Department stores are an "urban technology" built for walking not driving

State Street Shopping District, Chicago, 1984, Chicago Sun Times photo.

There is a letter to the editor in the Post "Save an endangered species: The American department store,"  responding to the article "Macy's and other department stores are an endangered species," opining about the difference between department stores in European cities like London and Paris.  

It completely misses the point.  Those are walking cities.  For the most part we don't have walking cities in the US.  We have car cities.

-- "Responding to retail decay in Friendship Heights (DC/Montgomery County, Maryland)," 2023
-- "Friendship Heights and the production of retail decay," 2020
-- "Urban decay and sprawl: one community's gain at the expense of another's," 2011
 -- "A brief lesson in "incentivizing" supermarkets and department stores," 2007 
 -- "Why it's okay to give tax increment financing to department stores but you still need to think long and hard about where you put your money," 2007 
-- "Turnabout is fair play: why Topher Matthews/GGW is wrong about TIF incentives for a departmentun store in Georgetown," 2012

Plus center city downtowns in the US aren't the same kind of shopping draw as they were 50+ years ago, at least for larger cities--lots of smaller cities in the US and Europe are seeing their retail districts decimated.  For the most part, suburbanites are content shopping near home.

But what a difference between a downtown store and suburban mall location in terms of quality store offering.  

The DC Downtown Hecht's was a grand store.  And it paled by comparison to Macy's in Herald Square in Manhattan or in Union Square in San Francisco or in Downtown Chicago.  Or the city-based stores, like Hudson's in Detroit, from our youth.

Suburban mall stores tend to be dingy.

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From the San Francisco Chronicle, "Union Square once was the center of San Francisco. Now it’s off the map," 

The terrain in the retail zone centered on the actual Union Square, an area that, for decades, was the busiest downtown retail district outside New York and Chicago, is in sorry shape.

... There’s been ample attention to the empty spaces within the no-longer-Westfield shopping mall, from the former Nordstrom on down, and the numbing procession of “for rent” signs along Powell Street that offer a bleak welcome to cable car riders. To me, though, the 200 block of Sutter Street tells a story even more grim. 

Of the 15 retail spaces on the block, 12 are vacant. Two “store closing sale” signs are taped near the door of one shop front, and judging from the emptiness within, they’ve been there awhile. Across the way, there’s a “support small business” sign in the window of a falafel shop with the slogan “Where food takes flight.” Indeed it has; the space sits empty. 

.. The numbers downplay the sense of desolation. One vacant space that Banana Republic occupied from 1997 until last year stretches for nearly half a block. This isn’t a precarious fringe block, either. Nearly all the buildings are gorgeous masonry, built in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake. Banana Republic’s former flagship with its arched grandeur began life as the White House, a department store that opened in 1908 with a design by architect Albert Pissis and closed in 1965. 

... San Francisco has changed immeasurably since “everyone” visited Union Square on a semi-regular basis, whether they were looking for a night on the town or a place to buy the basics. Now the happening neighborhoods are Hayes Valley or Dogpatch or the Mission, depending on your inclination. Tourists are as likely to visit Haight-Ashbury or the Castro as Fisherman’s Wharf. 

Presidio Tunnel Tops and Crane Cove Park offer connections to the bay that would have been inconceivable in the 1990s — when the arrival of Yerba Buena Gardens, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an expanded convention center prompted another planner to comment to the Chronicle how the changes along Mission Street and directly south “will really shift the center of gravity.”

Also see "Behind the Macy’s closure: ‘This is a Union Square problem. Not a San Francisco problem’" 

“Union Square doesn’t need to exist in the modern framework of local consumer demand,” said Christopher Thornberg, an economist and founder of Beacon Economics. He said with fewer people going downtown for work in San Francisco’s urban core, big shopping centers like Union Square don’t make economic sense. 

“This is a Union Square problem. Not a San Francisco problem,” Thornberg said. He said San Francisco’s low unemployment rate, and hyperactive venture capital sector, mean “it’s a great economy. It’s just that this economy doesn’t need a Union Square.” 

More broadly, he said, the same market forces that brought down Sears and JCPenney were now converging on Macy’s bottom line, delayed only by the “crazy surge in post-pandemic spending” once social distancing and other restrictions were lifted.