It's No Crime to Close a Nordstrom

Peek at the numbers for a look at what's going on with retail in 2023

The nicest customer experiences I've had have all been in the downtown San Francisco  Nordstrom -- the purse saleswoman who was as thrilled about my first royalty check as I was and helped me pick out just the right Coach bucket bag; the personal shopper who helped me buy a suit when I needed to execute a job pivot to a more formal workplace; the lingerie saleswoman who helped fit me for my first post-nursing bra after I stopped pumping. For all that I love retail as an industry, I hate shopping in person, but Nordstrom's actually made the experiences feel simultaneously soothing and productive.

My niece became the lucky recipient of this bag when I cleaned out my closet in 2008. Best aunt ever, am I right?

The company is closing its two downtown San Francisco stores. It's not a surprise: Market Street is not what it was pre-pandemic.  San Francisco has been the poster child for the growing pains a city is going to go through as it moves from a 20th-century commuter economy. In the past three years, twenty separate retailers have chosen to move out of the Union Square shopping district. 

One can accept the narrative that a one-two punch of declining traffic and rising crime caused the retailers to flee for less perilous climes. One can also note that among the 20 outlets listed, the parent companies of ten of them — Abercrombie & Fitch, the Container Store, DSW, the Gap, Banana Republic and Athleta, Anthropologie, Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack — all reported declining sales in 2022. At least one cited "low double-digit negative retail store sales primarily due to reduced store traffic." There are multiple factors at work here.

Investor taking falling comps seriously or San Francisco pedestrian? Depends what you read!

While the practical reason for a department store was once evident -- one-stop shopping -- the critical element that has always set department stores apart from their big-box brethren is the sense that shopping is an occasion: from the marble floors to the vaulting atrium where escalators silently whir, from the careful spritz of luxury scent to the gleaming specialty cookware, from the fantasies sold in the store windows to the lush holiday displays that go up in mid-November and come down December 26 … the point of shopping at a department store is that the experience is essentially a little dream, a participatory gift-with-purchase. 

Kate Chopin wrote "A Pair of Silk Stockings" in 1896, it ran in Vogue in 1897, and the story itself could easily be told in modern times: A woman walks into a department store with the intention of knocking off some errands, and is transported by the experience of being recalled to herself during the process of selecting goods:

It was a long time since Mrs. Sommers had been fitted with gloves. On rare occasions when she had bought a pair they were always “bargains,” so cheap that it would have been preposterous and unreasonable to have expected them to be fitted to the hand.

Now she rested her elbow on the cushion of the glove counter, and a pretty, pleasant young creature, delicate and deft of touch, drew a long-wristed “kid” over Mrs. Sommers’ hand. She smoothed it down over the wrist and buttoned it neatly, and both lost themselves for a second or two in admiring contemplation of the little symmetrical gloved hand.

Let's forget that the whole point to the story is that consumerist pleasures are fleeting and if you're a Kate Chopin character, you're going to end up acutely aware all happiness is transient. Let’s focus instead of the retail aspect: Mrs. Sommers spends her money on herself because the department store makes it fun. Or, as Spider Elliot mansplains in the shopping-and-sex ur-text, Scruples:

All the stores in town that are fun to shop in do wonderfully, Dorso’s most particularly. Just going in there makes you feel good, whether you buy or not; it’s half like going to a good party, half like going to a friendly museum—a sensuous experience either way. Billy, Billy, people want to be loved when they buy their clothes!

That said, Scruples reads like a relic of a bygone era after a decade-plus of DTC brands perfectly calibrated to an American consumer class that, in the words of Jia Tolentino, is "running survival drills for life under an advanced capitalist economy." 

“Running survival drills for life under an advanced capitalist economy” has gotten distressingly literal in America c. 2023.

Maybe Americans are tired of multitasking their retail chores as part of the survival drills. I looked at Nordstrom's 2022 sales to see what the growth was in digital sales -- if there was any growth in digital sales: in 2021, the company made $6 billion in digital sales or 42% of total sales, and in 2022, the company made $5.7 billion in digital sales or 38% of total sales. Earlier this year, Nordstrom announced it was sinking a lot of money into supply-chain optimization and solving the last-mile problem of multichannel retail; yesterday, they announced layoffs and restructuring among the tech division. Online shopping for Nordstrom does not deliver the same delight as the in-person experience.

One wonders where the fun is in American mainstream retail in 2023. Or -- in light of the mountains of waste generated by our retail activities, the emissions our e-commerce generates -- is it time to ask whether we really need to play Mrs. Sommers while the planet burns?

Part of living in a city is accepting that a city is, in its way, also a living thing. It changes and grows in response to the times. Like all cities, San Francisco has had waves of transformation over the last sixty years, from the summer of love to the decade of plague to the explosion of the Internet. We’re on the edge of what’s next.

Nordstrom's saw me through some milestone moments; there will be other city landmarks for the milestone moments to come.