Remembering Main Street: Consumers, Nostalgia, and Independent American Department Stores, 1930 to the Present

For most communities in the United States, the downtown independent department store exists only in nostalgic memory.  This paper argues that these recent expressions of loss and longing for Main Street businesses represent a cultural, rather than political form of opposition to globalization and the retailing revolution.  Historicizing consumers’ recent “nostalgic localism,” the paper finds that department stores themselves have deployed nostalgia in different ways over time.

First, independent department store retailers invoked nostalgia for their firm as they developed a place-specific store identity that could compete with national chains.  As early as the 1930s, retailers infused nostalgia for their late nineteenth-century origins into their institutional advertising and anniversary promotions.   Independents used it to paper over their increasing convergence with chains.   Juxtaposing their longstanding local connections with the impersonal, distant management of chains, they set themselves off from chains ideologically, even as they too sought the advantages of “bigness” by cooperating with other non-competing independents in figure exchange groups, joining independent buying groups centered in New York City, or merging with other firms.

Nostalgic localism was a way for businesses to compete with chains; for consumers in recent decades, it became a cultural rejection of globalization and the aesthetics of a Wal-Mart world.  Local historical society exhibits and nostalgic newspaper articles documented the specific histories of these social institutions, tying their growth to the history of their community or region.   Nostalgia websites emerged, featuring posts of childhood memories of shopping trips alongside distinctive old store photographs.   With Youtube, lost department store TV ads now generate thousands of hits and nostalgic comments.  And finally, as department stores continue to lose market share to discounters and “category-killers,” standardized chains like Macy’s now deploy nostalgic localism to evoke a golden age of department stores now irretrievably lost.