Fargo, ND--Not so long ago, anyone looking toward the southwest edge of Fargo would have seen farms and fields to the horizon. Today, the same land is a shopping paradise. Once, the people of Fargo spent their money downtown. Now they come here--to 13th Avenue.
    From the door of Straus Clothing, North Dakota's oldest family-run business, Ed Stern looks in wonder at his bustling strip. Two years ago, his family abandoned downtown and moved their store to the 13th Avenue miracle mile, where neighbors now include Target and Barnes & Noble.
    "I stand here and I can't believe my eyes," says Stern, 85, who ran Straus for a half-century before turning it over to his sons. "Then I remember that retailing is always changing. What makes you successful is if you keep up."
    

Ed Stern, 85, ran Straus Clothing for a half century before turning it over to his sons, John and Rick, in the early 1980's. Two years ago, the company's flagship store left its longtime location in downtown Fargo to better compete with the stores in the bustling retail area near West Acres Shopping Center.

Straus is one small merchant in one small prairie city. But its proprietors over four generations have witnessed the staggering transformation of American retailing in the 20th century.
    They've watched family businesses, long the anchor of the retail industry, lose customers to better-priced, better-stocked superstores. They've watched people abandon downtowns for suburbs, Main Streets for malls. They've watched something called the Internet change shopping's very nature.
     Ed Stern's family has seen these changes and lived them, adapting decade by decade to meet the competition. Just two years ago they launched http://www.strausclothing.com.
    If you want to see how American shopping has evolved during the 20th century, you might start at the suit racks at Straus Clothing.

Good beginning

    Shopkeeping has been in the Stern family since 1879, when Adolph Sternberg opened his first store in North Dakota. By 1907, M.G. Straus and Herman Stern, relatives and both German immigrants like Sternberg, were in charge of a store renamed Straus Clothing.
    Times were good. Retailers around the country--whether they sold from a small shop or a pushcart--were prospering. Some of today's best-known chains, including J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus, opened their first stores during this time.
    At Straus, a top-of-the-line suit sold for $15 (old ads also note this curiosity: dog fur coats for $10.50). In those early days, there were no sales, no bargain tactics, no giveaways to lure shoppers.
    Boom times lasted until World War I, when retailers found themselves starved for business. But only briefly: Once the troops returned, the buying resumed. Straus opened two more stores. It even began selling groceries in one--a radical idea back then, but used by merchants like Wal-Mart today.
    At the same time, a revolution was beginning that eventually would touch Straus' corner of the retailing world. Country Club Plaza, built in Kansas City, Mo., in 1922, linked a group of neighborhood stores with unified architecture and paved and lighted parking lots. It catered to the growing number of Americans with cars, who used to walk to Main Street to shop but now could easily travel anywhere.
    As the Roaring 20's ended and the Depression followed, leaving Americans with little money to spend on anything but necessities, fine suits no longer drove business at Straus stores. Instead it was worker's overalls--bought wholesale for $12 a dozen. And sold for 89 cents a pair. Herman Stern was willing to take a loss on a leading item to beat the competition and keep his store alive.
    To save money, Straus salesclerks used pencils on alteration tags, erasing measurements so they could reuse the tags.
    About 150,000 retailers went out of business during the Depression, according to Dun & Bradstreet. Straus shut down three of its four stores but kept going.
    "Our best suit was $35 and we sold damn few of them," said Ed Stern, Herman's son.
    But it couldn't last forever, and in the late 1930's Americans were beginning to spend again.
    Again, the family business was adapting--Straus was the first store in North Dakota to install air conditioning--and expanding.
     War again slowed business, but when war troops returned from World War II, a boom period began. The G.I. Bill gave guaranteed loans for veterans to buy homes, farms, or businesses.
    "We would have 50 or 60 suits in stock and sell out of almost all of them," said Ed Stern, who went to New York to buy clothes on the black market. Customers were desperate for suits, he said. "They needed them so that they could go out and get a job."

Birth of shopping centers

    Now the suburbs were growing, seven times as fast as the central cities.
    At first, the retail development accompanying house-building was modest. In many communities, Fargo included, small neighborhood shopping centers started to appear: a supermarket, drugstore and a few other shops.
    In 1956, the first enclosed mall was built in Edina. Southdale Mall was radically different--a two level, climate-controlled structure. Two big department stores opened there, separated by a number of smaller speciality shops.
    As Southdale gained popularity, the impact was immediate. A miniature city sprouted up around it--office buildings, a supermarket, a hospital, even apartment buildings.
    "When malls were first coming up, people still shopped downtown. So the mall was intended to be a replica of downtown," said Phil Kowalczyk, a retail analyst at the Atlanta-based consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates. "Then the mall took over as the downtown."
    In 1959, there were 2,640 shopping centers in the United States; that number grew to 7,600 by 1964, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.
    By 1966, the Sterns realized that they couldn't ignore the popularity of shopping centers. They opened their fourth store at South Forks Plaza in Grand Forks, N.D.
    By 1970, with 12,170 U.S. shopping centers in operation, a new generation was changing the dynamics of retailing. Baby boomers, with their free-spending ways and their credit cards, became a catalyst for expansion.
    Regional department stores began to venture outside of their traditional markets. Nordstrom grew beyond the Pacific Northwest, Neiman Marcus from its Texas roots. Specialty stores such as The Limited and The Gap boomed.
    By the end of the 1970's, there were nine Straus stores.
    "There was so much money in North Dakota in the 1970's," Ed Stern said, "that we didn't think we could do anything wrong."

Difficult times

    Ed handed over the reins of the business to his sons, John and Rick, in the early 1980's, but there were difficult times ahead.
    Many trends converged to hurt small merchants, including Straus Clothing, which by the early 1980's had become the top-selling men's retailer in the region.
    Downtowns, where four Straus stores remained, continued to be abandoned for the mall. Shopping centers added movie theaters and amusement rides, morphing into destinations for entertainment and community gathering as well as places to shop.
    Discount chains such as Wal-Mart and K-Mart expanded fast, wooing shoppers with unbelievable prices and wide selection.
    And again, the Straus suit rack mirrored national trends. Men started dressing more casually for work, and women began to do the shopping for the entire family.
    The Sterns tried to keep pace. They offered women's clothes and increased their stock of sportswear. Sixty-three percent of their selection used to be suits; today suits represent only 40 percent.
    They began to be more competitive with price, running more sales and promotions. But after more than a decade of trying, Straus couldn't keep up. By 1997, all but two of its stores were closed.
    "We had to look at things that made economic sense," said Ed Stern, who still comes to the Fargo store nearly every day. "We were a retailer in a changing world."
    While the Sterns are settled--for now--in a highly visible 13th Avenue spot, near Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney, they look the to future. Only a handful of orders come in each week to http://www.strausclothing.com, but they come from customers around the country.
    "Who knows," Ed Stern said as he drove along busy 13th Avenue, "if the Internet will be it--or something else will come along."