How Private Equity Killed the Feminist Department Store

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.