John Wanamaker

Based on Wikipedia: John Wanamaker

The Man Who Invented the Price Tag

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

This quote, possibly the most famous sentence ever uttered about marketing, is attributed to John Wanamaker, a Philadelphia merchant who died over a century ago. It's still repeated in business schools and boardrooms because it captures an eternal frustration: we know advertising works, but we can't quite prove how.

Yet this quote only hints at Wanamaker's real significance. Before Wanamaker, shopping was an adversarial sport. Customers haggled. Merchants sized up each buyer and quoted prices based on how wealthy they looked, how desperate they seemed, or how skilled they were at negotiating. The "retail price" of any object was whatever two people agreed upon in the moment.

Wanamaker changed all of that. He invented the price tag.

Or rather, he popularized it so thoroughly that we can scarcely imagine shopping without one. His revolutionary principle was simple: "One price and goods returnable." Every customer, rich or poor, savvy or naive, would pay the same amount. And if you didn't like what you bought, you could bring it back.

This sounds like common sense now. In 1861, it was radical.

From the YMCA to Oak Hall

John Wanamaker was born in 1838 in Grays Ferry, a working-class section of South Philadelphia. His father made bricks. His mother's family had come from Alsace, that contested region between France and Germany, and from Switzerland.

At nineteen, Wanamaker took a job with the Young Men's Christian Association—the YMCA—becoming the first corresponding secretary in the organization's national structure. This wasn't just a job; it was a calling. Wanamaker remained devoutly religious his entire life, a Presbyterian who took Sabbath-keeping seriously and believed commerce could be conducted with moral integrity.

In 1861, the same year the Civil War began, Wanamaker opened his first store with his brother-in-law Nathan Brown. They called it "Oak Hall" and situated it at Sixth and Market Streets in Philadelphia, a location with historical resonance: it stood adjacent to where George Washington had lived and worked during his presidency.

Oak Hall wasn't just another clothing shop. It operated on principles that contradicted everything established merchants believed about retail.

Fixed prices. Money-back guarantees. No haggling.

The store grew rapidly. When Nathan Brown died in 1869, Wanamaker renamed the business John Wanamaker & Company and opened a second location on Chestnut Street. Six years later, he made an audacious move: he purchased an abandoned railroad depot and transformed it into something America had never quite seen before.

The Grand Depot and the Birth of the Department Store

The concept of the department store was emerging simultaneously in several cities. In Paris, Aristide Boucicaut was building Le Bon Marché. In New York, Alexander Turney Stewart had created the famous Marble Palace. But Wanamaker's Grand Depot, which opened in 1876 to coincide with Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition, represented something new in American retail.

The Grand Depot took the shell of a railroad terminal—a vast, industrial space designed for trains—and filled it with merchandise organized into distinct departments. You could buy clothing in one section, furniture in another, housewares in a third. The store became a destination, not just a transaction.

Wanamaker understood something his competitors missed. Shopping could be an experience.

In 1910, he replaced the Grand Depot with an even more ambitious structure: a twelve-story granite building designed by Daniel Burnham, the visionary Chicago architect who had masterminded the World's Columbian Exposition and would later create urban plans for cities from San Francisco to Manila. President William Howard Taft personally dedicated the building in December 1911.

The Wanamaker Building still stands today, encompassing an entire city block across from Philadelphia City Hall. Its most remarkable feature is the seven-story Grand Court at its center, clad in marble, soaring upward like the nave of a cathedral devoted to commerce.

The Largest Pipe Organ in the World

Within the Grand Court sits one of the most extraordinary musical instruments ever built.

The Wanamaker Grand Court Organ began its life at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis—the same exposition where the ice cream cone was popularized and the Olympic Games were held in America for the first time. The organ was designed by George Ashdown Audsley, an architect and musicologist who believed pipe organs should replicate the full tonal palette of a symphony orchestra.

When the fair ended, Wanamaker bought the instrument for $105,000, the equivalent of several million dollars today. Moving it required thirteen freight cars. Installing it in Philadelphia took two years.

On June 22, 1911, the organ played publicly for the first time, timed to coincide with the coronation of King George V in England. But Wanamaker wasn't satisfied. Over the next two decades, he and his son Rodman expanded the instrument relentlessly, adding rank upon rank of pipes.

The original organ had 10,059 pipes. By 1930, it had 28,750.

This makes it the largest fully functioning pipe organ in the world. It's not in a concert hall or a cathedral. It's in a department store.

The organ still plays twice daily, every day the store is open. Once a year, usually in June, "Wanamaker Organ Day" draws thousands of listeners for a full day of concerts. The instrument remains a working part of Philadelphia's cultural life, a reminder that retail once aspired to something grander than efficiency.

Meet Me at the Eagle

Below the Grand Court's soaring atrium stands a bronze eagle, cast by the German sculptor August Gaul. Wanamaker purchased it after the 1904 World's Fair, the same exposition where he found the organ. The eagle weighs 2,500 pounds and sits atop a steel beam because the floor couldn't otherwise support it.

"Meet me at the Eagle" became a Philadelphia catchphrase, the equivalent of "meet me under the clock at Grand Central" in New York. For generations, Philadelphians arranged rendezvous beneath those bronze wings. The phrase entered the city's vernacular, understood by anyone who had grown up in the region.

The Grand Court has appeared in films ranging from Blow Out in 1981 to 12 Monkeys in 1995, its dramatic atrium instantly recognizable to Philadelphia audiences. Every November since 1955, the space has hosted an elaborate light show, a tradition that continues even though the store is now a Macy's.

The Invention of Modern Advertising

Wanamaker's innovations extended far beyond fixed prices and grand architecture. He essentially invented modern retail advertising.

In 1874, he became the first retailer to place a half-page newspaper advertisement. Five years later, he ran the first full-page ad. These weren't small experiments; they represented a fundamental shift in how businesses communicated with potential customers.

At first, Wanamaker wrote his own advertising copy. Eventually, he hired a man named John Emory Powers, who became the world's first full-time advertising copywriter. Powers developed a style that was direct, honest, and conversational—revolutionary for an era when most commercial writing was pompous and exaggerated.

During Powers's tenure, Wanamaker's revenues doubled from four million to eight million dollars.

The "Wanamaker quote" about wasted advertising money captures both his faith in marketing and his frustration with measuring its effects. A century later, with all our digital analytics and attribution models, marketers still wrestle with the same fundamental uncertainty. We can track clicks and conversions with precision our great-grandparents couldn't imagine, yet we still can't fully explain why some campaigns succeed and others fail.

Postmaster General

In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Wanamaker as United States Postmaster General. The appointment was controversial; newspapers accused Wanamaker of essentially buying the position through campaign contributions.

Wanamaker's tenure at the Post Office was a mixture of genuine innovation and spectacular controversy.

On the positive side, he introduced the first commemorative postage stamp. He developed the initial plans for rural free delivery—the system that would eventually bring mail directly to farms and remote homes rather than requiring rural Americans to travel to distant post offices. This plan wasn't implemented until 1896, after Wanamaker left office, but he laid the groundwork.

He also launched a successful campaign against lottery tickets sold through the mail. In 1890, Wanamaker persuaded Congress to prohibit the practice and then aggressively prosecuted violators. His crusade effectively ended all state lotteries in America until they reappeared in 1964—a gap of over seven decades.

But Wanamaker's Post Office years were also marked by significant failures. He fired approximately 30,000 postal workers under the "spoils system," the tradition by which new administrations replaced government employees with their own political supporters. The mass turnover caused chaos and inefficiency. Theodore Roosevelt, then a civil service commissioner crusading to replace patronage with merit-based hiring, clashed repeatedly with Wanamaker.

In 1890, Wanamaker commissioned a series of postage stamps that the press derided as the worst ever issued, both in printing quality and materials. When his own department store ordered advance copies of a new translation of Leo Tolstoy's novel The Kreutzer Sonata and the publisher missed the deadline, Wanamaker retaliated by banning the book from the U.S. Mail on grounds of obscenity. Major newspapers ridiculed him.

Perhaps most memorably, Wanamaker predicted at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that American mail delivery would still rely on stagecoaches and horseback for another century. He made this statement just as trains were revolutionizing transportation, and a mere decade before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

The Merchant and His Contradictions

Wanamaker embodied contradictions that seem peculiarly American.

He provided his employees with benefits that were remarkably progressive for the era: free medical care, educational programs, recreational facilities, pension plans, profit-sharing arrangements. In an age when workers were often treated as expendable, these were genuine innovations.

Yet Wanamaker was also a fierce opponent of labor unions. During an 1887 organizing drive by the Knights of Labor—one of the first major American labor organizations—he had his detectives identify union members among his workforce. The first twelve they discovered were fired.

He was a devout Presbyterian who believed deeply in keeping the Sabbath holy. When his son Thomas purchased a Philadelphia newspaper and began publishing a Sunday edition, the elder Wanamaker was offended. Thomas also irritated his father by giving regular columns to radical intellectuals, including socialists and future lawyers for Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist. The tension between religious conservatism and commercial ambition played out within the Wanamaker family itself.

His philanthropy was genuine and substantial. He co-founded the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission in 1878, a homeless shelter and soup kitchen that still serves Philadelphia's homeless population today. He made significant donations to the University of Pennsylvania Museum, including a collection of bronze reproductions of artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum that he had commissioned from a foundry in Naples.

He was also an avid art collector whose collection was largely destroyed when his country mansion, Lindenhurst, burned in 1907. He rebuilt with a neoclassical structure on the same property in Cheltenham Township, where President Harrison had once visited. Part of that estate is now the campus of Salus University.

A Peculiar Proposal

During World War I, as millions died in the trenches of France and Belgium, Wanamaker made a proposal that captured both his business mindset and his genuine horror at the carnage.

He suggested that the United States simply buy Belgium from Germany for one hundred billion dollars.

The idea was absurd, of course. Germany wasn't selling, and nations aren't commodities. But Wanamaker was a merchant, and merchants solve problems with transactions. If the war was about territory, why not simply purchase the territory? The proposal reveals how thoroughly commerce had shaped his worldview—and perhaps how desperately people searched for any alternative to the industrial slaughter that was destroying a generation of young men.

Mother's Day

Anna Jarvis, a West Virginia woman, had long campaigned to establish a national holiday honoring mothers. Starting in 1908, Wanamaker financed her efforts, providing the resources and platform she needed to reach a national audience.

The earliest Mother's Day ceremonies were held at Wanamaker's Philadelphia store.

On May 8, 1914, Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day. It later became an international holiday. Today, a Pennsylvania historical marker near Philadelphia City Hall—directly across from the building that was Wanamaker's store—honors both Jarvis and Wanamaker for their roles in creating the holiday.

Ironically, Jarvis later grew to hate what Mother's Day became. She spent the latter part of her life campaigning against the commercialization of the holiday she had created, organizing boycotts of florists and candy makers. She was particularly outraged by printed greeting cards, which she viewed as a lazy substitute for a handwritten note.

Wanamaker, the merchant who had helped make the holiday possible, represented exactly the kind of commercial force Jarvis came to despise. The tension between sentiment and commerce, between authentic feeling and its profitable packaging, persists to this day.

Fame in His Time

It's difficult now to appreciate how famous Wanamaker was during his lifetime. He was a national figure, his name synonymous with retail innovation and Philadelphia commerce.

In George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, first performed in 1912, a character is left money by an American philanthropist millionaire named "Ezra Wanafeller"—Shaw's playful combination of Wanamaker and John D. Rockefeller. The joke worked because audiences on both sides of the Atlantic would have immediately recognized both names.

Wanamaker owned homes in Philadelphia, Cape May Point and Bay Head in New Jersey, New York City, Florida, London, Paris, and Biarritz. His Philadelphia townhouse on Walnut Street contained a Welte Philharmonic Organ—because apparently one massive pipe organ wasn't enough. He died in that residence on December 12, 1922.

At his death, his estate was estimated at $100 million—equivalent to nearly two billion dollars today. He was the last surviving member of President Benjamin Harrison's cabinet, a man who had served as a presidential elector in both the 1888 and 1920 elections, spanning the transition from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties.

The Fate of the Stores

Wanamaker left his store empire to his surviving son, Rodman. The elder son, Thomas, had died in Paris in 1908.

Rodman Wanamaker was a Princeton graduate who had lived in France early in his career and developed a taste for French luxury goods. He is credited with creating American demand for Parisian fashion and design that persists to this day. He also organized spectacular organ and orchestra concerts in both the Philadelphia and New York stores, treating retail space as cultural venue.

Rodman died in 1928, leaving the businesses in a trust valued at nearly $37 million—about $650 million in today's money. He had also, perhaps unexpectedly, founded the Professional Golfers' Association of America and the Millrose Games, the prestigious indoor track and field competition still held annually at Madison Square Garden.

The Wanamaker family trust maintained the store chain until 1978, when it was sold to Carter Hawley Hale. The fifteen-store chain changed hands again in 1986, going to Woodward & Lothrop. Woodies declared bankruptcy in 1994. In August 2006, the flagship Philadelphia store was converted to a Macy's.

But the building remains. The Grand Court still soars. The eagle still waits for meetings. The organ still plays twice daily, its 28,750 pipes filling the atrium with sound that Wanamaker would recognize, even if he wouldn't recognize much else about modern retail.

The Price Is Known

When The Price Is Right debuted on CBS in 1956, contestants competed to guess retail prices. The game show's premise only works because Wanamaker's revolution succeeded. There is a price, a single fixed number that applies to everyone equally, printed on a tag and displayed for all to see.

Before Wanamaker, asking "how much does it cost?" was the beginning of a negotiation. After Wanamaker, it became a simple question with a simple answer.

We take this for granted now. We shouldn't. The fixed price is one of those invisible innovations that restructured daily life so completely that we can no longer imagine the alternative. It made shopping impersonal in a way—no more relationship between buyer and seller determining the terms—but also democratic. The widow and the tycoon pay the same amount. The skilled negotiator gains no advantage over the inexperienced.

Half the money spent on advertising is wasted, and we don't know which half. But we do know the price. A merchant from Philadelphia made sure of that.