A Farewell to Carson's, and the Assignment of Blame

For over a century, Chicagoans grew up with a signature memory: special days downtown, shopping at Marshall Field’s and Carson’s, the great rival retail giants down the block from each other on State Street. (shown here: Carson's longtime downtown landmark by Louis Sullivan, sold off years ago).

Smaller stores came and went, but Field’s and Carson’s were the giants, the dominant figures in Midwestern retail for generations.

Macy’s bought out the struggling Field’s chain over a decade ago and cremated the brand name while keeping the stores. Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. wasn’t so lucky; its current holding company, Bon-Ton, is giving up the ghost for good this spring.

Unable to find a buyer or investor to keep the chain alive, Bon-Ton is shuttering its 200 stores and terminating its many brands. Along with Carson’s, we’re likely saying goodbye to Bergner’s, Boston Store, Younkers, Elder-Beerman, and Herberger’s (though there’s still a chance that the liquidation might leave one or two of these names standing, God willing).

Many Americans grew up with these same memories… Milwaukee kids shopped at Younkers or Boston Store; Rice Lake and Eau Claire kids headed to Herberger’s… there was a time when the department store – the anchor of the local mall – was the big draw. You bought your parents’ anniversary presents there, and your siblings’ Christmas presents, and your girlfriend’s birthday present too. Ever since the days of Montgomery Ward and Marshall Field, a century and a half ago, the department store has towered above the rest of the retail world in our communal memory.

Read the business pages, searching for the reason for the long slow death of traditional retail, and they will have answers that are difficult to challenge:

It’s the full-on assault by Amazon and other online retailers; why pay more for the same thing at an expensive building, when you can get it by mail-order without leaving your house? Seems a logical enough position, until we recall that catalog sales provided just as easy an option for 150 years without killing the brick-and-mortar alternatives. So it can’t really be that.

Or… It’s the lack of a genuine brand nowadays. When Field’s, Carson’s, and the rest stopped really making their own products, and just started slapping their private label on products made in the same Chinese factory as everybody else’s, that took a toll. Why spend $40 for this Chinese shirt when I can buy a Chinese shirt at Walmart or Meijer for $20? That argument may be stronger.

Or… It’s the bad individual decisions made by some of these retailers. Penney’s famously switched out their entire menswear lines in favor of all-extra-slim sizes a few years ago; the error lasted less than a year, but the damage was done. Similarly, some retailers target the wrong demographic, or hire the wrong decorator, or hitch their wagons to the wrong fad, and lose a season or two that they otherwise wouldn’t have lost. But are such errors enough to kill a century-old name?

Industry experts have plenty of reasons for these failures. They see a bankruptcy, identify the company’s last three mistakes, or the company’s biggest competitors, and lay the blame there. It’s how analysts think… they have to… in order to figure out which stocks to recommend and which stocks to flee.

But if every retailer is struggling, even in an economic recovery, mightn’t there be some other reason for these doldrums? Some over-arching problem with our economy that we need to tackle before it gets too late? With the way that the analysts talk, one would think that the weak stores’ problems are their own fault, but strong stores will survive. And yet, only the low-priced stores are really thriving – the Walmarts, the Meijers. Is that really because they’re so well-run, or might it perchance just be because they are low-priced?

Other industries don’t have this problem. There’s room for both well-run fast food chains and poorly-run fast food chains, well-run homebuilders and poorly-run homebuilders, well-run landscape companies and poorly-run landscape companies, well-run radio stations and poorly-run radio stations. The economy is big enough to support all of these. You do better if you invest in the well-run ones, of course, but there are still jobs and profits to be made in the imperfect ones.

Why is it that only in retail have we begun to unquestioningly accept the premise that any business that’s less than perfect is now expected to go bankrupt?

The retail sector – especially every big department store that anchors a mall – has an outsize role in the economic climate of our cities and towns. Retail draws tourists and suburbanites to our downtowns and to our malls. Retail provides the part-time jobs that high school and college students depend upon. Retail provides tax revenue for the community. And big retail makes small retail possible – because without the anchors, people don’t walk into the mall to get attracted to the smaller stores either.

The retail world built up in the 20th century to respond to population growth, the same way it did in the 19th. As cities grew up, department stores came to the downtowns. As suburbs grew, the stores built branches in the suburbs too. Even small towns became hubs for the surrounding rural areas, and gained their own department stores as well. As American population grew, the feeling went, it would need – and be able to support – more stores.

But that’s not how it turned out. The growth of the internet since the early 1990s has served as a handy scapegoat for our real problem, but the enemy is demographic, not digital. The long, slow death of department stores is caused by a transformation in who makes up the American population.

When America was on its great period of growth – in the 1800s – Americans prided themselves in being able to shop, to be able to own more than the single Sunday suit of clothes, the single wedding ring, the single pot or pan to which poor people had been limited since time immemorial. All of a sudden, a middle class was growing, a class of people who could enjoy plenty. Even those who were far from rich could afford to "go shopping," for the first time in history.

Henry Ford famously focused on producing a mass-produced vehicle that was affordable enough for his own employees to buy. Instead of the makers of luxury goods doing their manufacturing for members of an upper class, the American economy of a century ago enabled workmen to do their manufacturing for themselves. This was earth-shattering in economic history; it was a wonderful snapshot of the American promise that Washington, Hamilton and Morris had envisioned for us at our nation’s dawn.

- The American government turned on its manufacturing sector. With high taxes, crippling employment regulations, union supremacy, corrupt government and a litigation culture, our manufacturers were driven away. The great American clothing and footwear and sporting goods and home appliance industries, one by one, were pushed overseas to foreign shores. Today, you can’t buy an American iron, radio, or TV. You can’t afford an American pair of shoes. You can’t even find an American shirt or sport coat. The jobs aren’t there, so the people who would have worked those jobs can’t afford to shop in the stores that would have sold them.

- The American public stopped marrying and having children. The average age of first marriages has skyrocketed; the average number of kids per family has plummeted. So the people who grew up in that department store culture we remember haven’t passed on that culture to many, or even any. (This writer’s grandmother worked at Field’s in her 60s; both the writer and his father worked at Field’s while in college. It was a part of our lives then; it is no longer). If you didn’t grow up with both a special respect for the shelves of the department store, and an ability to afford what they sold, you won’t shop there “if you can buy the same thing for less somewhere else.”

- Seeing the plummeting birthrates, the powers that be decided – half a century ago – to import their replacements. As we allowed late marriage, nihilism, selfishness and abortion to reduce our natural American population, we opened up our borders to a flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal – as if numbers were numbers, and everyone was identical. But where has this left us? Our nation has nearly doubled its population since the last year of the Baby Boom, but with so much of that growth coming from poor foreign immigrants, this new demographic mix obviously cannot and will not support the same economy that the old demographic mix could (nothing against immigrants, by the way; this writer is a grandchild of immigrants… but we are talking about undeniable statistics here, and cultural differences, in the big picture).

Just imagine. What if America had been allowed to continue, over the past century, the same way it grew in its first century? With limited government and minimal obstructions to manufacturing, our economy would have been able to continue to produce both domestic goods to fill the store shelves and an affluent enough populace to buy them. With an America that grew its population organically, with a gentle, controlled assist from abroad, rather than an America that stopped having children and had to import tens of millions wholesale, we would have a people who were raised from birth to participate in this domestic consumer economy.

The challenges of retail are real… and this writer is not trying to overlay a political spin where none belongs. But as one peels this onion and studies these challenges, the real answer is undeniable. The causes of retail’s problems – like the causes of most of our societal problems, from crime to wage stagnation to the unaffordable welfare state burden to urban flight – lie in the errant liberal policies that have been practiced at the local, state, and federal level for a century now, and were then turbo-charged in the 1960s.

We have much to correct if we are to save this country. It can be done, but the first step is to acknowledge reality. It’s the departure from the Founding vision of limited government that put us in this mess, and only a return to the Founders’ vision can help to bring us back.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. A former board member of the Illinois Small Business Men’s Association, the Illinois Right To Work Committee, and other such groups in the 1980s, he served as Milwaukee County Republican Chairman in the 1990s, and his columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.

I can’t believe Sears let the whole internet thing pass them by. They were Amazon 100 years before Amazon.

The original owners/founders who had the smarts died off. Much like what will probably happen with Walmart. Sam Walton knew the business as well as his late son. Walmart is bleeding money in loss of sales due to their computerized inventory and on time delivery to store stocking policy. I've seen things like 10w/30 motor oil not be on the shelf for weeks at a time before. The computer shows it's there and no more is ordered. In some cases they discontinue huge demand items because their system doesn't show it selling but shows it on the shelf. I've asked workers before when they were getting something in. They'd pick up the wand and say it's on the shelf the computer shows ** in stock. Then I'd say OK can you please show me where then? LOL.

Whenever I fly especially internationally I always wear a coat and tie I am an anachronism I suppose but I feel I get better service. Also, unlike some fellow passengers I don’t like looking like I slept in a dumpster.

The downtown store was really beautiful. Six or seven floors with everything including bicycles. The store for homes was a wondrous place with furniture, fixtures and rugs.
A pair of rugs from this store still grace my mom’s place, nearly ten years after she passed.

To add to your point - you’ve seen the videos of New York/San Francisco streets at the turn of the century...just being ‘out and about’ the vast majority were ‘dressed up’ (men wearing hats, ties, etc.)
,

Special clothing for different events.

When people very seldom flew, they always wore their best clothes. Look at real old photos from the 20, 30's and 40's of baseball games. All the crowds wore their best clothes and hats were in style.......

John, this was extraordinary reading. I still pine for the days when I would go to the department store with my family and we would split into groups (my sister with my mother to shop for clothes and sundries, and my father and me to look at hardware and automotive tools, or presents for my mom or sisters). Then after we met up again we'd go to lunch at the local family restaurant.

Our government killed all of that. Makes me tremble with... patriotism.

Never did get to Wanamakers. And I was on my own before I got to Higbees on Public Square in Cleveland.

And it wasn’t really shopping - we might get a souvenir - it was part of the sightseeing of the legendary.

I'm sorry that you took such offensive and umbrage at my post; however, I suggest that you read my posts more carefully, since NOTHING I said applies to you, nor your late, beloved wife and what either of you wore/wear, due to medical problems, your profession, and lifestyle.

I didn't say anything at all about a beard! I referred to the scruffy, unkempt, 5 o'clock shadow ( or worse ) look, now so popular with some males. A well kept, nicely trimmed beard is something else completely!

Work clothing is a distinct, quite different thing entirely! Someone doing your the job you once had, in a 3 piece suit, dress shirt, and tie, is just as wrong ( not to mention patently ridiculous and out of placed !), as someone showing up to a square dance in white tie and tails. :-)

LOL...re your Santa stories! They're lovely and you sound like a kind, happy with yourself, courteous, "old school" man.

Yes, very true!

Not only have I seen those old movies ( thanks to YouTube ), but am old enough to remember when ALL people dressed as well as they could, in the proper attire for what they were doing, and know exactly when that all began to change.

Also, people dressed differently, in "modern times", depending on their ages. Now, many little girls are either dressed like filed hands, or two bit hookers. And many little boys look as though they are about to go to prison/in a perp line-up.

Oh there are exceptions, there always are, to all things; however, todays "exceptions" should be the RULE and vice-a-versa!

JFK killed off the men's hat business. :-(

Most people were still dressing up to fly, through the 1980s!

OTOH...people began to NOT dress up to see a Broadway show nor to attend an opera, in the early 1970s. They were stared at, in disgust, but sadly, that way of dress soon became common as the 20th century ended. Today, anyone who can afford to shell out $100 and sometimes very much more, to see a lousy play, has more than enough money to at least buy and wear something better than scruffy, stupid looking, what was once considered to be low level work clothes; but most don't!

I've seen things like 10w/30 motor oil not be on the shelf for weeks at a time before.

My local Wal-Mart has a 65" Hisense HD TV on rollback, for $648, but currently "on order". It has been that way for the last three months. No biggie. I have a 40" one that I am "getting by" with. :-)

It's at the point now that I ask when one will be in just to hear the electronics dept people say there's none on hand. Yesterday the guy told me that they had no 65" in stock and didn't know when they'll come in.

At somr point, I will buy that 65" from some other retailer, and when I do, I will copy that sales receipt and send it to the manager, asking him to forward it to headquarters as a hint as to why their sales are stagnant/dropping.

its demographics.

..the population ages and WE DON'T NEED ANY MORE STUFF....

plus the fact that people do not marry nor have children...

children are almost despised by some....

so why are we surprised...

a vacuum will fill up....which is why so many are racing to to our borders....

absolutely.....me for instance, and my husband, we wear jeans practically all the time...

I did insist that he not wear camouflage to his father's funeral though...

Sad face. My home town lost a block and half of Main Street downtown — and 41 people — in a gas explosion in 1968. During the rebuild Elder-Beerman came in. It was a bright big city store with *gasp* escalators from the main floor to upstairs. It anchored the downtown reconstruction... sad to see it go.

“Along with Carson’s, we’re likely saying goodbye to Bergner’s, Boston Store, Younkers, Elder-Beerman, and Herberger’s”

First time in my life I’ve ever heard of these stores.

The 50s and 60s (most of the 60s) were a wonderful time. You had a confidence that America had direction, that people were basically good. As a child I felt that Adults looked out for you and the nation. And now?

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