Dry goods are products such as textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and sundries. In U.S. retailing, a dry goods store carries consumer goods that are distinct from those carried by hardware stores and grocery stores, though "dry goods" as a term for textiles has been dated back to 1742 in England. Dry goods can be carried by stores specializing just in those products, or may be carried by a general store or a department store or more recently, a big box store.
In the beginning of the 19th century, dry goods were often combined with other commodities to form the merchant's stock in trade, that it was difficult to determine where the former began or the latter ended. Trading of all kinds was of a generalized character, merchants handling a like dry goods, groceries, and sundries in the same establishments. The stocks represented in such stores were incongruous in the extreme; cottons and silks from India, and velvets and woolens from Europe, were placed in juxtaposition with groceries and hardware.
The village stores in the early days were few and far between, and where they did find location, their stocks, so far as dry goods were concerned, represented only a few of the coarser textures in woolens, linens, and cottons, with buttons and thread, associated with goodly supplies of rum, molasses, and groceries. A considerable trade with towns located on the banks of inland streams was transacted by means of flatboats similarly stocked. In the cities the wholesale trade was almost entirely confined to the importers, who dealt in those foreign and home commodities, crude or manufactured, which were in the greatest demand and yielded the best profits. With the retail trade in the cities likewise, the distinction in the kind of goods handled by different dealers was not very marked, most of the shopkeepers selling a little of everything. Eventually, dry goods merchants moved to handling mainly textiles and clothing. Many of these stores had modern appointments and conveniences that served to attract, please, and satisfy the wants of customers. Some of these establishments provided delivery, samples, mailing, and express systems to patrons living thousands of miles away. The merchants of America who have handled the immense quantity of merchandise instanced have, as a rule, been men who have borne favorable comparison with those in other varied walks of life. A standard of integrity and honor was formed by the early merchants, which their successors have maintained. Before the days of "rapid transit," when a journey from Buffalo to New York was more of an undertaking than is now a trip to California or to Europe, the village merchant who made his annual or semi-annual visit to the city was the oracle of his neighborhood. His return home was hailed as an important event. He was immediately surrounded by his neighbors, anxious to hear all the news from the city. The answer as to whether goods were "high or low " settled the market with them for the season, as "new goods " would not again make their appearance for six months at least. Those who were in a position to secure the first selections were to be congratulated. After the advent of new goods ceased to attract attention the merchant would find time to attend to certain duties which, by virtue of his position in the community, were apt to be placed upon him. As a rule, he held the office of postmaster, town clerk, school trustee, and exchange banker, for his customers. He wrote their wills, and in due time executed many of them.
Numbers of such old-time retail merchants can now be recalled by our city jobbers. They were, in the main, honest men—as is true of the great majority of the merchants of to-day. While dishonest failures occur, and always have, and always will, they are the exception and not the rule. The safety with which wholesale merchants distribute millions upon millions of dollars of merchandise far and near, throughout the length and breadth of this land, lies essentially in the fact that they are dealing with honest men, whose ambition is to make themselves more and more worthy of credit. Mutual confidence exists, and forms the basis of the immense volume of business of the present day. The aggregate transactions of a single day in any of our large houses often reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, and many of them are based upon the simple word of honor. A prominent dry-goods merchant, accustomed to large offhand transactions with his fellow-merchants, was recently closing up a real-estate deal. Being somewhat wearied with red-tape delays and repetitions, he exclaimed, " I suppose all this is necessary with you real-estate people; but in my office I would have transacted ten times this amount of business, with perhaps not a written word between my customer and myself, and our obligations to each other would have been carried out as faithfully as will these which you have taken volumes to express."
Since the establishment of the first mercantile agency in 1841, these agencies have multiplied and improved so as to be of vast service in determining credits. While far from infallible, they are indispensable. The uniform courtesy existing between merchants in the exchange of references is also of great value, and with all the means of information now at hand the "far-off merchant" worthy of credit suffers no disadvantage by reason of distance from market.
For more see George Cole's Complete Dictionary of Dry Goods (1892).
Famous 19th century dry goods merchants:
Alexander T. Stewart, Marshall Field, Isidor Strauss, Levi Strauss, and Aaron Montgomery Ward.
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