Millennials Didn’t Close Your Favorite Retail Store.

Cody Johnson

Why America’s retail woes are more personal than just millennial shopping tendencies.

Forever 21 has filed for bankruptcy. My understanding of that process came from playing monopoly with my dad. When I didn’t have enough money to pay the fee for landing on one of his properties, he would bargain with me every time to keep me playing. Forever 21 may or may not be your favorite store, but they are yet another chain of stores that are closing a large number of their retail locations in 2019.

Coresight Research announced as of October 2019 that year to date “US retailers have announced 8,642 store closures…compared to 5,844 closures for the full year 2018.” The typically revitalizing holiday season could be the final hoorah for many retailers as Coresight estimates show a potential for US store closures to reach 12,000 by the end of 2019. 

While the outlook for traditional retail locations are growing dimmer by the month, a constant reasoning for theses attitudes from some analysts has been the lack of shopping via brick and mortar methods on behalf of millennials. This belief was shown to be untrue by a Growwire study that surveyed more than 1,000 US consumers. The study found that “more than 56 percent of millennials said they shop in stores at least once per week. In contrast, just 27 percent of baby boomers and 44 percent of Gen Xers shop in stores weekly.”

As a retail veteran, I would attribute the struggles of retail not to just millennials are shopping with Amazon constantly, but rather the environment that shoppers of all ages create through patience and purchasing. 

I work full time for a large retail chain, so these perspectives are isolated to my personal lens, but in reference to the purchasing factor, it has become a hassle to shop in person at large retailers due to the shoplifting that renders on hand quantities null and void. How many times have you entered a store looking for an item on hand only for it to be nowhere to be found, or worse, present but missing a portion of its materials. This hassle that arouses when shoppers can’t purchase what they traveled for, leads to the patience factor I believe is affecting retail. Why stress and struggle to locate an item that was probably damaged or stolen, when I can have an employee do that for me? After all, it’s their job. 

As mobile ordering supplements physical shopping for many large retailers, the physical consumers are placed on the back-burner as processing times are given precedence over physical registers. While more employees are placed on warehouse processing shifts, there are less hands for cash registers, fitting rooms and floor coverage. This leads to frustration with long waits for remedial tasks like purchasing one item, which shouldn’t take twice as long to pay for than it does to find. 

More than 56 percent of millennials said they shop in stores at least once per week. In contrast, just 27 percent of baby boomers and 44 percent of Gen Xers shop in stores weekly.

I believe that the retail woes in the US are not the result of millennials avoiding retail stores  —  although you can’t blame them with how stressful it can be to find parking at these megamalls  —  but rather shoppers are not good stewards of the environment they find themselves in. If you had a favorite restaurant that is struggling to remain afloat, you would feel agitated by a guest dining and dashing without paying for their meal. In the same manner, the poor stewardship from the public creates a cyclical process of patience and priority that elevates the online shopping and shipping process that many retailers are trying to revitalize.