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Thursday, December 17th, 2020

The death of the department store and the American middle class

Author:     Jason Del Rey
Source:     Vox
Publication Date:     Nov 30, 2020, 7:00am EST
 Link: The death of the department store and the American middle class
Stephan:   We are going to come out of this pandemic, no matter how it goes, as a very different country.  Here is one aspect of this important trend. Whether that is different-good or different-bad is not clear yet, but Biden does give me hope. It could be like FDR's transition, which created a new world, and the middle-class we have known for 50 years, or it could be the dystopia of Trump world. Seventy-four million of us clearly prefer dystopia, so the rest of us will have to work even harder to create a collective social intention that produces wellbeing.
Illustration by Shaneé Benjamin for Vox

In a New Jersey suburb seven miles west of Midtown Manhattan, the American Dream is on shaky ground.

The Dream in question isn’t the mythological notion that upward social mobility is within reach for all hardworking Americans. It’s a $5 billion, 3 million-square-foot shopping and entertainment complex in East Rutherford featuring an indoor ski slope, an ice-skating rink, and a Nickelodeon-branded amusement park. The complex finally opened last fall, but it’s now facing huge new challenges.

The development’s complicated 17-year history, marked by ownership changes, false starts, and broken promises, had already put American Dream in a precarious situation. The Covid-19 pandemic hitting in March made things much worse. Whether the mall makes it in the long term will hinge in part on how it deals with the collapse of three of the marquee department stores that were to anchor the complex and draw foot traffic — Barneys New York, Lord & Taylor, and Century 21 — which all have gone bankrupt and closed, or are planning to close all their stores […]

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