Stevereads: Give the Lady What She Wants!

Our book today is an odd little gem from 1952: Give the Lady What She Wants! It was written by Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, and it's a history of the beginnings and heyday of the great sprawling department store Marshall Field & Company. Wendt and Kogan were a pair of seasoned journalists, and the fact that their copy had to be snappy and readable shows on every page of their book.

That book starts in the mid-19th century in a pre-fire Chicago bursting with new crowds and new commerce. Female shoppers braved the muddy streets and splashing horse-drawn carts in order to buy basics and hunt for bargains in the city's burgeoning world of businesses. The book is full of arresting, well-drawn portraits of retail pioneers like Potter Palmer, a commercial dreamer who built a enormously successful retail business from the ground up in Chicago, to Marshall Field himself, who came to Chicago at age 21, listened a great deal more than he spoke, and eventually maneuvered himself into a position to buy Palmer's business and use it as the basis for the institution that would grow, survive the Great Fire, and eventually become Marshall Field & Company.

The Great Fire of 1871 provides the book with its first major dramatic beat, naturally enough, and our authors give it all the flourish it deserves, very much including the devastated aftermath:

By Tuesday, when the fire finally burns itself out, the heart of the city is a mass of blackened ruins.

Gone are stores, homes, banks, hospitals, public buildings, railroad stations, hotels, theater. Nearly 300 have lost their lives. Nearly 100,000 are homeless. Almost $200,000,000 of property has been destroyed.

“Chicago is in ashes,” a woeful citizen writes to a friend in Iowa. “Not one wholesale business left. Such a conflagration was never known on this continent. At present, we hardly know the extent of the damage, only that it is terrible.”

Wendt and Kogan chronicle all the growing pains of this scrappy company as it adapts and expands but always manages to stay true to Potter Palmer's original stunning insight: that there might be a pile of money to be made out of the fact that Chicago's streets were crowded with women in possession of spending money. That insight gradually took on an evolution of its own, morphing into an entire ethos of what the 20th century called “customer service” (needless to say, the 21st century has neither a term for this concept nor any knowledge of it). That ethos was the origin of the quote that gives the book its title:

Even those who could not always afford to buy what Field's store offered appreciated the service and the elaborate courtesy. Many who made only one small purchase every six months came to consider the store a place where the customer was always right, and this became an unofficial maxim in these years. Another motto stemmed from an incident in which Field, while strolling through the store, came upon Lindsay T. Woodcock, assistant retail manager, speaking heatedly with a woman customer.

“What are you doing here?” asked Field.

“I am settling a complaint,” replied Woodcock.

“No, you're not,” snapped Field. “Give the lady what she wants!”

Wendt and Kogan wrote their book when Marshall Field's was in the fullness of its retail life, when it seemed like a permanent fixture on the American retail landscape. That landscape has changed a great deal over the years, of course; Marshall Field's underwent an assortment of sales and mergers and transitions, finally giving up the ghost in 2006. Probably there are many thousands of people still alive in the US who have fond memories of shopping in the vast expanse of these stores, and probably there's another book to be written on the company's history (Gayle Soucek book from ten years ago is quite good but not playful enough and not nearly long enough). But we'll never have a better book on the heyday from the heyday than this wonderfully readable thing, Give the Lady What She Wants!