Over the weekend, I stood in a long checkout line, balancing a tower of ribbons marked 40% off at Joann, a fabric and craft store closing some 800 locations across the country. I don’t sew but I enjoy pretty gift wrapping and have a small closet devoted to papers, bags, tapes, ribbons and doodads to dress up packages.
As I waited, even the discount and the stack of pretty ribbons couldn’t lift my mood, which was dark knowing that another U.S. retailer is shutting its doors. (The Joann store I visited is in a spot previously occupied by craft store A.C. Moore, which shuttered all of its locations in 2019.)
In the past few years, I’ve lost my favorite place to buy shoes, my favorite place to buy bras and my favorite place to sample and buy perfumes. Those were three different retailers, by the way. I’ve also lost my favorite fabric store for upholstery.
With the loss of brick-and-mortar retail (mostly to online shopping), we are losing a sense of discovery and a way of interacting with and evaluating products that can’t be replicated by scrolling on a screen and clicking to buy.
And omnichannel retailing, the mix of physical and virtual stores that has promised the best of both worlds for consumers, doesn’t seem to be living up to its potential.
In short: Shopping sucks these days.
I suspect the only people who enjoy it are homeowners accompanying interior designers on shopping sprees for projects. But not everyone has access to an expert to help them find retail gems.
Consumers deserve more.
Oversaturated and too much sameness
I believe brick-and-mortar was overbuilt heading into the 2000s. We’ve all experienced that feeling of driving down a commercial avenue in a new city, seeing the same stretch of Marshall’s, Home Depot, Home Goods, Sam’s Club, PetSmart, etc. They are the same big boxes that also line a road in your city — and every other midsize and large city in this country. Have we ever really needed a Walgreens and a CVS cattycorner from each other?
The big boxes pushed out smaller, locally owned retailers. Now online shopping is killing the category killers.
And what a murder spree it has been. Coresight Research, a retail and technology research firm that tracks retail closures, reported 7,325 store shutterings in the United States in 2024, the most since some 10,000 stores closed in 2020. Coresight forecasts that another 15,000 retail locations will close in 2025. By comparison, the firm expects only about 5,800 retail locations to open this year.
Winnowing at retail has been necessary and even welcome at some level. The big boxes offer wide selections and relatively good prices but have never been the most pleasant places to shop. They commodified a shopping experience that had once been marked by the knowledgeable sales associates, community ties, and curated selections at local and regional retailers.
And, frankly, I’d like all those stretches of big boxes and strip malls across this country to be turned into, at the very least, mixed use developments that would help solve our housing crisis and make communities more walkable and livable.
The imperfect alternative
But the growing dominance of online shopping isn’t entirely satisfying either. Even with all the product photography, videos, 3D configurators, measurement features, extensive descriptions and detailed specs, it can be hard to get a sense of items like apparel and home furnishings. That helps explain online shopping return rates that, depending on the reporting source, range from about 13% to 19%.
It’s one thing to purchase diapers or batteries online; it’s another to try to find the right throw pillows for a new sofa, having to guess at hues and fabric textures.
It can also be overwhelming to search for products. Big sites like Amazon and Wayfair contain hundreds or thousands of products in every category, with algorithms and even filters that seem more designed to promote specific items than to help shoppers narrow their search. At this stage, artificial intelligence seems to be making the morass worse, as shady marketers flood marketplaces and social media with specious products.
Of course, there are wonderful online shopping sites with curated selections of quality products. But finding those sites is getting harder to do, too.
Early this week, I needed to send flowers to someone in Florida and was looking for a local, well-recommended florist. The first three florists I checked out were not actually locally owned florists but essentially shell companies that purport to be local but are run by unidentifiable entities. The florist I finally found told me those faux local florists sometimes take consumers’ money and never deliver flowers or deliver flowers of iffy quality and then don’t respond to customer complaints. “We get calls every day from people who’ve had problems with those companies,” says the florist from whom I finally ordered a bouquet. (The recipients sent me a photo in thanks and the flowers were lovely — just what I ordered.)
Breaking it all
There is a popular belief in the country right now that we need to break our systems and rebuild them.
I think retail, largely, is already broken. We can buy virtually anything we want at any time — there are stores across the street and at our fingertips. But, too often, the experience is not enjoyable or engaging, regardless of channel.
I hope that as the sector rebuilds, we can keep the strengths of online shopping (ease, speed, buy-at-any-time convenience, records of past purchases) and the strengths of traditional brick-and-mortar stores (in-person browsing, carefully chosen selections, personal recommendations, knowledgeable sales associates, support of local communities).
In an economy built on consumers, those consumers deserve the best.
