The slow death of the department store

I don't even know what they would tell Gimbel's

News story on my phone: Macy’s to close 150 stores. Really. Do they have 150 stores? Let’s check . . . ah. They have 500 stores at present. That’s fewer than Penneys, and I thought Penneys had evaporated completely a few years ago. It’s certainly better than Sears, which now has 11 stores, down from 1,345,394,390 at its peak, I think. You think of department stores like you think of newspapers: a Gibraltar-sized institution that now consists of a few rocks and pebbles.

As it happened I was at a mall with a Macy’s on a Tuesday afternoon, killing time before my phone-store appointment. I was going to trade in one thin magical device for another. Everything was better and upgraded and more powerful, and my life would change not a whit. I’ll have to transfer my pictures, of course, including the one of my parents sitting about 30 feet away in this very mall, having coffee at a cafe over half a century ago.

Southdale, 1964

Even though the mall was enclosed, the cafe tables had umbrellas, so you could pretend you were in an outdoor cafe. Howling bitter winter outside, eternal summer in here. The Mall. The perfect peaceable prosperous place.

I’ve been coming here for decades. I can tell you what came before Macy’s: Dayton’s, the big department store chain of the cities. The name on the box you loved to see at Christmas. Long gone. Someone bought the rights to reproduce the old logo and put it on shirts and mugs, and these relics have a particularly potent popularity with the boomers. They’re recalling their youth, of course; getting fitted for school clothes with Mom, checking out the racks in the teen section for bell-bottoms or torso-hugging crepe tube tops, or ghastly shoes with thick plastic wedgie heels. Getting the first suit for a grandparent’s funeral.

It is an ordinary and banal emotion. I was young then, listening to Kung-Fu Fighting, and now I’m not! Okay grampa let’s get you back to your room and you can tell me allll about dung-flu fighting on the way.

It was kung-fu fighting. And let me tell you despite what you may have heard everybody was not kung-fu fighting. It was limited to very specific localities.

Anyway. The original downtown flagship store closed years ago. It’s been rehabbed into a space that was supposed to be a new downtown destination, with cafes and shops and bustle and of course vibrancy, but the pandemic and work-from-home put paid to that. The original mall Dayton’s store at Southdale was razed and rebuilt in a mall renovation. It is a beautiful store, with Moderne-style mythical scenes in the ceiling above the elevator core. But then came the mergers and name changes and acquisitions . . . and Dayton’s was gone. Now the space is occupied by Macy’s.

What the hell did Macy’s want with us? We didn’t want anything to do with them.

So they’re closing 150 stores. Would the Southdale store shutter?

I thought: you know, I don’t care if they close. It’s junky and understaffed. The upstairs Marketplace, a holdover from its original days as a Dayton’s, is a depressing echo of its old status, when it was a showplace for clever appliances, kitchen implements, delicious food, sumptuous desserts. Now makes Dollar Tree look like Williams Sonoma. You expect to encounter men hunched over a trash-can fire while cats loudly copulate in the empty bath towel department. The men’s casual wear department has the bustle and verve of a graveyard on a grey November day. (And like a graveyard, it might have my pants size, but it will take a lot of work to find it.) The only part of the store that maintains its glamour is the makeup counter, a bright and glittery fiefdom staffed by bored and well-put-together women who wait for someone to come along and ask to be daubed or painted. The men’s formal-wear department once had an army of hunched men with tape-measures around their neck, and pieces of chalk in their hand, ready to mark up your suit for tailoring. Now there’s one guy who will ring you up, but that’s it. The tailors were let go. Eh, that’s okay they probably went to Substack they’ll be fine

Okay, let’s check the list . . . ah. No, Southdale is not on the list.

For now. But eventually, probably, it will close. And then will there be a great lamentation from the middle-aged people who remembered coming here in the Oughts and buying something for the Prom. The last gasp of retail nostalgia, perhaps. No one will have misty memories of adding something to their Amazon cart - unless that, too, goes away some day. Hard to imagine Amazon going the way of Woolworth’s, but I’m sure my parents, sitting under the bright umbrella in a cafe in the first great mall, thought this new idea would never fade. It was wonderful! People loved it!

Indeed they did. Until they didn’t.