It was not simply the creation of the grands magasins that offered an alternative to the unattractive little shop that was hostile to change and relied on local clients in the quartier for its custom. Indeed, certain groups of small shopkeepers clustered together in arcades in order to provide a more congenial environment and attract customers; these are an important forerunner of the department store and in fact anticipate the modern shopping mall. The significance of the Passage des Panoramas, the Passage Véro-Dodat, the Passage Vivienne, the Passage Choiseul, the Passage de l'Opéra and numerous others is illustrated in the great unfinished Arcades project that Walter Benjamin devoted to them. The modern department store itself did not emerge from nothing: Aristide Boucicault, who began pioneering new methods at the Bon Marché from 1852, had previously worked at the Petit Saint-Thomas store; Chauchard, one of the founders of the Louvre in 1855, had been employed at the Pauvre Diable. Balzac's César Birotteau, as we have seen, drew on the example of le Petit Matelot to enhance the business of his own shop. Most of what later became known as magasins de nouveautés began to make their appearance in the early years of the nineteenth century after Napoléon I liberalised the laws governing commerce, lifting the interdiction that had previously prevented traders from selling goods other that what they had made themselves. They offered other forms of shopping before the grand magasin became the target of resentment for small shopkeepers.

The sales and marketing instinct to which these innovations bear witness is signalled by Balzac, as we have already indicated. In the opening lines of the novella Gaudissart II, written in 1844 (the year after small shopkeepers first petitioned government for measures to restrict the development of magasins de nouveautés), he notably highlights the sales fever that gripped the capital: ‘Savoir vendre, pouvoir vendre, et vendre! Le public ne se doute pas de tout ce que Paris doit de grandeurs à ces trois faces du même problème.’