Selfridges
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Selfridges is a chain of department stores in the United Kingdom. It was founded by American entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge who opened a large store in London's Oxford Street on 15 March 1909. H. Gordon Selfridge was born in 1858 in Ripon, Wisconsin, and in 1879 joined Field, Leiter and Company (later to become Marshall Field & Company), where he worked under the Chicago retailer of the same name. He worked his way up through the firm, married into the prominent Buckingham family, and amassed the fortune with which he built his new London store. The Oxford street building housing Selfridges was designed by the Chicago architect Daniel Burhnam, the same architect as Marshall Field & Company's State Street flagship.
Selfridges is credited with coining the phrase "The customer is always right", by using extensive advertising. It was learned however that Sir Selfridge had first heard the expression while on a rug buying expedition in the Farsi districts of Bombay (Mumbai) India. Instead of keeping products behind counters, Selfridges decided to place them on displays that were more accessible to customers. Such changes were soon adopted by other retailers. Selfridges was also the first retailer to have the perfume counters at the front of the store on the ground floor, something that all department stores now do.
H. Gordon Selfridge was genuinely interested in education and science, and believed that by attracting people into his store with educational and scientific exhibits, he would induce them to spend time and money there, and perhaps return.
In 1909, after the first cross-Channel flight, Louis Blériot's monoplane was exhibited at Selfridges, where it was seen by 12,000 people. The first public demonstration of television was by John Logie Baird from the first floor of Selfridges from 1 April-27 April 1925.
A Milne-Shaw seismograph was set up on the Selfridge store’s third floor in 1932, attached to one of the building's main stanchions, unaffected by traffic or shoppers. It recorded the Belgian earthquake of 11 June, 1938 which was also felt in London. At the outbreak of war the seismograph was moved from its original site near the Post Office to another part of the store. In 1947, the seismograph was given to the British Museum.
After the sale of its provincial stores in the 1940s to the John Lewis Partnership, Selfridges remained a one-location business with its 460,000 square-foot flagship London store until 1998 when it opened its first store outside London, at the Trafford Centre, on the outskirts of Manchester with a retail space of 150,000 square feet. Such was the success of the Trafford store a second Manchester store was alocated taking half of the Marks & Spencer's store in Exchange Square, Manchester. The retail space of the Exchange Square store is 120,000 square feet. By the end of 2003, Selfridges had four stores: the London flagship store, two in Manchester and a new one in Birmingham's Bullring shopping complex which opened in September 2003. The Birmingham store is covered in 15,000 spun aluminium discs and was designed by architects Future Systems.The Birmingham store has a retail space of 160,000 square feet. There were plans for stores in Leeds, Newcastle Upon Tyne and Bristol but these plans seemed to have stalled with the axing of the Bristol scheme and the Leeds and Newcastle schemes being put on review (since 2003). [link] According to Selfridges this is because of a policy of choosing to invest in existing stores as opposed to continued expansion. A further store is scheduled to open in Glasgow in 2007 but this is highly unlikely considering work to construct the Glasgow Selfridges has not started as of June 2006. In 2003, the chain was acquired by the family holding company of Galen Weston for £598 million and has resulted in a substantial sum being spent renovating the flagship location on Oxford Street.
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