Store closings: Who are the biggest victims of the retail apocalypse

Aimee Picchi | Special for USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Bed Bath & Beyond, other store closings can blame shoppers Brick and mortar stores that we thought would never disappear are now creating empty retail landscapes.

Rona McClaughlin gets emotional when she talks about the closure of Payless stores in June.

After 20 years with the discount shoe retailer, she was a store manager and had grown friendly with many of her Chicago-area customers.

“I saw their kids growing up,” she recalls, starting to cry. “You see them every back-to-school, every Easter.”

McClaughlin, 47, says she is left with plenty of questions about what happened to Payless – as well as the entire retail sector, which has been hit by 75,000 announced job losses from the start of 2019 through November, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

In her view, few policymakers focus on the job losses in the retail industry, which have an outsize impact on the female workers who sit behind cash registers and interact with customers in apparel stores such as Payless.

“Ninety percent of the time," the workers "were all women in my store,” McClaughlin says. “You lose your job after 20 years, and it’s like, ‘Who cares?’ ”

The bankrupt footwear retailer accounts for the largest number of store closings in 2019 with more than 2,500. Nationwide, more than 9,200 store closings were announced this year, 59% higher than in 2018, according to global marketing research firm Coresight Research.

Women outnumber men in brick-and-mortar retail jobs at a ratio of 2-1, according to a new report from The Mom Project, a career service for mothers. Although the retail industry is creating jobs, they tend to be focused in traditionally male roles such as warehouse work and delivery services, giving a hiring advantage to men, the report says.

“Women tend to be more representative at the store level and in face-to-face roles, and those are the roles being impacted the most by store closings,” says Pam Cohen, president of The Mom Project’s MP Labs, its research division, and the author of the report.

Women who work in retail face a number of complicated labor market issues, says Ariane Hegewisch, program director for employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank that focuses on women and the workplace. For one, Automation reduces employment for some retail jobs, such as cashiers, where almost three of every four workers are women, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Secondly, department stores such as Sears are shuttering or cutting staff, hurt by the shift to online retail and problems of their own making. When stores shift jobs to their warehouses to meet online sales demand, the positions are typically filled by men, Hegewisch says.

“And those jobs typically pay better per hour,” she notes.

Despite the job losses in the retail sector – more than 500,000 announced in this decade, Challenger Gray & Christmas says – the Trump administration is focused on boosting employment in the manufacturing and mining sectors, which suffer from their own set of challenges.

Because the retail sector contributes a smaller share of GDP than manufacturing, it doesn’t garner the same attention from policymakers, Hegewisch says.

One aspect of the retail industry’s woes is in the spotlight: the role of private equity firms.

In July, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced the Stop Wall Street Looting Act to try to change the private equity industry, whose practice of loading up businesses with debt is cited as a contributing factor to the demise of Toys R Us and other retailers.

“These firms are gobbling up more and more of the economy,” Warren wrote in a Medium post in July. “A study found private equity-owned firms accounted for 61% of the retail jobs lost and planned for elimination in 2016 and 2017.”

The private equity industry was the focus of a hearing last month at the U.S. House’s Committee on Financial Services. “It’s not right that working moms like me work so hard and count every dollar to take care of our families while these private equity firms get to walk away with all of our money,” former Toys R Us worker Giovanna De La Rosa told the committee. She said she got involved in the labor group United for Respect because of her experience with the Toys R Us closure.

“Private equity investments have helped build better businesses across all sectors, including retail companies like Dollar General," a representative for the American Investment Council, a trade organization representing the private equity industry, said in an email. "The overwhelming majority of our investments are successful, support jobs, and strengthen local communities."

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Though it’s unclear what steps lawmakers will take, the retail apocalypse continues to unfold. Employment of retail sales workers is likely to shrink by 2% by 2028, while all other jobs will expand by 5%, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As for former Payless worker McClaughlin, she says she is starting a job in airline operations this month, which pays about one-third less than her Payless role.

She can’t see herself returning to retail: “It's so painful. I don't want that situation to happen again.”