When I was a kid, we had a shopping district downtown. We had stores where you could buy tailored suits, dress shops, toy stores, local jewelers that made custom jewelry and had existed since the 19th Century or early 20th Century, restaurants with waitresses who'd worked in the same establishments for decades, shoe stores staffed with people who could tell you anything about any brand of shoes they sold and personally fit your shoes. All of the shoes were made in either America or Europe (principally Britain or Italy), some by Maine and Massachusetts shoemakers who could trace their family lineage in the business back generations. We even had a cobbler who could repair the shoes you bought. There were variety (five-and-dime) stores as well, such as Woolworth's, Kress, J.J. Newberry, and W.T Grant.
And then a mall anchored with Sears at one end and J.C. Penney at the other opened and that was the beginning of the end for the five-and-dimes and mom-and-pop stores downtown. The city tried to put lipstick on the downtown pig with nice planters and benches and by limiting vehicular traffic, to no avail. By this time as well (early to mid-1960s) discount department stores such as Kmart, Gemco, Fedmart, Unimart, and Zody's appeared on the scene. But the final nail in the coffin for downtowns all over Southern California came when huge regional malls with well-stocked, multi-level anchor department stores such as Bullock's, Robinson's, and May Co. opened. We had two single-screen movie theaters downtown, one owned by 20th Century Fox, the other by United Artists. The malls cornered that business, too, with multii-screen theaters operated by companies such as AMC. Soon after that the downtown theaters closed for good, but you could still catch
Planet of the Apes at the AMC while the kids watched
Blackbeard's Ghost on another screen. The 1980s and '90s saw the three or four-screen theaters balloon into huge multiplexes, some with ten or more screens. And what
NOW? Malls, in an effort to stay relevant, are tearing down multiplexes and structures previously occupied by department stores such as Sears and creating upscale theaters that combine elements of the movie palaces of my youth with the multi-screen theaters of the 1960s-70s (
Mall of America's replacement for movie theaters: More movie theaters). Go figure.
So basically what we see in the American retail experience, which has been a central part of our culture, is evolution. Some companies adapt, some don't. F.W. Woolworth, arguably the inventor of the downtown variety store, begrudgingly accepted the mall concept and managed to morph itself into Foot Locker, while W.T. Grant and J.J. Newberry clung to their downtown roots and eventually went bankrupt. Sears and J.C. Penney are just the latest examples of what happens when you don't change the times.