Never underestimate the impact of supermodels. Aside from the excuse it provides to use photographs of Jennifer Hawkins on otherwise colourless business pages, how else to explain our fascination with miserable Myer?

It happened again Thursday – a Christmas sales downgrade, another chapter in the saga of Myer disappointments– received major coverage.

Myer's retail share might be shrinking, but the department store chain still has Jennifer Hawkins.

The implication in some quarters was that the formerly important department store chain represented the state of Australian retailing, which in turn meant the health of the Australian consumer. It’s a mindset that’s stuck in the last century.

To put Myer in context, department stores make up the smallest of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ six categories of retail sales.