8 thoughts on “Retail Apocalypse – Not Just Amazon

  1. OUCH, that figure for Pittsburgh is fugly, as is the map for SoCal's Inland Empire. Guess I'll have to get used to ordering things online and not seeing them in person and on my body until I get them and then having to return them if I don't like them.

    Remind me, how convenient is this new system again?

    1. The problem is that it's more convenient, so long as there is a still a store where you can go look at the stuff before ordering it on-line for less.

  2. "The root cause is that many of these long-standing chains are overloaded with debt—often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms."
    Yup. Look at Guitar Center, for example. Most individual stores are profitable, but paying back the PE firm that ate them (looking at YOU, Bain Capital) is draining them dry. We recently lost our J.C. Penney store in Bishop CA. Been there over 50 years, the building was paid for, and they had a captive clientele. Rumor is, Dollar General bought the building. There's progress for ya.

  3. Map depicts some deep red for Columbia SC, and orange for Wilmington NC/ Myrtle BeachSC. I was in Wilmington one weekend last month for a friend's family reunion and visited a Belk store for the first time in ages.
    The sales register where I was rung up in the "department" I was shopping, included on its cluttered counter a real dinosaur of a computer maybe a sales processing unit, complete with floppy disk drive and the dingy beige color so characteristic of 90s models. Proven not very stain resistant and had acquired a signature pallor of outmoded-ness.

  4. Sorry!

    And BTW, isn't retail dying more because financial finaglers are over-leveraging it than because people aren't eating food or wearing clothes anymore?

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