The End of Saks As We Knew It
When Saks Fifth Avenue opened, between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets, on September 15, 1924, shoppers in fur coats and pearls mobbed the sales floors. The first package out its doors was a silk top...
View ArticleJ. C. Penney’s Martha Stewart Mistake
The early covers of Martha Stewart Living magazine, in the nineteen-nineties, featured Stewart’s name in bold type and photos of the namesake herself, frosted hair lacquered in place, arranging...
View ArticleAre Clothing Companies Moving Fast Enough to Fix Factory Problems?
On Tuesday, the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety—made up of twenty U.S. and Canadian apparel companies, including Wal-Mart, Gap, and Macy’s—quietly issued a statement saying that the group had...
View ArticleEverything You Know About Black Friday Is Wrong
Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, thousands of fans thronged Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium for the Army-Navy football game. As festive as the mood was inside the stadium, it wasn’t nearly so...
View ArticleDon’t Blame the UPS Guy for Your Late Presents
On Christmas, a day after UPS admitted it wouldn’t be able to make many of its promised holiday deliveries, the shipping giant posted on Facebook a cheerful illustration of one of its signature trucks,...
View ArticleA Death in the Database
Last February, Ashley Seay was seventeen years old, a high-school junior studying cosmetology in a suburb of Chicago. Outgoing and empathetic, the middle child of five, she dispensed advice to her...
View ArticleWhere the Middle Class Shops
On State Street in downtown Chicago this week, a man trudged through the slush outside a soon-to-be-shuttered Sears, wearing a yellow signboard that read, “Store Closing Sale/Everything Must Go.”...
View ArticleHow Dick Cabela Sold the Great Outdoors
The origin tale of Dick Cabela, who founded the outdoor-goods chain Cabela’s, and who died this week, at the age of seventy-seven, begins with fishing flies. In 1961, according to company lore, Cabela...
View ArticleAre Malls Over?
When the Woodville Mall opened, in 1969, in Northwood, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, its developers bragged about the mall’s million square feet of enclosed space; its anchor tenants, which included Sears...
View ArticleMarketing “Real” Bodies
One recent evening, on Park Avenue, in Manhattan, fashion editors lined a white runway in the Seagram Building as models walked past on high heels, wearing embroidered eyelet jackets and lace cocktail...
View ArticleThe Commercial Allure of the Eighties
A new commercial for Taco Bell opens with an actor with shaggy, Don Johnson hair, in a white oversized blazer with shoulder pads, pulling a McDonald’s sandwich from a paper bag. To the tune of “Old...
View ArticleMaking Wearable Tech More Wearable
When Angela Ahrendts became the C.E.O. of Burberry, in 2006, the company had an unusual problem: its brand was too blatant. Burberry’s signature pattern, a beige, red, and black plaid, which had...
View ArticleWhat Retail C.E.O.s Don’t Understand
In the past, if your goal in life was to run a retail company, you wanted your biography to open with a scene of you manning the sales floor or schlepping boxes in a warehouse. The younger you were in...
View ArticleThe Walmart-Free City
In October, the city council of Portland, Oregon, in between updating the payroll system for the police honor guard and changing the duties of the golf advisory committee, adopted a resolution banning...
View ArticleWhy Students Aren’t Fighting Forever 21
Last month, the retailer Forever 21, known for producing trendy, ephemeral clothing for young women, opened a store outside Los Angeles that surprised even some people familiar with the chain’s...
View ArticleDov Charney’s Failed Utopia
Ten years ago, Alberto Chehebar, then the editor of Loft, a Hispanic men’s magazine, struggled to keep up with Dov Charney, the founder of the clothing retailer American Apparel, as he speed-walked the...
View ArticleWho’s Buying J. Crew’s New XXXS Clothes?
At first, the new clothing sizes that J. Crew established in May—000 and XXXS—seem to send an outrageous message to women. Pants in this size fit a twenty-three-inch waist; the average American woman...
View ArticleA Pop-Up Shop for Every Artist
Last week, people filed into a macaroni factory turned event space in Chicago. They were there to celebrate the expansion of Storefront, which allows small-business owners to rent empty or flexible...
View ArticleRestoration Hardware’s Mail-Order Extravagance
The first stirrings of dissent came from the UPS drivers. In May, they began posting on Brown Café, an anonymous message board, about the thirty-three-hundred-page catalogue bundles sent out by the...
View ArticleThe Flextime Blues
In rural Washington State, a local restaurant owner, who runs the kind of place where retirees linger over scrambled eggs and parents feed their children hamburgers, proudly told Anna Haley-Lock, a...
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