Posted on 07/15/2023 2:25:54 PM PDT by Twotone
The department store will probably disappear in the next ten to twenty years, according to everyone who still cares about department stores. Writing in the early months of the pandemic, the New York Times predicted that lockdowns would deal the killing blow. If they didn't disappear outright, "there is expected to be an enormous reduction in the number of stores in each chain, which once sprawled across the American continent like a pack of many-headed hydras."
That sort of bleak language – "many-headed hydras" sprawling across a continent – paints a bitter picture of an institution that was once a retail innovation, a game-changing business model as economically crucial as online shopping, fulfillment centres, same-day delivery and instant downloads are today. More than that the department store was, not so long ago, a setting in movies as common and vital as today's cubicle farm or pretentious coffee shop.
By the middle of the last century the department store as shopping destination and workplace was ubiquitous, in films like Miracle on 34th Street, The Big Store, Holiday Affair, Modern Times, Safety Last!, You and Me, There Goes My Heart, The Jackpot, Our Blushing Brides, Employees' Entrance, Bachelor Mother, Who's Minding the Store?, One Touch of Venus, Every Girl Should be Married and many more, if you're just counting Hollywood films.
Strange as it sounds today, as the empty husks of department stores sit at the withered extremities of shopping malls everywhere, the department store was once regarded as not just modern and aspirational, but stood as a microcosm for society as a whole in movies – populous but stratified along class lines, from the budget shoe department in the basement to the perfume counters by the main entrance to the competitively elegant upper floors selling furs and designer dresses.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
You said the quiet part out loud.
As we move to a more thinned out white-majority nation, things that we took for granted will be gone.
Sad. And planned.
Wrong movie. Never mind....
Yeah, you and I were thinking of the “other” movie...
I didn’t know they had a Dedham store. But, they did have a store in Framingham.
That’s where I used to shop.
….
If we’re mentioning famous London department stores, we surely can’t forget Grace Brothers....
:)
The good old days....
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