Jan 5, 2017 3 min read

Nothing makes you feel the relentless advance of time like a new year, as you affix a new calendar to the wall and realize that, say, in just three years we’ll be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Y2K. Anyone else feel like the 21st century has been barrelling by?

The sense of dislocation, and the sense that the sands are moving through the hourglass even more swiftly, is certainly heightened when, just a couple of days into the new year, there’s word that once-mighty retail giants are shuttering stores and handing out pink slips, as consumers flock to other options.

Late Wednesday afternoon, it was announced that the Macy’s store at Washington Crown Center is one of 68 the Cincinnati-based retailer is closing, with the plug set to be finally pulled in the spring. The announcement wasn’t entirely a surprise – Macy’s has been signaling since at least last summer that it was going to drive a stake through several stores that were not generating sufficient sales and were more valuable as real estate. The Macy’s store at Crown Center isn’t the only one in this region locking its doors for good. The Macy’s at the Beaver Valley Mall in Monaca will be closing, as will the store at Fort Steuben Mall in Steubenville, Ohio. Across the country, 10,000 jobs will be lost.

The news is dire for Macy’s, but it’s hardly better for struggling Sears Holdings, the parent company for both Sears and Kmart. It announced this week that it was closing stores in the wake of lackluster holiday sales. The Sears at Crown Center has so far been spared, but its stores in Sharon, Mount Pleasant and Uniontown will be axed, as will the Kmart store in St. Clairsville, Ohio. Sears has also said it will sell its Craftsman brand of tools in order to put some money in its coffers.

What’s going on? In the 1980s or 1990s, the notion of a Macy’s store going out of business would have seemed like a sign that the apocalypse was nigh – the retailer embodied a kind of affordable sophistication and panache. After all, its flagship store is in Manhattan, and Macy’s has been sponsoring New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade since 1924. But its legacy has not been enough to fortify it against changing consumer habits, which find shoppers surfing online for discounts rather than getting into their vehicles and actually roaming the aisles of brick-and-mortar stores.

Edward Yruma, a managing director at KeyBanc Capital Markets, told The New York Times last summer that, thanks to the bazaar that is available at everyone’s fingertips, “the consumer needs a really good reason to go to a store and park their car. It has to be exciting and have something new, because if not, why wouldn’t I sit on my couch in my pajamas and shop on my iPad?”

Companies like Macy’s and Sears will no doubt go where the dollars are by beefing up their e-commerce operations. But now Washington Crown Center, and other shopping centers where Macy’s had served as an anchor, will have to scramble to find other tenants. Macy’s has been at Crown Center since 1999 and has occupied a full 148,000 square-feet. Given the currents the mall’s operators are swimming against, it probably won’t be easy to find a replacement. But it will be imperative, in order to keep Crown Center healthy.