"Piles of folded sweaters and polo shirts cascaded into disorder, their tags boasting incremental markdowns that seemed to shout over one another. The escalator, unmaintained for close to a year, stood inert. Nervous-looking shoppers bouldered their way up its heavy corrugated steps in search of washrooms or the closest exit to the parking lot. All the beauty counters featured displays which had been denuded to East German levels of bare."
"I am, however, a bloody-minded woman, and I have cleaved unto my secret love of department stores with all the tenacity of a sticker on the bottom of a remaindered soap dispenser at Winners. It began, around 1975, with outings to Eaton's in downtown Vancouver. There, I would watch glamorous women in uniforms (suits with gold buttons or ludicrous white lab coats) cosmetically transform my mother into a Terminal City Bianca Jagger before she handed over her Chargex to be rammed through a small, fierce machine."
A nearby department store decayed into a post-apocalyptic ruin with dangling fixtures, disordered clothing piles, stripped beauty counters, and an unmaintained escalator. Shoppers navigated the inert fixtures and searched for exits while few salespeople aimed mainly to deter theft. Traditional anchors like The Bay closed as e-commerce and big-box retailers came to dominate. A persistent affection for department stores endures, rooted in 1970s outings to Eaton's in Vancouver with glamorous uniformed staff, in-store specialists, and indulgent cafes. Those stores offered a technicolour, service-rich social and sensory environment that felt extravagant and communal.
Read at The Walrus
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]