Retail Reimagined

Detroit’s shopping lore is replete with riveting tales of retail — from the death of its salesmen to the rise of its newest generation. Now the ever-changing face of enterprise is undergoing yet another transformation

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Once  upon a time, Detroiters shopped downtown for new clothes at Hudson’s or Winkelman’s, picked out spring flowers and Christmas trees at Frank’s, and garnered their dinner ingredients at Chatham or Great Scott.

We smiled when Ollie Fretter offered us five pounds of coffee if he couldn’t beat our best deal, and then headed to his stores for a new stereo system — and then on to Harmony House for the records it played. We put up our feet — clad in Sibley’s shoes, perhaps — on a Joshua Doore coffee table and hoisted a bottle of Stroh’s or Towne Club cola.

Maybe it wasn’t quite like that, but the 20th century was indeed a golden era for homegrown merchants in metro Detroit. From dime-store debuts to Dittrich Furs, family-run shops took root downtown, supplying first the necessities, then the frills, for an upwardly mobile consumer base fueled by the wild success of the automobile. Unprecedented working-class affluence spawned dozens of retail chains that became household names and, in some cases, pop-culture icons whose low-budget TV ads still get played on YouTube.

As the new millennium approached, shifting demographics and the invasion of the big-box “category killers” doomed many old familiar logos. A handful — like Art Van and ABC Warehouse — not only survive, but thrive today, and industry observers say a new generation of innovators is bringing the personal touch back to southeast Michigan retailing.

“The sense of being that hometown-trusted merchant goes back to the trading post and the old general store,” says Shawn Kahle, who’s been a retail-marketing and PR executive in metro Detroit for a quarter of a century. “Retailing is about price, connection, and service. Service only matters if you make that connection first.”

Glory Days

Merchants first began connecting with patrons at the core of downtown Detroit, when eponymous marquees like Vernor’s, Sanders, Kresge, and Kern’s were a stone’s throw from Campus Martius at the base of Woodward Avenue. Nearby neighbors eventually included Himelhoch’s, Harry Suffrin (which later merged with Hughes & Hatcher), and J.L. Hudson’s flagship store.

And it was, for all intents and purposes, the experimental laboratory for the malls to come. Within roughly the same space as today’s mega centers, shoppers had a world of options, from perching on a stool at one of two downtown Sanders ice-cream parlors, getting fitted for a suit at Capper & Capper, or looking for an engagement ring at Wright-Kay Jewelers.

Given the fortunes and density of the city at the turn of the last century, merchants like Sebastian Kresge were able to flourish. “The Kresge legacy is really thefoundation for retailing in metro Detroit,” says Kahle, who directed corporate communications for Kresge descendant Kmart Corp. in the 1990s. “He made a conscious decision to locate in Detroit — the very first five-and-dime store was across the street from where Compuware is now.”

S.S. Kresge dominated and, like others, found that the concepts developed in downtown Detroit translated elsewhere, too. By 1912, his chain had grown to 85 stores and, by 1918, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Other retailers burgeoned, as well.

“Detroit was like the Silicon Valley for retailers,” says Fred Marx, a longtime merchant and PR executive. “Every category was represented. And there’s a reason that we were the birthplace for a lot of specialty stores.”

Marx — who came to metro Detroit in the 1970s as a vice president for Hudson’s — posits that the lack of a major secondary department-store chain left a void to be filled by niche merchants and boutiques.

Other cities had a dominant retailer, occupying the berth Hudson’s did in Detroit — but generally also supported two or three competing department stores. Not so here. Jacobson’s posh emporiums were based in Jackson and mostly located outstate. Crowley, Milner & Co. was an upscale operation poised to give Hudson’s a run for its money but for the untimely death of co-founder William L. Milner in 1923. Milner’s heirs sold the family stake to outside investors and, while Crowley’s flourished through most of the century, it never became a Hudson’s-style powerhouse.

The Shift to Suburbia

Among the first chains to grow were grocery stores, which, through the 1930s, evolved from corner shops to family-run coalitions of a dozen stores or more, says Ted Simon, a former executive with Allied Supermarkets, one-time parent company of chains like Packer, Chatham, Great Scott, and Farmer Jack.
Post-World War II prosperity fueled more expansion as an increasingly consumption-oriented society headed for the suburbs. “And, of course,” Simon says, “retailers followed this growth.”

Moving outside the city’s core meant that merchants — accustomed to a captive audience dependent on stores on the streetcar line or within walking distance — had to become real-estate experts as well as retail titans. Some stumbled; others capitalized on a knack for selecting and financing new locations.

By the early 1960s, suburban retail expansion was in full swing, the discount era ushered in by a new Kresge concept — Kmart — on Ford Road in Garden City. A young pharmacist named Eugene Applebaum opened the first of many drugstores at the corner of Michigan and Greenfield in Dearborn. Hudson’s was refining the mall-anchor concept it pioneered at Northland Center in 1954, and Winkelman’s satellite branches were radiating out from Gratiot, Grand River, and Michigan avenues into suburbs such as Grosse Pointe and Lincoln Park. Many other well-known names followed suit.

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