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The Great Retail Depression

Sep 15 2026 | By: Taylor Boone

The Great Retail Depression: When Customers Stopped Feeling Seen

By Taylor Boone | Brand Strategy Advisor

We blamed the internet for a relationship retail had already broken.

We watched department stores shrink, familiar stores disappear, and malls lose the businesses that once made them destinations. Online shopping became the explanation. Better prices. More choices. A package at your door.

But there is another question worth asking: what had happened inside those stores that made leaving them so easy?

My belief is that part of retail’s decline began when the customer stopped feeling valued and started feeling processed. The sale became more important than the person making it.

That is what I mean by the Great Retail Depression. A loss of connection that deserves a place in the conversation about store closures, and an urgent place in the conversation about AI.

 

When someone knew your name

There was a time you could walk into Nordstrom and feel known. Someone remembered you. They knew what you liked. You could return to a person who understood your taste instead of explaining yourself all over again.

That is the Nordstrom experience I remember. Having worked there, the difference between service and selling is personal to me.

A good recommendation made you feel understood. You trusted the person offering it. You might buy something you had never considered, but the purchase grew out of someone paying attention.

The shift I experienced was toward pressure to grow the transaction. A customer came in for a lipstick, and the expectation became finding more items to add to the purchase. The question seemed to move from “What is right for this person?” to “How much more can we sell?”

Customers can feel that shift. The interaction changes when every answer becomes an opening for another pitch. Saying “just this today” starts to feel like something you have to defend.

A larger receipt can look like success while the relationship behind it gets weaker.

What made retail easier to leave?

Online shopping offered convenience, selection, and the ability to buy on your own terms. For a customer tired of being pressured, that could also mean relief.

Choose what you came for. Decline the extras. Finish the purchase without managing another person’s expectations.

Of course, online retailers sell additional products too. Recommendations, bundles, and prompts fill their pages. But closing a recommendation on a screen carries a different social weight from declining a salesperson standing in front of you.

Once the store experience feels like work, convenience has less to compete against.

That is the part of the story I believe we have underestimated. Retail had something a delivery could not reproduce: a person who knew you, exercised judgment, and gave you a reason to return. When that experience weakened, the customer had less to lose by leaving.

 

The closures are real. The explanation is bigger.

Coresight Research tracked 7,325 U.S. store closures and 5,970 openings in 2024, a net loss of 1,355 locations within its tracking. These are individual store locations, not numbers of entire chains or malls. Source: Mass Market Retailers, reporting Coresight Research’s figures.

Those numbers establish disruption. They cannot tell us how many customers left feeling unseen.

Debt, operating costs, location decisions, competition, and changing shopping habits belong in the explanation. Amazon’s success cannot be reduced to frustrated department-store customers. Nor does every closure signal a failure of customer care.

My argument is that losing the relationship made retailers more vulnerable to those pressures. A customer who feels known has a reason to return beyond the product. A customer who feels processed can compare price and convenience anywhere.

When you make people feel like a transaction, don’t be surprised when they shop for a better one.

Culture decides what the customer receives

A brand can promise personal service. Its culture determines whether employees have the time, permission, and incentive to deliver it.

What happens when an employee recommends the less expensive option? When they tell a customer they do not need another product? When they spend time understanding a concern and the conversation ends without a sale?

Does the business recognize good judgment? Or only the missed revenue?

Those decisions teach employees what the promise is worth. People hired for their ability to build relationships can find themselves measured primarily by how much they extract from each interaction.

The customer eventually experiences that contradiction. No amount of beautiful brand language can compensate for feeling pushed through a system.

AI puts the same choice in front of us

Now brands have tools that can produce more content, recommend more products, and automate more conversations. The temptation is to measure success through everything moving faster.

But faster does not tell us whether anyone feels understood.

AI can make useful space for human attention. It can reduce repetitive work and put relevant information in reach. The question is what the business does with the capacity it gains.

Does the team spend that time understanding customers? Can someone resolve a problem that falls outside the script? Or does the business simply increase the number of people moving through the same impersonal experience?

This is the Great Misalignment I see coming: brands getting better at reaching people while becoming less practiced at relating to them.

The technology may be new. The cultural decision is familiar.

Personal brands have an opening

My prediction is that personal brands willing to stay close to their customers will become more valuable as automated experiences multiply.

Putting a face on a business is only the beginning. The advantage comes from being accountable. Remembering the conversation. Offering an honest recommendation. Standing behind the outcome when something goes wrong.

A personal brand can become just as transactional as a department store. The opportunity belongs to people who make connection part of how the business operates, even as it grows.

Before your next investment in reach, ask your team: where does our customer start feeling processed? What are we rewarding that makes our brand promise harder to keep?

Then change something the customer can feel.

Give people a reason to miss you if they buy somewhere else.

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