The 10 Lamest Department Stores in America
Depart as quickly as possible.
Image via Complex Original
There was a time when department stores made sense. Before online sales brought myriad possibilities to your finger tips and niché stores sprang up to create immersive retail experiences, it was enough to have a fair selection at a fair price. Once a linchpin of American capitalism, department stores are now as antiquated as general stores and trading posts.
And yet, they persist. Every quarter, a failing department store is scooped up by an enterprising Wall Streeter who thinks they can stem the tides of history. These corporate raiders cut costs, add some flashy new brands, and usually fail. Customers are left with a dingier, sadder version of the store they only went to as a last resort in the first place.
Department stores will eventually go extinct, but for now, they litter the malls of America, fluorescent lit capitalist ghost towns, living monuments to a time when customers would settle for a product that was almost what they wanted. Enjoy the last gasps of old retail with The 10 Lamest Department Stores of All Time.
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10. Bed Bath & Beyond
OK, so this is only a three department store, but those three departments provide enough annoyance to fill a superstore. Also, "beyond?" GTFO. You don't hear the same horror stories from BBB employees or customers that you get from many retail giants, but the problem with this store isn't the way the do business, it's their business itself. Though they generally only sell items for your bathroom and bedroom, they don't hire the knowledgeable sales staff you expect from a high ticket specialty store. When you go to R.E.I., you expect to talk to a seasoned outdoorsman. When you head to the Apple Store, you expect to be handled by a tech savvy millennial. If a store pushes a higher price tag, the experience should be of a higher quality. In our experience, shopping at Bed Bath and Beyond is like shopping at any department store, except with less selection and inflated prices. Bed Bath and Beyond is good for little more than starting arguments between couples regarding exactly how much money they should be spending on kitchen linens.
9. T.J. Maxx
T.J. Maxx didn't launch an online store until last year, as in 2013. Though your Aunt Sharon is the only person you know who openly shops at T.J. Maxx, the company is actually larger than The Gap and Nike. How does a store that is so not sexy lead in the womanswear space? T.J. Maxx is essentially a giant thrift store. Over 400 buyers look high and low for brands unloading quality goods. A bad holiday for retail means a wonderful January for T.J. Maxx. Heading into T.J. Maxx is essentially a crap-shoot. Some months you can score deals while a visit later in the year may offer a scant selection. T.J. Maxx isn't even legally allowed to advertise the brands they carry, so you truly have no idea what you're walking into. This is a dream come true for bargain hunting fashionistas, but for those who want shopping to be stressless experience, a trip to T.J. Maxx with your girl is nothing short of a torture session.
8. Nordstrom Rack
Are you working/middle class, but want to feel rich? Good news: elite retailers are here to sell you all the stuff that rich people didn't want. Many stores do this by creating discount outlets or sourcing their leftover and irregular items to stores like T.J. Maxx, but Nordstrom has taken things to a whole new level. Nordstrom has created a discounted version of their store that is actually larger than their flagship. By 2016, Nordstrom Rack will have close to twice as many locations as Nordstrom. Yes, the store opened as a way for people to buy the leftovers from a fancy store now has more locations than the fancy store. Nordstrom has come out and admitted that they are simply leveraging their brand to attract young, aspirational (read: poor) customers. As President Blak Nordstrom put it, "Where the bigger opportunity lies is acquisitions of a younger aspirational customer, again, without alienating the customer that’s paying the rent.” Or, more succinctly put, "rich lady gets fancy store and you get the rack."
7. Bon-Ton
This store almost didn't make the this list because we had forgotten it existed. Surely, this store shuttered its locations long ago, right? Wrong. Bon-Ton is still alive and (kind of) kicking. Who shops at Bon-Ton? After a brief survey of a nearby almost-empty Bon-Ton, we concluded that the customer base is largely comprised of employees and empty-nesting mothers whose children thoughtlessly bought them Bon-Ton gift cards. What items are they buying? Judging from Bon-Ton's Twitter account you can pick up items like Yankee candles and seashsell themed bathroom accessories. Speaking of Bon-Ton's stellar tweets, they're worth a follow for one-liners like "This #winter calls for hot chocolate… and lots of it!" and "Tick, tock! The time has come. Save up to 50% on a wide variety of clocks."
6. Dillard's
It's hard to stand out as a particularly awful place to work in the retail sector. Working retail generally sucks. Dillard's has impressively managed to be one of the worst places to work retail for years. As with most great problems in business, this one starts at the top. The Dillard family owns 99% of the company and occupies a number of key executive positions. They also champion some terrible labor policies. For example, Dillard's employees are evaluated not on a commission system, but on sales per hour. One Dillard's employee said that the company has, "A culture of intense, even savage competition amongst employees to fulfill impossible sales quotas and SPH (sales-per-hour) goals that lead to much bad blood and even outright hostility." With a corporate culture like that, it's no wonder that shopping at Dillard's provides all the comfort and joy of a trip to dentist's office.
5. Kohl's
"Isn't it great? It was on sale."
The greatest trick that Kohl's ever played was convincing the middle class that what matters is not what they're buying, but that what they are buying is on sale. Between seasonal sales, Kohl's Cash, and cardholder discounts, you can walk out of Kohl's saving as much as 75%. Never mind that every customer gets the sale price and the sale price is always higher than you would pay for the same item on Amazon. IT WAS ON SALE! Children across America continue to get the same not-quite cool polo shirts and the Spencer's Gift joke t-shirt rejects for Christmas while the young adults in the family receive Jennifer Lopez's line of bath rugs not because the products provide a good value, but because, damn it, it was on sale!
4. J.C. Penney
When J.C. Penney goes down in flames with many of their fellow department store chains, at least they can say they tried. Few retail executives have found the kind of success that Ron Johnson had launching Apple's retail brand. Prior to that, Johnson had a hand of turning Target into what your aunt lovingly calls "Targét." To the surprise of casual observers and completely in line with the expectations of industry insiders, Johnson's tenure at J.C. Penney was catastrophic.
Johnson tried to bring Penney's in line with the times by attracting hot brands and weaning the company off of coupons. A Father's Day campaign featuring two dads announced that they would reposition their stodgy image along with their antiquated practices. These moves alienated Penney's aging, traditional customer base without bringing in new customers to replace them. Sales plummeted over 30% in one quarter and Johnson was fired last year before many of his ideas could truly be tested. The retailer then hired their previous CEO Mike Ullman, presumably to ensure that the company would continue its slow march into oblivion.
3. K-Mart
K-Marts are the cockroaches of suburban retail centers. They get dingier with time, but damn it, they keep hanging on. Marcia Layton's book, Kmart's Ten Deadly Sins: How Incompetence Tainted an American Icon, was published over ten years ago, yet somehow, you can still spot a Big K or two in every sad neighborhood in the country.
Ten years ago was right around the time that Eddie Lampert took over K-Mart and made a bad situation worse. Lampert was concerned with cost-cutting rather than branding. Wal-Mart continued to preach value. Target positioned itself as the sexiest bargain retailer. K-Mart did nothing. Though Lampert has made a tidy sum for himself in his time at the helm of the fading retail giant, the last time someone actually enjoyed shopping at K-Mart came and went well before he took over the box store.
2. Ross
We are told Ross is a department store, even if it is absolutely unclear where these so-called departments begin and end. If you want to practice feeling empathy for your fellow man, pay a visit to the complaintsbord.com page for those who have worked at Ross. There are tales of woe there on a level usually reserved for longshoremen and coal miners. Working at Ross sounds awful, but that shouldn't surprise anyone who has ever shopped there, which is also a pretty terrible experience. If you've beheld the disorganized sections and the disinterested employees, you'll probably feel that one blogger's description of the store, "similar to a 3rd-world bazaar, only more chaotic" is on the mark. There are deals to be had at Ross, but we ask you, at what cost?
1. Sears
How far the mighty have fallen. You know the Sears Tower that used to be the tallest building in the world? Yeah, it was named after this Sears. Who knew that there was this much money to be made selling overpriced tools and kitchenware? While there used to be money in selling pricey merchandise to people who didn't have better options, those days are over.
Today, customers have superior choices. Sears watched Amazon and Wal-Mart gobble up the basement of the retail space while their pickier customers retreated to specialty retailers like Williams-Sonoma, R.E.I., and the Apple Store. The game was changing and Sears wasn't. As early as 1992, at the very dawn of e-commerce, Sears started posting their first quarterly losses since the 1930s.
Enter Edward "Fast Eddie" Lampert: the man who somehow made K-Mart even worse (Two stores in the top 10. Good job Ed!). Lampert is the kind of guy who loves the free market, Ayn Rand, and favorable tax rates, and hates paying his employees a living wage. Fast Eddie brought with him the cost cutting and morale busting that you would expect from a corporate raider and got predictable results. Sears stores took on all the charm of your uncle's insurance office with all the efficiency of your uncle's girlfriend who works as a secretary at his insurance office.
Lampert did all he could to destroy what corporate culture Sears had left: he weakened management, he watered down the presence of the store's iconic brands, he split the store into thirty separate divisions. Recent polls found that only 30% of employees recommend working at Sears and 19% approve of Lampert's time at the helm. Though it seems a no-nonsense business model of offering a decent product at a decent price is no longer viable, it turns out that neither is relentless devotion to the bottom line at the cost of customer and employee satisfaction.