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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't really compare items if they are separated out by brands and not all together in a common 'pans' area. Being able to compare is a huge part of going to an actual physical store to look at the items. They are removing one of the huge reasons to go to the physical location.
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...
Nordiska Kompaniet is no longer a proper department store, but a collection of boutiques. This has been the case for a couple of decades. The real department store that's left in Stockholm is Åhléns, but it's very mid-market, not fancy.
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
> 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.
Subjective indeed. I also like Sam’s, but mostly because they are essentially the same as Costco but with slightly different versions of things. While Costco has some stinkers, I still rely on them as a reliable source for generic products.
When talking about department stores people in Europe will likely mean something like Selfridges in London, not Costco or Walmart. A vast difference in service and presentation.
The wholesalers I'm thinking of are the "cash and carry" warehouse variety - Makro, Booker and so on.
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".
Quality companies can't survive on making 'limited, rotating selection'. Costco's model only works when piggybacking off of a long term model capable of sustaining the suppliers between 'limited Costco' manufacturing runs by selling products continually.
The system is eating itself and we are at the point in this new cycle where it's showing.
>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.
The self-employed expert still have self interests. That kitchen builder generally get's discounts/kickbacks from Tom's appliance based on volume. So you are backed to 'commissioned sales staff' just in a way less opaque manner.
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.
As I understand it, that was one of the advantages of department stores. When you went to the jewelry section, for example, to buy your spouse an anniversary gift, the person working there was often the same person who recommended the jewelry you bought last anniversary.
In theory. Most staff at classic department stores didn't last quite that long.
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.
In the old world where people knew each other, knew this was a lifelong sales relationship, and we saw each other at the grocery store, church, it worked pretty well. In the modern world where we are as anonymous to each other in person as online it doesn't really.
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?
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.
Growing up there was a outdoors/sports store called Galyans where every department was staffed by people who actually participated in that activity. It was an amazing experience both because you were buying equipment from someone who actually knew what you needed and because talking to them was a great way to, for lack of a better term, start getting encultured into the community built around the hobby you were starting.
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.
From what I read, he theorized that internal competition was the only way to incentivize efficiency rather than being propped up by the rest of the company. Essentially, made each division compete for funding, which naturally lead to undermining and backstabbing— for example, the retail division started undercutting Kenmore with other brands— and eventually it all collapsed.
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.
You can still see (and play!) the “Big Piano”. It was relocated after FAO closed and is now in the flagship Macy’s in NY. It’s looking kinda beat up these days, perhaps even symbolic.
> 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.
Home Depot and Lowes are absolutely department stores. You may be too young to remember what it was like before they existed (and yes there are long gone proto-bigboxes like Pergament that were popular in the the 1970s), but previously every trade had a specific store. Lumberyards carried lumber, and that's about it. Maybe some 10d common nails if you were lucky. In fact, you would go to one store for your dimensional lumber, a different store for your plywood and paneling, a different store for paint, a different store for hardware, a different store for appliances, electrical, plumbing, tools, draperies, flooring (tile or carpet? separate stores...) lighting fixtures, and then you had to go to a totally different garden center for all your outdoor needs. Now they are all departments within the same store.
Home Depot smells like a men's shelter/halfway house (it took me a couple trips to realize, why do I hate this familiar smell and not want to come back to this place).
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.
Mine is an enigma. The lumber is indoors, but is always soaking wet. It's infuriating.
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."
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.
There was something to be said for being able to get jobs fast because the relationship and obligations between employees and employers was so minimal, when you could "give the boss a firm handshake" and start working that day, then find a new job just as fast if your boss turned out to be an abusive prick.
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.
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.
It's not considered "sales" nor "commission" but I would imagine that hiring attractive people as servers (restaurant waitstaff) who rely on tips is a similar concept.
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.
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.
They would have just had to become Amazon (inventing/creating everything involved with that) while being saddled with the overhead of 350,000 employees and 1,500 dying retail stores. And no Jeff Bezos at the helm.
Well, Amazon did Amazon, right? So it's not impossible to be Amazon.
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.
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.
> 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.
Stores like Walmart don't provide the same level of service that department stores did. The staff at department stores were generally expected to more or less present as professionals and act as salespeople. The staff at Walmart more or less present as bored and spend most of their time stocking shelves. The staff at department stores were expected to have some level of expertise in their department. The staff at Walmart often seem to only have a vague idea of what products they sell.
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.
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.
The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh. The escapist experience was paid for by pricing the goods to cover the overheads.
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.
> The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh.
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 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.
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 think that what you're describing is more like the "failure mode" of these stores - nowadays they are basically selling crap with labels, but in the 80s and 90s I don't think that was the case. It'd never be the same quality as a top end boutique of course, but it wasn't tat either.
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.
These are gone from many markets due to the race to the bottom. They cut the quality out of clothes so they could make more per item without paying attention to the simple fact that quality is what brought people into the store.
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?
> At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them
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.
You go to specialty stores depending on what you're looking for. They may not be really high-end but I don't have a real argument with brands like Patagonia for the most part for things like outdoor clothing. For dress clothing, something like Joseph Banks really isn't bad and you get tailoring as needed.
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.
You have to be able to determine the quality yourself.
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.
I think I somewhat know how to do this, i.e. feel a fabric and gauge its thickness and weave. What I don't know is how to search for it. What do you filter to get the thicker, densely woven cotton like polo shirts used to be made of in the 80s, instead of thin see-through half synthetic stuff so common today?
Wondering if there are technical specs for this like there are e.g. for paper with their "24 lb paper" etc.
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.
I think the 80s was a big period of change from what malls were to what malls are now. My beard is only half grey, I wasn’t there for that.
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.
I’m curious why you don’t consider Saks a department store.
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.
As a kid I loved getting the Sears catalog before Christmas. I would pour over that thing looking for something I might be able to convince my mom to get me for Christmas. Thank you for the pleasant memory :)
That’s good to hear. The impression I get is that Macy’s outside of NYC is basically gone, in spirit if not physically.
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.
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?
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.
In major US cities, there is sometimes one department store that meets this qualification, like San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, but even those are in decline.
>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.
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.
I'd do that with my brothers until invariably some old miserable bitch would make a snide remark about it to my mother, who would be "MORTIFIED!" and drag us out to the building and make us wait in the car the rest of the day. Fun times...
There are people who do argue that using your phone/laptop instead of getting to a physical location is good for the environment, since quite some people would instead use their car for this.
If you're not driving or riding to the store, someone is driving to your house to deliver a package. Sure, it's likely more economical but on an individual level, it's another reason to sit on your ass.
My mom is a big fan of Kohl's. I casually mentioned I needed to restock on pants for the winter while visiting her last month, so she gave me her Kohl's coupon stack. Turns out that 40% off sale only was on certain brands. At least I liked the pants I bought.
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.
(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.
> I don’t know who came up with the “30% of your salary” rule for housing
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.
> 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.
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.
It's not a rule, it's guidance to say - if you spend more than this you're probably being irresponsible and living outside your means.
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.
> if you spend more than this you're probably being irresponsible and living outside your means
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.
From my perspective that's the action you take in order to avoid the problem but it's kind of the same thing.
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.
Sure, and some of those things were made up thousands of years ago and have proven to work well since.
Others were made up in the last 30 years by global corporations trying to extract maximum profit as fast as possible, future be damned.
You have no idea how clueless and privileged that idea is.
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.
30% is legit? Oh come on now. We're seeing that it's not. We're seeing that if that's the baseline, the starting point, then it's too easy / tempting for many to go over that. When that happens, it gets normalized and that's a free pass for leadership / politicians to not address the issue.
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.
What part of "it's an upper limit, not a baseline" do you not understand? And an upper limit that people exceed not by choice but because there is no cheaper housing available. And the causes for that have absolutely nothing to do with the number.
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.
> Individuals don't set the prices, the market does.
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.
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.
Maybe department stores are very different in the US, but I'm not sure how much social benefit we gain from having a buffer in the supply chain of expensive clothes, cosmetics and homewares.
Any inventory warehouse can choose how much inventory to stock. If it maintains, say, 1 month of monthly demand instead of 3 months, it is more likely to run out of inventory during a supply chain shock. The fragility of the system is more related to this aspect than to anything else.
Impending death based on what? There’s plenty of boutiques that cater to things above “the necessities”, like groceries or clothes. Why do we need mom and pop grocery? It’s not efficient. Take a look around at the amount of thrift or boutique clothings shops, they’re small but large in number and it’s not even including purely online boutique. People who cry about the death of the corner store have insane tunnel vision.
I loved living around the corner from a small grocery store. It made it possible to pick up ingredients and fresh vegetables for dinner on the walk home from the train or when taking the dog for a walk with my wife. It was a bit more expensive, but that was offset by the fact that buying only what you need for the next couple of days leads to less spoilage and waste. Overall, our food budget has remained about the same since we had to move away.
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.
How centralised the logistics are doesn't seem to me to be all that related to the size and number of the shops.
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.
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.
I think the point of the op was that the size of systemic shocks increases to the point where societal collapse is inevitable. Centralization decreases resilience and at a certain point the system can’t handle the standard changes the system will experience.
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.
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.
I always got the feeling that their car statistics were so divorced from reality that they’re recommendations are worse than useless: they seem to genuinely recommend outright bad cars now.
That doesn’t work at all anymore for many products for two reasons:
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.
Sure, Japan is probably one of the largest exceptions in all of Asia. I wasn't making a absolute statement, more relative. So in general directional terms, I guess I was thinking more so of China/India (that are individually over 10x Japan's population) and have a middle class consumer for only a couple decades now. Many other countries are closer to mirroring China than Japan and some don't even apply here because they don't have a significant middle class yet. I thought it would be obvious that China/India is most of Asia.
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.
I remember the early/mid 70's when I was a little kid and department stores with multiple floors, elevators and escalators and Santa. They were nice. But buying something at the time was en event (at least for my family) too. A small microwave was hundreds of dollars (in 1970s dollars). A TV was a giant purchase.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Groceries seem quite unusual for a department store, with their focus on quality and luxury (or at least the illusion of), and food being commoditized.
Are you, perhaps, thinking of discount department stores? Groceries are quite commonly found there, but they are something quite different.`
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've come to the conclusion that men will eventually just be naked in the future. Every time i go to shop for clothes in the USA the men's section has shrunk and the women's has gotten larger.
Or we will all eventually just dress like steve jobs, just pairs of the one legal compliance shirt and pants combo available for sale.
The men's clothes are still larger than they were in the 80s.
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.
I don't think the booty shorts phase with gay men has ended yet, still very much see it in places like ptown. (however I do acknowledge that ptown is a bit of a bubble...)
Personally I am waiting for the long earings to catch on outside of gay men.
I'm told there is a growing trend of men wearing "women's" clothing. Perhaps the eventual outcome is that we will all wear the same thing (whatever women consider to be fashionable)?
I'm a 6'4" man and bought two pairs of trousers from the women's section recently. They fit perfectly but granted are what would have been marketed as "plus size" in the past. Would encourage everyone who doesn't mind a less utilitarian look to try it. There's a much, much wider variety of pieces and it's cheaper too - especially for more formal styles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And? Fiskars frying pans are pretty good!
You can't really compare items if they are separated out by brands and not all together in a common 'pans' area. Being able to compare is a huge part of going to an actual physical store to look at the items. They are removing one of the huge reasons to go to the physical location.
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.
Nordiska Kompaniet is no longer a proper department store, but a collection of boutiques. This has been the case for a couple of decades. The real department store that's left in Stockholm is Åhléns, but it's very mid-market, not fancy.
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.
> Magasin du Nord in Copenhagen
I'd recommend you go to Illum instead next time you are in Copenhagen.
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
> 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.
https://youtu.be/RDd10-poMm8
> Costco (and similar) put significant effort into buying and presenting high quality goods.
That's a subjective statement. Costco's brands and products have been so consistently poor (and overpriced), we switched to Sams Club.
Subjective indeed. I also like Sam’s, but mostly because they are essentially the same as Costco but with slightly different versions of things. While Costco has some stinkers, I still rely on them as a reliable source for generic products.
When talking about department stores people in Europe will likely mean something like Selfridges in London, not Costco or Walmart. A vast difference in service and presentation.
The wholesalers I'm thinking of are the "cash and carry" warehouse variety - Makro, Booker and so on.
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".
Quality companies can't survive on making 'limited, rotating selection'. Costco's model only works when piggybacking off of a long term model capable of sustaining the suppliers between 'limited Costco' manufacturing runs by selling products continually.
The system is eating itself and we are at the point in this new cycle where it's showing.
>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.
The self-employed expert still have self interests. That kitchen builder generally get's discounts/kickbacks from Tom's appliance based on volume. So you are backed to 'commissioned sales staff' just in a way less opaque manner.
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.
As I understand it, that was one of the advantages of department stores. When you went to the jewelry section, for example, to buy your spouse an anniversary gift, the person working there was often the same person who recommended the jewelry you bought last anniversary.
In theory. Most staff at classic department stores didn't last quite that long.
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.
Iterated prisoner's dilemma vs regular
Same reason people are mean on the Internet
In the old world where people knew each other, knew this was a lifelong sales relationship, and we saw each other at the grocery store, church, it worked pretty well. In the modern world where we are as anonymous to each other in person as online it doesn't really.
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?
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.
Best Buy always pushed this. All the salespeople seem uninterested, uninformed hard to find, and all they want to do is sell the warranty/accessories.
Good! There’s no way they would be an expert on TVs anyway. I go elsewhere for information about TVs. The store is for simply purchasing the TV.
Yes, we now all trust the random internet 'experts' whose profit motives we have zero knowledge or insight into.
Real experts can provide good explanations that can be independently verified by oneself and by a large community.
> 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.
Growing up there was a outdoors/sports store called Galyans where every department was staffed by people who actually participated in that activity. It was an amazing experience both because you were buying equipment from someone who actually knew what you needed and because talking to them was a great way to, for lack of a better term, start getting encultured into the community built around the hobby you were starting.
REI in the US is sort of like that.
> talking to them was a great way to, for lack of a better term, start getting encultured into the community
The normal term is "acculturated".
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.
Lampert failed at the personal profiting part big time:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/business/sears-edward-lam...
Probably one of the worst business moves in the 2000s.
From what I read, he theorized that internal competition was the only way to incentivize efficiency rather than being propped up by the rest of the company. Essentially, made each division compete for funding, which naturally lead to undermining and backstabbing— for example, the retail division started undercutting Kenmore with other brands— and eventually it all collapsed.
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.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAO_Schwarz>
You can still see (and play!) the “Big Piano”. It was relocated after FAO closed and is now in the flagship Macy’s in NY. It’s looking kinda beat up these days, perhaps even symbolic.
> 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.
Home Depot and Lowes are absolutely department stores. You may be too young to remember what it was like before they existed (and yes there are long gone proto-bigboxes like Pergament that were popular in the the 1970s), but previously every trade had a specific store. Lumberyards carried lumber, and that's about it. Maybe some 10d common nails if you were lucky. In fact, you would go to one store for your dimensional lumber, a different store for your plywood and paneling, a different store for paint, a different store for hardware, a different store for appliances, electrical, plumbing, tools, draperies, flooring (tile or carpet? separate stores...) lighting fixtures, and then you had to go to a totally different garden center for all your outdoor needs. Now they are all departments within the same store.
Home Depot smells like a men's shelter/halfway house (it took me a couple trips to realize, why do I hate this familiar smell and not want to come back to this place).
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.
Where is the Home Depot you’re talking about?
Tbh Home Depot is to lumber what gas stations are to sandwiches. Actually this is unfair to gas station sandwiches, but you get the idea.
Mine is an enigma. The lumber is indoors, but is always soaking wet. It's infuriating.
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."
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.
"Captain Peacock, are you free?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Being_Served%3F
You beat me to it. :)
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.
There was something to be said for being able to get jobs fast because the relationship and obligations between employees and employers was so minimal, when you could "give the boss a firm handshake" and start working that day, then find a new job just as fast if your boss turned out to be an abusive prick.
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.
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.
It's not considered "sales" nor "commission" but I would imagine that hiring attractive people as servers (restaurant waitstaff) who rely on tips is a similar concept.
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.
You sound like you could use a vacation, or just a walk in the forest, or maybe some free time, or being blunt, oral attention from another.
We can only hope Terry Crews runs for president.
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.
They would have just had to become Amazon (inventing/creating everything involved with that) while being saddled with the overhead of 350,000 employees and 1,500 dying retail stores. And no Jeff Bezos at the helm.
Well, Amazon did Amazon, right? So it's not impossible to be Amazon.
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.
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.
> 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.
Stores like Walmart don't provide the same level of service that department stores did. The staff at department stores were generally expected to more or less present as professionals and act as salespeople. The staff at Walmart more or less present as bored and spend most of their time stocking shelves. The staff at department stores were expected to have some level of expertise in their department. The staff at Walmart often seem to only have a vague idea of what products they sell.
Thank you, You just randomly use Trantor as an example, Give me a warm feeling :)
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.
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.
The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh. The escapist experience was paid for by pricing the goods to cover the overheads.
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.
> The department store was a place where women could escape their houses or apartments and spend time in surroundings That were much more expensive and attractive. Marble floors, decorated walls, mirrors and glass, finely finished display cases, and quality goods all contributed to a pleasant environment. Seasonal changes in decoration and products kept the experience fresh.
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 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.
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 think that what you're describing is more like the "failure mode" of these stores - nowadays they are basically selling crap with labels, but in the 80s and 90s I don't think that was the case. It'd never be the same quality as a top end boutique of course, but it wasn't tat either.
Or maybe that's just nostalgia!
Tat? Tattoo?
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.
These are gone from many markets due to the race to the bottom. They cut the quality out of clothes so they could make more per item without paying attention to the simple fact that quality is what brought people into the store.
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?
> At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them
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.
You go to specialty stores depending on what you're looking for. They may not be really high-end but I don't have a real argument with brands like Patagonia for the most part for things like outdoor clothing. For dress clothing, something like Joseph Banks really isn't bad and you get tailoring as needed.
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.
You have to be able to determine the quality yourself.
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.
I think I somewhat know how to do this, i.e. feel a fabric and gauge its thickness and weave. What I don't know is how to search for it. What do you filter to get the thicker, densely woven cotton like polo shirts used to be made of in the 80s, instead of thin see-through half synthetic stuff so common today?
Wondering if there are technical specs for this like there are e.g. for paper with their "24 lb paper" etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staple_(textiles)
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.
I was born in the late 90s and I only remember malls with big brand stores.
Maybe there was like 1 independently owned store at my local mall even I was a kid.
It’s a ghost town now.
I think the 80s was a big period of change from what malls were to what malls are now. My beard is only half grey, I wasn’t there for that.
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.
I’m curious why you don’t consider Saks a department store.
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.
As a kid I loved getting the Sears catalog before Christmas. I would pour over that thing looking for something I might be able to convince my mom to get me for Christmas. Thank you for the pleasant memory :)
The Macy's at 34th street in NYC is the flagship and it's still going strong. I went last week, lots of nice stuff.
That’s good to hear. The impression I get is that Macy’s outside of NYC is basically gone, in spirit if not physically.
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.
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.
In major US cities, there is sometimes one department store that meets this qualification, like San Francisco, Chicago, or New York, but even those are in decline.
>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.
"only stock super high end designer gear"
I don't think that applied to BHS or Debenhams - both long gone though....
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.
Yes, me too. And no phone or anything to occupy your time. Just behave and follow your mom step after step for hours.
I used to do the thing with my siblings where we hide in the clothes rack. Made the trips to Mervyns a little more tolerable.
I'd do that with my brothers until invariably some old miserable bitch would make a snide remark about it to my mother, who would be "MORTIFIED!" and drag us out to the building and make us wait in the car the rest of the day. Fun times...
> 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
Getting outside is good for your health. If you go to the store by bicycle, it's also good for the environment.
That was my point ? If you just use TEMU then it’s another exercise to sit in your ass all day.
There are people who do argue that using your phone/laptop instead of getting to a physical location is good for the environment, since quite some people would instead use their car for this.
If you're not driving or riding to the store, someone is driving to your house to deliver a package. Sure, it's likely more economical but on an individual level, it's another reason to sit on your ass.
My mom is a big fan of Kohl's. I casually mentioned I needed to restock on pants for the winter while visiting her last month, so she gave me her Kohl's coupon stack. Turns out that 40% off sale only was on certain brands. At least I liked the pants I bought.
>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.
> There are stories about department stores stopping this and losing lots of sales because their customers were addicted to it.
On the plus side, we got that memorable joke in "Airplane!".
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.
> I don’t know who came up with the “30% of your salary” rule for housing
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_...
> 30% is way too high.
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.
It's not a rule, it's guidance to say - if you spend more than this you're probably being irresponsible and living outside your means.
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.
> if you spend more than this you're probably being irresponsible and living outside your means
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.
From my perspective that's the action you take in order to avoid the problem but it's kind of the same thing.
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.
Everything in every society is just "made up".
Sure, and some of those things were made up thousands of years ago and have proven to work well since. Others were made up in the last 30 years by global corporations trying to extract maximum profit as fast as possible, future be damned.
> I don’t know who came up with the “30% of your salary”
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".
You have no idea how clueless and privileged that idea is.
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...
Huh? I didn't say it was legit. Actually...
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.
Oh wow. You missed my point completely.
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.
30% is legit? Oh come on now. We're seeing that it's not. We're seeing that if that's the baseline, the starting point, then it's too easy / tempting for many to go over that. When that happens, it gets normalized and that's a free pass for leadership / politicians to not address the issue.
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.
What part of "it's an upper limit, not a baseline" do you not understand? And an upper limit that people exceed not by choice but because there is no cheaper housing available. And the causes for that have absolutely nothing to do with the number.
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.
You're naive.
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.
> Individuals don't set the prices, the market does.
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 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.
Maybe department stores are very different in the US, but I'm not sure how much social benefit we gain from having a buffer in the supply chain of expensive clothes, cosmetics and homewares.
Any inventory warehouse can choose how much inventory to stock. If it maintains, say, 1 month of monthly demand instead of 3 months, it is more likely to run out of inventory during a supply chain shock. The fragility of the system is more related to this aspect than to anything else.
Capitalism reinvents communism: many such cases.
Impending death based on what? There’s plenty of boutiques that cater to things above “the necessities”, like groceries or clothes. Why do we need mom and pop grocery? It’s not efficient. Take a look around at the amount of thrift or boutique clothings shops, they’re small but large in number and it’s not even including purely online boutique. People who cry about the death of the corner store have insane tunnel vision.
I loved living around the corner from a small grocery store. It made it possible to pick up ingredients and fresh vegetables for dinner on the walk home from the train or when taking the dog for a walk with my wife. It was a bit more expensive, but that was offset by the fact that buying only what you need for the next couple of days leads to less spoilage and waste. Overall, our food budget has remained about the same since we had to move away.
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.
How centralised the logistics are doesn't seem to me to be all that related to the size and number of the shops.
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.
> the impending death of a society
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.
I think the point of the op was that the size of systemic shocks increases to the point where societal collapse is inevitable. Centralization decreases resilience and at a certain point the system can’t handle the standard changes the system will experience.
My guess is that People travel way more than in the last 50 years and department stores have nothing to do with experiencing a diverse life.
The humans in WALL-E didn't move too far, either...
For a certain interpretation this was also true of the old society. The definition of "too far" is subjective.
People are more mobile than ever. Everyone is flocking to big cities.
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 buy a lot online and almost never on amazon, preferring shops focusing on a specific domain.
I am pretty sure amazon/aliexpress model will be dying too at some point, because of the search nightmare, inexistent warranty and unreliable reviews.
He did say "inferior business model". Not inferior customer experience.
I'm a fan of the seemingly randomly chosen brand names on Amazon.
Consumer Reports, or what is left of it?
>Consumer Reports
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.
I always got the feeling that their car statistics were so divorced from reality that they’re recommendations are worse than useless: they seem to genuinely recommend outright bad cars now.
searching the product name and appending "reddit" to the query
That doesn’t work at all anymore for many products for two reasons:
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.
https://archive.is/slouE
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.
Novel where? I don't think this is a good explanation. Japan has had department stores for the better part of the last century.
Sure, Japan is probably one of the largest exceptions in all of Asia. I wasn't making a absolute statement, more relative. So in general directional terms, I guess I was thinking more so of China/India (that are individually over 10x Japan's population) and have a middle class consumer for only a couple decades now. Many other countries are closer to mirroring China than Japan and some don't even apply here because they don't have a significant middle class yet. I thought it would be obvious that China/India is most of Asia.
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.
I remember the early/mid 70's when I was a little kid and department stores with multiple floors, elevators and escalators and Santa. They were nice. But buying something at the time was en event (at least for my family) too. A small microwave was hundreds of dollars (in 1970s dollars). A TV was a giant purchase.
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.
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...
Well, Mexico is doing everything US does but with a 30 to 50 years delay so that is not really suprising.
Mexico is doing everything the US did of what? This isn't an explanation, but just a random idea.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson%27s_(department_store)
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.
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.
Groceries seem quite unusual for a department store, with their focus on quality and luxury (or at least the illusion of), and food being commoditized.
Are you, perhaps, thinking of discount department stores? Groceries are quite commonly found there, but they are something quite different.`
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.
kadewe was amazing for finding brands that only dinky boutiques would carry in north america, only store outside of japan i've seen carry undercover
I've come to the conclusion that men will eventually just be naked in the future. Every time i go to shop for clothes in the USA the men's section has shrunk and the women's has gotten larger.
Or we will all eventually just dress like steve jobs, just pairs of the one legal compliance shirt and pants combo available for sale.
The men's clothes are still larger than they were in the 80s.
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.
I don't think the booty shorts phase with gay men has ended yet, still very much see it in places like ptown. (however I do acknowledge that ptown is a bit of a bubble...)
Personally I am waiting for the long earings to catch on outside of gay men.
I'm told there is a growing trend of men wearing "women's" clothing. Perhaps the eventual outcome is that we will all wear the same thing (whatever women consider to be fashionable)?
I'm a 6'4" man and bought two pairs of trousers from the women's section recently. They fit perfectly but granted are what would have been marketed as "plus size" in the past. Would encourage everyone who doesn't mind a less utilitarian look to try it. There's a much, much wider variety of pieces and it's cheaper too - especially for more formal styles.
Jeans that are acceptable and T-shirts made of whatever "ring-spun Egyptian cotton" that is cheap enough to feel like polyester and probably is
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I buy about 99% of what I consume online, so yeah, I would guess that old, large, and wasteful ventures will eventually die out.