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What’s in store

The pandemic threatens devastation to the retail industry that built America

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Oline ones are thriving but unloved. The biggest, Amazon, is battling damaging headlines over its patchy service and treatment of workers. Traditional retailers are meanwhile looking into the abyss. This week J.Crew filed for bankruptcy. JCPenney, whose low-cost innovations helped it survive the Depression and proved inspirational to one of its employees, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, is also struggling under a heavy debt load. Macy’s, America’s biggest department store by sales, lost its place in the S&P 500 last month while all its 775 stores were closed. It reopened 68 this week but expects them to do around 15% of their regular trade: more a death rattle than a recovery. By one estimate, over 300 department stores could go under by the end of next year.

(1)Losing your custom overnight will do that. Yet bricks-and-mortar retailers were struggling long before the virus struck, against e-commerce and other stresses, including Donald Trump’s tariffs, which many decried. The president was never going to turn to them as Herbert Hoover did to his friend J.C. Penney in 1929. Yet a weary sense of inevitability about legacy retail’s demise should not obscure (2)how traumatic a development it is. Many of America’s shuttered cities were shaped by department stores: they would not have developed as they did, or at all, without them. Nor would the consumer economy; nor elements of American democracy.

The emergence of palatial, multi-line stores in New York, Chicago and other big cities in the mid-19th century was a first-world phenomenon, pioneered in Europe. Yet merchants such as Wanamaker, (3)who opened his first department store in Philadelphia in 1876, added American characteristics. Their stores tended to be bigger than European ones and packed with extravaganzas; Wanamaker’s flagship store boasted (4)2m square feet and the world’s biggest (5)organ. America’s retailers also poured their huge profits into advertising, which shored up the free press. And they were more egalitarian than Europeans, especially to women, as both customers and employees. (6)By 1918 42% of Macy’s buyers were women.

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