Extinction of the Giants

The retail world has changed, and this Christmas season has illustrated this most clearly.

Gift shopping has always played a part in the holiday. It used to be done in a landscape of department stores.

In the Victoria of my childhood, the Meccas were The Bay, Eatons, Woodwards, and Woolco. A big Sears opened very near my home, followed by Zellers, and K-Mart, and finally Walmart.

Then the closures started, brought on by financial collapse. One-by-one, they fell. Woolco, Woodwards, K-Mart, Eatons, Zellers, and now Sears.

Only two of them remain.

The Bay was founded back in 1670, and has weathered many storms. In its current incarnation, it caters to a high-end market with its reputation for quality. They seem to be hanging on, but it is only a matter of time. A casual walk-through will show a clientele of older citizens. It is not a place where the young go to shop. An aging customer base is one that can only shrink.

Walmart is the other survivor, and the only one with a future that seems bright. They are known for bullying unsustainably low prices from overseas suppliers, and painfully underpaying employees. Their only redeeming feature is that they are able to provide customers with low prices.

So where has the business gone that used to support all of these varied department-store giants.

For a time, malls seemed to be the future of shopping.

They started out as mere attachments to the giants, but long ago developed serious clout of their own. They became the main shopping experience, with the department stores as mere afterthoughts. Although still called the, “anchor stores,” in a mall, the department giants became increasingly irrelevant and less frequented.

Big stores still exist at malls, but are often specialized, such as a Best Buy, or Indigo Books.

But even this isn’t written in stone. The large non-department store chains are suffering, too, as are the malls themselves.

The business is more and more going to other suppliers than department stores, or to malls.

The current big success story is with merchandise being delivered to the home, and to other non-traditional types of retail.

Let’s say you want to buy a new item, and have a tight budget. You could buy it at the cheapest price you find in a store, or you can go online to try and do better. Within a few minutes you will be able to locate a significantly lower price, and can have the item quickly delivered to your door.

Or lets say you are after something expensive, such as an iPad. They are available many places, or online, but if you live in a big city you might decide to pick one up from an actual Apple Store. The staff there are truly expert in everything that Apple handles, and if you manage to stump them, they will instantly grab one of the even more highly-qualified “Apple Geniuses.”

Apple Stores are sometimes in malls, but are also sometimes stand-alone places. There are no checkout tills, and plenty of casually uniformed staff is available. These places just feel different.

Any staff member can perform a sale of any magnitude instantly, using their phone, and your credit card. The only thing that slows this is a cash sale, where the staffer has to disappear for a moment with your money and return with the change.

It is even possible for a customer to take something off of the shelf, and perform the transaction with their own phone, and leave the store without bothering to find a staffer at all.

These places also hold training sessions, and one-on-one problem-solving dates with experts, and full-blown courses. They are as much educational facilities as they are merchants.

Perhaps the future is a mix of online buying with home delivery, mixed with educational/retail centres loosely based on the Apple model.

I am not, however, very good at predicting the future.

I can recall the past, and in my holiday travels around town, remember the department store giants that resided in this location, and on that corner, and attached to that mall.

Nothing ever stays the same.