Harry Gordon Selfridge

the house conducted on scientific lines can estimate to a fraction of one per cent.

The merchant sends the buyer far afield with instructions to invest

The floors are of marble or mosaic or are covered with hundreds of thousands of yards of carpets. The lifts are almost without number...

Bigness alone is nothing, but bigness filled with the activity that does everything continually better means much.

more space will allow him to set the word "perfection" further out in the hitherto unexplored fields of endeavour.

a structure perhaps twice as large

it is quite likely that before the ink on these pages has become dry some great merchant

These buildings measure their floor area by the acre

with rapid smooth-running lifts

in America stores frequently tower up fifteen storeys or more

Imagination must be drawn upon, risks must be assumed. "Nothing venture, nothing have" is perhaps truer of the department store than of any other enterprise.

a new and hitherto undreamed of realm

The room for improvement is still the biggest room in the world

they have continued to develop in every direction, and no man can foresee their final form and size, or say where they will stop.

Then it was that department stores in their early stages began to appear, and

In all parts of the world this condition existed till about half a century ago, when a few shop-keepers became inoculated with the spirit of enterprise. They grew beyond the little shop by the simple process of addition

[A] hundred years ago the selling of goods at retail had settled into a system of small shops, each confining itself to a particular class of merchandise.

is intimately associated with every family in the community in supplying them with the necessities of life, and thus... enters into the daily life of the city in which it is.

[T]he great Distributing House or Department Store

This ability... to organize, to breathe into others that fire of enthusiasm, that quality of judgment, that spirit of progress, has long been considered by thinking men of commerce as the final and greatest of all qualities, the test of …

No one has more than a given number of minutes... in which he can work, and no matter how great his ability he will soon find his limitations. If, however, he uses that ability in finding and teaching others as capable as himself, or in …

The last hundred years have shown... that one man cannot do it all, and that anyone who attempts to hold within his two hands all the threads of a great business of the present day fails to achieve the greatest success.

Men of genius and wonderful nerve and determination, who in the Dark Ages would have been conquering princes, have... thrown their ability into Commerce and have conquered, not territory and slaves, but trade and its child, money, from any …

The world is smaller. Steam and electricity, great ships, railways and many recorded experiences have made it so; but as the circumference of this earth has seemed to diminish its commercial undertakings have grown greater.