Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 34

Winter was nearly over on the calendar, yet the cold in Whitechapel surpassed even Christmas in one last fierce refrain.

The lively Nash household stood in sharp contrast to the bleak streets around it. At dawn, the first amber light on Clark Street appeared in the little building that housed Nash Grocery.

Mr. Nash stepped through the wooden door in a well-fitting coat over a shirt and waistcoat, a chain of keys hanging from his lapel. An old felt hat sat on his head, and his worn leather shoes had been polished to a gleam.

Yawning, he spat carelessly into the cold wind as he walked to the mouth of the lane. Then he continued to No. 6 Dorothy Street and unlocked the door.

The carpenter was coming today with pre-cut boards to install the display cases.

Mr. Nash pushed open the freshly oiled door, its clear varnish now dry, and entered a broad, clean hall. The layout had changed. Following Daisy’s design, they had demolished the partitions that once formed storerooms. Apart from the stairwell, the entire ground floor was now sales space, and both panes flanking the front entrance had been replaced.

They had removed the old damp floorboards, and the carpenter finished repairing the floor yesterday.

Mr. Nash admired the family’s work, then took the boards from the windows and opened them to air the building.

He fetched iron tongs from behind the door and walked through every floor, checking the traps and carrying away the dead rats.

That was why he had come so early. In his mind, Daisy was still the little girl who would leap and shriek at the sight of a dead rat, then lose her appetite.

The old shop had room for only eight small display units. The new one, apart from the checkout area, would hold sixteen broad sets of shelves.

Having seen Daisy’s drawings and notes, Mr. Nash knew the design was ingenious. She had decided what goods belonged in each area first, then designed different fixtures for the way each type should be displayed.

The upgraded grocery would offer far more than needles, thread, oil, salt, and canned food. Daisy went out every day to select merchandise.

There would be small household furnishings and textiles—aprons, sleeve protectors, gloves—as well as tools, pliers, scissors, drinking glasses, and porcelain plates.

Some goods would be stacked, others strung or hung from hooks, each in its proper place. The store would look full without appearing cramped, comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

Once the cases were installed, the exposed walls would be papered. The glass ceiling lamps had been removed and washed. When rehung, they would catch the candlelight and gaslight and give the room atmosphere.

The second floor would serve as a warehouse, while the third floor and attic became dormitories and an accounts office. Those rooms had merely been cleaned, not renovated. Every saved penny went into the display fixtures.

Last night Fred ordered secondhand tables, chairs, stools, and beds, along with the raised storage racks and damp-proof mats Daisy required. They would arrive this morning.

When Mr. Nash finished, he set out for the old shop and met Daisy outside the house. She had just received the business permit from the postman.

Daisy opened the envelope, went inside, and placed the document in a frame.

The law did not require a permit to be displayed, but she wanted it as a keepsake. From today onward, the new store was officially a lawful place of business.

She dragged over a stool and, with hammer and nail, struggled to hang the framed permit in the old shop’s corridor.

Mary laughed as she shoveled coal into the kitchen stove.

“I’ve seen people hang portraits of their ancestors in the hall. I’ve never seen anyone hang up a business permit.”

Daisy stepped down, folded her arms, and regarded the frame.

As a merchant, it gave her far more peace of mind than any ancestor’s portrait.

After a moment, she lifted the kitchen curtain. “When is Aunt Anne coming?”

“The note said this morning. She should be here soon.”

Daisy nodded, opened her notebook at the kitchen table, and reviewed the day’s schedule.

Its thick pages contained a complete list of preparations for opening the shop. Every design item had been checked off.

Construction of the sales displays had begun and should be finished in three days. The carpenter’s boards had been oiled months ago, so they could be used at once. That made the fixtures the most expensive things in the shop—over ten pounds for materials and labor—but there would be no delay, and carpenters in this age did not charge by the day.

After rent, renovations, the vehicle, and legal fees, their cash flow was almost flat on its back.

Only enough remained to keep the old shop operating at seven or eight pounds in daily sales and roughly one-third profit. Yet in three days, the finished shelves had to be stocked.

How could such a tiny problem possibly defeat her?

Daisy’s notebook held credit invoices worth more than a hundred pounds.

There were ten-pound accounts for liquor, cigars, and tea, as well as invoices from paper merchants, match and soap factories, a butter company, hardware manufacturers, glass merchants, tableware dealers, and flour mills. Together they came to around a hundred pounds. The printing factory had also extended credit for several thousand advertising handbills.

Daisy calmly pasted the bills into her notebook, calculated interest as part of the cost, and designed the overall pricing and sales strategy.

In three days, the handbills would return from the printer. There were enough for ten nearby streets, announcing the opening time and an assortment of promotions.

For a limited period, customers could buy registered prepaid vouchers worth twelve pounds for ten.

Anyone who spent three pounds in a single purchase earned a chance to win free liquor or cigars.

Residents with little money could spend one pound and add one penny to purchase food at a special price.

Every mechanism had been calculated with care. Whatever happened, Daisy’s margin remained thirty-five percent.

In a week, they could move the old shop’s stock into the new premises and open the following day. If the conversion rate matched her forecast and the promotions ran smoothly, the first week would bring back a large sum of cash.

So the heap of invoices did not trouble her in the least.

Compared with high-interest loans and financial leverage, this was a modest commercial risk. At least she had goods to sell.

Even Mary knew that a grocery shop or restaurant spent its first month or two buried in bills. If it opened smoothly and operated for half a year, it usually recovered the investment.

Nash Grocery had begun the same way, only on a much smaller scale.

Still, they saved wherever they could.

Take the textiles Daisy planned to add. Aunt Anne and her husband worked at a factory that produced them.

After Mary wrote, they agreed to obtain respectable factory remnants and bring them to Dorothy Street themselves, then see what else they could help with.

Aunt Anne, two years younger than Mary, was a typist who also did bookkeeping at the factory. Her husband, surnamed Tadwin, cut shirt patterns and could make simple cloth goods.

They had a son and a daughter. Cousin Lucas Tadwin was fourteen, two years younger than Daisy, and apprenticed at the same shirt factory. Cousin Irene, thirteen, worked there too.

Notting Hill was not as notorious as Whitechapel, but no one cared about child literacy or child labor there. Lucas learned pattern cutting from his father, while Irene trained under her mother as a typist, earning a little less than an adult.

It was a small factory, and the whole family were long-serving employees with access to internal prices. An apron or pair of gloves cost only a few pence.

The wages were meager. Even with everyone working, the family merely covered its daily needs.

Business at the shirt factory had recently declined, which at least left them free enough to request time off. Mary often wondered how much longer their jobs would last.

Daisy had noticed that the textile industry, prosperous for decades, had entered difficult times. She searched the newspapers and followed the trade closely.

Recent policy changes affecting regions that produced textile fibers had increased the cost of cotton and other raw materials. Some tiny factories could not survive and closed—a round of commercial selection.

In late-nineteenth-century England, an inconspicuous act of Parliament could decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in a single industry. The present disruption barely counted as significant.

Once Daisy finished arranging her schedule, she went to the new store to watch the carpenter for a while. Her aunt’s goods had to be paid for on delivery, but Mary could handle that.

After lunch, Daisy had plans of her own and went out alone. Fred was delivering to old and new customers in Camden.

She followed Jude Road for a time, kept to the main streets, and walked a mile toward Tower Bridge. Several quarters of an hour later, she reached Whitechapel’s oldest and largest subscription reading room: Feather River Library.

She wanted its newspaper archive and twenty years of local Whitechapel papers.

Her purpose was to study the members of the Whitechapel Parish Council: their origins, promotions, transfers, political ideas, and the network behind them.

She also needed to investigate the prominent merchant families with substantial businesses in the district.

By mapping the ties between the two groups, she could conduct a proper background investigation of her surroundings and avoid offending someone she could not afford to offend.

It was perhaps the most important preparation for making her business grow.

Once the new shop opened, she would have no time to come here.

London remained overcast, though at least it did not look like rain. Daisy wrapped her scarf tightly and pushed through the howling wind. At a broad street, she hurried across an intersection crowded with carriages and reached an old building on the corner.

Inside, she politely explained herself at the ground-floor reception desk. Only then did the manager agree to admit her in exchange for a week’s subscription of several shillings.

It was expensive, but a week would be enough.

“Miss, you have no guarantor. You may find a table and read the books here, but you may not take them away. Do you understand?”

The manager was gray at the temples and wore an immaculate tailcoat, an ornate brooch, and white gloves. His proud air suggested that he served only the wealthy.

Daisy ignored his manner, nodded obediently, and accepted the brass pen to sign the register.

Her nib stopped.

A familiar name stood at the top of the page, entered by someone borrowing a book.

By coincidence, the manager looked up just then, hurried to the entrance, and opened the door with great attentiveness.

“Superintendent! You’re early today.”

Daisy turned in puzzlement.

Wasn’t the superintendent supposed to be at work?

…