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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

• ghaff 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          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 2y ago
            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.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          In the 80s, Sears was this sort of meandering store with no real identity that had some strong points (Craftsman) but had mostly mediocre clothing--they brought in Lands End but mis-managed. Were OK in appliances but big box vendors really out-competed them. And Walmart really outcompeted on discount. I did shop at Sears at one point especially after I bought a house but they became increasingly uninteresting relative to alternatives.
• throwup238 2y ago
  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 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.
  • pmarreck 2y ago
    Idiocracy is a rare example of something that is aging like cheese instead of milk.
    • deepfriedchokes 2y ago
      That’s clever, but I think it’s just us that’s aging. When you’re young and dumb and full of… optimism, you don’t really notice how fucked up everything and everyone is. It just hasn’t sunken in yet.
      • pmarreck 2y ago
        You sound like you could use a vacation, or just a walk in the forest, or maybe some free time, or being blunt, oral attention from another.
    • dole 2y ago
      We can only hope Terry Crews runs for president.
• buescher 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
        • t-3 2y ago
          It's also just a hassle that neither employers nor the prospective employees want to deal with. Tons of rules and regulations for the boss, very limited working hours, and the risk of an immature kid suddenly quitting without notice or throwing a tantrum. The kids have to get a work permit from their school, have to find someone willing to hire them (for probably less than the adult minimum wage), and then do the type of menial and unrewarding drudgery that drives working adults to despair. The days boomers talk about - when a kid could start work at 14 and make money worth spending and get useful experience - are long gone.
• Earw0rm 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    >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 2y ago
      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.
      • 2y ago
• tivert 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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.
    • RoyalHenOil 2y ago
      Kmart stores are still doing very well in Australia and New Zealand, with 325 locations serving a population less than 1/10th the size of the US. However, Australian/New Zealand Kmart stores have had no connection to American Kmart stores since the 90s, when Kmart Corporation sold them off to an Australian company that has managed them much more effectively.
  • lupusreal 2y ago
    Tbh Home Depot is to lumber what gas stations are to sandwiches. Actually this is unfair to gas station sandwiches, but you get the idea.
    • silisili 2y ago
      Mine is an enigma. The lumber is indoors, but is always soaking wet. It's infuriating. One time while digging through a pile of 2x4s, an employee asked if I needed anything. I sarcastically asked what time they watered the lumber each day, so I could try to come get some before then. He just deadpan said "uh...I'm not sure."
• adamc 2y ago
  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.
  • jhbadger 2y ago
    Even Macy's (which is what took over Marshall Field's) is a far, far inferior experience to classy classic stores like Marshall Field's.
• thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > 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. That's not an issue of size; Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot are smaller than department stores are. And department stores have gotten smaller over time; they used to be much bigger than they are now, which you can see by visiting a flagship store.
• melagonster 2y ago
  Thank you, You just randomly use Trantor as an example, Give me a warm feeling :)
• harimau777 2y ago
  Stores like Walmart don't provide the same level of service that department stores did. The staff at department stores were generally expected to more or less present as professionals and act as salespeople. The staff at Walmart more or less present as bored and spend most of their time stocking shelves. The staff at department stores were expected to have some level of expertise in their department. The staff at Walmart often seem to only have a vague idea of what products they sell.