Dry Goods

By Deane Barker • •
A Dry Goods museum exhibition in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

A Dry Goods museum exhibition in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.

(Credit: Harper’s Ferry Park Service)

This is an outdated term, but it used to refer to stores that sold goods that did not contain liquid (meaning they have an indefinite shelf life), or that were measured with a dry unit (pounds, for example).

It was a popular term for clothing, and eventually morphed into what we know today as a “department store,” differentiated from a grocery store or hardware store.

Why I Looked It Up

I saw a store so-named while traveling. It was clearly a stylized affectation (I think it included a coffee shop), but I had occasionally wondered what it referred to.

In The Money Kings, the term came up a lot, as it was common to Jews to open dry goods stores in the American south, or peddle dry goods as traveling salesmen.

Links from this – The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America
As the subtitle suggests, this is the history of some of the wealthy Jewish people of American finance. It concentrates on a few of the big names – Joseph, Seligman, Walter Sachs, Jacob Schiff – and some of the big firms – Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Kuhn-Loeb. Jews left Europe because they...