but are determined you shall have just what you want ”

“ Then one of the company cheapens something or other, making many words with the shopkeeper about the price, thereby giving an opportunity to some of his companions to hand things of value from one to another till they were insensibly vanished, the honest shopkeeper being left to deplore the misfortune of having such light-fingered customers find the way to his shop. ”

“ In fact, the shops seem to be convenient places opened to enable their owners to causer with the greatest possible number of their neighbours and other people, rather than places for the receipt of custom and serious making of money. I doubt if any man is a worse hand at shopping than I, and yet I can go boldly into any shop here, and turn over the articles, and chaffer over them, and then go out without buying, and yet feel that I have conferred a benefit rather than otherwise on the proprietor of the establishment. ”

“ For a mercer to set up now in Paternoster Row, or a woollen-draper in St Paul's Churchyard, the one among the sempstresses, and the other among the chair-makers, would be the same thing as for a country shopkeeper not to set up in or near the market-place. [15]
The place, therefore, is to be prudently chosen by the retailer, when he first begins his business, that he may put himself in the way of business; and then, with God's blessing, and his own care, he may expect his share of trade with his neighbours. ”

“ But is there any understanding or practice according to which the men do deal at the merchant's shop?-I cannot say. The men that we deal with are at liberty to take their supplies either from us or from any other shop in the country. ”

“ The errand-boys and chandler’s-shop-keepers’ sons, are all stage-struck: they ‘gets up’ plays in back kitchens hired for the purpose, and will stand before a shop-window for hours, contemplating a great staring portrait of Mr. ”

“ Shop assistants are so invariably prepared to give advice on matters of dress and domestic management that I suppose there are people who go to shops not to buy but to have a heart-to-heart talk about what they shall buy. ”

“ In four fifths of these great retail stores, the discovery that the purchaser is an American or an Englishman, and a stranger, is a signal for increasing the regular price of every article he desires to purchase ”

“ The shopmen are mostly young men, who appear to have all the persuasive arts of their brethren in London, prevailing upon their fair customers to get rid of their money, and subjecting them to a good scolding from husbands and mammas, for extravagance, leading to pouting and sulks for a week. ”