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Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

Probably not much different in the US. We used to have Montgomery Ward, Nordstrom, JCPenney, Kmart, and Sears in my town. All gone.

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From watching the Dead Mall series on YouTube [0], this has been going on for a long time, too, "even" in malls (i.e. where rents should be lower, and the audience generally more willing to actually buy items than in a general downtown type area).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNz4Un92pGNxQ9vNgmnCx...

The irony is that those merchants were the Amazon of their day, bringing a wider range of choices and quality to cities they served.

Yep, there were free-trade laws to protect independent grocers and the chain department stores set up in suburban areas which took away business from independent inner-city department stores (typically family-owned).

Interestingly, I think the implosion of chain department stores in the US is linked far more to growth of online sales (even though, online sales are far higher in the UK) and overbuilding of retail capacity. The UK is seeing demographic/infrastructure changes with greater suburbanization.

Stores that are in out-of-town retail parks, more like US strip malls, are actually doing very well. One example is Next, a big clothes retailer, they used to have a lot of high-street/inner-city locations but moved stores out-of-town, and they are doing quite well (they also have a very nice business online, they even do third-party fulfilment from their warehouses). And there are lots of new chains focused around retail parks that are growing very fast.

Online is definitely a factor that is shrinking the overall offline retail market. But a lot of these department store chains started having problems in the 2000s, and just imploded in the 2010s. The comparison with the US is very interesting though.

Another reason for the implosion in US department stores was the poor decision about twenty years ago to make all stores owned by Federated Department Stores (which included Macy's, May, Marshall Field, Hecht's, and others in different parts of the country) to be rebranded all as "Macy's". That may have saved them a bit of money, but it destroyed consumer loyalty. People from the Chicago area had fond memories of Marshall Field -- they had no connection to NYC's Macy's. Same thing for Hecht's in the Washington DC area and others.

I wonder if that also garbled market position messaging.

I seem to recall the store that became Macy's here was called three or four different names in the last 20 or 30 years.

Back when it was Broadway or Robinson-May, the store was in the "higher half" of the market, closer to Dillard's than Penney's, but now the gap is smaller. They can't rely on the (abandoned) name and positioning, and they didn't do a good job of positioning themselves as premium after the rebrand.

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