Marshall Fields
Founded (1834-1906)
Marshall Field was born in 1834, in a Massachusetts farm. At the age of twenty he moved to Chicago. He worked as a clerk at Cooley, Wadsworth and Company. He then worked for Potter Palmer’s dry goods store and when Palmer retired from the retail business, Field bought an interest
Marshall Field instituted retailing policies that revolutionized the department store world. He would post the price of the goods in plain sight, thus ending a policy of haggling and charging whatever the buyer would pay. In addition, he would stand behind his merchandise and would gladly refund the full price of any item bought in his store. Marshall Fields’s six-story merchandising emporium catered to urban women with leisure time. He immortalized the slogan “Give the lady what she wants”.
After the Great Fire of 1871, Field and Leiter disagreed over the direction of the business. Field bought out Leiter in 1880 and the business took his name. Fields hired young ladies as salesclerks and lit up his store with electric lights. He established a restaurant in the store and offered lounges, rest rooms, a library, nursery and telephones. His products were selected for the store by buyers in the European capitals, or shipped from East Asia. When the streetcar was introduced, Field invested in one of the lines and made sure that trains stopped in front of his store.
In 1887, the store was moved into a magnificent Romanesque warehouse designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson, a structure that had a tremendous influence in the designs of the Auditorium and other Chicago landmarks. Sears soon moved to Chicago because of its central access to the railways. Not only did trains bring grains and livestock into the city; the same rails would carry merchandise from Sears, directly to the American consumer. Before his death in 1906, Marshall Field saw his company become the largest wholesale and retail dry goods enterprise in the world. Marshall Field’s was the first department store to establish an European buying office, the first to offer in-store dining and the first to offer a bridal registry. In the early 1900, Marshal Field’s had buying branches located in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Stockholm and Berlin. In the 1920s, during the Great Depression, Marshal Field’s ended its wholesale operations.
At the end of World War II, Field & Co. ranked as one of the twenty largest retail enterprises in the United States. In 1982, Field ceased to be an independent company; it was purchased by BAT Industries of London. After 1990, Field was again purchased by the Dayton Hudson Corp. of Minneapolis. At the end of the century, Dayton Hudson became the Target Corp. In 2005, Federated Department Stores bought Marshall Field’s and all other stores owned by The May Department Stores Company. Federated converted all Marshall Field’s stores, as well as most other stores in the May fold, to the Macy’s nameplate on September 7, 2006. May had purchased Marshall Fields from the Target Corporation in mid 2004.
Marshall Field donated land to the University of Chicago later in his life and also funded the museum of natural history that now bears his name.
