Department Stores Must Die Faster

What of the humble “department store,” a physical space in which humans used to peruse goods that they now purchase on Amazon? According to one new analysis, the only way for department stores to live is to die faster.

Department store sales figures have fallen by about a quarter in the past decade, thanks to selfish bastards like you who go lie down on all the mattresses at Sears before ultimately ordering one from Overstock.com. Via the Wall Street Journal, a new report from the research firm Green Street Advisors calculates that if department store chains like Sears, Kmart, Macy’s, and J.C. Penney want to bring their sales-per-square-foot numbers back up to where they were in 2006, they would need to close “roughly 800 department stores, or about a fifth of all anchor space in U.S. malls.”

Pick your angle here: “malls are dying,” “department stores are relics of a past age,” or “Sears is perhaps the most suicide-inducing place on earth.” Will your children ever have the opportunity to engage in “hanging out at the mall,” the activity that was perceived as representing the waywardness and anomie of lost American youths for decades? Perhaps not. Now they will just be ordering “molly” from the “dark net.”

Sad.