Department stores’ fall followed the decline of America’s middle class

December 1, 2020

Moderate-income Americans shopped at department stores for decades, but that changed as income disparity hollowed out the nation’s middle class. The result has been record numbers of department store closures in recent years with the number of stores falling from 8,600 in 2011 to 6,000 today. The number of people employed by department stores has fallen to fewer than 700,000 today, down from more than 1.2 million nine years back.

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