 |
| «
Back to Main Menu
« Back to Department Stores |
| Following
William A. Wieboldt's willingness and desire to do trade with Chicago's
ethnic, working-class population, store executives stocked merchandise
and therefore advertised products of particular and sometimes unique
usefulness to their value-oriented, need-motivated, and culturally
marginalized customers. In the spring of 1910, for example, Wieboldt's
prominently advertised confirmation outfits and gifts for Catholic boys
and girls. Necessities such as groceries, baked goods, health and beauty
aids, work clothes, durable jewelry, household cleaning supplies, "disinfectants
and insecticides," even backyard fencing and manure fertilizer were
given regular exposure by Wieboldt's in the hopes of communicating to
the buying public the store's willingness and desire to serve, as
Marshall Field's preferred not to, the need-motivated consumer. Nor,
however, were unique ethnic and working-class tastes overlooked. In one
1925 issue of the Abendpost, for instance, in spite of Prohibition,
Wieboldt's boldly announced, to the store's German-American clientele,
reduced prices on non-alcoholic vermouth, non-alcoholic sherry, and
Puritan brand malt sugar syrup and hops, "the preferred brand of
thousands of Chicago `Home Brewers.'"
The discount store's marketing appeal to the serious shopper dictated the design, style, and placement of their advertisements as well. Thus, whereas Marshall Field and other high-end department store ads proffered only limited numbers of products in a well-arranged, symmetrical layout, those of Wieboldt's frequently jammed as many sale items as possible into a single ad, cataloging them and their prices, without comment, one after another in straight, unimaginative columns. Presumably, such practices enabled need- motivated and time-scarce customers (as opposed to Marshall Field's want-motivated customer) to knowledgeably compare Wieboldt's offerings to those of other stores before setting out on their day's errands. By being able to compare prices at home, poorer customers, so the ad-designers believed, avoided wasteful expenditures of time, energy, and, in many cases, carfare in their efforts to find the best deal by going from store to store. Generous provision of ad-product illustrations were added to the advertisements. Although the practice often lent the ads a disorganized and unsymmetrical appearance, store executives nevertheless believed it enhanced customers' capacity to save money by planning their shopping excursions in advance and visiting first those stores with the lowest advertised prices (which, in this case, was Wieboldt's). Ad-executives at Wieboldt's, moreover, carefully selected, as did their counterparts at Marshall Field's and similar high-end stores, which of Chicago's many newspapers would best reach their intended audience. For example, they advertised their products most heavily in the less sophisticated of the city's various mainstream newspapers, namely, the Daily News and the American. By contrast, Wieboldt's purposely avoided the favored outlet for Marshall Field ads, the Tribune, throughout the 1900s and 1910s. (Wieboldt's began to advertise in the Tribune only in 1918, when, for reasons to be noted in the next section, they suddenly reversed this long-standing policy.) Meanwhile, when it came to alternative presses, the Milwaukee Avenue store regularly purchased space to hawk its wares in the Abendpost and the Sonntagpost. Even during the nativist era of the late-1910s and early-1920s, when department-store ads in both papers fell off significantly, Wieboldt's remained a major advertiser. On the other hand, non-mainstream papers that identified with specifically socialist, suburban, African- American, or neighborhood issues and events received, for both similar and dissimilar reasons (e.g., location, custom, prejudice, etc.) no more attention from the ad-executives at Wieboldt's than from those at Marshall Field's, Mandel Brothers, Carson Pirie Scott, and other Loop department stores. Related Information The Milwaukee Avenue Store The Northtown Store The Englewood Store The Evanston Store |