More than 1,300 department stores closed last year — here’s how malls are scrambling to survive
“The pandemic has accelerated what we thought was the normal trend by about three years.”
June 7, 2021 | Aditi Shrikant | grow.acorns.com
More than 8,000 major retail stores nationwide closed in 2020, according to Coresight Research. Of them, 1,347 were department stores.
“For department stores, the weaker chains have been disappearing for 25 years,” says Michael Brown, a partner at Kearney, a consumer practice of management consultancy. But like many other consumer retail shifts in 2020 — the adoption of QR codes, the rejection of of underwire bras — the pandemic simply sped up what experts noticed was already happening.
“The pandemic has accelerated what we thought was the normal trend by about three years,” Brown says.
