Opinion: Loss of most mid-sized retail is a loss few mourn, but today's bigger department stores fail to offer real 'deals'

A Roses discount store in Hickory, North Carolina,
photographed in October 2018. (Photo via The Bulwark)

In 1985, the zealous hunt for a good deal could take you to Ames, Woolworth, Caldor or Szolds. Those stores don't exist anymore. "The loss of the regional mid-sized discount department store deprived us of 'deals' and left us with 'stuff,'" writes Addison Del Mastro for The Bulwark. "The period roughly from 1990 to 2005 was an absolute bloodbath for the discount department store world, as Walmart and Target aggressively expanded."

Mastro uses an unlikely find, a Roses discount store, as an example of an almost extinct business. "Roses is a living fossil: It’s one of the last remaining mid-sized regional discount department store chains in the United States. . . . Roses’ inventory and pricing are both impressive and distinct from that of Walmart or Target. . . . I got a sense that Roses employs some strategy and deliberation when it comes to what they buy and stock; they don’t compete solely on price, as Walmart does, or on a combination of price and style, as Target does. It’s not just bins of the same junk you’d find at every other discount store. Roses has a different stream of inventory that comes from different channels."

Mastro offers examples: "Thick, soft area rugs made of undetermined carpet remnants that have been professionally trimmed and finished. (Every single area rug I’ve seen in every other store is a thin imitation of real carpet.) . . . Big packages of cotton rags for pennies a piece (from a manufacturer called St. Mary’s, which has more presence on eBay than anywhere else online). . . . Roses is ultimately interesting because of the lost perspective it offers on the idea of a 'deal.' What I mean is: While we have no shortage of stores where cheap products are available, we have few that offer goods that could reasonably be sold for much higher prices in a different context—that specialize, in a word, in deals."

"Walmart caused us to lose a whole category of mid-sized, mid-scaled stores that had played a crucial role in the retail ecosystem—a role that has never fully been replaced," Mastro reports. "The demise of this retail category left many areas without a proper one-stop store, closed off opportunities for smaller suppliers . . . . Nobody really mourns this or even thinks about it. . . . But the regional discount department store chain that operated 50 or 100 or 200 stores, at 40,000-70,000 square feet each, in two or three or four states, in rural or small-town settings—when we lost those, we lost something important."