The Old Store

A long black-and-green Daimler, sporting the British royal crest on its radiator, drew up to a doorway on London's Basil Street one day last week. Out stepped a silver-haired lady in a flowered saucepan hat, to stride regally through the swinging doors. It was the 100th birthday of Harrods, one of the world's great department stores, and 81-year-old Queen Mary, a customer for more than 40 years, thought it a proper time to drop in.*

Her Majesty browsed around for an hour, while other shoppers politely made way, then left without buying anything. But Harrods, which had sold her some baby clothes for her new great-grandson a few months ago, was grateful that she had remembered the day. Watching her leave, a $24-a-week stenographer who had looked wistfully at an $80 dress and also come away without buying, sighed: "I don't think they want people like me to come into their old store."

The stenographer was quite right. Harrods Ltd., which grossed a thumping $80 million last year, has never failed to show a profit; but Harrods prefers to do it by selling quality goods to people of quality. Most of its 300,000 customers are members of the upper classes.

Cradle to Gravestone. Harrods cares for its customers' wants from womb to tomb. It provides their layettes, is their official outfitter for Eton, Harrow and a score of other schools. It delivers their food and wines, handles their banking and insurance, paints their portraits (for -L-35), parks and manicures their poodles in basement kennels, and takes care of their funerals--all on credit.

The Harrodian tradition began in May 1849, when Tea Merchant Henry Charles Harrod opened a three-room grocery in Knightsbridge. His son, Charles Digby Harrod, proved to be something of a taskmaster when he took over in 1861. He installed a removable staircase at his employees' entrance, and took it away at 8 a.m. Store help who showed up later than that could not get in. He also abolished "cook's perks," the traditional perquisite for servants who bought their masters' provisions at the store. Eventually, he sold out to a group which turned Harrods into a public stock company.

In 1898 Richard Burbidge, then managing director, startled the retail world by installing escalators on Harrods' ground floor. At the top of the 40-ft. moving stairway, he stationed an attendant to hand out free doses of smelling salts or cognac to all who had braved the trip. When he built his new store, between Basil Street and Braupton Road, a domed and gingerbready six-story edifice with 13 1/2 acres of floor space, Burbidge shrewdly allowed for expansion by letting out the top floors as flats. Of the ten flats that are left, the largest belongs to his grandson Sir Richard Burbidge, Bt., who was born there and grew up to be the present managing director. Several hours a day, Sir Richard leaves his office and patrols his domain, correctly clad in striped trousers and short coat, and wearing a bowler hat to keep from being mistaken for a floorwalker.

Helping Hands. For generations Harrods held to a strict caste system for employees; a charwoman could advance no farther than head char. Nowadays things are more democratic, and many a shipping clerk has risen to a minor executive's job. No salesgirl can take the floor without at least six months' schooling in "the Harrodian spirit," which has been sloganized into "Think of the customer first." Salesgirls never ask: "May I help you, Madam?" Instead, they are instructed to strike up a casual conversation about whatever Madam has her eye on, and to feel her out on the price she wants to pay. Never, never ask her directly, salesgirls are warned. Harrodians start out at only $11 a week. But they have their own country club and a pension plan, and tend to stick around: 850 of the 5,000 employees have more than 20 years' service.

Even in a Socialist economy, Harrods' snob appeal continues to pay off; last year's profits for the store and subsidiaries* were $2,300,000 after taxes. On its birthday last week, Harrods gave a champagne luncheon in the store for some of its 30,000 stockholders and told them that for the third year in a row the store was paying a 4 shillings dividend on its common stock, a 6% dividend at the current market price. But when an American congratulated one of the executives on the store's success in capturing the trade of the upper middle class, the old Harrodian stiffly corrected him: "Not the upper middle class, sir! It's the lower upper class which we serve."

* For news of another visit by Queen Mary, see FOREIGN NEWS.

* Harrods Ltd. has two more stores in London, others in Manchester and Sheffield, but now owns only a small interest in Harrods of Buenos Aires, which it founded in 1913.

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