Soviets need soap

Must have been 20 years ago, oh more, that I was attending a conference of a board of advisers to an encyclopedia and listening to the experts give their annual reports – they were a formidable bunch, Paul- Henri Spaak on the international scene, James Reston on American affairs, Harrison Brown on science, the incomparable Red Smith on sports, and so on – when a man got up whose name I didn't catch.

I wasn't sure what he was doing there and he started to go on about something called consumerism. I hadn't the remotest idea what he was talking about. Perhaps he was a doctor – rheumatism, consumerism? Maybe it was some sort of disease. Some people say it is, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers, moaned the poet. A poet, I should say, from a prosperous society, certainly not from Russia or Poland or Czechoslovakia.

Well, down the years we got thoroughly used to the word and by now it's even in the dictionary with a rather stately definition, 'the protection of the interests of the purchasers of goods'. The word came up last weekend when Mr Gorbachev and Mr Bush were riding the swells on that Soviet cruiser. I'm not sure that Mr Bush put it bluntly as in, 'How's your consumerism?' but it's been reported by what they used to call a reliable source that after Mr Gorbachev had assured the American team that he was very much in political control, the same could not be said about his control of the economy and that he thought his ultimate test was consumer shortages, simply, how to get more food, goods, soap into the hands of the 290 millions theoretically under his control.

It must have bought the Americans down to earth when, at a lunch during which bowls of caviar were circulating like pepper and salt and they were ready to talk about such things as strategic and conventional arms cuts and the unification of Germany, Mr Gorbachev kept coming back to the real threats to the stability of his nation – too little sugar and soap.

Just to think, the two most powerful politicians on earth heaving on the Mediterranean and glumly facing this radical problem, while every university and political study group around the globe is busy teaching the elements of government, such things as the structure of parties, control of the money supply, free-floating exchange rates, Cabinet government, the basic tenets of liberalism, conservatism, Communism – all the high-falutin' things that don't mean a thing to people who have no bread and soap. Lenin drilled his finger into this nasty truth when he wrote, one month before the 1917 Russian Revolution, 'No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses'.

A world away from Malta and Moscow, I battled my way downtown this week in the choking traffic that since the day after Thanksgiving has seemed to have only half a dozen destinations – the department stores, those temples of consumerism which we take for granted as the elementary sources of our goods and services. From now till the first of January we will be possessed by an orgy of consumerism. Getting and spending may have laid waste Wordsworth's powers, but if we didn't go at it between now and the New Year like sharks in a feeding frenzy, there'd be more filings for bankruptcy and an exodus of unemployed.

Most of the big department stores take in 20 or more per cent of their annual revenue in those five weeks. These thoughts occur just when we see radical changes, including collapse and bankruptcy happening to some of America's most famous department stores. It's got to the point where a just-published survey concludes, 'It is safe to say that the era of the big store is passing'. It's as much of a shock to hear this from a knowledgeable team of economists as it would be to hear that baseball or the drugstore or the United States Senate were on their way out. Evidently, other times, other ways of mass marketing.

The department store is well over a hundred years old and, contrary to the general belief, is not an American invention. It was the French who, in Paris in 1852, opened the first one, the Bon Marché. But within the next ten years, an American one appeared at the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street and through the 1860s and Seventies they mushroomed in many parts of the United States, in, of course, the big cities.

But another institution was born, thanks to the headlong development of the railroads, the growth of a transport network across 3,000 miles – an institution that suddenly brought a wealth of manufactured goods to the people scattered across the prairie and the mountains and the deserts. You might call it everyman's invisible department store – the mail order house which was, and still is, a godsend to rural America and communities in remote and lonely places.

It all started in a ludicrously primitive way in 1872 in a room 12 feet by 14 in Chicago. A man named Montgomery Ward spotted, before most merchants, that Chicago would become the railroad hub of the country. Chicago, a thousand miles from one coast, 2,000 from the other, but at a strategic point on the north-south traffic run also, whether by river or rail. Mr Ward decided that the way to reach the unseen remote consumer was by sending him a letter, a catalogue, of goods he could write in for and have delivered to his one-horse town or, now, his whistle-stop railroad station.

Mr Ward's first catalogue was a single sheet of paper, eight inches by 12, offering a few, rude, necessary items – watches, trousers and other, as it said, household notions. He was very soon flooded with mail from everywhere the trains travelled and, within ten years, he'd opened a chain of stores and the sales from the stores and from the unseen distant customers grew to $150 million. We're talking about the early 1880s.

Only three years after Ward, in 1875, a man in Buffalo, New York, John Larkin, started a business exclusively to sell by mail something that the pioneers, early and late and, indeed, all country people made for themselves, just like peasants today in Armenia, in Georgia, in Siberia – soap. And then a man in Minnesota in the Eighties, a Richard Sears, a railroad agent, started selling watches by mail, in the beginning, writing out his ads in longhand. After a year, he quit the railroad and hired a watch repair man, A. C. Roebuck. In time they got together and became – what else – Sears and Roebuck, which by the 1890s was a general merchandise store sending out thousands upon thousands of fatter and fatter spring and fall catalogues, the width and heft of single-volume encyclopedias, detailing every item of clothing and household gadget and farm implement and stove and watches and clocks and toys and wagons and trim, cheap versions of the high styles the rich ladies of Chicago bought in town. By 1895, within 15 years that is, the take was over $250 million.

Some time after the Second War, I was having dinner with an advertising tycoon, a rock-bound Republican and a parson's son, very much a man against sin and Communism. The Communist hunt of the early Fifties was at its height and everybody had a solution of some dotty sort to hold off or defeat the Russians.

This old man said, in the middle of dinner, I recall, 'The Russians will be a menace as long as they're Communists.' Ah so – but how would you cure or convert them? 'I would get the United States Air Force to drop a million Sears Roebuck catalogues all across the Soviet Union and they'd come crying.' He was dead serious and, of course, we, the serious, intelligent, well-informed guests thought he was downright silly.

I now think that if Mr Gorbachev can get the trade loans that he needs and set up central supply stores in spaced cities, maybe the mail order catalogue would be the answer to a general secretary's prayer.

Back to our problem – the death or decline of the department store. Of the dozen biggest and most famous department stores in America, five are more or less thriving, two in New York – Bloomingdale and Saks – are up for sale, Altmans is closing for good next month, Bonwit Teller is bankrupt and on the block. Chicago's famous Marshall Field is up for sale. What has happened?

Well, obviously the enormous growth since the Second War of interstate highways, motorways, going along with the decay and crime of the big cities and the increasing density of traffic, first drove the middle-class consumer out to the new suburbs, then the department stores followed them in the sense of starting suburban branches.

Many of them overreached themselves and, just when people were complaining that lots of items in the parent catalogue were unavailable in the branch stores, there arrived the shopping mall – or 'mawl' – with lots of regular shops and stores for everything, grouped around a parking lot. Freight, the carrying of the nation's goods, passed over from the railroads to the truckers and the highways. Such staples as furniture and appliances could be ordered from mail houses and delivered to your door.

The big-city department stores, losing the suburban shopper who used to make regular trips to town, turned into specialty stores with boutiques, so-called, selling a single item – shoes, perfumes, television sets, fancy foods. Fewer and fewer of them are selling 30 types of kitchen furniture and 20 sorts of underwear. The ones that have flourished are the ones that have concentrated on fewer specialties and the boutique idea – which annoys old housewives who bought just about everything at a department store – has been the salvation of those big stores that got control of their inventories in time.

Well, these must seem very remote, high-flown, but enviable problems to Mr Gorbachev. I still think his destiny, his survival, might lie in taking a page from John Larkin's book, the mail order man marketing a single item. What item?

The sharp, savage Los Angeles cartoonist Conrad said it in a simple cartoon the other week. He showed Mr Gorbachev saying to the Pope, 'Loaves and fishes are fine. But how about soap?'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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