Today being not only the birthday of Middle Sister (happy birthday to you!) but also the 162nd anniversary of the birth of Montgomery Ward, founder of the retail chain of the same name, brought to mind Portland's own long retail history. Unlike many of the other cities in Oregon, Portland didn't start life as a logging camp, a mining town, or a fishing village, but as the commercial center supporting and living off of those activities. One of the three or four most creative merchants our town has known was the late Fred G. Meyer (1886-1978). Stories about him are legion. One that sticks with me is his venture into market research, long before market research had picked up its current veneer of science and mathematics.
Mr. Meyer opened a store downtown in the 1920s. It did well. It did so well that he wanted to open a second store. To decide where to locate his second store, he ran a promotion at his downtown store. Any shopper who received an overtime parking ticket while shopping at Mr. Meyer's store could bring the ticket and the receipt to the store, and the store would pay the ticket. For each ticket he paid, he learned the customer's name and address and how much the customer spent on that trip. (Because in the 1920s many households didn't have cars, this also meant that he learned the addresses of his more prosperous customers.)
After doing this for a few months, he mapped the customers' addresses and found a cluster of shoppers in the Hollywood district, near 42nd and Northeast Sandy. And that's where he opened store no. 2.
Later in his long life he started to buy real estate in the path of growth. He bought the land for the Beaverton Town Center Fred Meyer long before Highway 217 was built. I think he owned it as early as the middle 1960s. One of his acquaintances saw him standing next to the vacant field back then, with his car and driver waiting, while he looked over the site. The acquaintance stopped, said hello, and asked Mr. Meyer when he was going to build a store there. "Not until interest rates get back down to four percent," replied Mr. Meyer.