Time to Remember

We're so preoccupied with today that sometimes it takes an important event to remind us how the past has put us where we are, and why.

Two deaths within a few days of each other in February recalled how history, society and culture have changed in 40 years – and, yes, retailing too. Because after all, what you do is primarily a reflection of what your market demands and who is doing the demanding.

Coretta Scott King's death, just two weeks after the holiday honoring her late husband, reminded us that the once-invisible society (Ralph Ellison's characterization of the black experience in the 1950s) is much more visible today. People of all color shop where and when they want, with no restrictions or demeaning signage. And retailers now design their stores for the entire cultural quilt that we are, not just for certain races or classes.

White teens all over suburban America, such as my stepdaughter Amanda, embrace black style, slang and music.

Perhaps it's ingenuous to say that African-Americans have taken their place of equality in our society's seating plan. But this morning's Macy's web site featured a lone black model. (I can recall articles in this magazine's archives telling of the first black mannequins and how revolutionary that was then.) To see Macy's list of fashion categories include “streetwear” and to know that brands like Ecko, Enyce and Sean John share floorspace with Levi's, Tommy and Nautica is to reinforce that if we're not yet color-blind (hardly), black is becoming a socially primary color – and retail is responding.

Less dramatic, but perhaps even more seismic for retailers, was Betty Friedan, who passed away a few days after King. At about the same time Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing voting-rights marches and boycotts, Friedan was announcing that something was wrong with the way women were living their lives in this country.

In her 1963 book, “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan observed how life for a typical American woman centered almost exclusively on chores and family.

And it was not necessarily enforced servitude. It was what women themselves had come to expect of their lives, even college-educated women. (Friedan, a Smith College graduate, was herself a non-working housewife and mother when she began researching her classmates' lives after graduation for a class reunion essay that became her epic treatise.)

She called it “the problem that has no name.” It proceeded to take on a whole series of names, of course, from “women's lib” to “feminism” to “equal rights.”

Women began to flow into the workplace and occupy executive suites, becoming well-paid, independent, influential and successful. But they didn't necessarily cast off their roles of wife and mother, either. Juggling, they became time-pressed, demanding and impatient.

And so, of course, store design had to accommodate them. It had to acknowledge that women weren't in the store to spend the afternoon anymore. They had gone from browsers to speed-racers, insisting on logical floor plans and adjacencies, clearer sight lines, wider aisles, more informative signage, more and bigger changing rooms, easier access to merchandise, simplified pricing and quicker checkout systems.

The success of the Kohl's store plan; the rise of Whole Foods; the consolidation of the department store business; the hypermarket revolution; the ability of Target to compete with the Wal-Mart juggernaut – all can be traced to the New Woman, in charge of the family pocketbook, juggling finances, eager to get in and get out of the store, demanding quality and simplicity and efficiency and wanting style if it's also affordable.

I don't want to diminish the lives of either King or Friedan by saying their influence was simply about retail. I just think sometimes we need to stop and remember where we've been.