Sometimes a great notion

When the I Magnin store closed in Santa Barbara I was sad, but not really surprised. All department stores are a dying breed. I know what killed them.

When I was growing up in Wichita, it was a big thrill when my mother would say, "I need some thread and snaps, let's go to downtown." We got dressed up and rode the bus. Alighting at Douglas and Broadway, mother headed straight for the notion's department at a store named Bucks. She and a knowledgeable sales lady would discuss zippers, and decide which one would be right for the dress mother was making. If the notions department at Bucks didn't have what she needed, we would proceed to an even grander store called Innes.

While we were at it, we always checked out the adjacent fabric department. Mother loved to look at yard goods, paw through pattern books. I never learned to sew, despite my mother's valiant attempts to teach me. But I still like to hang around bolts of fabric — to feel their flat silkiness, to smell their new sizing. I love the pleasant flop, flop noise a bolt makes when it is flipped over and over while the clerk measures out the yardage.

The hat department was right on our path to notions. Mother loved hats, could not resist trying them on. Once in a while she broke down and bought one. She was always a little embarrassed, a little giggly when she took it home to show my father. Because my mother was a thrifty soul — who always bought for the rest of the family first — my father was always pleased when she indulged on herself.

But I doubt mother would have gone to town or spent money on herself at all — had she not had the excuse of needing something from "notions." Her quest for shoe trees or knitting needles drew her into a store more frequently than advertising.

Once there, she frequently bought something else on impulse. On rare occasions, she even took me to lunch in the store's tea room where I put little rosettes of butter on hot clover-leaf rolls. Heaven.

Sometime in the 1960's, some guy fresh out of business school got the bright idea to analyze sales — department by department. I can just see this man looking over his sales sheets. "This notions department is nickel and dime stuff. Don't make any money on it. Labor intensive. Get rid of it."

Would the same guy, analyzing sales of a hardware store, say, "Screws don't make any money. Quit stocking them."

It didn't take my mom very long to figure out that if she couldn't find what she needed in notions there was no point going into the store. So she didn't buy her cloth there, either. Naturally, the fabric department was the next to be eliminated.

All too soon, a worse disaster followed. The lady in ready-to-wear who smelled nice and said, "May I help you?" disappeared. Remember her? When you said you wanted a blue dress she started pulling hangars off racks, lugging garments to your dressing room, offering an opinion when asked. In her place, a worried looking person stood next to the cash register, poring over computer print-outs. Her new responsibility was to continuously count and check off the whereabouts of merchandise.

Instead of "May I help you?" the refrain became, "If you've found what you want, I'll take time out from doing something important to ring it up."

What's killing department stores? Merchandising experts. That's what.

Virginia Cornell is the author of The Latest Wrinkle and Other Signs of Aging — a collection of her humorous essays. For information on ordering, see The Latest Wrinkle.