Broken nickels and ninety-cent silver dollars

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I recently became acquainted with “The Fair,” self-proclaimed as Chicago’s first department store in this privately-printed 1915 booklet, Since Forty Years Ago….

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This little booklet was sitting on a bookshelf in a second-hand store and had suffered enough damage to its cover that its title isn’t immediately obvious. But here’s the title page….

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The store’s founder was E. J. Lehmann, who as a 9-year-old had come to America with his parents from the German state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. That was in 1858. By 1875 he had a store and an idea. The store….

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And the idea: “Everything for Everybody under one roof, at a lower price—and that price an odd price.”

Breaking nickels!

The little booklet, again: “The broken nickel price was a brilliant novelty that made a marvelous appeal to the people. The chance to ‘save the odd cents’… went straight to the thrift of the frugal housewife… The housewife reasoned well when she said to herself: ‘Here is an article that cost a store five cents. And because it has never been fashionable for a storekeeper to break a nickel he charges ten cents—an advance of a hundred percent—for it. But The Fair asks only seven cents. It is less afraid to break a nickel and a precedent than to take a toll of a hundred percent profit.’”

Breaking nickels like this contemporary:

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Into….cents like this contemporary:

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Note the 1873 date on this cent, struck just two years before “The Fair” opened for business. And coined in a year of economic hardship, which became a key to the early success of the store.

Mr. Lehmann (again according to the little booklet) “was himself a poor man and this circumstance put him in position to realize the problems of the people, the pressure upon the ordinary family to economize and the appeal to the struggling housewife made by the opportunity to save even a few cents on each purchase for the home. Besides, the public appetite for economy was especially keen at that time from the fact that the country was still in the grip of the financial panic of 1873. Any chance to buy cheaply was not to be overlooked.”

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Breaking nickels into pennies paid off; by 1888 The Fair had grown exponentially….

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Pricing was important; a variety of merchandise was important—but the additional key to the great success of “The Fair” was advertising!

“In the field of retail advertising The Fair has been a pathfinder. As far as Chicago records show, it gave the newspapers their first double-page advertisement. This was on May 31st, 1885. Its advertising blazed the trail followed by almost the entire retail trade of the country. It did not hesitate to use sensational means to put its precedent-breaking campaign on its feet. Literally it sold silver dollars for ninety cents and five dollar gold pieces for $4.75. “

As above, advertised for the price of $0.90 by “The Fair,” a silver dollar, this one dated 1885 like the store’s first double-page newspaper advertisement:

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Mr. Lehmann died relatively early, in Chicago, just three weeks before what would have been his 51st birthday in January 1900. His life’s work was a healthy success, however, and continued on. Not only that, but Mr. Lehmann lived to see the completion of his new building in 1897. Here it is, “The Fair,” in 1915:

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“The Fair” was sold in 1925 to an S.S. Kresge-owned syndicate that established additional branches of the store. “The Fair” chain of stores was sold in 1957 to Montgomery Ward, then a large national retailer just past its heyday.

The original store remained as “The Fair” until 1964, when it too was given the Montgomery Ward nameplate. Montgomery Ward would itself go out of business in 2000, but the original “Fair” disappeared years before that—the old building was demolished in 1984 and the land lay vacant for more than a dozen years after that.

I wonder…might a weekend afternoon with a metal detector have turned up one of those ninety-cent silver dollars? Almost certainly not. But maybe one of those “broken nickels” might have turned up.

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[KarlAntonMartini]

Thank you for this report full of details and well illustrated! Best regards, KarlAntonMartini