There’s a reason the bankruptcy of retail icons like Sears and Toys’R’Us resonates with U.S. consumers in a way that the demise of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and rotary dial telephones didn’t, and it may prove to be the salvation of Main Street America.
If your vision of Main Street America includes bricks-and-mortar stores, that is. For generations of shoppers, such businesses were far more than places to exchange money for goods: They were cultural touchstones, bringing city style to the suburbs and providing social gathering spots for pre-Snapchat teenagers.
It was Rodeo Drive, after all, where Julia Roberts’ character in “Pretty Woman” went when she wanted to transform herself from streetwalker to Hollywood princess for Richard Gere; it was in the Herald Square Macy’s that a young Natalie Wood discovered Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street;” and it was inside a big-box discount chain that America Ferrera found love with a business school dropout on “Superstore.”
Children in the 1970s, when Sears was already 90 years old and a fixture of the retail landscape, pored through its Wish Book catalog for toys and picked out their first bicycles in its stores. “To somebody that is of my generation, Sears Roebuck was a very big deal,” President Trump observed when the Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based company sought bankruptcy protection in October. “It’s very sad to see.”
Such experiences have more than sentimental value: They illustrate something physical stores can offer that e-commerce can’t match, Mark Pilkington, a former retail industry executive whose resume includes a stint as CEO of British lingerie company Gossard, argues in his new book Retail Therapy: Why the Retail Industry is Broken — And What Can Be Done to Fix it.
They can exploit that edge with strategies like “brand theater,” which makeup chain Sephora employs through on-site studios that offer not only tips on applying eye shadow and lip liner but total makeovers, he says. Or by playing up opportunities for social interaction, like Lululemon with in-store classes and Apple with its community-style Genius Bar technical assistance.
Ensuring retailers adapt to the 21st century is crucial to the U.S. economy, since the industry contributes $2.6 trillion a year and remains the country’s largest employer, according to the National Retail Federation.
“I don’t see the future as everyone sitting in their houses on mobile phones, ordering everything and never going out,” Pilkington told the Washington Examiner. “Humans are social beasts. We like to go out.”
Indeed, Toronto-based Brookfield Office Properties leveraged that trait when it overhauled the World Financial Center, the shopping center and office complex across West Street from New York’s World Trade Center, in 2014. Now home to high-end stores from Salvatore Ferragamo to Diane von Furstenberg and Saks Fifth Avenue, the site offers an outdoor ice-skating rink in the winter as well as events like movie nights and a live performance of “The Nutcracker” ballet.
“Shared shopping spaces have the potential for a great future, but, like the stores within them, they can no longer afford to be glorified warehouses, stocking commodity products,” Pilkington wrote in his book, published Jan. 22 by Bloomsbury. “That part of shopping is certainly going to be handled more efficiently by the Internet. However, they can find an important role as the anchors for the new types of shared experiences that people are beginning to crave.”
