In 2023, sales at department stores represented just 2.6% of total retail transactions, compared with 14.1% in 1993 and 5.7% in 2013, according to CNN. It’s been a downward slide for some time.

Department store chain Dillard’s is another retailer founded in Arkansas (1938). The company just posted quarterly earnings that beat Wall Street estimates by a wide 18% margin.

America is not a department store—and that's a good thing, because if it was, the shopkeeper would be driving it toward bankruptcy. Start your day with Reason.

In an era when the department store model is under siege, two major examples of it in the U.S. — Macy’s and J.C. Penney — are pursuing very different brick-and-mortar strategies.

Macy’s is wedging itself into a popular novel based on women who shaped the department store business and adapting the bestseller by Julie Satow into a scripted television series. Satow’s book ...