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The demise of the department store is largely due to them squandering their biggest advantage which was customer service and customer experience. When I was yo

The demise of the department store is largely due to them squandering their biggest advantage which was customer service and customer experience. When I was younger, I remember the quality of service you got from a department store. The assistants would help you shop, make suggestions, were knowledgable about the products etc. You also got to know the assistants if you were a repeat customer in the smaller stores. This model largely disappeared in the 80s when it became a race to the bottom and about maximizing ROI. As soon as this happened the out of town supermarkets won as they could always go lower. If there is any hope for the high street it's in focusing on the customer experience rather than trying to compete on price.

Rd6n6 5y ago
I used to love chapters in Canada as somewhere you could go to sit and browse books casually in comfy chairs, and just loiter. I spent a ton on books back then. Now those chairs and tables are almost entirely gone. It doesn’t make sense, they can’t compete on convenience or selection, so why toss out the in-person shopping experience advantage?
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Because they need the extra space as they slowly turn into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The last Chapters I visited was about 1/3 housewares.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > sit and browse books casually in comfy chairs, and just loiter So ... actually you were not a customer? Yet you wonder why bookstores have declined, or even disappeared. As KS says, "You can't make this shit up."
bsder 5y ago
> The demise of the department store is largely due to them squandering their biggest advantage which was customer service and customer experience. And inventory. And different inventory. It used to be that each department store had different fashions. As such, there was a difference between each chain. However, once they all started selling the same Chinese crap, there was no differentiation so why buy ono anything other than price. And department stores used to have inventory and more than one of each size. How many times do you need to go into a department store and find that they don't have your size before you quit going in at all?
- Spivak 5y ago
  I wouldn’t blame China for sudden demand for extremely cheap goods. They’re just responding to the same market incentives like everyone else. You see this race to the bottom in every market segment not just the ones that are typically supplied by Chinese manufacturers.
  - wesleywt 5y ago
    I would say they forced the Chinese goods on us rather than giving us a choice between good quality and cheap. In my opinion it was not market forces but corporate forces that made the choice for us.
- l33tman 5y ago
  China is a billion people economy, it's a strong opinion to say that "everything out of china is the same crap". You can order anything for manufacture there at any quality point and nobody forces a dept store to order the exact same clothes from the exact same factory (out of tens of thousands factories) as the neighbour store. I'd attribute it to laziness. I mean, they might actually DO check where the neighbour store orders from and order the same.. :) Then again all the clothing stores where I live have inventory and different sizes and definitely sell different things than the other stores so I guess this trend is not universal hopefully..
- tellersid 5y ago
  I also suspect we forget how in the "good ol days" that you would go into a department store and they wouldn't have your size even before the internet and cheap goods. I absolutely remember this with sneakers a few times. Oops, sorry that size is out of stock. Go to a different store, oops sorry that size is out of stock. Could go to 3 different locations and still come home empty handed. To believe department stores use to always have every size is simply not reality IMO.
robbedpeter 5y ago
The fundamental trouble seems to be that market has collectively decided that the cost of good customer service is a value consumers are willing to lose in exchange for cheaper goods. The endless consolidation of profitable businesses into ever larger corporations transforms places of business into inhuman constructs where comfort, care, and other aspects of good service get buried by unexpectedly perverse incentives: Avoiding litigation Maximize profit Higher costs of tracking employee misconduct leading to ineffective internal accountability. Once you have thousands of people acting as customer service agents, no amount of culture or rules or management can cure the natural distribution of human populations. People will find ways to do just above the minimum required effort to appear satisfactory. Employee productivity becomes subject to pareto distributions with a tiny number of high quality workers and a majority being merely average. Throw in the modern "gig" culture where nobody stays for longer than 3 or 4 years, and good customer service becomes very expensive and vanishingly rare. Capitalism, as she is wrote, contains fundamental structural incentives that keeps accountability to the consumer priced out. Society has imposed the burden of product safety (and other tangible effects) through legal means, but social niceties and good service are harder to legislate. Rebuilding capitalism into something far more human friendly will be one of the grand philosophical and economic challenges in the near future.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  I went to John Lewis for some blinds, thinking that they were more expensive but the service would be good. Turns out that they outsource it, and that it took three weeks to get someone out to measure my widows, three weeks to get the blinds made, and three weeks after they came back to book in a fitting. The next time round I went with a small local shop and had the whole thing done in less than a week. I'm not paying extra for worse service.
  - philjohn 5y ago
    The only thing I get from John Lewis is electricals these days - their 5 year warranty on TV's is definitely a nice plus point.
sgt101 5y ago
>If there is any hope for the high street it's in focusing on the customer experience rather than trying to compete on price. Which the ma & pa stores that are taking smaller units provide - the problem is the big units that the department stores vacate; only supermarkets & discounters want them. I think that the big hope for the highstreet is the coming correction in commercial property - eventually rents must fall, when they do the highstreet should repopulate.
dannersy 5y ago
I have recently moved from the United States to Sweden and was surprised that basically every store has great service. It was quite refreshing to go to a tech/PC hardware store and have the person behind the counter not only know what I was talking about, but actually be experts in the products they sold. So many times in the past I would go to BestBuy just to see if they had what I needed (I assumed the experience would be negative). When I got there, I'd have trouble finding what I needed, assumed correctly that the employee would have no idea what I was talking about, then I would find that they didn't have it or it was priced higher than the convenience was worth of having it right now. To be clear, I don't blame the kid trying to help because they almost always genuinely wanted to help, but it was BestBuy. Something they are doing doesn't bring me back. I have no idea how well these stores in Sweden are doing, but it reminds me of the old experiences at a Sears where when you wanted a power tool, the rep behind the counter could give informed recommendations based on what it was you were trying to do. I suspect it has a lot to do with Sweden paying these folks a living wage. I scoff at the idea of going back to working retail in the US, but here it seems like there is actual expertise and more career options for it. So much to say, I'm surprised how much the service aspect of the experience in stores matters and actually see myself leveraging in store service more in the future since Amazon isn't as convenient as it is in the US. Actually, I'd argue this may be preferable since it seems common that the employees can actually help me choose instead of wading through hundreds of fake online reviews.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Amazon and Uber are solutions to American problems. I guess for example Home Depo killed off specialist shops with expertise? Then you can aswell buy the cheap crappy tools on Amazon.
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    Yet neither are struggling to find customers in Europe.
    - jfengel 5y ago
      That seems to be the American way. We have a genius for the things that feel too easy or simplistic, and then exporting them. It's the same with our food, our movies, even our politics. People dismiss it even as they embrace it.
tellersid 5y ago
It also went too far though as well. I remember I stopped shopping at Circuit City because you couldn't walk 10 feet without someone asking you if you need help finding something. If you wanted to browse the CDs you would have to tell 3 people you didn't need any help and were just browsing. Walk to a different section, "no thanks I don't need help, just looking." It was an utterly ridiculous shopping experience.

Rd6n6 5y ago

I used to love chapters in Canada as somewhere you could go to sit and browse books casually in comfy chairs, and just loiter. I spent a ton on books back then. Now those chairs and tables are almost entirely gone. It doesn’t make sense, they can’t compete on convenience or selection, so why toss out the in-person shopping experience advantage?

Waterluvian 5y ago
Because they need the extra space as they slowly turn into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. The last Chapters I visited was about 1/3 housewares.
redis_mlc 5y ago
> sit and browse books casually in comfy chairs, and just loiter So ... actually you were not a customer? Yet you wonder why bookstores have declined, or even disappeared. As KS says, "You can't make this shit up."

bsder 5y ago

> The demise of the department store is largely due to them squandering their biggest advantage which was customer service and customer experience. And inventory. And different inventory. It used to be that each department store had different fashions. As such, there was a difference between each chain. However, once they all started selling the same Chinese crap, there was no differentiation so why buy ono anything other than price. And department stores used to have inventory and more than one of each size. How many times do you need to go into a department store and find that they don't have your size before you quit going in at all?

Spivak 5y ago
I wouldn’t blame China for sudden demand for extremely cheap goods. They’re just responding to the same market incentives like everyone else. You see this race to the bottom in every market segment not just the ones that are typically supplied by Chinese manufacturers.
- wesleywt 5y ago
  I would say they forced the Chinese goods on us rather than giving us a choice between good quality and cheap. In my opinion it was not market forces but corporate forces that made the choice for us.
l33tman 5y ago
China is a billion people economy, it's a strong opinion to say that "everything out of china is the same crap". You can order anything for manufacture there at any quality point and nobody forces a dept store to order the exact same clothes from the exact same factory (out of tens of thousands factories) as the neighbour store. I'd attribute it to laziness. I mean, they might actually DO check where the neighbour store orders from and order the same.. :) Then again all the clothing stores where I live have inventory and different sizes and definitely sell different things than the other stores so I guess this trend is not universal hopefully..
tellersid 5y ago
I also suspect we forget how in the "good ol days" that you would go into a department store and they wouldn't have your size even before the internet and cheap goods. I absolutely remember this with sneakers a few times. Oops, sorry that size is out of stock. Go to a different store, oops sorry that size is out of stock. Could go to 3 different locations and still come home empty handed. To believe department stores use to always have every size is simply not reality IMO.

robbedpeter 5y ago

The fundamental trouble seems to be that market has collectively decided that the cost of good customer service is a value consumers are willing to lose in exchange for cheaper goods. The endless consolidation of profitable businesses into ever larger corporations transforms places of business into inhuman constructs where comfort, care, and other aspects of good service get buried by unexpectedly perverse incentives: Avoiding litigation Maximize profit Higher costs of tracking employee misconduct leading to ineffective internal accountability. Once you have thousands of people acting as customer service agents, no amount of culture or rules or management can cure the natural distribution of human populations. People will find ways to do just above the minimum required effort to appear satisfactory. Employee productivity becomes subject to pareto distributions with a tiny number of high quality workers and a majority being merely average. Throw in the modern "gig" culture where nobody stays for longer than 3 or 4 years, and good customer service becomes very expensive and vanishingly rare. Capitalism, as she is wrote, contains fundamental structural incentives that keeps accountability to the consumer priced out. Society has imposed the burden of product safety (and other tangible effects) through legal means, but social niceties and good service are harder to legislate. Rebuilding capitalism into something far more human friendly will be one of the grand philosophical and economic challenges in the near future.

AndrewDucker 5y ago
I went to John Lewis for some blinds, thinking that they were more expensive but the service would be good. Turns out that they outsource it, and that it took three weeks to get someone out to measure my widows, three weeks to get the blinds made, and three weeks after they came back to book in a fitting. The next time round I went with a small local shop and had the whole thing done in less than a week. I'm not paying extra for worse service.
- philjohn 5y ago
  The only thing I get from John Lewis is electricals these days - their 5 year warranty on TV's is definitely a nice plus point.

sgt101 5y ago

>If there is any hope for the high street it's in focusing on the customer experience rather than trying to compete on price. Which the ma & pa stores that are taking smaller units provide - the problem is the big units that the department stores vacate; only supermarkets & discounters want them. I think that the big hope for the highstreet is the coming correction in commercial property - eventually rents must fall, when they do the highstreet should repopulate.

dannersy 5y ago

I have recently moved from the United States to Sweden and was surprised that basically every store has great service. It was quite refreshing to go to a tech/PC hardware store and have the person behind the counter not only know what I was talking about, but actually be experts in the products they sold. So many times in the past I would go to BestBuy just to see if they had what I needed (I assumed the experience would be negative). When I got there, I'd have trouble finding what I needed, assumed correctly that the employee would have no idea what I was talking about, then I would find that they didn't have it or it was priced higher than the convenience was worth of having it right now. To be clear, I don't blame the kid trying to help because they almost always genuinely wanted to help, but it was BestBuy. Something they are doing doesn't bring me back. I have no idea how well these stores in Sweden are doing, but it reminds me of the old experiences at a Sears where when you wanted a power tool, the rep behind the counter could give informed recommendations based on what it was you were trying to do. I suspect it has a lot to do with Sweden paying these folks a living wage. I scoff at the idea of going back to working retail in the US, but here it seems like there is actual expertise and more career options for it. So much to say, I'm surprised how much the service aspect of the experience in stores matters and actually see myself leveraging in store service more in the future since Amazon isn't as convenient as it is in the US. Actually, I'd argue this may be preferable since it seems common that the employees can actually help me choose instead of wading through hundreds of fake online reviews.

rightbyte 5y ago
Amazon and Uber are solutions to American problems. I guess for example Home Depo killed off specialist shops with expertise? Then you can aswell buy the cheap crappy tools on Amazon.
- ryanlol 5y ago
  Yet neither are struggling to find customers in Europe.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    That seems to be the American way. We have a genius for the things that feel too easy or simplistic, and then exporting them. It's the same with our food, our movies, even our politics. People dismiss it even as they embrace it.

tellersid 5y ago

It also went too far though as well. I remember I stopped shopping at Circuit City because you couldn't walk 10 feet without someone asking you if you need help finding something. If you wanted to browse the CDs you would have to tell 3 people you didn't need any help and were just browsing. Walk to a different section, "no thanks I don't need help, just looking." It was an utterly ridiculous shopping experience.