Are your changing shopping habits killing the department store and the mall?

Death by Amazon

They are signs of the times. Bright yellow banners with enticing slogans... "Store Closing," "Everything 20-50% Off," and "Everything Must Go"... splashed across the entrances of Sears Canada stores.

The Sears liquidation sales this past week mean bargain-hunting to some... end of an era to others. Since the 1950s, Canadian kids have leafed through the glossy pages of Sears catalogues, dreaming of what might be under the Christmas tree. And Kenmore-brand appliances are fixtures in kitchens and laundry rooms across the land.

Nostalgia aside, the closure of roughly 130 Sears Canada stores will hurt current and former workers — 16,000 employees are out of work without severance. But it's also part of a growing trend: the Retail Apocalypse of 2017.

That's what they're calling so many stores closing in malls all over North America. 

The Sears saga is just the latest problem for Canadian shopping malls. Eatons, K-mart, Target, Woolco, Woodwards, and Zellers... remember them? Those once familiar department stores were mainstays of the malls. But when the anchor store leaves, the mall often goes too. In the U.S., JC Penny and Macy's have announced hundreds of closures, and a quarter of American malls are expected to be out of business by 2022.

If you shop at Sears, where will you go now? Malls have been our gathering places — a combination of community and commercialism. Are indoor malls as meeting places now an endangered species? What about our cold Canadian winters? Don't we have a special need for indoor public spaces — a place for seniors to exercise and chatter, and teens to hang out? Are you one of the many shifting to shopping online? If so, and if local retailers continue to suffer "death by Amazon, " where is the new town square in cyber space?

Our question: "Are your changing shopping habits killing the department store and the mall?"