Vicki Howard, "From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

New Books in Economic and Business History · Jul 24, 2019 · 44m

This week we take a break from fun and games to talk about business and consumerism–which, to be sure, is for some people also fun and games. As Vicki Howard reminds us in her new book, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), it used to be that America was filled with department stores. Congenital nostalgics remember places like Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia; they even print books about the big-city department stores of Days Gone By. But that ignores the important place that department stores held in small towns all…