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After the golden age: Why department stores are no longer glamorous

Inside Retail

When Laura Peden was growing up in the 1970s, department stores were a special place. Decades later, she still vividly remembers how she and her grandmother would travel into Myer’s city store at Christmas to see the “insanely fascinating” windows. The department store was no longer the star attraction.

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Amazon to test department stores in offline expansion

Inside Retail

Amazon.com is to open several department stores in its home US market to test the concept as it continues to build out its multichannel business model. Department stores’ share of the overall US market has fallen from 14.5 Kohl’s may suffer, if only because Amazon is likely to favour locations similar to its own.

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Analysis: How Australian department stores can thrive in a post-Covid world

Inside Retail

Those brands that have avoided bankruptcy have often been forced to undertake aggressive cost reduction and store closures. Department stores have been particularly impacted, with consumers forced online during the pandemic now choosing to buy direct from brands or from more price-competitive online marketplaces.

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How can department stores pivot ahead of a spending decline?

Inside Retail

The biggest swing occurred in department store spending, which saw a 14.3 Especially in department stores, where the consumer appetite to spend appears to have fallen so dramatically between November and December? After almost a year of consecutive increases, the retail industry saw a 3.9 per cent in August, 2022.

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Why department stores are thriving in Japan even as the US sector shrinks

Inside Retail

For once, department stores are leading a retail sales recovery instead of lagging it. Supermarkets (5,921 stores) gained 1.8 per cent but the big winners were department stores (190 of them) performing well above the average, with a 13.5 METI counted 190 department stores for its first quarter survey.

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Japanese department store Takashimaya looks to the future

Inside Retail

Living in a building of historic importance gives one of the world’s pre-eminent luxury department store companies that extra little bit of cache — the trick now is to find ways of being a retailer of future importance, a stiff hurdle upon which so many department store companies are stumbling. Footfall was up 6.4%

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Even Japan’s Takashimaya can’t escape department stores’ woes

Inside Retail

We have ‘iconic’ shopping centres, ‘iconic’ retail stores, ‘iconic’ restaurants, ‘iconic’ hotels, ‘iconic’ rock groups. But Takashimaya, a retailer of 1831 vintage and still the largest department store chain in Japan, is surely genuinely deserving of the word. The amount of department store floorspace declined by 6.1