It Keeps Growing and Growing

By 1928, the first Goldblatt’s store located on Chicago Avenue west of Ashland had achieved 140,000 square feet of dry goods retail holiness that would make Marshall Field himself blush. A few months ago I actually started reading (though never quite finished) Sam Walton’s autobiography, Made In America. Upon discussing opening up his first Walton five and dime, Walton wrote that he had crammed as much merchandise as he could inside and outside the store, pulling it all from various resources and finding creative ways to sell it all. It seems that Nathan Goldblatt was a subconscious influence on Mr. Walton as he used much the same tactics to generate traffic inside his no frills attached store. According to Richard Longstreth's article "Bringing Downtown to the Neighborhoods: Weiboldt's, Goldblatt's and the Creation of Department Store Chains in Chicago" Other key ideas Goldblatt’s pioneered was distributing their own separate weekly circulars and giving its employees commissions on top of their regular salaries to make them some of the highest paid in the city.

Goldblatt’s was certainly beginning to beat its competition. In the mid 1920s a Woolworth opened up nearby and Nathan’s brother Louis Goldblatt describes the chaos that ensued on the day of the Woolworth grand opening….inside the Goldblatt’s store! “When our doors opened that morning, customers came crashing in and rushed down the stairs into the department [where the specials were being offered] with such a fury that the police came to control them. Customers got into fights over the same item. The only way I could get through the mob was by swinging across from the ceiling pipes…We even had to empty the show windows for fear the plate glass would break. But the Woolworth store was practically empty.” Was that a scene a hybrid of the mall chase sequence in The Blues Brothers and Tarzan swinging from left to right and side to side? Sounds like it definitely competes for all time extreme wackiness.

Soon after the huge expansion of the Chicago Avenue location, another location was constructed at 47th and Ashland in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Next came this location at 91st and Commercial pictured above in all its subtle art deco touches. The folks at Goldblatt's were moving pretty quickly as Longstreth writes "The example of Sears, Roebuck, which had entered the retail arena in 1924 and had erected several dozen large stores coast to coast within a few years' time, in all likelihood helped shape Goldblatt's strategy. So too, no doubt, did the proliferation of chain variety stores and, perhaps, the prophesying of retail gurus Edward Filene and Paul Mazur, who believed such networks to be the inevitable destiny of department store operations. As one of the newest companies in the field, Goldblatt's was also in the front ranks of those to embrace the chain concept." Likewise, Walton, was influenced by other retailers as well as you can read Dave's written posts on Wal-Mart at the excellent Pleasant Family Shopping blog.

Unfortunately, it does not look as if the location pictured is still standing. Please correct me if I am wrong on this. Otherwise this building is a tad bit more exciting to me than the Uptown location I pictured in my last post. More to come, folks. That's all for now.