[HN Gopher] Death of the Department Store
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Death of the Department Store
Author : samclemens
Score : 41 points
Date : 2024-09-24 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| baggachipz wrote:
| https://archive.is/slouE
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| jewayne wrote:
| 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| throwup238 wrote:
| 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| jerlam wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Sorry not the window displays, but display cases: the
| sales help.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| "Captain Peacock, are you free?"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_Being_Served%3F
| ztetranz wrote:
| You beat me to it. :)
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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.
| jasode wrote:
| _> 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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.
| dwaite wrote:
| 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.
| devilbunny wrote:
| 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.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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.
| vector_spaces wrote:
| 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.
| RGamma wrote:
| 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.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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>
| buescher wrote:
| >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.
| tivert wrote:
| > 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.
| buescher wrote:
| 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.
| adamc wrote:
| 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.
| ScienceKnife wrote:
| I buy about 99% of what I consume online, so yeah, I would guess
| that old, large, and wasteful ventures will eventually die out.
| atourgates wrote:
| 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 apero 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.
| tpm wrote:
| 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.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| 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.
| mullingitover wrote:
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| 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.
| willismichael wrote:
| unbiased third party reviews
|
| Where can I find these unbiased third party reviews?
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| 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...
| openrisk wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
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