Most New Yorkers my age have three or 30 Macy’s stories. When I came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, department stores were already well past their national peak, but for many of us, they were the place where most major shopping trips began. , or was a place to end. Macy’s “Miracle on 34th Street”” was our Macy’s features its iconic wooden escalator, Thanksgiving parade, and magical animatronic window displays every Christmas. It was here that I did my annual school shopping, bought my first cocktail dress, and had my first makeover. For a middle-class kid like me, it was a fountain of memories and a factory of milestones.
Of course, those days are long gone. I now live in Washington, D.C., and the last Macy’s I visited was a deserted mall outpost surrounded by late-night stores and CBD vending machines. I didn’t even go to Macy’s. I was picking out glasses at LensCrafters in the store. When Macy’s announced this week that it would close 150 stores over the next three years, I wondered if that would be one of them, and how long the Herald Square mothership would hold out.
Information on which stores are closing is difficult to find, but it speaks to how important department stores have become to American life. The only reason anyone is paying attention to this story seems to be that the store in San Francisco’s Union Square is in jeopardy. This got conservative attention on social media, not because they wanted to shop there, but because the store’s closure added to a larger narrative about out-of-control shoplifting and urban disorder. be.
That theory is not completely wrong. Stores are closing down due to shoplifting in urban areas, and Union Square seems to have been particularly hard hit. Macy’s employees told the San Francisco Standard that theft is rampant. But while shoplifting is clearly bad for business, this isn’t primarily a story about urban mismanagement. This is a story about the power of technology that created the department store and the power of technology that is now destroying it.
Department stores rode the rails into town, and so did modern cities. The railroad brought cheap goods from all over the country to town, and the people who bought them. Streetcars made it convenient to work and shop from miles away from where you lived. These trends promoted the classic prewar urban shape: stately residential neighborhoods, a downtown near the train station, and a shopping district filled with office blocks and major department stores.
Railroads made large-scale sales a reality, allowing department stores to do things that traditional retail stores could not imagine. They bought in bulk, sold at prices that smaller stores couldn’t match, sent trend spotters to Paris, and translated those designs into large-scale orders for the immigrant-driven ready-to-wear industry. They brought together the entire emerging urban middle class under one roof – the young secretary in the bargain basement, the doctor’s wife upstairs, surrounded by finer dresses, but all in the same place. , they buy the same kind of things and form their preferences on the same display. . There’s no more efficient way to shop for furniture, baby clothes, housewares, new ties, and more all in one building, then enjoy a leisurely lunch in the store’s tea room.
In their heyday, department stores accounted for more than 10 percent of all retail spending and were near the forefront of successive technological and cultural transformations. They were among the first to install elevators, escalators, electric lights, and air conditioning, making buildings larger and allowing shoppers to stay longer. Along with sustaining the ready-to-wear revolution, they invented bridal registries and provided women with some of the first high-paying jobs.
After World War II, as automobiles and interstate highways moved consumers away from downtowns, department stores followed Americans to the suburbs and became the nucleus of new shopping malls. And when the city’s downtowns became chic again, they were still housed in beautiful old buildings and reflected all the charm they had embodied over the years. However, department stores didn’t make much sense anymore. Now there’s a better way to view 1,000 products in less time. Please open your computer.
Whatever local conditions may be exacerbating a particular store’s woes, the fundamental problem is that too many technological advances have rendered Macy’s and its ilk obsolete. Shoplifting and disorder are serious problems, but if you still want to shop at Macy’s, they can be addressed by hiring more staff, investing in anti-theft technology, and pressuring local governments to add police patrols. is. But those investments probably won’t pay for themselves because we don’t want to shop there.
If San Francisco authorities had maintained better order in Union Square, they could have held out Macy’s and other retailers a little longer. But it’s hard to see how it could have done much more than delay the inevitable, especially as remote work has drawn professionals out of city centers. Physical department stores are an important part of a city’s history, and they are important to me personally. But apart from pleasant memories, they are unlikely to take center stage in our future.