Some Fallen Mighty Retailers

Not long ago I posted about the once-dominant news magazine Time and that it's a shadow of its former self because the whole category of weekly news magazines has largely imploded here in the USA.  (Some argue that the Economist, a British version, is still doing fine, but I have my doubts about its viability in the medium-run.)

Then there are companies dealing in retail sales.  A few days ago I was driving through Tacoma on Interstate 5 and glanced at Tacoma Mall, noticing that the Sears store there had closed.  Sears has been in decline for many years now, even having sold some of its prime assets to bring in cash.  The Tacoma Mall store closing is just one of many such closings.

Yet 40 or 50 years ago Sears was a retailing powerhouse, having grown from being a major catalog mail-order operation to a bricks-and-mortar giant by mid-century.  Its clientele was Middle America -- upper Blue Collar and lower White Collar workers and their families.

While Sears was at its peak, newer retailing concepts appeared.  But these concepts were faster-moving from birth to decline or extinction, being more like fads or fashions.  What I find interesting is that many of these were hailed as transformative, waves of the retailing future.  And by implication, they might rule for many decades.

An example is E.J. Korvette, a discount clothing retailer that met with sudden success in the 1960s, even having a store on New York's Fifth Avenue.  Then there were the "Big Box," "category killer" stores of the 1980s and 90s.  Their strategy was to have huge selections of a single class of merchandise, providing potential customers the opportunity to fairly quickly find what they needed without traipsing all over town from store to store (remember, this was mostly pre-Internet).   An important example here is Toys "R" Us, that many observers thought would destroy all toy-selling competition.   Then there was Blockbuster, a leading renter of video tapes and compact disks of movies and did roaring business around the turn of the present century.

All those companies are defunct.  Stronger competition probably did Korvette in.  Walmart and the Internet are two factors in Toys "R" Us's failure.  Blockbuster's demise was probably triggered by the Internet.

The current hot retail paradigm is Internet-based sales facilitated by massive, efficient distribution systems.  Looks like this is The Wave of The Retailing Future.

Right?