I went to Lloyd Center two Saturdays ago to buy a gift I could have ordered from my couch, and stood for a while in front of an anchor space that has been papered over since spring.
The trade press has spent all of 2019 counting doors. Payless, Gymboree, Charlotte Russe, Forever 21 in September, Barneys in August. Somewhere north of nine thousand closures announced this year. Every headline about it uses the word apocalypse, and every one of those headlines is wrong about what it is looking at.
This is not a die off. It is an edit.
Fewer, better stores is a stronger brand strategy than being everywhere, and most of the chains going dark are finally admitting that ubiquity was never a strategy in the first place.
The chains shedding hundreds of locations built those locations in an era when footprint was the only available proxy for market share. If you wanted to be considered, you had to be in the mall, and if a competitor took two malls in a metro you took three. Nobody asked what the four hundredth store said about the brand, because the four hundredth store was not saying anything. It was just being counted.
Then the counting stopped mattering, and what was left was the experience of walking in. That is where the real problem showed up. A tired store is not neutral. It is a negative brand impression that you are paying rent on, staffing at four people, and lighting for eleven hours a day.
A tired store is not neutral.
Watch who is opening instead of closing. Nordstrom is running small service-only shops with no inventory on the floor. Target has spent three years building compact urban formats tuned to the block they sit on. Everlane has a handful of stores and treats each one like a campaign. Best Buy did not save itself by opening doors. It saved itself by fixing the ones it had.
What separated the survivors from the obituaries was not e-commerce spend. It was the willingness to say that some of their own stores were hurting them, out loud, in a room with the people who had approved those stores.
I have sat in that room. It is not a fun room. The number of locations is on somebody's bonus, and the recommendation to shrink reads as an accusation no matter how gently you deck it. But shrinking on purpose is the only version of this that ends with a brand instead of a liquidation sale.
Powell's has one store that matters and has never once seemed worried about coverage. It is raining, it is the last week of the year, and I plan to spend an hour in it. Truffles and Barnaby will be exactly where I left them, unbothered by retail, holding their own footprint steady at two.