10. New York’s Gimbel’s department store was born in Indiana
New York’s iconic Gimbel’s, which gained national fame thanks to the motion picture Miracle on 34th Street, approached the Big Apple cautiously. The store was born in Versailles, Indiana in the 1840s, established itself in Milwaukee and then Philadelphia, and did not open its first store in New York until 1910. Its Philadelphia store began promoting a Thanksgiving Day parade in Philadelphia in 1920, which helped create a rivalry with Macy’s in New York, but the competitive enmity between the two stores was largely fictionalized for the famous Christmas film. In the 1920s Gimbel’s, which based its appeal on the middle-class customer outside of New York, began attracting more of the city’s affluent citizens when it opened Saks Fifth Avenue.
Gimbel’s eschewed many of the so-called frills offered by many of its competitors, telling its customers that fancy gimmicks such as Wanamaker’s famous organ, lavish seasonal decorations, in-store entertainment, and other customer attractions generated costs which were invariably absorbed by the customer. Gimbel’s nonetheless exploited its perceived rivalry with Macy’s, playing it for all it was worth in sales literature and advertisements for most of the store’s 100-year existence. Possibly Gimbel’s greatest contribution to American culture was not from the famous film starring Maureen O’Hara and a juvenile Natalie Wood. The walking spring toy called the Slinky was first demonstrated at Gimbels’s Philadelphia location, which was also the first department store to move customers between floors using a moving staircase called the escalator.