This week, while travelling through Windsor, a small town 56 kilometres north west of Sydney on the Hawkesbury River, I popped into a museum that I’d read about. What piqued my interest is that The Hawkesbury Regional Museum is holding a retail exhibition featuring a department store called Horderns. Windsor was settled in 1791 and is the third oldest place of British settlement in Australia, with a population today of just about 1700. In 1879, Edward Hordern established Hordern Brother
s in Pitt Street in Sydney. Later on in 1959 it was his grandsons, Hunter and Ross, that decided to start a new venture in Windsor.
They purchased a business from the Pulsford family and set up H&R Hordern – Value Department Store.
These were the glory days of department stores and they stocked everything from ladies underwear, to hardware, to guns and ammunition and even gelignite, gunpowder, detonators and fuses.
If you visit the museum you will see the gelignite register of sales. I had heard of the famous cash carrying system that operated in those days on overhead wires and transported cash in small wooden containers to a central point, but I had never seen one before.
This system was prior to the old Lamson Paragon vacuum system that was followed by cash registers and today’s point of sale (POS) systems.
Visit the museum and you will not only see the wire system but also one of the most antiquated cash registers – manual of course. They also had their very own customer relationship management (CRM) system, which consisted of a small tickler box from A to Z.
On Friday 9th April, 1999 – only 14 years ago – the doors closed. Ross and Hunter were in their 70s and a dynasty ended.
For those who have been in retail a while and for those who are more recent members of the trade, a trip to Windsor and an hour or two in the Museum will be well worth the effort.
Stuart Bennie is a retail consultant at Impact Retailing and can be contacted at stuart@impactretailing.com.au or 0414 631 702.
