TRADE: Out of Oxford Street

Off the liner Washington at Manhattan last week stepped a Wisconsin-born Britisher who looks more than a little like David Lloyd George: London’s most famous merchant, 74-year-old H. Gordon Selfridge. To newshawks at the ship he said: “The opportunity to achieve . . . has been eliminated all over the world . . . everyone will be on salary . . . enterprise will be abandoned.”

From the only man who ever bought a business* from five Jews and sold it to seven Scotchmen at a profit, this was a dire prophecy. Yet the pert, imaginative magnifico—who cleaned up a cool million in Chicago’s Marshall Field & Co. and in 1909 impudently invaded London, with U. S. merchandising methods—had reason to be glum. Three weeks ago he resigned his chairmanship of Selfridge & Co., Ltd., great, gaunt, sprawling department store on Oxford Street west of Oxford Circus, took the inactive, empty post of president.

Selfridge’s in 1937 made a $4,000,000 profit on sales of some $65,000,000. Last year saw the profit more than halved. This September London’s retail trade dropped 30% under 1938. People bought blankets, clothing, boots & shoes, blackout materials but not much else. Even J. Lyons & Co., Ltd. (teashops) in the West End felt the pinch, for the first time in years cut its dividend from 8⅓ to 5%.

But Britain’s September retail trade rose 14%, for in the provinces buying zoomed a whopping 30% over last year: people were staying in the country, in the suburbs and buying there, not in central London.

Fortnight ago Harry Selfridge’s son, handsome, fun-loving H. Gordon Jr., resigned his directorships in Selfridge’s and its West London white elephant, William Whiteley, Ltd. (bought in Britain’s 1927 boom), but kept his managerial job in the 19 Selfridge Provincial Stores throughout England and the London suburbs. A U. S. citizen, Gordon Jr. now has an unpaid job in the Ministry of Information’s Home Publicity Department. Father Selfridge, now definitely in retirement, plans after visiting Chicago to return to his London office (whose windows are covered with autographs etched in with a diamond-pointed pencil) and work on a life of Cosimo de’ Medici.

* Chicago’s Schlesinger & Mayer to Chicago’s Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co.