Death of the Department Store
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
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.
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.
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.
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'd recommend you go to Illum instead next time you are in Copenhagen.
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.
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.
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.
I did shop at Sears at one point especially after I bought a house but they became increasingly uninteresting relative to alternatives.
They had had a catalog operation and by some accounts class-leading (for the time) information systems. They had Prodigy and more or less successfully pivoted into making Prodigy an ISP. Undoubtedly they knew a lot of things Amazon had to figure out from scratch. The notion that Amazon was a great invention rather than just great execution is kind of risible.
Flip it around - what could Amazon have done with 1500 marginally profitable retail stores and a storied brand name? Sears kept the party going for a couple decades after the dotcom era, and still exists, so they weren't on the brink of folding back then. Note also that Sears' failure was not preordained: other brick-and-mortar retailers from the era have survived and even prospered.
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.
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.
These days if an adult wants to get even a basic unskilled labor job it takes weeks or months to get through the application and review process and the temp-to-hire run-around that follows it. The result is mostly the same for employers, they ultimately only hire people they feel they can count on and the extra overhead just represents a few more people in HR for them. But for employees, the lengthy process makes switching jobs a stressful ordeal of getting tangled in inhuman bureaucracy while your need to pay rent looms.
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.
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.
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.
Same reason people are mean on the Internet
There's a local chocolate shop that has lots of turnover because they hire college girls to staff them most of the time. But the owner is on top of it, keeping good records, and about two weeks before Valentine's Day, they call me and say, Devilbunny, this is so-and-so from Chocolate Shop By You, you bought some chocolate-covered strawberries last year, would you like to order again this year? Yes, here's my credit card, and I'll pick them up after 3 pm on the 13th. Thank you, see you then. I walk up to the window, pick them up, bring them home, and say happy Valentine's. It's really the only thing she wants (I get her flowers but not roses - why be so cheesy when every other flower is like, half-price?) specifically. They make it easy to spend money with them instead of someone else. I don't have to wait more than a minute - they have a dedicated window for prepaid orders. That's service, and it's worth the small premium.
Back when I was a rich tech guy, the local Nordies would hold all the Ugg styles in my daughter's size and the next up for my daughter when the season started because the sales lady that worked with my daughter and wife had a relationship with them. It was an AMAZING shopping experience for my daughter. She was seen by the sales person. She felt special. And my daughter had some issues that made her feel less than special. But here was this beautiful sophisticated sales person not only seeing her, but helping her in areas she felt poor self worth in. And if you make my daughter feel special then I'm coming back to you year after year. But if I go in and am a random person to you, and you are to me, why pay Nordies prices?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/business/sears-edward-lam...
Probably one of the worst business moves in the 2000s.
The normal term is "acculturated".
> Costco/Walmart ... There is very little effort made to present the goods, it's all about high volume and the lowest possible price.
I can see that perspective, but it's actually quite wrong. Costco (and similar) put significant effort into buying and presenting high quality goods. Their value proposition is that they don't need on-hand staff with relative expertise trying to match the consumer to product.
A century-plus of data on consumer buying habits have allowed them to engineer an environment where their value proposition is that they are only presenting to the customer good quality for price items. The limited, rotating, selection is Costco (and similar) putting their relative expertise on the shelf and there's tremendous money spent by these companies figuring out how to do this.
The "warehouse" environment is just another method to drive down costs in addition to eliminating pushy salespeople. Costco offers you usually one or two choices for an item, maybe for a few months, then it rotates out. Which one do you buy? It doesn't matter, they're both going to be of reasonable quality and value - a salesperson would try to direct a customer the same way. The stock rotation creates scarcity, but a good salesperson would let the consumer know "this sale is only valid for the next few days!" to create the same sense of urgency.
These companies have huge analytics departments figuring out where the dairy should be in relation to the car batteries, and for how long they should have the special display for fresh shrimp running.
Costco wants consumers to feel like they are getting wholesale prices. But the actual wholesale experience is completely different. Actual wholesale buying experiences are in some ways closer to the traditional buying experience. You're usually dealing with salespeople, hired by the originating company, who try to align you with the long tail of their product offering. Big wholesale markets even advertise that you get to meet salespeople and negotiate buying terms.
That's a subjective statement. Costco's brands and products have been so consistently poor (and overpriced), we switched to Sams Club.
The system is eating itself and we are at the point in this new cycle where it's showing.
I don't mean Costco haven't put thought into what they're doing, but there is no attempt to create a perception of aesthetic value - indeed, quite the opposite to communicate their no-frills value of "the most stuff for the least money".
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.
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.
One time while digging through a pile of 2x4s, an employee asked if I needed anything. I sarcastically asked what time they watered the lumber each day, so I could try to come get some before then. He just deadpan said "uh...I'm not sure."
It has the most bottom of the barrel staff and a lumber yard that sells... something... that barely qualifies as lumber. It is the epitome of modern American capitalism. It exists solely because it exists. No one would ever see a current Home Depot when visiting someone and say 'oh my god, please replace our current store(s) with this!'. But department stores used to offer experiences where people said that.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Or maybe that's just nostalgia!
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.
It’s a shame because they took over the Marshall Field building in Chicago (another department store I forgot to mention) which is a gorgeous historic building, so it was kind of nice when Macy’s moved in and fixed it up. Last time I was there it felt like a last-mile warehouse for their online delivery business. Same thing happened to the State St. Sears store just a block away.
At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them. Consumers saw no value in paying a lot extra for something they could get for a lot less somewhere else. Thus, department stores outside of big cities vanished.
The same thing happened to malls. They used to be full of locally owned businesses that offered a variety of goods. Now, they are all the same handful of stores selling the same things you can get for a lot less online. Even worse, nearly all of them offer a low rent experience because there are only a handful of stores left operating in each one. Seeing a building full of dark and closed stores screams economic decay. Who wants that experience?
Maybe there was like 1 independently owned store at my local mall even I was a kid.
It’s a ghost town now.
I was born 10 years before you and I remember in the 90s smaller malls still having one-off and quirkier shops, but many of the bigger ones were already full of the same chain stores. Eventually the smaller ones closed or followed suit, until now even the bigger ones have met the same fate, it just took longer.
There has got to be a way to get good fabrics some other way even if they cost more. Merely going to a fancier store doesn't seem to work, because as you say they tend to use lower common denominator material suppliers.
And I'm sure there are plenty of even higher-end stores at least in big cities. I'm not into "fashion" as such so can't really speak to boutiques along Fifth Avenue or wherever.
Find these things at actual boutique retail locations which are rather hard to find, or individual manufacturers direct to consumer website, and to find those... I don't know, it's not easy.
Wondering if there are technical specs for this like there are e.g. for paper with their "24 lb paper" etc.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-long-...
You probably won't find it unless you do a lot of work to reach out to industry contacts and are willing to cough up a lot of money.
The market just doesn't exist, most people are satisfied with Costco/Uniqlo/H&M/Old Navy clothing for 95% of their needs, and maybe Lulu/Nordstroms for something a little more fancy.
Do you feel the same about similar stores generally considered upmarket of Macys? Bloomingdales, Nordstroms (which you did mention), Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, to name a few.
YMMV but I wouldn’t consider Macys to be a “high end” store.
I don't think that applied to BHS or Debenhams - both long gone though....
>super high end designer gear
In theory this is what they're trying to project, but what it actually is around here is designers who were high end decades ago who have since dumped their quality and started selling to K-Mart. First you start selling to the rich, then you start selling to teenagers, then you put your label on anything hoping the symbol has some small value left.
This sounds like what happened to JC Penney.
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.
On the plus side, we got that memorable joke in "Airplane!".
When the department store migrated to being the anchor store at the suburban mall, its role as an escapist haven was diluted by the mall's amenities and by the proliferation of boutique shops lining the corridors.
On-line shopping now offers a wider selection of goods at lower prices. And social media offers an alternative mechanism to escape their present reality.
I guess it was that way at some time in upscale neighborhoods, but what I remember as a kid is linoleum and cheap worn out commercial carpet floors, the stink of cleaning chemicals, low ceilings and dim light, and unceasing elevator music. It nonetheless kept women zoned out ambling through the halls for hours. John Romero got it right when he portrayed it in his zombie movies.
The low energy music, the spread out merchandise, the allure of "sales" that could be down the next aisle, no visible windows to the outside... these stores were engineered to get people zoned out and lose track of time. Like casinos with less bells and flashing lights.
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.
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.
Well of course, it was "the experts". You know... "THE experts".
I wish I had $20 for everytime the media parrots something without every questioning it. And the masses nod mindlessly and think, "Yes, of course."
In this case... Landlords, banks and real estate agents - all with an interest in higher === better - are the likely candidates for "the experts".
Apparently you think that number is meant to encourage engineers who just landed a 200k FAANG job to buy a McMansion to get up to 30%.
It's quite exactly the opposite: it's usually given as an upper limit to prevent people from getting houses they can't afford.
And it's increasingly unrealistic for low-income people in HCOL areas because even the cheapest available housing is more than 30% of their income.
As for who came up with it: it was originally an observation of what people were typically paying, which in the 60s became a limit for the price of public housing. And at that time it was 25%, changed to 30% in the 80s.
Source: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
You missed the obvious sarcasm.
You missed the bit about the mindless media repeating it and not asking how legit is.
The point about the banks, etc is that ALL those "experts" have incentives to get people to buy more than they can afford.
Come on man, the math was all there... just take a moment to add it up.
I was saying that it IS legit.
And that your idea that it is propaganda to "get people to buy more than they can afford" is clueless and privileged.
If 30% is housing, and 20% is healthcare (which keeps going up), and inflation is eating up more budget... What's left? Where is that increase in income coming from?
The point is 30% of income is a false god. It's for fools. It's at best a fax machine.
Again, it is a very, very privileged position where you can suggest that people should just spend less than those 30%, because it shows your income is big enough that a smaller proportion of it is still enough to afford something.
What part of housing is priced such that 30% is the defacto baseline for most people, don't you understand? Individuals don't set the prices, the market does. And fyi home sellers and landlords love the phrase "what the market will bear".
Sure, if you have two six figure incomes in your household you can come in at 25% or 20%, but everyone else... 30% would be a God send.
Where and when did I suggest people just spend less? Again, I repeat, that 30% is a number used by people who... Wait for it... Make more money from higher prices. It's not the families setting that bar.
We're done here. You're so intent on picking a fight that you're ignoring everything I'm saying. This is not what I come to HN for. Thanks. Good night.
Exactly. So why do you think the number is relevant in how actual prices are determined?
> Again, I repeat, that 30% is a number used by people who... Wait for it... Make more money from higher prices. It's not the families setting that bar.
And again, I repeat that is simply not true.
> We're done here. You're so intent on picking a fight that you're ignoring everything I'm saying.
You are describing your own behaviour.
The thing is that you're never going to convince most people to give up living in the place they want to live in, they'll stick around until the bitter end, and that means you end up with people earning 10 pounds an hour living in Zone 2 London in some dickensian shoebox.
It’s funny, the way you’ve said it is a common framing, but I rarely see the opposite, equally valid framing: no responsible person should take a job whose wage is less than 3.3x their housing cost. If companies don’t pay enough, the responsible thing is for no one to take the job.
I guess what it comes down to is what comes first for you. For me I've always figured, well, if I'm close to my limit (e.g. I only have a few months savings) then nothing matters other than to build that buffer.
Some people seem to focus more on things like the short term (e.g. do I like where I live, does it have things I enjoy doing, etc etc). There's nothing wrong with that, we all will wake up one day and realise we're getting older and it's a bit late to do certain things now, but there's a balance somewhere.
It is not something to strive for. It is offered as a warning.
Like how the US suggests 50 mSv/year for occupational radiation exposure. That doesn't mean you should go out and purposefully expose yourself to radiation to hit 50 mSv. You still want to minimize exposure to the greatest extent possible. The figure indicates the danger zone where if you see yourself drawing near, you need to get off the path you are going down.
The "30% of your salary" rule for housing stems from U.S. federal housing policy. It was first introduced in 1969 under the Housing and Urban Development Act as part of the government's effort to define affordable housing.
25%-30% was a benchmark used in housing assistance programs to determine eligibility for federal aid. If households spent more than 30% of their income on rent, they were considered "rent burdened" and might qualify for subsidies.
https://www.hud.gov/about/hud_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_and_Urban_Development_...
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> person who came up with the “3 months salary for a ring” rule
That was good old De Beers. In the 1980s, they promoted the idea that spending two months' salary on a ring was appropriate, which later increased to three months in some markets.
Example of their marketing campaigns: https://i.etsystatic.com/17868656/r/il/2bc5ab/1933571085/il_...
If you remove dampening elements, the resulting system is more agile but also more fragile and potentially self-destructive.
Where I live now, it takes 15-20 minutes to drive to the grocery store, so it's only practical to shop once per week. Shopping is a big chore and a fight with traffic, not a nice walk. It means I need to dedicate more of my apartment to food storage and more of my time to meal planning. It's certainly not an efficiency gain for me personally. On the plus side, the large store does have 73 different flavors of potato chips.
For example, here there's Tesco. But there's huge tescos, tiny ones in towns, tiny ones outside of towns, subsidiary companies like onestop that exclusively are smaller shops (we tend to call them "corner shops" here).
If anything, a larger central logistics "engine" behind it should make it much easier to pop up a new shop somewhere as most of the issues are solved and there's experience in doing it.
It does however make things more boring.
A society. The old society. To be replaced by a new society that doesn't work like the old one.
The new society is evolving towards humans that behave like frogs: They're born in a certain area and don't roam too far from that original spot because everything they could ever want is available at their fingertips or only a hop away.
To be fair, this is the primary factor why frogs (anura) have "survived" with few changes for about 250 million years. Innumerable creatures have come and gone in that time yet frogs are still around. Not a bad evolutionary strategy if you ask me.
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.
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 am pretty sure amazon/aliexpress model will be dying too at some point, because of the search nightmare, inexistent warranty and unreliable reviews.
unbiased third party reviews
They're not great either these days. They're pretty much in the business of affirming their readers preexisting viewpoints with a little bit of actual content sprinkled in.
I find that reading amazon reviews worst first looking for failure modes to gauge a product's limits is more productive.
1. Astroturfing 2. Redditor incompetence.
As it turns out, Reddit doesn’t know shit about a lot of large purchases. Reddit thinks that pottery barn makes some of the best furniture and that I should buy from them, rather than negotiating and buying from a top furniture maker like Hancock and Moore.
I ended up with a furniture set which is at least 3X better for the same price by ignoring what idiot redditors told me to do.
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...
Meanwhile Best Buy is looking more like an old school department store, with sections for one vendor.
It seemed to start changing in the 80s when the "Mallrats" style malls came to prominence followed by the big box stores in late 80's/90's.
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.
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.
Are you, perhaps, thinking of discount department stores? Groceries are quite commonly found there, but they are something quite different.`
Or we will all eventually just dress like steve jobs, just pairs of the one legal compliance shirt and pants combo available for sale.
Really men's clothing right now is just a game of doing whatever gay men do but, like, 5 years later. So that means in a year or two men's clothes will be back to thick pant legs, flares, and maybe even pleats.
Don't worry, the cropped shirts and booty shorts was just a phase.
Personally I am waiting for the long earings to catch on outside of gay men.