The shopping experience of the department store (pleasant environment, individual attention by knowledgeable salespeople etc.) is now only to be found in upmarket boutique shops, whereas hoi polloi are being served by goods distribution systems that are essentially automated.
It's where you go to find mediocre but overpriced products. It's where your mom bought clothes for you that you didn't really like. It's where your mom still shops. The pricing structure is based on making moms feel like they got a good deal on a "sale", but actually everything is just overpriced and you can't get things with the appropriate price unless you play their dumb game. There are stories about department stores stopping this and losing lots of sales because their customers were addicted to it.
They simply failed to change to attract new generations, their buyers couldn't buy for the next generation, so they kept targeting their aging customer base until they were gone and poof, no more department stores.
You probably could do a new generation of department store targeting younger folks, but it would have to be much different. Probably won't happen.
My last department store trip was to buy socks, they didn't have what I wanted, then I paid an outrageous price for average athletic socks because I didn't have the right coupon, store card, flier, whatever. I wanted socks more than I wanted to go through the trouble of buying nicer or cheaper ones on the Internet as I was already there.
Kohls has a deal where they will give you a substantial coupon if you return something from Amazon to the store. Fuck me though, I'm not going to do the obvious scam.
I'd feel less ripped off spending $50 per sock at Hermes.
These negative comments seem way off base to me. I wonder if they have ever been to John Lewis or Debenhams?
I really miss department stores and I'm sad that they're disappearing. I have positive experiences using them.
A lot of the "branded" goods were more like the first OP said - just a print or a label with some credibility like Levis, Diesel, Calvin Klein, Armani but on indifferent quality stuff you would never see in a high-end store from the same brand - likely from the same factories filling up super-market own brands but at 1/5 the price.
The sales were also a very big thing, especially the big dates like Boxing Day, New Years or Easter - it was a common habit to only buy clothes once a year. All those sales got gamed though, they would ship-in special tat to put on rails at 70% off for Dec 26th rather than actually discount their products and then they started before Christmas, and then from "Black Friday" and then from before "Black Friday"...
Yet I still miss them too. I hate fashion/shopping but clothes are sensual, they rest against the skin for years and the difference between good and bad is materials, craftsmanship and fit whereas an online jpg of a black t-shirt and a review of "my husband says it's ok" really tells me nothing at all. I find online browsing, deliveries and returns more time-consuming and stressful than a rare shopping trip.
Or maybe that's just nostalgia!
Of course those are all either shells of their former selves or gone entirely.
Macy’s might have been the last high end department store in the US (that I’m aware of), but even 10 years ago going into their flagship Chicago location felt like walking into a K-Mart. I don’t know if I’d consider stores like Saks to truly be department stores.
It’s a shame because they took over the Marshall Field building in Chicago (another department store I forgot to mention) which is a gorgeous historic building, so it was kind of nice when Macy’s moved in and fixed it up. Last time I was there it felt like a last-mile warehouse for their online delivery business. Same thing happened to the State St. Sears store just a block away.
At the end, they all sold the same junk sourced from the same places, but with different labels sewn into them. Consumers saw no value in paying a lot extra for something they could get for a lot less somewhere else. Thus, department stores outside of big cities vanished.
The same thing happened to malls. They used to be full of locally owned businesses that offered a variety of goods. Now, they are all the same handful of stores selling the same things you can get for a lot less online. Even worse, nearly all of them offer a low rent experience because there are only a handful of stores left operating in each one. Seeing a building full of dark and closed stores screams economic decay. Who wants that experience?
Maybe there was like 1 independently owned store at my local mall even I was a kid.
It’s a ghost town now.
I was born 10 years before you and I remember in the 90s smaller malls still having one-off and quirkier shops, but many of the bigger ones were already full of the same chain stores. Eventually the smaller ones closed or followed suit, until now even the bigger ones have met the same fate, it just took longer.
There has got to be a way to get good fabrics some other way even if they cost more. Merely going to a fancier store doesn't seem to work, because as you say they tend to use lower common denominator material suppliers.
And I'm sure there are plenty of even higher-end stores at least in big cities. I'm not into "fashion" as such so can't really speak to boutiques along Fifth Avenue or wherever.
Find these things at actual boutique retail locations which are rather hard to find, or individual manufacturers direct to consumer website, and to find those... I don't know, it's not easy.
Wondering if there are technical specs for this like there are e.g. for paper with their "24 lb paper" etc.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-a-long-...
You probably won't find it unless you do a lot of work to reach out to industry contacts and are willing to cough up a lot of money.
The market just doesn't exist, most people are satisfied with Costco/Uniqlo/H&M/Old Navy clothing for 95% of their needs, and maybe Lulu/Nordstroms for something a little more fancy.
Do you feel the same about similar stores generally considered upmarket of Macys? Bloomingdales, Nordstroms (which you did mention), Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, to name a few.
YMMV but I wouldn’t consider Macys to be a “high end” store.
I don't think that applied to BHS or Debenhams - both long gone though....
>super high end designer gear
In theory this is what they're trying to project, but what it actually is around here is designers who were high end decades ago who have since dumped their quality and started selling to K-Mart. First you start selling to the rich, then you start selling to teenagers, then you put your label on anything hoping the symbol has some small value left.
This sounds like what happened to JC Penney.
This seems to have been replaced by Shein/Temu, which don't require you to get off your phone and go to a physical location.
On the plus side, we got that memorable joke in "Airplane!".
When the department store migrated to being the anchor store at the suburban mall, its role as an escapist haven was diluted by the mall's amenities and by the proliferation of boutique shops lining the corridors.
On-line shopping now offers a wider selection of goods at lower prices. And social media offers an alternative mechanism to escape their present reality.
I guess it was that way at some time in upscale neighborhoods, but what I remember as a kid is linoleum and cheap worn out commercial carpet floors, the stink of cleaning chemicals, low ceilings and dim light, and unceasing elevator music. It nonetheless kept women zoned out ambling through the halls for hours. John Romero got it right when he portrayed it in his zombie movies.
The low energy music, the spread out merchandise, the allure of "sales" that could be down the next aisle, no visible windows to the outside... these stores were engineered to get people zoned out and lose track of time. Like casinos with less bells and flashing lights.