ABSTRACT
The transformation of small shops into department stores in Budapest can be regarded as a relatively late retail revolution in comparison with Western Europe and the USA. This delay is hardly surprising, considering the pre-industrial stage of the economy, the underdeveloped urban network, and the low income level of the middle classes in Hungary around the middle of the nineteenth century. The process of retail transformation only began to get underway during the late nineteenth century. In 1895, a year before the country celebrated with immense pomp the millennium of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, Sandor Holzer purchased a four-storey building on the central avenue of Budapest, in order to move to a new site the modest Ruharaktar he had inherited from his father. The store was named after Simon Holzer, a head tailor who had founded the firm when he established a workshop in 1869.
