The store is where you go to get stuff. It is the most common physical instantiation of ‘the market’. Usually, you buy stuff at the store. Sometimes you steal it. If you work there, sometimes you throw it away. It is a place where material decisions are made by different actors.
The store is a convergence point. A moment where material flows cross, where flows slow down to a glacial speed. But they're still moving, inexorably, through time, and therefore towards the next step of the journey that their assemblage dictates.
Things vibrate on their shelves. In some models of ontology, such as Sausage Party (2014), they beg to be bought. In mine, they finally rest for a little while, having moved so rapidly through the first part of their supply chain.
Their resting place, The Store, is the subject and title of Frederick Wiseman’s 1984 cinéma vérité documentary. He situated a film crew for the 3 weeks leading up to Christmas in a Dallas department store called Neiman Marcus. They specialise in luxury merchandise, such as clothes, jewellery, and cosmetics. They remain operational, with 36 stores across the US, although they were merged in 2024 into a holding company that last month (January 2026) filed for bankruptcy. It is reported that the bankruptcy is directly caused by the debt-fuelled acquisition.
In 1984, times were perhaps sunnier for Neiman Marcus. In the preceding 15 years, they had expanded from having no stores outside of Texas to having locations in 30 different cities. They were 3 years shy of acquiring iconic Fifth Avenue store Bergdorf Goodman. Stanley Marcus, son and nephew of the three 1907 founders, was 8 years into his advisory role, having stepped back from his position as board chairman, leaving the store’s operations to his son, Richard.
The documentary ends, triumphantly, at 75th anniversary gala dinner, with Stanley Marcus singing Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’.
Neiman Marcus, above anything, sell product. The first spoken words of the documentary are from an executive in a boardroom:
‘There’s one word, the whole reason for it all. Sales. A simple little word. That’s why we have the building. You know, if we were doctors, we would have a doctors office, and the only reason for us being there would be for people to come in with something wrong with them, for us to look at them and for us to cure them. And that would be our purpose for being doctors... But we’re at Neiman Marcus for one reason and one reason only, it doesn’t matter if we’re Phil Miller as president or if we’re sweeping the floor, or whatever we are, whatever capacity we have. There’s really one grand purpose to our being at Neiman Marcus and that’s to make sales. Because it’s an institution created to make sales. We’re not a place to get out of the rain, we’re not a place to visit and socialise. We are those things also, but with all of that we only have one purpose. So when we do what we’re here for, we’re doing what we do well. If we don’t do that well, if we don’t encourage that, if we don’t eat and sleep that as a purpose, then we’re defeating our purpose... We’re salesman. Neiman Marcus is a selling institution. Every morning when you wake up and you enter this building until the minute you leave at night, that’s the only purpose we have in life. Now, how we do it and why we do it is what distinguishes us from everybody else.’
This is the purpose of a shop, usually - to sell products to consumers. Often, retailers will buy products wholesale, at a cheaper cost per item, and sell them to consumers at a markup. This markup reflects their other expenses, such as transportation, rents, labour, administration, as well as a profit margin. Once an item has been purchased, the capital has been ‘turned over’, and can be reinvested by the retailer in more products, or other ways to make more revenue, such as advertisements, or supply chain improvements.
Shops are where demand is registered. They are like polling stations, but for stuff. ‘Vote with your wallet’.
There is also, these days, internet shopping. That’s different. Wiseman is interested in the place and the people.
In The Store, we see the Company as a social force in a way that is unfamiliar to me, 40 years later. The salespeople have warm and old relations with their biggest spenders. They understand the personal tastes of their clients, and work resolutely within those boundaries, purely dedicated to creating satisfaction and the fulfilment of the customer’s self image. As founder Herbert Marcus put it: "there is no good sale for Neiman-Marcus unless it is a good buy for the customer".
This approach is due to the nature of a luxury department store's market. Most likely, the majority of the store’s revenues will be generated by a small percentage of their customer base - in sales lexicon these high value individuals are called ‘white whales’, named after the titular animal in Moby-Dick. To keep these customers happy and loyal to the department store is crucial. In another boardroom scene, an executive instructs all his heads of departments to ring their 5 highest revenue clients and invite them to the store in the run up to Christmas period. Their presence will determine whether the store will meet that quarter's targets.
The boardroom scenes are enthralling. The participants combine proto-management-speak patterns and corporate gimmics with a deep social knowledge of their customers and their tastes. There are a series of benign worker training and team building exercises, such as a smiling workout class for a group of cashiers. These are in sharp contrast with product strategy meetings, such as one example in which 15-20 participants discuss the sweet pastries that will be on offer in a certain department. One executive in particular demonstrates incredible nuance on the topic:
‘What we want to avoid is getting into commercial kind of looks. No matter who wants a buttercream with roses it’s unavailable [laughter]. We don’t want the meat cases to evolve their way into looking like the normal Jewish delicatessen on 77th Street and Broadway in New York. It’s a fabulous look and I love those delicatessens but it’s not what Neiman Marcus wants to be. We want an international European attitude food shop. And that’s the one thing as you people oversee the operation, we’re anxious for you to be sensitive that when the salamis come in they don’t start piling them 7 high and that the blue roses don’t show up on the white buttered cream-cakes. And it happens! It happened to us in White Plains, and once it happens to you, then you begin to develop a different audience, because you can’t sell blue roses next to kiwi tarts, it just won’t work.’
All of these insights are completely unintelligible to me. Of course, the 40 year time differential will have contributed to that. Nor am I discerning pastry eater, I appreciate them all greatly with little regard for class or quality. And it goes without saying that this is his job, to obsess over these details. But the specificity of these details, blue roses next to kiwi tarts, belies how involved he is in the trends at play, as if he was the head of a Parisian fashion house, or I supposed in this context, the head chef of a patisserie. These aren’t data driven decisions, they’re qualitative, based on fashions.
There is a deep knowledge of product displayed by the workers. Another scene shows a salesman explains the difference of different species and rearing methods of minks to a man looking to buy his wife a fur coat. This was described by the film’s curator in my screening as ‘PhD level knowledge’. This knowledge clearly reflects a desire in the luxury consumer to understand the reasons behind the exorbitant cost of their product, or at least to hear someone elaborate at length on those reasons. In this discussion, salesmanship can be put to work, a carefully played out conversation, with gradually revealed information and aesthetic judgements laid out by the attendant to bring the customer to maximum fervour.
Salesmanship and corporate strategy in this era of information processing required deep social understanding. It is a knowledge of material semiotics - what things portray to other people around you. Wiseman was interested in the consumers self image formulation, but it is the attention paid and processes of the firm to servicing that ego in The Store that fascinated me the most.
It is here where the comparison to e-commerce is relevant. In that medium, recommendations are algorithmic, based on your previous purchase history and activity. The process of selecting how to self express through commodities in a solo task, mostly. In the department store, at this price point and level of customer service, the Other that the self interacts with in the consumption process is manifested physically - the store attendant. Both are socially entangled processes but with different mechanics, one operating via a massive database of accumulated public consumption history, the other in the complicated social dynamics of a skilled sales clerk motivated to reliably sell a discerning shopper products.
Department stores are where people go to get all kinds of nice stuff. The people who sold that nice stuff know so much about the stuff, and they know so much about the people who want to buy it. They have weaved themselves into the web of material and social qualities that drives the desires that drives the supply chains. That is how they made all of those sales, and moved the things along on their journey.