Are they being preserved?

CONSUMERS prize authenticity, say market researchers. And it would be hard to find a store more authentic than Jacksons, a 138-year-old emporium in Reading, west of London. The shop’s fittings—glass counters set before wooden shelves—belong to an era before stores let shoppers loose to examine merchandise for themselves. A system of pneumatic tubes whisks money from customers to a central cash office. Receipts are hand-written. Jacksons puts visitors in mind of “Are You Being Served?”, a 1970s sitcom that mocked a way of retailing that was outmoded even then. The staff take that as a compliment.

Yet on Christmas Eve the store will close and its 60 employees, many of them part-time, will be out of a job. The Oracle, a shopping mall that opened in 1999, gradually sucked trade away from Jacksons’ end of the shopping district, says Brian Carter, who belongs to the fourth generation of family proprietors. Jacksons clung on, largely by outfitting successive cohorts of Reading school children. But that did not stop the greying of its customer base. Its premises are a hard-to-manage, multi-level labyrinth. Its old-fashioned approach to customer service is labour-intensive. The “coup de grâce”, says Mr Carter, was the news that the shop needs to replace its rotting roof for £60,000 ($98,000). An investor has bought the building.

The label “family-owned department store” sounds like a double death sentence. Stand-alone department stores have looked doddery since the 1970s, when customers defected to more stylish specialist shops and to malls; small independent ones were the frailest. Wikipedia’s list of defunct independent department stores has 132 entries.

Yet in many British towns a Jacksons equivalent survives. The British Independent Retailers Association counts some 200 independent department stores. As a group, their sales have risen this year while those of independent stores generally have fallen. Camp Hopson of Newbury has a “brow bar”. Jarrold in Norwich recently enticed Gok Wan, a celebrity “fashion stylist”, to sign a cookery book and prepare a dish in the store’s demonstration kitchen. In Trowbridge hjKnee sells electronics online. Such shops boast of their long pedigrees and local roots, but happily pander to consumers’ changing whims.

That is not Jacksons’ way. The store’s answer to the rise of online shopping was to put in a bowls department. “We never had music here, never,” says Thomas Macey, the company archivist. If Jacksons changed with the times it “would lose its appeal”, he says. Sadly, its appeal faded anyway. You can be too authentic.