Old department stores sell nostalgic journey to past

Aged inventory

When Qiao took over the store in 2003, traditional neighborhood department stores were disappearing across Beijing. Supermarkets were expanding, department store sales were poor, and employees were earning only a few hundred yuan a month.

Qiao decided he had to find a way to survive. He gave individual section teams more control over what they stocked and how they displayed and sold it. Most importantly, he stopped trying to compete directly with supermarkets.

"If the supermarkets don't sell it, we will," he said.

The store increasingly stocked unusual goods: old-style thermal underwear, buttons, elastic bands, paper clips, bicycle-pump needles and traditional Chinese cosmetics.

Among its most popular products today are sailor shirts, or haihunshan — the blue-and-white hooped tops once associated with Chinese sailors — and old-fashioned face creams, a basic skin-care product familiar to older generations.

The products have become part of the store's appeal to younger visitors, who know them from childhood memories, photographs or social media.

Around 2007, a television program featured the shop and its reputation spread beyond the neighborhood. In recent years, celebrities have visited and posted about it on social media, helping boost the homely store's popularity.

Young people began arriving with phones in hand, photographing and filming the old-fashioned counters and browsing goods that their parents or grandparents might have used. The store's customers are now a mix of generations.

"Customers are not just coming here to buy things," said Qiao, who has no official social media accounts to promote the store. "They come to chat and browse just like the old days."

Qiao said in an era of online shopping, some customers still want to hold a product in their hands before buying it.

Li Yumei, an elderly Yong'an Road resident who recently dropped in to buy socks, said she has shopped at the store since she was a child.

"If I hadn't chatted with the staff, I wouldn't have even realized this store is turning 70," said Li, 79. "It was already here when I was a child. It was even a little bigger back then."

The store's future, however, is not guaranteed.

Qiao's children are not interested in taking over. When he retires, he expects to pass the business on to younger employees. After two decades of keeping the store open, he said that his goal has largely been achieved.