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What’s in store

The pandemic threatens devastation to the retail industry that built America

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Many promoted their enterprises as morally improving. Wanamaker, who also formed the world’s biggest Sunday school, described his stores as “beautiful fields of necessities”. With steepling cast-iron structures and acres of plate-glass, flooding them with light, (1)they were America’s answer to Europe’s cathedrals.

Such stores’ impact on cities surpassed even their (2)footprints. They feminised and commercialised them. They fostered civic identity as well as consumerism. To be from Philly was to know and shop at Wanamaker’s. Thereby the great downtown stores became synonymous with the forces that had fuelled their growth, industrialisation, urbanisation, democratisation. To this day famous names such as Macy’s, which retains its giant flagship store in Herald Square, Manhattan, retain an exalted place in the culture: over 3m tur out to watch its annual parade.

This is despite the fact that most Macy’s and other department stores are now in the suburban malls that began mushrooming after the second world war. They are less loved. Where Holly wood invariably depicts downtown stores as places of innocence and Santa Claus, it portrays malls as anonymous and prone to zombie attack. Those contrasting views are linked-the suburban expansion having devastated many cherished downtown areas. But the contrast is also unjust. Most Americans seem to associate malls with relaxation and family-a truth your columnist learned while staying on American bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. (3)All the bigger ones had (4)a rudimentary mall, selling fast food, sportswear, cheap carpets and Celtic swords, where the soldiers loved to saunter and unwind. Even conventional malls build social capital in a way it is hard to imagine e-commerce ever could.