On Topic: Mr. Selfridge, the showman who remade retail

It isn't simple happenstance that the theme music for “Mr. Selfridge,” the eight-part drama running on Iowa Public Television's “Masterpiece Classic,” sounds for all the world like a big, bold Broadway musical.

The music, as with the man upon whom the more-or-less true-to-life tale is based, is intentionally showy and brash. Every day is opening night - or, in the retailer's case, opening morning.

As the series makes clear, Harry Gordon Selfridge (played by Jeremy Piven of HBO's “Entourage”) saw retail as theater, and the giant store was his personal stage.

The initial episode begins with the ever-exhilarated Selfridge - based on the Wisconsin-born retailer who once worked for the Chicago chain that grew to become Marshall Field & Co. - in 1908 London detailing his plans to open “the biggest and best department store in the world.”

His notion - and this is what made him different from practically every other peddler of his day - was “the customer always comes first.” It was in following this then-shocking notion that Mr. Selfridge changed how we shop today.

After all, in turn-of-the-last-century England and America, “going shopping (was) not considered smart,” he's warned.

In one of the first scenes, Harry visits an established London store and soon convinces a clerk to dump all the gloves on the sales counter - this is an era when merchandise was kept out of sight, and only a clerk could bring out each piece, so as to better advise the potential customer.

When he is chastised by a senior floor walker, Harry asks with a grin, “What if I said I was just looking?” This is not, the stuffy employee harrumphs in reply, “an exhibition.”

As employees prepare to open his own palatial store, he instructs merchandise to be laid on counters so customers can feel the items - even though he is cautioned by shocked employees that such open displays invite theft.

Harry's response? Customers don't know what they desire until they see it. ("That's why we advertised," my father, who spent his entire professional life in retail, told me after viewing "Mr. Selfridge.")

And a show Harry does bring: He hires a famous stage singer to be the “face of Selfridges,” he designs snappy military-style uniforms for elevator operators and, when Louis Bléroit crosses the Channel in 1909, Harry hires not only the French pilot himself to shake hands with customers, he also has the flier's monoplane taken apart and reassembled on the store's main floor.

Harry also came up with the novelty of “reductions” - though sales, too, were considered not the thing to do.

In his continual embrace of “modernity,” he rearranged how department store floor plans are laid out. In one long scene, he debates with his reluctant department heads about moving perfume - and eventually other beauty products, too - to the very front of the store. (The shrewd shift also helps mask the odor of horse droppings that waft in from the street outside.)

In creating what's now known as the beauty counter, and thereby displaying “the inner workings of the boudoir for everyone to see,” Harry also promises, “It is a whole new way for women to shop.”

The entrepreneur recreated an industry.