Shopping

“ In another shopping district, an armless man carried a small showcase with notions strapped over his neck and about his shoulders, with a sign calling attention to his infirmity and asking the public to purchase from him. ”

“ Shopping Commission.—If you live at a little distance from the city, a good business may be built up by shopping for your friends and neighbors. By dint of experience you know where to buy, and when your practice is built up you can buy cheaper by reason of larger purchases, and you can give both of these advantages to your patrons. Many women might find here both a congenial and profitable field. ”

“ The chief elements of a good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and cheques. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The best places for shopping are fashionable streets, bazaars, and the like. Street-shopping principally relates to hosiery, drapery, and jewellery of the richer sort. Bazaar and arcade shopping, to fancy articles, nicknacks, and perfumery. In street-shopping, walk leisurely along, keeping a sharp lookout on the windows. In bazaar-shopping, beat each stall separately. Many patterns, colors, novelties, conveniences, and other articles will thus strike your eye, which you would otherwise have never wanted or dreamed of. ”

“ Demonstrate the value of all merchandise under serious consideration whether you believe it to be necessary or not.—Many sales of advertised articles or merchandise chosen on the basis of its decorative appeal can be closed without discussion of materials or construction. As a safety-first measure, these factors should be mentioned somewhat carefully after the order has been booked. Sometimes a customer will buy an article in complete good faith, and yet within the next half [Pg 32] hour will start shopping in other stores to see whether or not she has bought wisely. ”

“ The following paper may be on shopping. It should be very practical and suggest that shopping [Pg 61] out of season is economical; that too much shopping is extravagant in time and car fares; that a bargain counter is seldom a good place to buy anything; that good materials wear longer than poor ones. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You'll never catch me shopping till the very last thing; and—as a matter of principle—I'll always go to the shop that keeps open latest. It does the young men good to keep 'em close to business. Improve their minds indeed! ”

“ HINTS ON CHRISTMAS SHOPPING. (By a good Old-fashioned Clown.)
Knock at a shop-door, and then lie down flat in front of it, so that the shopman, coming out, may tumble headlong over you. Then bolt into the shop, and cram into your pockets all the big things you can find, so that in trying to get out, you cannot squeeze them through the doorway. For instance, if it be a watchmaker's, clap an eight-day kitchen clock and a barometer or two, let us say, in your right pocket, and a brass warming-pan, or some such little article of jewellery (as you will take care to call it) in your left one ”

“ On a certain morning in late June, Sheilah woke to the realization that she must somehow muster enough strength to go in town to do some necessary shopping for the children. It had been haunting her for a week. Every necessity haunted her lately, loomed ahead of her like a menacing calamity. She postponed the dreaded shopping-tour until after lunch, and then, after the children had gone back to school, sprang up from the couch, put on her hat, and plunged out into the midday sun and heat in desperate and unintelligent determination. ”

“ We see the ladies go out shopping, in the most natural way, and flit from street to street and from store to store, just in the good old fashion, except that they leave the gondola, instead of a private carriage, waiting at the curbstone a couple of hours for them,--waiting while they make the nice young clerks pull down tons and tons of silks and velvets and moire antiques and those things ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ On one side of this walk is a long row of shops, plentifully stocked with all manner of toys, lace, gloves, stockings, and where there is raffling, as at Paris, in the Foire de Saint Germain. On the other side of the Walk is the Market and as it is the custom here for every person to buy their own provisions, care is taken that nothing offensive appears upon the stalls. Here young, fair, fresh-coloured country girls, with clean linen, small straw hats, and neat shoes and stockings, sell game, vegetables, flowers, and fruit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Merchandise is also divided into these three sorts,—navigation, by the which merchandizes are brought, and carried in and out over the seas; invection, by the which commodities are gathered into the city, and dispersed from thence into the country by land and negotiation, which I may call the keeping of a retailing or standing shop. In common speech, they of the first sort be called merchants, and both the other retailers.
Handicraftsmen be those which do exercise such arts as require both labour and cunning, as goldsmiths, tailors, and haberdashers, skinners, etc. ”

“ Here the long lines of lighted shops are now packed with their evening customers, who are buying meat and groceries and selecting furniture, being measured for new suits, trying on smart hats and cloaks of the latest West-end fashion, and examining the pink and blue and yellow silk petticoats which make such a gay show in the brilliantly-lighted windows of the milliners. ”

“ We sell 10 per cent. off to our employees. Here's the key of your locker. Here's your check book. When you've got your dress, ask for the schoolroom. Take fifteen minutes' lesson on the blackboard for making out your checks, and the rest's up to you. But look sharp. We've been open to customers for half an hour now. At ten-thirty a two-hours' bargain sale of blouses, sashes, and ladies' fancy neckwear opens on the first floor. That's yours. You must be in the square more than half an hour before the sale begins, to see stock and learn your job. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even our daily purchases, in manner, in number, and in character, seem to be looked upon as eccentric, for whenever we leave a shop, the relatives of the greengrocer, flesher, draper, whoever it may be, bound downstairs, surround him in an eager circle, and inquire the latest news. ”

“ Everything you sell, whatever its price, will be the genuine thing—straight from the East. We associate shop-keeping with the huckstering ideas of a servile class. I’ve often wanted to prove that shop-keeping, all trade, can be ennobled. ”

“ He deigns to answer your inquiries, but, in place of the pertinacious perseverance with which an English shopman displays his wares, it seems a matter of perfect indifference to the American whether you purchase or no. The drapers and mercers' shops, which go by the name of "dry goods" stores, are filled with the costliest productions of the world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ A second principle of the store in those early days which has come easily and naturally down to these—when it is accepted retailing principle everywhere—was the marking of the selling price upon each and every article. ”

“ Perhaps when we make use of the term ‘Brokers’ Shop,’ the minds of our readers will at once picture large, handsome warehouses, exhibiting a long perspective of French-polished dining-tables, rosewood chiffoniers, and mahogany wash-hand-stands, with an occasional vista of a four-post bedstead and hangings, and an appropriate foreground of dining-room chairs. Perhaps they will imagine that we mean an humble class of second-hand furniture repositories. ”

“ In the shop on the right of the building, we note the usual open shop-front with its counter, and the tradesman with a pair of scales; in the interior of the shop is an assistant who seems to be, with vigorous action, pounding something in a mortar, and so we conjecture the shop to be that of an apothecary. The costume of the man crossing the street, in long gown girded at the waist, may be compared with the merchants given in our last chapter, and with those in an engraving of a market-place at p. ”

“ Shops where the same kind of goods are sold are grouped in quarters by themselves. There is the street of the dealers in clothing, where the booths are bright with pink, blue, and orange silks, and with brocades of gold and silver, and where ladies, veiled and draped like phantoms, are posted. ”

“ Guide for Shoppers.—A department store in New York recently made a census of its customers, and from the count kept for a single week it was estimated that 3,125,000 persons passed through its doors every year. This for a single store. But there are thousands of stores. Vast numbers of these people are from the country, and do not know where they can trade to the best advantage. What a field is here for a shoppers’ guide! Ascertain what stores make a specialty of certain goods, what ones sell the cheapest in certain lines, and what days they make bargains in certain wares. ”

“ The company store is elaborately stocked with commodities ranging from spices and spinning-wheels to hand-made laces. In this part of the world a wheel for twisting wool or linen thread is an every-day article of merchandise whose staple price is five dollars. ”

“ Nearly all the best shops in the retail trade are in this street, some of them comparable to the richest of London and Paris, and the whole affording means for every device of elegant decoration and boundless expenditure. ”