The department store is so named for its administrative organization, which combines centralized marketing, customer service, deliveries, and accounting with separately managed departments for each type of stock, staffed by specialized buyers and sales personnel responsible for the unit’s profitability (Clausen, 1985). An index of emerging monopoly capitalism in the second half of the 19th century, these large-scale retail enterprises initially grew because of innovative sales practices, such as fixed pricing, free access to goods, low markups, and liberal rights of return and exchange. Higher sales, in turn, yielded volume discounts and prompted increased diversification. Urbanization and population mobility, facilitated by public transportation, were instrumental in their growth from a single storefront into vast premises occupying an entire city block. So significant was their effect on the urban fabric that the construction of a new department store might signal both the demise of ...