Some commercials stay with you forever, don't they? "Football, meat pies, kangaroos, and HOLDEN cars" is one of them; "I like Aeroplane Jelly" is another. So why did our department store David Jones' drop its "There's no store like David Jones'?"
It was still around in the mid-1960s when I sat at my desk inside the ANZ Bank and looked across Alinga Street to Canberra's David Jones' store, which had saved me many Mondays when I had once again failed to put my dirty washing through the machine, and got to work in a worn shirt.
A quick dash across to David Jones' fixed me up with one of their "For Service"-labelled white shirts (no coloured shirts in them days!) which, despite the fact that one could still detect the tiny holes from the pins that had held it together in the package, looked a lot better than two sweat-stained armpits. Yes, "there was no other store like David Jones'".
Other than having changed their slogan from the familiar "There's no other store like David Jones'" to the far too boastful "The most beautiful store in the world" and finally to the barely literate "Was. Is. Always", what I really want to know is why they had to drop the cursive (that's joined-up, Des) writing and the possessive apostrophe in their name.
I concede, today's generation can barely read, let alone cursive, but they absolutely love their apostrophe's. They have them in meat pie's and pizza's when they're looking for the special's in the supermarket's on the weekend's. Don't deprive them of their apostrophe's, David Jones'!
