The department store embodies middle-class consumerism of the 20th century. While consumerism is going stronger than ever, the same cannot be said about the middle class.
The shopping experience of the department store (pleasant environment, individual attention by knowledgeable salespeople etc.) is now only to be found in upmarket boutique shops, whereas hoi polloi are being served by goods distribution systems that are essentially automated.
The department store embodies old lady consumerism.
It's where you go to find mediocre but overpriced products. It's where your mom bought clothes for you that you didn't really like. It's where your mom still shops. The pricing structure is based on making moms feel like they got a good deal on a "sale", but actually everything is just overpriced and you can't get things with the appropriate price unless you play their dumb game. There are stories about department stores stopping this and losing lots of sales because their customers were addicted to it.
They simply failed to change to attract new generations, their buyers couldn't buy for the next generation, so they kept targeting their aging customer base until they were gone and poof, no more department stores.
You probably could do a new generation of department store targeting younger folks, but it would have to be much different. Probably won't happen.
My last department store trip was to buy socks, they didn't have what I wanted, then I paid an outrageous price for average athletic socks because I didn't have the right coupon, store card, flier, whatever. I wanted socks more than I wanted to go through the trouble of buying nicer or cheaper ones on the Internet as I was already there.
Kohls has a deal where they will give you a substantial coupon if you return something from Amazon to the store. Fuck me though, I'm not going to do the obvious scam.
I'd feel less ripped off spending $50 per sock at Hermes.
> You probably could do a new generation of department store targeting younger folks, but it would have to be much different. Probably won't happen.
This seems to have been replaced by Shein/Temu, which don't require you to get off your phone and go to a physical location.
Think of the health and the environmental benefits \s
I think UK and US department stores are actually very very different. UK department stores generally only stock super high end designer gear, and sales / coupons are very very rare.
When I think of heyday US department stores I think of Macy’s, Sears, Carson Pirie Scott, Montgomery Ward, Nordstrom, and I’m sure offers I’m forgetting.
Of course those are all either shells of their former selves or gone entirely.
Macy’s might have been the last high end department store in the US (that I’m aware of), but even 10 years ago going into their flagship Chicago location felt like walking into a K-Mart. I don’t know if I’d consider stores like Saks to truly be department stores.
Does Primark count as a "department store"? TK Maxx? Or, since the closure of Debenhams and BHS, are we down to John Lewis (true archetype of the department store that sells everything), M&S, and the occasional Harvey Nicks?
I'd class Primark etc as fast fashion stores really - in my mind department stores are Harvey Nicks and Harrods etc
Harrods is kind of an exception as it's a single store that's always positioned itself at the very highest end of retail. It will probably outlast most other retailers so long as it retains that cachet.
Agreed.
These negative comments seem way off base to me. I wonder if they have ever been to John Lewis or Debenhams?
I really miss department stores and I'm sad that they're disappearing. I have positive experiences using them.
The flag ship stores, the Harrods, the Harvey Nichols might fit the high-end description but the ones that have gone, the Debenhams, C&A, BHS etc. did not.
A lot of the "branded" goods were more like the first OP said - just a print or a label with some credibility like Levis, Diesel, Calvin Klein, Armani but on indifferent quality stuff you would never see in a high-end store from the same brand - likely from the same factories filling up super-market own brands but at 1/5 the price.
The sales were also a very big thing, especially the big dates like Boxing Day, New Years or Easter - it was a common habit to only buy clothes once a year. All those sales got gamed though, they would ship-in special tat to put on rails at 70% off for Dec 26th rather than actually discount their products and then they started before Christmas, and then from "Black Friday" and then from before "Black Friday"...
Yet I still miss them too. I hate fashion/shopping but clothes are sensual, they rest against the skin for years and the difference between good and bad is materials, craftsmanship and fit whereas an online jpg of a black t-shirt and a review of "my husband says it's ok" really tells me nothing at all. I find online browsing, deliveries and returns more time-consuming and stressful than a rare shopping trip.
I'm pretty sure I got PTSD as a kid by getting dragged through these department stores for hours upon hours by my mom as she mindlessly browsed through clothes. Five hours to buy five shirts? I swore I would never shop at such stores, and I never have.
>There are stories about department stores stopping this and losing lots of sales because their customers were addicted to it.
This sounds like what happened to JC Penney.
I’ve traveled to many places where stores seem to be doing just fine. They have too many employees, even, by American standards.
I think it comes down to the cost of real estate. Both for the store, but also for employees’ housing. Higher rents mean people need to be paid more which means fewer employees and a worse experience.
I don’t know who came up with the “30% of your salary” rule for housing, but it was probably the same person who came up with the “3 months salary for a ring” rule. It seems made up. 30% is way too high. I’d love to see a survey of these factors globally. I think we put up with things in America because we don’t know any better.
> 30% is way too high
Underestimate in many circumstances. Poor people living in UK cities are paying up to 50% of their income in housing. https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/IFS...
(the Georgists have a point; over time, rentiers gradually capture more and more of an economy)
Also department stores are a victim of a gradient across the globe. You want a westerner, standing in a western city, to spend time with you selling you a product? Of course all those things are staggeringly expensive. See also healthcare.
Seems like they just got so much bigger that we don't even recognize them as a department store. Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, et al. are just variations on the theme. Extrapolate and discover that we'll eventually live and shop in a department store that encapsulates the planet like Trantor.
Not exactly - part of the department store experience is the relative expertise of staff in each department. And the sales pitch is one of high value, you might even say beauty or care.
Costco/Walmart are, from a European perspective, more like a "cash and carry" wholesaler masquerading as retail. There is very little effort made to present the goods, it's all about high volume and the lowest possible price. They're equivalent to our supermarkets/hypermarkets, but even bigger and broader in scope.
This might sound like I'm stanning for department stores but not really. They're way more expensive than Amazon or discount retail, priced more like a specialist, and the quality and expertise doesn't always match the presentation. You can easily end up paying specialist prices for Amazon quality if you're not careful.
Anyway, I think their time is up, perhaps with a few high-end exceptions surviving as a luxury tourist experience. In central London, we've a department store just for toys - like an old-fashioned and upmarket Toys'R'Us - and today's generation are basically un-wowed. Like, sure it has a lot of stock, but the big etail operators have a lot more again. And you don't have to travel 40 minutes to look at it.
>part of the department store experience is the relative expertise of staff in each department. And the sales pitch is one of high value, you might even say beauty or care.
Yes, exactly. To add to that, the salespeople in each department got a percentage sales commission. E.g. at Sears department store, the salesperson in jewelry dept was on a commission structure. The salesman working the Sears appliance center got a commission when the customer bought a washer & dryer or refrigerator; same situation in the Sears furniture department when a customer bought a sofa.
In contrast, the big-box discount stores like Walmart and HomeDepot have hourly paid employees without sales commissions.
I realize you aren't saying this, but note that while commissions are common among larger department stores, it doesn't hold true in general across specialist retailers that every staff member is on commission. For instance, if you go to a specialty cheese or wine shop, or a fishmonger or supplement store or even smaller local department stores, it's entirely possible to meet a sales clerk on commission, but it's also (perhaps more) likely that you won't.
Also, RE staff commissions -- this isn't always bad for the customer as some here are implying. Although there are stores where commissions can come directly from the manufacturer, or where some manufacturers offer staff commissions but some don't -- this tends to be bad, nearly always.
On the other hand, if the commission comes from the employer, this can incentivize staff to build deeper product knowledge and awareness of tradeoffs between different brands and products (not to mention: mindfulness of trends, customer feedback and return rates, etc), which IME leads to better service and better sales for everyone involved. I mean, yes, sure, it can also lead to employees simply parroting whatever they learned from the manufacturer brochure. YMMV
Brick & mortar retailers that don't provide commissions at all often still allow manufacturer led trainings of staff -- the retailer views this as essentially free staff development and morale building by increasing staff product knowledge while often providing free product or steep discounts. Sometimes manufacturers will straight up give away prizes unrelated to the products they sell (I've seen supplement vendors give away iPhones or cash prizes, for instance). Sales reps sometimes build personal relationships with certain retail workers they know have influence over purchasing or merchandising decisions. Often this is explicitly forbidden, but in practice virtually every company that has rules like this also rarely enforces them
In any case, my point is that commission structures do not imply that you're getting bad/misleading information from sales staff, and lack of commission structures don't mean that sales staff are free of undue influence from sales reps and manufacturers or that they otherwise aren't incentivized somehow to push a particular product on you.
It's probably a good idea if you can find a self-employed expert for that specialty (like a decorator or kitchen builder) and have them make recommendations on what to get where. There's a (real, ahem) risk that you'll get a bad in-store salesperson that only cares about your card swipe.
That is an excellent reason not to go to such places. For some stores, "we don't work on commission" is a selling point to the customer.
I think it tends to push to the extremes. Either it provides an incentive structure that retains knowledgable salespeople and provides a huge customer benefit, or it winds up being toxic for both the employees and customers.
Commissions work best when the customer and sales staff have long relationships and a decent knowledge of their markets. That's rarely the case at retail and pushes more hard-sell types.
In B2B, it's about a relationship and trust. My FIL sells clothes. He's the middleman between the manufacturers and the stores. He has a territory and based on what's happening in other stores in the region he can steer them toward the right stuff for their store. I.e., what's this store's target age range, how affluent is the area, and so on. In return, when he does a good job with them, they will learn to trust his advice on what will generally sell well, and he ends up getting better commissions. He sells about a dozen lines from about six manufacturers, though about three or four of the lines tend to make up the bulk of his income.
Since he's very good at his job, he can demand higher commissions than other salesmen just to take a line on. He's got the on-the-ground relationships, and a manufacturer will give him a bigger cut because he's not going to have canceled orders, returns, or headaches for them.
Yep, and they trade on reputation, thinking that will let them off on other factors.
We have a store here, John Lewis, whose tech department sells lots of Macs and high-end TVs.
So when they got in some 17 inch HP android tablets, I figured, surely they can't be _too_ bad? This was before iPad Pros, and I liked the idea of a large tablet.
The thing was absolute garbage, stuck on an already-obsolete Android release. At least their returns policy was accommodating, but that's half a day I'll never get back.
> Costco/Walmart are, from a European perspective, more like a "cash and carry" wholesaler masquerading as retail
Costco _is_ wholesale, they just allow "members" to buy some of it too. Costco supplies quite a lot of things to enterprises such as office supplies and food.
>part of the department store experience is the relative expertise of staff in each department
That's been unusual in the United States for at least a generation. Nordstrom is a notable exception. Department stores have shed departments, too. The camera counters hung on for a while after other electronics and toys had gone to big box stores, but they've gone the way of the candy and nut counter.
Yeah. At best, most I've been to over the past couple decades seem to have roving cashiers that went through a program about how to be irritatingly salesy and might know where a specific thing was in their department. Sears was barely better than K-Mart in its death throes after the CEO decided to embrace the Hunger Games organizational strategy.
As I remember it, Sears was basically gutted by its CEO, Eddie Lampert, for his own personal profit at the expense of the company.
Americans might be more familiar with FAO Schwartz, an iconic, up-market toy store formerly with a flagship in New York City on Fifth Avenue, which featured in several films including Big (starring Tom Hanks).
The company has been through several ownership changes and bankruptcy in the past quarter century, and was at one point in fact owned by Toys "R" Us. Since 2016 it's been owned by ThreeSixty Group, of which also presently owns Sharper Image and Vornado.
> Seems like they just got so much bigger that we don't even recognize them as a department store. Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, et. al. are just variations on the theme.
I don't think so. Home Depot is clearly a big hardware store / lumber yard. Costco may carry many kinds of merchandise, shelved roughly according to type, I don't think it really qualifies as it has unspecialized staff (and very few of them), little selection within each type of item, and probably its only true "department" is the tire department.
The only thing you list that could arguably be a department store is Walmart, and I think the reason it's not recognized as one isn't because of its size, but because it's been drained of all glamor.
And none of them (at least in their non "super" sizes) are subjectively much bigger than the old mall department stores.
Walmart and Target are discount department stores, which is a different niche. K-mart is closing their last store, incidentally. There used to be more of them, too, and more regional ones.
Kmart stores are still doing very well in Australia and New Zealand, with 325 locations serving a population less than 1/10th the size of the US.
However, Australian/New Zealand Kmart stores have had no connection to American Kmart stores since the 90s, when Kmart Corporation sold them off to an Australian company that has managed them much more effectively.
Big box stores are really qualitatively different from what a department store was - although the department store's brilliant marketing innovation of letting customers handle the merchandise as if it was already theirs led to big box discount stores and supermarkets. Merchandising and decor have been going downhill in even the best mall anchor stores for decades, so maybe the gap isn't as big now, but it was a really different shopping experience within living memory.
This is going to sound sexist, or youthist... but... dep't stores used to hire young people for many of the display cases, either gals or guys --of course they had the "patronly" guy for serious things, like suits and so on, but for many things they had something not quite over the top like the buxom and ripped "kids" A&F had, but the guys and gals were not frumpy... these days it's different.
For the displays? Rarely. But as salespeople, well, that too. There's probably a whole lot to unpack in the why of that, but there just aren't as many young people, more of them are fat, and on the whole people don't dress as carefully.
As an aside, I've lived away from urban areas for a while now, so maybe I am not the best judge, but I would be dumbstruck today by a first-rate window display in a downtown retail store.
Having a job, any job, as a teenager is now looked upon as something that makes you look poor, and in many states the minimum wage is barely worth the effort. Wealthy parents would rather their children spend their time doing more studying or extracurriculars, since both of those have a better return when applying for colleges than any retail job.
It's also just a hassle that neither employers nor the prospective employees want to deal with. Tons of rules and regulations for the boss, very limited working hours, and the risk of an immature kid suddenly quitting without notice or throwing a tantrum. The kids have to get a work permit from their school, have to find someone willing to hire them (for probably less than the adult minimum wage), and then do the type of menial and unrewarding drudgery that drives working adults to despair. The days boomers talk about - when a kid could start work at 14 and make money worth spending and get useful experience - are long gone.
Sorry not the window displays, but display cases: the sales help.
The practice of preferentially hiring conventionally-attractive women for sales is still rampant even if people don't admit to it. In parts of Asia it's unfortunuately often explicit; job postings often specify the race, age, weight of what they are looking for.
Same in US for actual sales roles, it’s unspoken though. But the retail experience is mostly not actually sales. It’s entirely self service, walk into a warehouse, find what I need, use a kiosk to pay. The humans typically only get spoken to for orientation (they point you in right direction, sometimes) or if doing a return or having some issue with the intended frictionless self serve shopping experience (like a barcode won’t scan). So what you find from a human physique perspective is looks don’t matter at all. They’ll intentionally hire ugly people if they will take less pay, which statistically is the case since data shows good looking people make more.
"Captain Peacock, are you free?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Being_Served%3F
You beat me to it. :)
I think the Costco Idiocracy scene is probably going to be the most prescient portrayal of the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y
Trantor is the seat of a galactic empire with thousands if not millions of planets supplying its population. Skynet by Haliburton-Costco-TraderJoes will eat the world long before we're interplanetary.
Idiocracy is a rare example of something that is aging like cheese instead of milk.
That’s clever, but I think it’s just us that’s aging. When you’re young and dumb and full of… optimism, you don’t really notice how fucked up everything and everyone is. It just hasn’t sunken in yet.
I think the distinction is between historically urban department stores and big box suburban stores although there was a period when you had (now dying) department stores like Macy's in the suburbs.
I think it's an open question what happens to downtowns with the diminution of brick & mortar retail and people coming into offices (even if the latter has reversed in favor of office work more than some had predicted). A lot of cities have ebbed and flowed over time and there's no guarantee of a specific universal future pattern whatever some individuals may wish for.
Suburban malls were really disruptive to the dry goods industry - in the sixties. Well-run stores adapted fast to needing have anchor stores at malls. I wonder how things would have played out differently if the generation that computerized their stores before the personal computer era and finessed the transition to malls had still been calling the shots at these companies during the dotcom boom.
> I wonder how things would have played out differently if the generation that computerized their stores before the personal computer era and finessed the transition to malls had still been calling the shots at these companies during the dotcom boom.
A lot of it was bad luck. Sears shut down their catalog operation in 1993, because it was losing money, but if they'd held on for a few more years they'd have been in a prime position to be Amazon.
Sears managed to miss both the opportunity to be Amazon and the opportunity to be Home Depot. At some point you have to wonder how much luck was really involved.
The US financial system discourages mature companies from making the kinds of investments necessary to stay relevant indefinitely. Maybe in a Jack-Welch-free world Sears would have become Amazon, but in our world a mature company has to maximize this quarter's profits, over and above all concerns about the future.
Well, Amazon was a venture-funded startup, so sure, but Home Depot and Lowes? Other companies managed under similar constraints. Sears, on the other hand, introduced and successfully marketed the Discover card during that era, which is still plugging along. Probably to be more like GE, which used to have a big financial services division. There's nuance here.
In the 80s, Sears was this sort of meandering store with no real identity that had some strong points (Craftsman) but had mostly mediocre clothing--they brought in Lands End but mis-managed. Were OK in appliances but big box vendors really out-competed them. And Walmart really outcompeted on discount.
I did shop at Sears at one point especially after I bought a house but they became increasingly uninteresting relative to alternatives.
There was a period where you had a lot of white flight from urban centers in the US and a lot retail moved out to the suburbs as a result. Retail pretty much follows the consumers. I'm not sure retail could have (or had the incentive to) keep the consumers in the cities.
As anecdata, when I graduated from grad school in the mid-eighties, other than Manhattan financial people, pretty much no one I knew went to live in a major city. In Massachusetts, none of the computer industry jobs were in Boston any lony longer.
Thank you, You just randomly use Trantor as an example, Give me a warm feeling :)
> Seems like they just got so much bigger that we don't even recognize them as a department store. Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, et al. are just variations on the theme.
That's not an issue of size; Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot are smaller than department stores are.
And department stores have gotten smaller over time; they used to be much bigger than they are now, which you can see by visiting a flagship store.
The experience of something like Walmart is so much degraded from, say, the Marshall Field's I grew up with in Chicago, that... no. They are nothing like classic department stores. They are more like a modern K-mart.
Even Macy's (which is what took over Marshall Field's) is a far, far inferior experience to classy classic stores like Marshall Field's.
While "a major department store in every town" is probablty a thing of the past, my impression is that at least in major European capitals, the "national" department stores are still going strong.
I make it a point to try and visit them when I can. A couple hours in Selfridges in London, Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Stockmann in Helsinki, Nordiska Kompaniet in Stockholm or Magasin du Nord in Copenhagen will tell you something about the country you're visiting, and keep you well entertained. I never buy anything outside of maybe a snack from their over-the-top food halls (most recently Moomin-shaped-gummies in Helsinki), or a sometimes surprisingly affordable lunch at one of their lunch counters (it's hard to beat the view you get along with your lunch or apéro at the top Galeries Lafayette on their terrace).
But in any case, none of these flagships have ever seemed empty or disused. On the contrary, I'm always surprised that while I might be astounded by the prices on display, there are always hundreds of local shoppers who seem to be quite happy to pay them.
In the Netherlands, most of the traditional department stores have imploded and are long gone. I live in Germany currently and the local chains here have been struggling for decades as well.
The exception to this seems to be flagship luxury stores with exclusive and expensive stuff on display. Here in Berlin that would be the Alexanderplatz Galeria and the KaDeWe on Kudamm. Both attract a lot of tourism. But the chains that own them are struggling as well. Tourists of course look but there's only so much they are going to stuff in their hand luggage when they fly back home. And they don't come back that often. The issue is that the locals ignore these stores because they can get better deals online for essentially anything sold inside those stores.
KaDeWe filed for bankruptcy and is being restructured. And the group that owns Galeria is also being restructured. And not for the first time. Most of these things have been handed off between various hedge funds for decades now and they are just milking these things for short term profit.
Online shopping killed off that market. If I need socks, I get them on Amazon.
I'm Germany, the writing is on the wall. 30y ago, there were three chains operating nationally (Karstadt, Galeria Kaufhof, Hertie, maybe there were others), each represented in bigger and even medium cities, often multiple times.
They've all merged into one chain, and the resulting company is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. Every year or two, they announce store closures. This year, 9 out of 92 were closed, fewer than planned, because each closure gets heavy local opposition. That's down from 171 in 2020.
Despite the opposition, the last time I went to one, it was a ghost town. I'm sure it wasn't prime time, but still, a weird vibe. Expensive, too.
What killed it? Online shopping and non-food specials in discounters like Aldi.
Stockmann is dying slowly. They already shed at least food and electronics in at least their other stores in other cities. Also they are constantly losing money. I would not call that going strong, just barely surviving...
I have no idea how Stockmann makes money. It's overpriced compared even to other brick-and-mortar shops, and doesn't sell anything unique.
Couple of years ago I went to Helsinki for my birthday, and got a gift card for Stockmann department store. I was so disappointed. I found the "department" for cooking things. But I did not find a section for frying pans or scissors. I found a section for Fiskars brand, and others. Fiskars had frying pans, scissors, and everything they make, up to and almost including their wood splitting axes. Other brands had their frying pans, pots, cutting boards, aprons, salt shakers, and whatever. I felt that I was supposed to decide first on what brand I wanted, and then what kind of thing. Maybe some people shop that way, but for me it certainly didn't work. Same thing with Magasin du Nord in Copenhagen. All about brands. A little bit of friendly service, but nothing special. But yes, they are busy with tourists and even some locals shopping. Glad we still have a few shops that specialize in the kind of things they sell, and can provide good service. That is the kind of shops I want to support, even at a bit higher prices.
I also enjoy El Corte Ingles in Spain.
Sadly the German department stores seem to be dying and in the eastern countries the stores died in the 90's after the fall of communism.
The switch to massive, centralized logistics, is itself a indicator of the impending death of a society. It removes the little local depots that are department stores, thus allowing supply-chain "kicks" to come in ever harder.
If you remove dampening elements, the resulting system is more agile but also more fragile and potentially self-destructive.
Go to Asia, the department store is not dead in the slightest. Though, definitely changed a lot.
That would make sense as it’s essentially a middle class novelty and their middle class is still rather novel.
For me personally they are just not a very attractive place. At best you get the grocery section and the shoe store.
Everything else is usually too expensive, doesn't offer a good variety and quality of products, or is highly targeted at teenage girls for some reason. As a guy I honestly don't know where to go shopping for clothes... I just have to hope for occasional random finds.
This isn't terribly surprising: it's an inferior business model to online sales.
They put too many obstacles between the customer and the checkout counter. The customer had to travel, potentially long distances. Then they had to wander the aisles looking for the product, compare it without any unbiased third party reviews. Then they had to travel back home. This all added friction, not to mention the overall price of the products.
All the opulence of those stores came from high operating costs, which were ultimately borne by the customer.
The sales staff expertise came with commission-based sales, which meant you could never really trust the salesperson because they had a vested interest in making a sale whether the product was good or not.
Mourning the loss of department stores is like bemoaning the loss of fancy horse carriages.
Compare that to todays model where I get to spend hours scrolling through Amazon listings of mostly the same product sold by different vendors, except occasionally there are small (but significant) differences. I don't get to see or touch the product until it arrives. For the product categories that still have recognizable brands (fewer and fewer every day it seems like) I am 100% reliant upon online reviewers, many of whom are biased and paid by the brands they are supposed to be reviewing.
Amazon makes a lot of money by showing ads on their own site, so they are incentivized to keep me scrolling through page after page of listings crammed with ads, for as long as I can tolerate before I actually do make a purchase.
I'm a fan of the seemingly randomly chosen brand names on Amazon.
unbiased third party reviews
Consumer Reports, or what is left of it?
Department stores are doing great in Mexico.
For example, the high rise Mitikah in CDMX was recently completed, and it has a mall complete with metro access, cinema and a giant department store chain called Liverpool. Pictures from the opening[0].
Another new mall, Portal Norte is under construction in Naucalpan, a suburb.[1] Not sure whether it will feature a Liverpool but I would almost be surprised if it wouldn't.
I went to Puebla last month and it has a whole neighborhood of malls called Angelopolis, including bike paths to connect them.[2] The last mall opened in 2018.[3]
I love malls because they are car free, pretty plants and have armed guards. It feels safer than being in the street.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/liverpoolmexico/posts/liverpool-m%C... [1]: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/edomex/portal-norte-es-un-mon... [2]: https://www.corazondepuebla.com.mx/descubre/parque-lineal/ [3]: https://www.e-consulta.com/nota/2017-12-14/ciudad/abre-soles...
The whole time I grew up Department Stores were not functioning like old school department stores. With the exception of the cosmetics area in Macy’s and Penny’s that’s still pretty true.
Meanwhile Best Buy is looking more like an old school department store, with sections for one vendor.
We lost our local family owned department store a few years when the CEO retired. Walking around in there was like stepping back in time.
There's an independent (ish) department store near me, Selby's, that's just about still going, somehow: https://www.elyswimbledon.co.uk/pages/james-selby
And another that is no longer so near me, Boswells, that very sadly isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boswells_of_Oxford - it was a frequent destination for homewares as a student, and then many years later, for last-minute christmas shopping as an uncle.
There is a department store in Berlin called KaDeWe that is definitely worth a visit if it is doomed. It is probably the coolest department store I've ever seen.
Absolutely. It is probably the best existing example of the classic department store (not discount store like WalMart or the current version of Macy's) that is basically already gone in the US.
I buy about 99% of what I consume online, so yeah, I would guess that old, large, and wasteful ventures will eventually die out.