From lipstick counters to leveraged buyouts, the quiet destruction of a women’s world.
Department stores weren’t just where women shopped. They were where we learned taste, practiced independence, and built our mother-daughter rituals. Then finance arrived, hollowed them out, and called it progress.
Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, I looked forward to Saturdays at the mall with an almost devotional excitement. It was never just about shopping. It was about time with my mother, a form of shared attention that felt rare even then.
The mall near us was Monmouth Mall in New Jersey. The anchor stores were Bamberger’s and Abraham & Straus, both long gone now, as if they were never there at all. We always had lunch, because lunch was part of the ritual. My mother’s favorite was Kresge’s five-and-dime lunch counter, which felt to me like a tiny stage set for adulthood: the waitresses in pink, the smell of coffee and grilled cheese. My mother ordered a tuna fish sandwich. I ordered a hot dog, and thought I was living large.
The Saturday Ritual
It wasn’t glamorous, but it was ours. And it taught me something I didn’t understand until much later: At its best, shopping was never simply consumption.
Department stores were where women practiced being visible in public without apology—one of the rare third places. They were where we learned taste, identity, and a certain kind of independence, one dressing room debate at a time.
In college, my world expanded from suburban malls to New York City, where I first encountered the grand dames: Saks, Bergdorf’s, Barneys. In my 20s I barely bought anything there, unless you count roaming the beauty counters, sampling perfumes, and trying on lipstick, seeking a future self in the mirror.
Later, when I had children and more resources, I became a real customer, not a tourist. After moving to Houston, I found my way to Neiman Marcus and a spectacular Saks at the Galleria, a mall so grand it had an ice-skating rink at the center of its three floors. Neiman’s, in particular, held a very specific social role. It was where the ladies who lunch weren’t a stereotype but a living species worth studying.
At some point, without quite noticing I was doing it, I inherited my mother’s ritual and handed it down. I began taking my daughter to Neiman’s for Saturday shopping and lunch, the way my mother once took me. The goal wasn’t simply to buy something. The goal was to make a day of it. Prom dresses. An upcoming wedding. A “just because” cosmetic splurge. We enjoyed the Mariposa Restaurant, an intimate place tucked on the top floor, very different from the counter at Kresge’s—white starched tablecloths, chicken broth served in a dainty teacup, and a warm popover slathered in strawberry butter. And then we’d go back down the escalator to the intimate delight of being in a dressing room together, passing hangers back and forth, giggling at what looked ridiculous, telling each other the truth with just enough kindness to make it bearable.
Those afternoons are some of my most vivid mother-daughter memories. Not because the clothes mattered so much, though sometimes they did. Because it was a place where women could linger without needing an excuse.
It Was Personal
The department store was not only retail. It was emotional infrastructure. It was social, not parasocial. Real, not virtual. We didn’t snap a “check my fit” selfie for anonymous critique on social media. We went into a safe space with a trusted friend or relative.
It was a place you went after a divorce and tried on a new version of yourself. It was where you bought the interview outfit that helped you walk into a room, channeling Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl with your ‘90s shoulder pads practically whispering, “You’ve got this.” It was where your favorite saleswoman remembered your size and your taste and, occasionally, your life, which in an age of anonymous online everything now feels too personal.
I didn’t understand then that these institutions were already dying, and that their deaths weren’t natural.
The Private Equity Template
Private equity is often described as investment, but that word is too generous. It implies stewardship, patience, and an interest in longevity. What’s happened to retail over the last decade has been something closer to wealth extraction. The template is now familiar. Acquire a beloved chain. Load it with debt. Slash labor. Reduce the in-store experience to a minimum. When the business begins to buckle under obligations it was never designed to carry, frame the collapse as proof that the market has spoken. Saks sliding into bankruptcy is just the latest iteration.
Since the mid-2010s, analyses of corporate and retail bankruptcies have found that a disproportionate share involved chains owned by private equity firms.
Even the language we use to explain it: efficiency, modernization, digital transformation. The nouns are sterile. The verbs are bloodless.
And yet the results are personal: fewer jobs for women, fewer racks, fewer reasons to go at all.
What’s also been erased is a culture of shopping that was intimate, generational, and deeply human.
A Women’s World, Erased
It also became unfashionable to admit what those stores really were: a women’s world.
And the cruel irony is that women drive the majority of consumer spending in the United States, and women over 50 outspend younger women across many discretionary categories. We have the money. We have the taste. We have the history. We are not, however, in the room.
Private equity boards remain overwhelmingly male and astonishingly insulated from the human consequences of their decisions. They can gut a store and call it strategy, rarely encountering what they leave behind: the customers, the workers, the communities, the rituals.
Luxury brands love to talk about customer experience. But experience doesn’t come from a website interface. It comes from people. When those people disappear, what remains isn’t luxury. It’s transaction.
Online shopping, for all its convenience, cannot replicate that embodied intimacy. Algorithms can recommend a dress. They can’t bestow dignity. They can’t recreate the love of a mother standing outside a dressing room, holding two sizes, ready to reassure her daughter that the number on the size tag isn’t the measure of her worth.
My grandmother worked in a department store for her entire career: Arnold Constable, also long gone. It was a respectable job. It offered a kind of stability and pride that women understood in their bones. Most of the retail jobs that remain are precarious and low-paid, stripped of the dignity that came with expertise and long-term customer relationships.
Where Do We Go Now?
It’s tempting to shrug and say: This is the future. Online shopping is easier. The market has moved on. But that isn’t the whole truth. We treat speed as a virtue and friction as a flaw, even though some forms of friction are precisely what make life meaningful. Taste. Beauty. Ritual. Connection. Those were never incidental to department stores. They were the point.
I keep thinking about that old Saturday ritual: my mother at the lunch counter, her tuna fish sandwich, my childish sense that I was doing something elegant. I think about my daughter and me in dressing rooms years later, laughing in the mirror, buying the dress for the version of life that seemed just ahead.
And now I think of a future granddaughter, growing up in a world where these places will no longer exist.
The men who dismantled these spaces will never understand what they took. They were never in the dressing room. They never needed to be.
But we were.
26 Responses
Hi, Susan, this article is about something I never thought about before. I see the retail stores disappearing (Lord &Taylor was my latest disappointment.)But realizing that money is erasing women in this way is one more big disappointment about the direction the world is going. It’s disheartening. But reading about it draws me closer to you and other women. Thank you.
Hi Gail, Thank you for this, and yes, Lord & Taylor was a real loss, wasn’t it? Not just a store but a whole way of being seen and served as a woman. You put your finger on exactly what the piece is about: it’s not just retail, it’s erasure. The fact that reading about it makes you feel less alone is exactly why we’re here. So glad you found us. —susan
I grew up in a very small town in the Deep South. We had exactly two “ladies” stores. I’ll never forgot how proud I was when I was offered an “after school and on Saturday” job at Lasky’s. Mr. and Mrs. Laskey taught me the importance of customer service, how to accessorize, how to create an awesome store front window, and importance of keeping the store merchandise neat and well organized. They turned an upstairs storeroom into a well-furnished boutique for teenagers. We’d offer cokes and snacks while almost every high school girl in town bought her new fall and spring wardrobes (often on lay-away). Those are lessons that have served me well for many years. Unfortunately, those lessons are no longer being implemented in any retail stores today. Great article.
Hi Cyndi, Thanks so much for sharing your story. Isn’t it the truth; The lessons, the ritual, the service. All gone now. —susan
Garfinkels in downtown DC with my mom! Everything there displayed so beautifully. And my favorite grandmother, a proper Bostonian , worked at Edgar’s, where I was told the department store Santa originated. I’ve no daughters so sadly the rituals ended for my family. Susan, you invoked memories beautifully.
My mother wasn’t a shopper so we rarely did those things together, but there was a small three block long beautiful shopping area with a lovely department store that I started going to with friends when I was 14 and was buying clothes. I got a part time job there my senior year of highschool and I thought it was very exciting to work in this adult world where salespeople had Personal Trade books that included all the measurements of their customers, as well as their addresses and birthdays, because that extra touch might come in handy. The salespeople made commission, and if you were good, you could do well, so the salespeople paid attention and helped you- you never had to go looking for them. They were a small family run company with about 6 stores and closed around 30 years ago. Switching over to a department store in a mall was different because they had stopped commission sales by then and in later years it was like playing hide and seek to find a salesperson just to pay for something. Even that mall is gone now. My son is getting married at the end of the summer and I want to buy a new dress, and the only mall with the stores is way across town now. It’s the only one left standing.
Hi Heather, What a beautiful memory — the Trade books, the commission culture, the sense of being seen. Retail used to feel human. Now it feels soulless and utterly impersonal. The image of driving across town to the last mall standing is powerful. Big occasion dressing, like a wedding, is where things really all apart. My son and daughter both got married in the last three years. For my son, I drove into Manhattan and hit some of the still standing boutiques, along with Saks. I did find a dress, but it took some serious searching. For my daughter, I ended up ordering something on-line—ordering 2 different sizes and 3 styles, since there was no inventory to be found. Thanks for sharing your story. —susan
Rich’s department store in Atlanta, either downtown or at the malls was my favorite place to shop. Beautiful clothes for plus size women, great cosmetics counters, fabulous fine jewelry, great furniture dept. Once Federated bought them, it became Macys, which maintained similar standards for a few years. The last time I went into a Macy’s, the store looked like it had been trashed. No more Beautiful displays of clothes. Just everything flung on racks for you to wade through. I’ve never gone back.
Hi Kelly, Rich’s was special. And you’re right — once it became Macy’s, it held on for a minute, the same thing happened to the store I referenced in the article. Bamburgers became a Macy’s – and then it became a shell of itself. And now it is gone completely. When the beauty of the display goes, and everyone who cared, the magic goes with it. I understand why you haven’t gone back. Thank you for sharing. —susan
A private equity group took over in 2011 and implemented all the destructive patterns you mention above. Plus they tried to procedularize our interactions with our customers. We had known many of them for years and were supposed to suddenly adhere to robotic scripts. Most of us continued to build and maintain authentic relationships with our regulars but as staffing cuts continued we could no longer spend the time helping them that was previously available. We were down to one fabric person, one cashier, and one manager on duty who was not full time and got a whole 50 cent add on to their MOD shifts. They were required to pull online orders, do some stocking, clean and of course talk to customers who complained about understaffing and long lines.
PE isn’t about investment it’s about sucking the financial life out of a company then a group of mostly old boy cronies flying away on their golden parachutes to the site of the next destruction.
Wow, Shannon. How I can relate to this. I have been a seamstress and crafter. My daughter is also. We made so many mother daughter trips exactly as you describe:for Halloween, costuming a school play, teaching her how to crochet and knit. The list goes on. Years ago the staff was always so knowledgeable and helpful. Once they went into bankruptcy, everything changed. The stores became shells of themselves and the poor soul that would be at the only single register open with 10 people in line was sad to watch. Your experience says so much. Those stores were communities — not just retail footprints. And once the staffing and autonomy were stripped away, the heart went with it.Firsthand voices like yours matter in this conversation. Thank you for adding it.This is why we have to keep telling these stories. Thanks for being here. —susan
Almost one year after the JoAnn bankruptcy closings this rings so true. I worked part time there for 20 years as the stable paycheck between freelance creative gigs. Our store definitely had a lot of mother-daughter ritual shoppers often expanding to four generations as daughters became mothers and mothers became grandmothers. My store had a group of long term employees that had expertise in various crafts. We could actually help customers start projects and see them through, and rescue those moms who found out the school project was due tomorrow and teachers who had to decorate their classrooms out of pocket. The comments we heard most often were “what are we going to do without y’all to help us” and “my daughter and I come here every Saturday. Now my granddaughter is old enough to come with us and you won’t be here anymore.
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I used to go to the mall with my mom growing up, all the time. I miss that time together, and her. If you haven’t been back, Monmouth Mall is almost completely gone (my husband is from Ocean). They’re turning it into a lot of the area that used to be the mall into condos. Very sad.
Hi Jenn, I grew up in Ocean too. It was never really about the mall, was it? It was about the time together. I just watched a facebook post on what is going on there, I couldn’t believe it. Everything is gone, making way for Whole Foods, condos, new chains of retail and restaurants all to support the new Netflix campus I would imagine. An era is over for sure. Turning Monmouth Mall into condos feels symbolic somehow — erasing the stage where so many of those rituals played out. Thank you for sharing this. —susan
Manhaset’s Bonwit Teller, Lord and Taylor, lunch at Bloomies – vivid memories surrounding back to school, Christmas and birthdays. We’d arrive, my Mom looking beautiful and I trying to emulate her in an age appropriate way.
Fast forward to my petite fashion-obsessed daughter. Setting her seasonal budget and hitting Tori Birch and the Ralph Lauren outlet in the Woodbury Commons with great anticipation! This article makes me sad. This wholly female ritual will be yet another unknown to my grand daughters. Boo Hiss!
Hey Kim, Bonwit. Lord & Taylor. Lunch at Bloomingdale’s—Forty Carrots! Their chicken noodle soup and their Fro-Yo, is a favorite of mine and my daughter’s. That was a whole education in taste, wasn’t it? I love that you carried the ritual forward with your daughter just as I have tried to do. Boo hiss indeed. These weren’t just shopping trips. They were memory bonds, rituals that can’t be replaced. Thanks for sharing and stirring up those memories for me. —susan
A shopping trip with my mother, which was never fun, became a ritual with a friend for me, then I was taking my trans friend. I could be a buffer and a safe guardian while she tried on a new skirt, and I wold bring in other things we could giggle over or debate on.
I didn’t realize how much I do miss it, and it’s probably why I hate shopping now. I miss the ritual of it.
I love this evolution — from obligation, to friendship, to being a safe buffer for someone finding herself. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. Shopping wasn’t just consumption. It was making space that we needed at that moment. No wonder it feels hollow now. We’re not missing the stores. We’re missing these shared moments.Thanks for being here. —susan
Ah yes, I remember it well. While I did not go with my mother, I remember riding the bus to downtown Brooklyn with a friend or two and going to Abraham and Straus, Mays, Martin’s and of course McCrory’s. Sigh.
Sigh is right Marcia. Nothing can be done. They are gone. all of them. Thanks for sharing your memory. Reading these comments is like a trip down memory lane for me. —susan
This article is so on-target, and it took me back to my sister and I shopping together, laughing as we tried on outfits in adjacent fitting rooms.
The Catch-22 created by online shopping is so frustrating. Online retail has gobbled market share because of economic efficiency, causing beloved department stores to shrivel and die at the hands of private equity. The few that are left have fewer products of a lesser quality, at a higher price point, in a less-inviting environment. Shoppers leave disappointed and turn to online, further fueling web retail and eroding the brick-and-mortar experience, destroying the “Taste. Beauty. Ritual. Connection.” that Ms. Dabbar mentions.
I, for one, truly miss hands-on, in-person retail.
You nailed the trap. Online wins on convenience and price; brick-and-mortar loses investment and soul; shoppers leave disappointed; online wins again. It’s a feedback loop.
But those fitting room moments — that’s what can’t be replicated in a box on your doorstep. I miss it so much. Thanks for your perspective. —susan
Yes. All this. I recently went from stay at home mom to returning to full time work. I went to my department store to refresh my wardrobe, and went home empty handed. No one to talk with, to help me, to celebrate with.
Most people do not understand the private model……think JOANN’S. Great article.
When I was a child of 8-10, my mother and I would go into Boston to the “tall girl store” (she was 6′ and couldn’t buy clothes anywhere else in the 60’s). We would do all the things described here and I would watch the orange robed Hare Krishna on the Common. Then we’d go to lunch where she would teach me etiquette, manners and how to eat soup properly. And mom, grandmother and I would go to Belk Lindsey bra shopping which was a fiasco my grandmother adored.
Boston, the tall girl store, soup lessons, Hare Krishnas — and bra shopping as family sport. That’s a whole world in one comment. Thank you for sharing it. —susan