Harrods

Harrods
	File:Logo harrods.gif
Company type	Private
Industry	Retail
Genre	Department Store
Founded	1834
Founder	Charles Henry Harrod
Headquarters	London, England
Products	Quality/Lifestyle
Owner	Mohamed al-Fayed
Number of employees	5000+
Parent	Harrods
Website	http://www.harrods.com/

Harrods is a department store on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London, England, that caters to upmarket customers. The Harrods brand also applies to other enterprises undertaken by the Harrods Group of companies including Harrods Bank, Harrods Estates, Harrods Casino, Harrods Aviation, and Air Harrods.

The store occupies a 4.5-acre site in Knightsbridge and has over one million square feet (over 92,000 square metres) of selling space in over 330 departments. This makes Harrods one of the largest department stores in the world.

The Harrods motto is Omnia Omnibus Ubique —- All Things for All People, Everywhere. Several of its departments, including the seasonal Christmas department and the Food Hall are world famous. The nearest tube station to the flagship store is Knightsbridge on the fashionable street of that name, so Harrods has called itself "Harrods of Knightsbridge". Mohamed Al-Fayed bought the store in 1985 for £615 million (615,000,000 pounds sterling).

History

Harrods was established in 1834 in London’s East End, when founder Charles Henry Harrod set up a wholesale grocery in Stepney, with a special interest in tea. In 1849, to escape the filth of the inner city and to capitalise on trade to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in nearby Hyde Park, Harrod took over a small shop in the district of Knightsbridge, on the site of the current store. Beginning in a single room employing two assistants and a messenger boy, Harrod’s son Charles Digby Harrod built the business into a thriving retail operation selling medicines, perfumes, stationery, fruit, and vegetables. Harrods rapidly expanded, acquired the adjoining buildings, and employed one hundred people by 1880.

However, the store’s booming fortunes were reversed in early December 1883, when it burnt to the ground. Remarkably, in view of this calamity, Charles Harrod fulfilled all of his commitments to his customers to make Christmas deliveries that year — and made a record profit in the process. In short order, a new building was raised on the same site, and soon Harrods extended credit for the first time to its best customers, among them Oscar Wilde, legendary actresses Lilly Langtry and Ellen Terry, Noël Coward, Sigmund Freud, A. A. Milne, and many members of the British royal family.

Significant events in Harrods history

1834: Charles Henry Harrod (1799-1885) founds a wholesale grocery in Stepney, East London
1849: Harrods moves to the Knightsbridge area of London, near Hyde Park
1861: Harrods undergoes a transformation when it was taken over by Harrod's son, Charles Digby Harrod (1841-1905)
1883: On December 6, fire guts the shop buildings, giving the family the opportunity to rebuild on a grander scale
1889: Charles Digby Harrod retires, and Harrods shares are floated on the London Stock Exchange under the name Harrod's Stores Limited
1905: Begun in 1894, the present building is completed to the design of architect Charles William Stephens

1912: Harrods opens its first and only foreign branch in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It became independent of Harrods in the late 1940s but still traded under the Harrods name
1914: Harrods purchases the Regent Street department store Dickins and Jones
1919: Harrods purchases the Manchester department store, Kendals; It took on the Harrods name for a short time in the 1920s, but the name was changed back to Kendals following protests from staff and customers [1]
1959: The British department store holding company, House of Fraser, buys Harrods
1983: A high-profile Provisional IRA bomb at the Knighsbridge store kills six people
1985: The al-Fayed brothers buy the store for £615 million
1994: The relationship between House of Fraser and Harrods is severed. Harrods remains under the ownership of the Al-Fayed family, and House of Fraser is floated on the stock exchange
1997: The British court issues an injunction to restrain the Buenos Aires Harrods store from trading under the Harrods name [2]
2006: The Harrods "102" store opens opposite the main store on Brompton Road; it features concessions like Krispy Kreme and Yo! Sushi, as well as florists, a herbalist, a masseur, and an oxygen spa. [3]
2006: Omar Al-Fayed, Mohamed's youngest son, joins the Harrods board

Products and services

The store's 330 departments offer a wide range of products and services. Products on offer include clothing for every sort of customer (women, men, children, and infants), electronics, jewelry, sporting gear, bridal trouseaux, pet accessories, toys, food and drink, health and beauty items, packaged gifts, stationery, housewares, home appliances, furniture, and much more.

A representative sample of store services includes 28 restaurants, serving everything from high tea to tapas to pub food to haute cuisine; a personal shopping-assistance programme known as "By Appointment"; a watch repair service; a tailor; a dispensing pharmacy; a beauty spa and salon; a barbers shop; Harrods Financial Services; Harrods Bank; private events planning and catering; food delivery; a wine steward; bespoke (customised) "picnic" hampers and gift boxes; bespoke cakes; and bespoke fragrance formulations.

There are also a number of concessions within the store such as HMV, Waterstones, Starbucks and Krispy Kreme.

Fur

In the late eighties, Harrods stopped selling fur clothing. At this time, Harrods was the flagship store of House of Fraser, the largest department store chain in the United Kingdom. In 1994, Harrods and House of Fraser parted company, and, while House of Fraser retained its fur-free policy, Harrods began to sell fur again shortly thereafter. In 2001, fur farming was banned in the UK, and, by 2005, Harrods was the only department store selling fur in the United Kingdom.^{[citation needed]}.

In October 2005, campaigners from CAFT (Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade) launched a campaign to persuade Harrods to stop selling fur. They mounted regular protests outside the store and organised telephone, e-mail, and letter-writing campaigns. This effort to influence Harrods followed similar successful campaigns against other department stores, including Fenwicks, Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, and Liberty, all of which have stopped selling furs.

In December 2005, Harrods went to the High Court to seek an injunction which would have imposed a ten-metre exclusion zone around the entire store, and would have forced the protesters across the road. The injunction was opposed by the campaigners, and a temporary order was granted, allowing protests to continue with some restrictions.

The protesters considered the restrictions onorous, and, after six months and four hearings, a compromise was reached. The High Court issued an order in June 2006 governing protest activities for a period of two years. Under the terms of the order, a maximum of three protesters are allowed within a five-metre zone outside each of the twelve entrances to the store. Outside these areas, there is no restriction on the number of protesters. Use of a megaphone is also restricted to fifteen minutes at any one time, with an interval of fifteen minutes between each use.

Mohamed Al-Fayed

Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed (Arabic: محمد الفايد ) (born 27 January 1933) is an Egyptian businessman. He styles himself Mohamed al-Fayed; the "al-" (meaning "the") creates an Arabic designation known as a nisba usually denoting, in personal names, a place of origin or family name or nickname.

Store owner Mohammad Al-Fayed has had a tempestuous relationship with British authorities through the years. He has never been granted British citizenship despite his efforts and many investments in the United Kingdom over the last twenty years. Most newsworthy are his claims against the royal family, particularly Prince Philip, in regards to the death of his son, Dodi Fayed, and Diana, Princess of Wales in the Paris Alma Tunnel. There is a memorial to the pair near Harrods' famous Egyptian escalators, and a life-sized statue at Door No. 3.

Fayed has an estimated fortune of between $2- and $5-billions. He continues to support many charities through the Al-Fayed Charitable Foundation. His well-known philanthropies span the globe from the United Kingdom and the United States to East Asia.

Royal warrants

Harrods was the holder of royal warrants from:

Queen Elizabeth II for Provisions and Household Goods
The Duke of Edinburgh as Outfitters
The Prince of Wales as Outfitters and Saddlers
The Queen Mother, now deceased, for China and Glass

Harrods had held The Duke of Edinburgh's warrant since 1956, but it was rescinded by Prince Philip on 21 December 2001 because of a "significant decline in the trading relationship" between the duke and the store. Speculation suggests that claims of Prince Philip's personal involvement in the death of Al-Fayed's son and Diana, Princess of Wales led to the warrant's removal.

Al-Fayed then pre-emptively removed all the royal coats of arms that had been prominently displayed by the business, even though other warrants were yet to expire or be withdrawn. None of the royal grantors of warrants had spent any money at Harrods since 1997.

Trivia

Up to 300,000 customers visit the store on peak days. More than five thousand staff from over fifty different countries work at Harrods. A fleet of fifty delivery vehicles make up to 225,000 deliveries every year. Approximately 11,500 energy-efficient light bulbs turn Harrods into a beacon of light each night.

The Harrods store in Buenos Aires, Argentina was modelled on the Knightsbridge building. It continued to be associated with the parent store until the 1950s, when all links were severed. The Argentine owners retain rights to the Harrods name, but the building is abandoned. Harrods, Buenos Aires, lost a lawsuit with the original company over the use of the Harrods name in internet domain names.

Harrods is featured as a backdrop in the computer game, Street Fighter. A player can also see the London Underground sign where Knightsbridge Station is.

Harrods and especially the Christmas department was prominently featured in the first scene of the Mr Bean episode Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean

Harrods also contain an area downstairs with safe rooms and safety deposit boxes in vaults for the richer clients. This can all be seen in the Discovery Channel documentary "Hidden Harrods".

Store access

The main store is open, Monday to Saturday, from 10am to 8pm, and, on Sunday, from 12 noon to 6pm. Selected food halls and restaurants are open, Monday to Saturday, from 9am to 9pm, and, on Sunday, from 12 noon to 6pm. The nearest stop on the London Underground is the Knightsbridge station on the Piccadilly line. The Brompton Road exit from the underground delivers a traveller to the sidewalk right outside Harrods. The #123 bus stops outside Harrods.

Notes

Template:Fnb Harrods own corporate website, http://www.harrods.com/Cultures/en-GB/History/history04.html
Template:Fnb Guiness World Records 2007, published by Guiness (August 8, 2006), ISBN: 978-1904994121

External links

51°29′57″N 0°09′46″W / 51.49917°N 0.16278°W / 51.49917; -0.16278