Fixed Prices and Free Returns
Boucicaut joined a small drapery as a partner in 1852 and bought out the whole business in 1863. Over that decade and a bit, fixed prices, free returns, free entry, seasonal sales and newspaper advertising fell into place one by one. Turnover went from half a million francs to five million. The most thorough of these was free entry: the shop kept no floorwalkers to approach customers and press a sale. It was a deliberate rebellion against the atmosphere of the age, in which walking in meant not walking out until you had bought something. Build a shop people can leave empty-handed, and they come — the distant ancestor of the free trial is standing right here.
The myth, corrected
Le Bon Marché was the world's first department store
This is the store's own official account. Bainbridge's in Newcastle (1849, whose weekly department-by-department sales records survive) and A. T. Stewart's in New York (1846) both came earlier. Scholarship gives Le Bon Marché a qualified title — the first «modern» department store in the sense of integrating all the elements into one system — and the plain question of dates has never been settled.