I did not write this. As a child I visited Winnipeg every summer as baby and until the age of 10 in 1948. My family stayed at my grandparent’s house at 136 Cathedral Avenue. I Remember visiting Eaton’s numerous times.
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WHEN I WAS growing up in Winnipeg in the 1960s, there were essentially two places to shop: Eaton’s and the Bay. Eaton’s was the store my grandmother frequented, checking for bargains in its basement every week, eating lunch in the sedate Grill Room. The Bay was vaguely hipper. I remember it still had elevator operators then as well as its own library and post office, though the in-house orchestra was gone. Both stores had a kind of majesty to them, unaware they had peaked as retail ideas.
The decline of the downtown Winnipeg Bay store resembled Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy—gradual, then sudden. It was the company’s national flagship store until 1974, but with the advent of malls in that decade, it began to lose its currency. By 2019, the downtown core of Winnipeg had largely hollowed out, and some of the Bay floors were closing. What remained felt like a dismal Soviet-era shopping experience under gloomy lights. The store was built in 1926 at a cost of around $5 million; at the time of its closing, in November 2020, Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate firm, valued the building at $0.
By Don Gilmore https://thewalrus.ca/author/don-gillmor/
Here in Los Angeles shopping malls have closed and many chains of stores have gone into bankruptcy. Eaton’s is gone in Canada and May Company in the United States is gone. Local California chains are now all gone.
Hudson’s Bay owns Sak’s Fifth Avenue they are now consolidating with Neiman Marcus.
Macy’s net income for the quarter ending April 30, 2024 was $0.062B, a 60% decline year-over-year.
So where did I buy my new sneakers (tennis shoes)? Amazon. It seems everyone is buying on line.
And that is why department stores are in decline.
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