Virginia Postrel, Columnist

Now's the Time for Big-Box Stores to Embrace the 19th Century

Macy’s and its competitors weren’t always dull places to buy things less efficiently than you can online or in catalogs.

January 18, 2017 at 10:30 AM EST

By Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University and author, most recently, of “The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.”

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Photographer: Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images

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If you’d told me back in 1984 that in 2017 we’d be talking about the collapse of Macy’s in particular and department stores in general, I’d have been shocked.

I really didn’t expect them to last this long.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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