Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 36

Several days later, after the dinner hour, only a few gas lamps lit Dorothy Street, their pools of light spaced along the road.

Workers released from the late shift wandered beneath the dim glow. Some entered bakeries or prepared-food shops, some sat in cafés with live performers, and others disappeared into public houses.

At the start of Dorothy Street, gaslights still burned in the new Nash Grocery well past midnight.

Behind the wooden blinds of a second-floor storeroom, busy shadows moved back and forth.

Fred and Mr. Nash were laying damp-proof raised racks. Daisy worked beside them, hanging a mercury thermometer in the most conspicuous place on the wall, then placing sacks of moisture-absorbing charcoal and ash beneath the shelves.

This room would hold dry food and more delicate goods such as liquor, cigars, and tea. It faced the sun, but temperature and humidity still required constant attention.

The second and third floors each held three small rooms, while the attic had two. Merchandise occupied the dry, weatherproof second floor. Two rooms served as stores. The one on the far right had once been a kitchen and could not be converted, so it became a small workroom with a fireplace.

After hanging the thermometer, Daisy put her father and grandfather to work. They opened the cases stacked nearby, sorted the contents, and placed everything on the racks in the order prescribed by the manual.

Every rack carried a letter. Those letters corresponded to the inbound and outbound entries in the warehouse ledger. Each type of good had a fixed zone; liquor, for example, belonged in Sections A through D.

After half a day of training, Fred and Mr. Nash understood the system completely. The letters were ordered by the value of the stock, from highest to lowest.

The two men would normally move goods in and out. This system made stocktaking simple and reduced mistakes in the ledger.

Warehouse scheduling and management were subtle disciplines—obstacles no industrialist could avoid.

Mr. Nash might be old, but he learned fastest.

Daisy waited for the mercury to settle, then checked the scale.

“What’s the temperature?” Fred asked.

He and Mr. Nash were sweating from carrying boxes up and down. Even with the windows open, neither felt cold.

“Only forty degrees Fahrenheit with the windows open.”

Just a few degrees Celsius above freezing. Closing the windows might make the room feel twice as warm.

“To be safe, let’s wrap the wine cases in cotton against the cold.”

Glassmaking had no borosilicate process in this age. A freeze could easily crack the bottles.

Fred unfolded an old quilt and wrapped the liquor cases.

Daisy personally opened the tea and cigar boxes as well.

The cigars came from two regions, dozens of boxes costing ten pounds in total, with a sixty-percent margin. Daisy sealed every box in waxed cloth against moisture, then set out charcoal and citrus peel to remove unwanted smells from the room.

Once an individual box was opened, it should ideally sell out that day.

The tea arrived in airtight metal barrels. It sold quickly in the Nash household: after several days scenting it with blossoms, they divided it into small bags that usually disappeared within a day or two. Long-term storage mattered less than whether they could package it quickly enough to keep pace with sales.

When the storeroom was finished, they locked the door and entered the office with the fireplace.

After dinner, Mary had locked the old shop and come over to scrub the tables and chairs. She lit the fire, heated water for washing hands, and mixed a large bowl of starch paste.

The three adults formed a small assembly line around the packing table, dividing the various new three-farthing products for opening day.

Mr. Nash weighed, Fred passed sheets of paper, and Mary wrapped.

The printer had produced finished paper bags bearing the Nash Grocery name. They needed only a stripe of paste applied with a wooden stick before being sealed and placed in long cartons. No more elaborate folding.

Daisy sat at a separate desk, dipped her quill in ink, and calculated the accounts again.

The merchandise now in the shop was worth two hundred pounds. Together with stock from the old store, it would only just fill the cases. Packing every shelf tight would require six hundred pounds’ worth of goods.

After opening, she intended to expand the selection gradually. Liquor, tobacco, and tea might be retail’s three great mountains, but the small things could not be neglected.

For now, they carried two kinds of liquor, two hundred bottles of each, with no casks: Scotch whisky and Old Tom gin, a juniper spirit sweeter than London dry gin.

The bottles ranged from several shillings down to ten pence. Both varieties were popular, and there were many moderately priced brands.

Daisy had studied Piero’s Grocery, nearby restaurants and hotels, and wine merchants in the West End.

Her target customers remained the poorer residents of the surrounding streets, so her selection remained affordable.

She had initially shortlisted several distilleries. After a family discussion, only two remained: Allutson Gin Distillery and Lansenper Brewery, both producing locally in England.

Allutson was also Piero’s supplier. As expected, its flavor was stable and its prices reasonable.

Daisy had someone purchase samples from Piero’s Grocery for comparison, however, and discovered that Piero stocked an exclusive line of slightly higher quality, different from the ordinary liquor she had ordered from Allutson.

Mr. Piero was no common petty merchant like Lobit.

His shop had never become entangled in any conflict. It sat serenely above the fray—neither smuggling nor copying anything the Nash family tried on Clark Street.

Piero did not even consider a sanitary inspector worth his notice.

His sources were enough to inspire envy.

Daisy had bought samples of everything for comparison. Even when the supplier was the same, it reserved its finest batches for his shop and screened out inferior goods first.

No wonder the store was respected on so many nearby streets and did the best business within half a mile.

Further neighborhood gossip revealed average annual sales of four thousand pounds. More than ten pounds a day came easily—equivalent to a minor country gentleman’s yearly income.

Even the poorest people nearby visited Piero’s Grocery for a fine bottle of liquor when celebrating a holiday or entertaining an important guest.

Daisy had studied Piero himself. He was merely an old man who knew his accounts, born to an ordinary family and once employed as a manager somewhere in the City of London. Neither he nor his relatives possessed such influence.

Only after buying information from the proprietress of the Clark Street tailor shop did Daisy learn that Piero’s employees said the grocery paid its landlord an unusually generous share of the profits.

Far too generous.

Daisy therefore concluded that Piero’s power did not come from Piero.

It came from his landlord: Cromerdy.

At the library several days ago, Daisy had not forgotten her true purpose. She quickly discovered that Cromerdy was not a single person but an enormous family with deep, tangled roots.

The Mr. Cromerdy spoken of on Clark Street was no elegant mastermind operating behind the curtain. In fact, he was a lecherous old man with countless mistresses.

One member of the family was married to the parish priest; another sat on the parish council; yet another was a useless heir who drank every day in the West End.

Following the newspapers year by year toward the present, Daisy gradually uncovered a thriving dynasty whose branching interests had begun with property development, commercial holdings, and horse racing.

Families like it were not rare in the East End.

The property agency from which the Nashes rented their new shop was backed by another such clan, known on the street as Robinson Brothers.

More interesting still, that morning’s newspaper carried a report: both families had their eyes on a theater and its land for sale near the river, south of Whitechapel.

Its former owners were a Jewish family named Samed.

A third family of equal stature had stepped onto the stage and entered Daisy’s field of vision.

For now, though, this three-sided rivalry remained far removed from her daily life.

Daisy sat peacefully at her desk until every figure was clear, then joined her family in packing.

Penny had been taken to school that morning. Mary and Fred missed her, but the new shop left no time for melancholy. Once the goods were packed, they went downstairs to arrange the counters.

After a few hours of hurried sleep, the family began moving the old shop’s remaining stock the next morning.

Prepared-food deliveries continued as usual. Fred went out on his route, while Mary spent hours in the kitchen baking biscuits in advance.

Daisy and Mr. Nash carried stock into the new store and arranged it according to the planned zones.

Her customer route was designed to deter theft. The checkout stood inside the curve of U-shaped counters, commanding a view of the entire floor.

Several low displays near the entrance held bottles and tableware. They blocked footsteps without blocking sight, forcing every customer to follow the intended path.

Shoppers had to pass through a long display of consumer goods before reaching the household staples at the rear—the oil, salt, sauces, and vinegar they had come to buy.

The most valuable retail space, around the checkout, held the cheapest items. Anyone queuing to pay would be tempted to pick up one more thing.

They did not finish moving the old stock until noon. Several new deliveries arrived that afternoon. Each was inspected, displayed, and labeled.

By deep night, every product stood in its proper place with a price tag.

Daisy brought over the cashbox from the old grocery to symbolize the inheritance of its prosperity. Then she tucked a few shillings into several auspicious corners of the checkout to invite wealth.

With that done, the whole family set out carrying small gifts for the neighbors. Beneath the moon, they visited house after house and slipped a handbill through every door.

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