Requiescat in pace, retail clothes shopping

Bon-Ton Stores, a holding company for department store chains Bergner's, Bon-Ton, Boston Store, Carson's, Elder-Beerman, Herberger's and Younkers, together consisting of about 250 department stores, has sold its assets to two liquidation firms.  All of these department stores will close down over the coming weeks, leaving cavernous holes in suburban malls across the Midwest and Northeast.

Throughout most of my adult life in the Chicago area, one of those Bon-Ton Stores chains, Carson's, competed with Marshall Field's for the title of leading department store in the region.  Both had multistory flagship stores along the city's State Street retail district.  When I got my first real corporate job and needed a wardrobe, I bought my suits, neckties and dress shirts at Carson's, where a suit salesman helped me pick things out, and an in-house tailor ensured that whatever I purchased had at least a semblance of fit.  And when my wife found it impossible to step back into her IT career when she had stepped out for 10 or so years to be a full-time mom and housewife, she sold women's shoes at Carson's for a few years before getting back into the corporate world.

But my adult life also has been, on the whole, a time of department store decline.  Marshall Field's nameplate disappeared about a decade ago when it was sold to Federated Department Stores, which turned the remaining Field's stores into Macy's stores.  Carson's State Street location closed a few years ago.  And now Macy's has announced that it is giving up the top six floors of the former Marshall Field's iconic State Street flagship space.  And the list of local department stores that are no more lengthens with the passage of years - we'd start with Montgomery Ward, and add on Wieboldt's and Goldblatt's, and I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of.  Sears is still around but maybe not for much longer.  There also are JCPenney stores throughout the Midwest, but that chain also is said to be practically on life support.

My life has been long enough now to have passed through at least a couple of generations of clothing retailing.  In the smallish city in Michigan where I grew up, the traditional downtown area was still the main retail magnet when I was a tot.  There was a lot of foot traffic on the downtown streets, and the city buses were crowded, bringing people to and from the city center.  The downtown retail district was anchored by two department stores, neither of which was  a chain, and also featured several restaurants, a couple of movie theaters and several square blocks of other shopfronts, as well as the train station that was the town's main transportation hub.  This was in a city with a population of about 50,000.

 But by then, in the mid to late 1960s, the seeds of future destruction of downtown retailing already had been planted: a new Kmart had opened on the east end of town, while a retail plaza - not quite a fully fledged shopping mall, and more resembling what we'd call today a good-sized strip mall, anchored by an A&P, a Kroger, an SS Kresge's and a Woolworth's - had opened on the western edge.  The latter development expanded a few years later when a standalone Sears store was built across the parking lot, followed across the street by what passed for a movie theater multiplex in those days - I believe it had three screens in the same building, an innovation that generated oohs and aahs.  A few years after that a proper indoor mall opened, across the street from the city limits, with an anchor department store, various smaller clothing chain stores, an Orange Julius and  4-5 movie theaters, all under the same roof and surrounded by a few acres of parking lots.

In the years that followed, Target and Walmart, as well as Meijer's, a regional chain that was like Target and Walmart with groceries, all planted themselves around the periphery of the city, and remain there today.

All this sounded the death knell of the downtown area - and to some extent, of the town as a functional entity.  While it would be an exaggeration to say that tumbleweeds blow down the downtown streets these days, it's not too far from the truth.  Just about everything I listed about the downtown retail district is gone now.  The train station is still there and is still an Amtrak stop but like intercity train travel in general, it's just a ghost of its former self now.  The department stores, and most of the other retail shops, are long gone.

 The newer retail developments that killed the downtown area chased the housing patterns, in which the middle class and upper middle class residents who didn't flee the entire region, at least fled the city limits for newer, bigger housing stock with bigger yards, lower taxes, safer neighborhoods and schools with fewer issues.   The malls and big discount retailers were newer and bigger, too, and considerably closer, parking was free, and they were warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

My personal observation is that shopping became less democratic when the downtown areas died.  The bankers and factory owners used to shop in the same department stores as the bank clerks and factory workers, and the worker might be behind the owner in the ticket line at the downtown movie palace.  For that matter, they might have worshiped at the same downtown churches.   And they might have waited side by side at the downtown bus stops, or before that, streetcar stops.  These days the buses don't run nearly as often, and the routes don't extend to the subdivisions where the owners and executives live.

This post is filled with store nameplates and other items that have virtually disappeared.  It's been decades since I've been inside a Woolworth's or an A&P, or a Montgomery Ward store. Or rode an Amtrak train.  Or gone to a downtown movie theater.  For that matter, I haven't purchased a suit in more than a decade.  Not that I need one: a few years ago, my employer closed the office where I worked.  Which was kind of okay, because some years before that, I had basically stopped going into the office.  All I need to do my job is a notebook computer, a headset and an Internet connection, and I don't collaborate at work with anyone who lives within a hundred miles of me.  Many of my coworkers are across an ocean, or even more than one.  Even former work-related habits like showering and shaving every morning have fallen by the wayside; why spend precious morning time in the shower if I can hop online a few minutes earlier in the day and catch the co-workers and business partners who are in Europe or Asia before they sign off?  It's not like anyone is going to be close enough to smell me.  A lot of days, I don't shower until before dinner.  As for the idea of tying a necktie before I start my workday: it's laughable.  I just wear whatever: jeans or dockers in the winter, shorts and a tee shirt in the summer.

These changing personal habits and patterns of daily life are bad news for shopping malls, which are anchored by department stores.  The men's departments of department stores, with their rows of suits, their stacks of dress shirts and their table displays of neckties, don't cater to my lifestyle.  Department stores want to sell high volumes of fashionable clothes to thin people.  I have very few fashion requirements and I'm not thin (or young).  If malls killed downtowns, it's entirely possible that I, and people like me, are killing malls.

I will say this for  traditional shopping: it was social.  It was a way for my wife and me (and the kids, when they were too young to leave at home by themselves) to get out of the house and do something together.  But the advent of Amazon and the zillions of other options for online shopping means I don't even need to leave my chair.  Online shopping also has put financial pressure on a traditional retail business sector that already was eking out its existence on tiny margins.  Crucially, the online stores often have been able to avoid sales taxes, which are important revenue generators for many municipalities and counties.

Downtown retail commerce was one of the building blocks of community.  Mall shopping was probably less so, but at least it was social in nature.  Today's shopping, via the web, is utterly solitary.  Perhaps it's saving us some money, but I think we've lost a lot.

So retail establishments and I live on different planets.  I wish there was a clothing store that was convenient and sold what I actually need: casual, comfortable, affordable clothes in colors and patterns that I like and that fit my non-fashionable body.  I don't love online shopping, either: I hate to buy any clothing item without being able to try it on.  So I basically have few or no clothes shopping options, and the social and communal benefits of retail shopping are dying out.  Whatever it is that we've wrought, it's not working for me.