There was a moment in the spring of 2021 when the steady growth of e-commerce actually reversed. For three months, Americans actually put down their laptops, mice, and smartphones and, like bears emerging from a very long hibernation, went out to enjoy the novelty of shopping for real things in real stores. Then the delta wave began, that mini-retail blip disappeared, and online sales resumed their relentless march toward gobbling up everything. It probably comes as a shock to no one that in 2020 the United States set a record for retail closures, with 12,200 locations shutting their doors, according to commercial retail firm CoStar Group. But was that the effect of the pandemic, or was it something else? Because the record that 2020 broke was set in 2019, when 9,300 stores closed. That followed 2018, when 5,700 stores closed. Some of the closures in 2020 might be more easily pegged to the pressures of the pandemic than others— clothing stores were more likely to turn out the lights than the grocery or drugstores deemed essential by authorities in many areas. Yet if you put 2020’s data on a chart next to that of previous years, it’s hard to even see the effect of the pandemic. 2020 was just another bad year for retail, in a a slide that’s been going on for decades. In 1990 alone, 19 massive new shopping malls opened in America. It was the height of a retail build up that seemed unstoppable. More stores, more variety, more more. Decades later, when The New York Times reported on the state of American shopping malls, they noted that the empty corridors of what had been the glitziest, most upscale locations “looked as if a viral outbreak had removed all life from the place.” But that wasn’t the coronavirus at work, because The Times’ report came out in 2017. Read more