Gimbel's

Gimbel's, now defunct, was for many years a well-known U.S. department store.

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The company, founded by a young Bavarian immigrant, Adam Gimbel, began as a general store in Vincennes, Indiana. After a brief stay in Danville, Illinois, Gimbel relocated in 1887 to the then-boom-town of Milwaukee. While the new store was an immense success, quickly becoming the leading department store in Milwaukee, Adam Gimbel, with seven sons (and another adopted), saw that one store, no matter how successful, would not accommodate his family's future.

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With, as a joke of the time put it, "a surplus of capital and a surplus of Gimbels," in 1894 he acquired the Granville Haines store in Philadelphia, and in 1910 opened another branch in New York City. With its arrival in New York, Gimbel's prospered, and soon became the primary rival to the leading Herald Square retailer, Macy's. This rivalry entered into the popular argot: "Would Macy's tell Gimbel's?" To distinguish itself from its Herald Square neighbors, Gimbel's advertising promised more: "Select, don't settle."

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This was so succesful that in 1922 the chain went "public," offering shares on the New York Stock Exchange (though the family retained control.) This provided the capital for expansion, starting with the 1923 purchase of across-the-street rival, Saks & Co., which operated under the name "Saks Thirty-Fourth Street"; with ownership of Saks came a new, about-to-open uptown branch, Saks Fifth Avenue. In 1924 another Gimbel's store was opened in Pittsburgh; while there was talk of a nation-wide chain, such hopes were ended by the Great Depression. The more-upscale (and enormously profitable) Saks Fifth Avenue stores did continue to expand in the 1930s, opening branches in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco.

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Despite its limited presence, Gimbel's was well known nation-wide, in part due to the carefully-cultivated rivalry with Macy's, but also thanks to an endless stream of publicity. The New York store got considerable attention as the site of the 1939-40 sale of art and antiquities from the William Randolph Hearst collection. Gimbel's also got an abundance of publicity from the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street. (An homage to the film was paid in the 2003 comedy film Elf which offered "Gimbel's" as the fictional setting of the title-character's workplace.)

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Gimbel's New York flagship was located in the cluster of large department stores that surrounded Herald Square. Designed by architect Daniel Burnham, the structure, which once offered 27 acres of selling space, has since been severely modernized and now houses the Manhattan Mall. When this building opened in 1910, a major selling point was its many doors leading to the Herald Square subway station; thanks to such easy access, by the time Gimbel's closed in 1987 this store had the highest rate of "shrinkage" or shoplifting losses, in the world. After conversion to the Manhattan Mall, parts of the former store were occupied by a mid-town branch of Brooklyn's Abraham & Straus, and still later, by Stern's. The building that housed a Gimbel's branch at 87th Street and Lexington Avenue remains, but has been converted to luxury apartments.

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Gimbel's was acquired in the 1970s by BATUS, the American retailing arm of British-American Tobacco, which eventually owned Marshall Field's, Frederick & Nelson, The Crescent stores, and Kohl's. Unable to create a strong identity for this collection, BATUS in 1986 sold the Kohl's stores to A&P and, unable to find a buyer, closed down the unprofitable Gimbel chain. Some of the more attractive branches were taken over by Stern's, Pomeroy's (Allied Stores), Kaufmann's (May Department Stores), or Boston Store (P.A. Bergner & Co.) The "cornerstone" of the chain, the downtown Milwaukee store where Adam Gimbel had first found success, (and alleged to be the most profitable Gimbel store), was handed to former BATUS sister-division Marshall Field's. After a few uncomfortable years trying to be a mass-market retailer, Fields gave up in 1997, closing the Milwaukee store and selling off the remaining Gimbel's branches it held.

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Department store: A department store is a retail establishment engaged in retailing a wide range of products without a single predominant merchandise line. Department stores usually sell products including apparel, furniture, appliances, and additionally select other lines of products such as paint, hardware, toiletr...

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