16 October: Department Store Day

One for the shopaholics. It's Department Store Day; 10 facts about department stores.

1. The first reliably dated department store was Harding, Howell & Co, which opened in 1796 on Pall Mall in London.
2. Department stores grew in popularity during the 19^th century as cities got bigger, transport improved and electricity became available.
3. When Selfridge’s opened in 1909, it offered customers 100 departments, a roof garden, numerous restaurants, reading and writing rooms, and a first aid room.
4. Large stores all have Escalators these days, which we take for granted, but when they were first introduced into the stores, the high society ladies refused to use them.
5. Marshall Field, the entrepreneur behind the Chicago store which was one of the biggest in the USA in the 1960s, considered the department store model to be rather low class. He was a conservative guy who forbade his staff from wearing make up and refused to display women;s underwear on mannekins. One of the managers who worked for him was Harry Selfridge, who went on to found Selfridge’s in London.
6. Selfridges has been voted the best department store in the world at the last three biennial Global Department Store Summits. It has the world's largest Shoe gallery and the world's largest accessories department.
7. The actress Halle Berry was named after the Halle’s department store chain in Cleveland.
8. Until 2009, the largest department store in the world was Macy's in New York City In 2009, it was surpassed by Shinsegae, a store in Busan, South Korea. The name Shinsegae means "New World" in Korean, and this store is over a million square feet bigger than Macy's.
9. Macy's has 22 restaurants inside it. Macy's is also credited with introducing coloured bath Towels to America in the 1930s.
10. GUM, the department store on Moscow's Red Square was once Joseph Stalin's office. It has a Historic Toilet – before the Russian revolution it had lavish bathrooms but they were closed down, being deemed a bourgeois luxury in 1918. However, in recent years, they restored one, and customers can use it -for a hefty fee.

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