Witness to a Long, Slow Fade

 

A Lazarus newspaper ad from a little before my time (1928).

It was fifty years ago, yet I remember the moment. 1975. I had just joined an advertising agency in Columbus, Ohio, to work on the Lazarus account. I was with some Lazarus executive, and we were walking through their print advertising department, which was a room with maybe 50 artists, hunched over paste-up tables, working on newspaper ads. 

I don’t remember the exact context, but the executive knew I was new and was giving me an overview of the business. He commented that department stores had been in decline ever since World War II. Many stores had closed. Most others had consolidated. Columbus still had Lazarus, Cincinnati still had Shillito’s, and Dayton still had Rikes, but they were all part of Federated, along with many other stores across the country, all still nominally autonomous, but slowly becoming mere brand names. I came to the job from one of the few remaining independents, Dayton’s Elder-Beerman.

The fact that this conversation took place in the store’s print ad department was a coincidence, but symbolic of the changes underway. In the 70s, Lazarus had something like 20 pages of ads in every daily paper and probably three times that many on Sunday. The store did all their print advertising in house, a department of probably 100 people, but they farmed out their radio and TV commercials to the agency where I worked and there were, like, three of us on the account. The decline of newspapers paralleled the decline of department stores, their primary advertisers. I was there at the beginning of the shift from print to broadcast.

Most cities of any size had multiple department stores in their 19th century heyday, but by the 1970s most were down to one or two. Columbus had just one, Lazarus. Their executives joked that their primary competition was their own Budget Store. In fact, what was killing them were specialty stores. One of the first big successes was The Limited, whose first store was in Columbus, one block north of Lazarus on High Street, across the street from the state capital. The Limited was revolutionary because they only carried what were known as junior sizes. They had cherry-picked one of the department store’s most profitable departments. As time went on, every department was poached in this way.

My college girlfriend was, by then, an assistant glove buyer at Halle's, a department store in Cleveland. Department stores were in my blood. My grandfather ran the maintenance department at Sterlings, another Cleveland department store. His mother-in-law, my great-grandmother, worked there as a salesclerk. Coincidentally, I think she sold gloves.

But I was 22 years old when that conversation at Lazarus took place. What I took from it was that I probably should get out of the department store advertising business as soon as possible, which I did eventually. It took me a couple of years, and I never got completely out. When I moved to Chicago in 1987, it was in part to work on a project for Montgomery-Ward, then still a moderately important national department store. I never worked on the Sears business, also based in Chicago, but had a close relationship with a studio that did most of their ad photography. I worked with chain drug stores for most of my professional career.

Although only 22, I had already made one major change in my work trajectory. Many more would follow. Looking back, I think I tended to follow this wisdom from Issac Wolfe Bernheim, a 19th century bourbon baron. “Wealth, in my humble opinion, is not a thing of luck, or the result of a deliberate and carefully fought campaign of industry, but rather the good judgment to take advantage, at the right time, of opportunities when they present themselves.”