Hospitality Department

We Were Merchants. (2009). Hans J. Sternberg, with James E. Shelledy. Louisiana State University, 141 pages, $29.95






Hans J. Sternberg - A Nazi sign warns against shopping at Jewish-owned stores in Aurich, Germany. The truck is parked in front of a shop owned by relatives of the author of 'We Were Merchants.'



A not unknown tale of Jews driven out of Germany by Nazis; this family left in 1936, and 1938. Winding up in Louisiana, they became merchants, and built a successful and popular store.

Hans J. Sternberg - Trying on a prom dress in the late 1940s at Goudchaux's department store in Baton Rouge, La.


Some details are unique.

Mr. Sternberg says that the family found Baton Rouge an "accepting community" from the beginning—the local country club had been admitting Jews since well before the Sternbergs arrived. He didn't experience anti-Semitism as much as he witnessed bigotry against blacks. The racism was especially overt during the civil-rights era. One day at Goudchaux's, Mr. Sternberg relates, a white woman shopper was holding a crystal bowl when a black sales clerk asked if she needed help. The woman said "yes" and asked her to fetch someone. When the black clerk said she was a salesperson, "the woman looked at her, held out the piece of expensive crystal in front of her, and slowly parted her hands. The bowl fell to the floor, smashing to pieces, and she strutted out of the building."

Goudchaux's was unusual for the Deep South in that the store employed black sales clerks and disdained the common policy of barring blacks from trying on clothes in stores. But Mr. Sternberg does not portray the store owner as a saint: "My father did bow to Louisiana law when it came to segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains."

Strange combination of social facts: lack of anti-Semitism, allowing blacks to try on clothing but not drink from a water fountain.

The store was also anomalous in the way it approached the retail business. Erich Sternberg, and later his sons, seemed to have a genius for promotion—hiding a $500 diamond ring in a box of Cracker Jack has a way of bringing in shoppers—and for nurturing lifelong customers. For years, a child could walk into Goudchaux's with a straight-A report card and get a nickel for an icy bottle of Coke from the store vending machine. Within a year of buying the business, Erich had instituted home delivery, an unusual practice at the time. And rather than wait on sellers to offer a limited range of fashions— and force customers to make do with whatever was available—the Sternbergs undertook their own buying trips to Japan, London, Paris and Milan. In my family, receiving a Christmas gift purchased at Goudchaux's meant somebody really cared.

Other retailing innovations followed. Goudchaux's, Mr. Sternberg says, was one of the first big department stores to provide interest-free charge accounts. By the 1970s, the store's best customers were offered "gold cards," interest-free charge plates that cost $30 annually but included travel insurance and discounts on products and services. Soon the cards were bringing in more than $1 million a year; later, American Express bought exclusive rights to the use of the name "gold card."

That was quite an innivation. These days gold cards are no longer the top notch in credit; Amex has black and plum, Chase now has sapphire.

At its height, as the expansion continued, the company ran 24 stores in Louisiana and Florida. From a clothing shop with $270,000 in sales when Erich Sternberg bought Goudchaux's, the family business was ringing up $480 million in sales by 1990.

Then Josef Sternberg died from a heart attack in 1990. Two years later, Hans decided to let go—his children and grandchildren showed no interest in carrying on the family's mercantile tradition. He sold Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche for $277 million, more than 2,500 times what his father had paid. Many Louisianans felt like an old family friend had passed away. I know I did.