5. Wanamaker’s changed the ways in which consumers paid for their purchases
Before Wanamaker’s opened his massive store in the former Pennsylvania Railroad station in Philadelphia, it was customary for a clerk waiting on a customer to fill out a sales receipt for items which the customer presented to a cashier before exiting the store. Well-known customers with a reputation for reliability often charged their purchases, with a bill sent for their attention once or twice per year. At some larger department stores boys were hired to act as couriers. The boys were given a sales slip and the customer’s money by the clerk making the sale, ran with it to a cashier, and returned with the customer’s change and a receipt. Wanamaker found the routine tedious, slow, and due to the occasional tendency of the boys to run away with the customer’s money, somewhat harmful to profits. Cash registers were in their infancy, unreliable, and beyond the technical skills of many sales clerks.
Wanamaker replaced the boys with a system of pneumatic tubes running throughout his Philadelphia store. A sales slip and the customer’s money were routed to a central checkout location, where cashiers completed the transaction and sent the change and receipt back to the appropriate department in minutes. It was a system adopted by department stores throughout the country. Wanamaker’s was also the first department store to fully illuminate its entire building with electric light, and was the first to install telephones throughout the store, with its own switchboard to route calls both within the building and outside. By the turn of the 20th century, Wanamaker’s flagship store was inadequate to the demands of its customers, and the construction of what became a Philadelphia landmark began in Center City, Philadelphia.