The top ten best-performing stocks of 1982 were Chrysler, Fay’s
Drug, Coleco, Winnebago, Telex, Mountain Medical, Pulte
Home, Home Depot, CACI, and Digital Switch.^18 How many are
still around today?
The best-performing stock of the eighties? Circuit City (up 8,250
percent).^19 In case you don’t remember, Circuit City was the
now-bankrupt big-box store that sold TVs and other electronics,
where “Service is State of the Art.” RIP.
Of the ten biggest retailers in 1990, only two remain on the list in2016.^20 ,^21 Amazon, born in 1994, registered more revenue after
twenty-two years in 2016 ($120 billion) than Walmart, founded
in 1962, did after thirty-five years in 1997 ($112 billion).^22 ,^23
In 2016, retail could largely be described as the crazy success of
Amazon and the disaster that is the rest of the sector, with a few
exceptions, such as Sephora, fast fashion, and Warby Parker. E-
commerce firms die with a whimper, not a bang, because while brick-
and-mortar retail has a face, e-commerce deaths are faceless and not
as jarring. One day that website you regularly visited just isn’t there—
so you find some other site and never look back.
Dead man (retailer) walking begins with margin erosion—the
cholesterol of retail—and ends with endless promotions and sales. You
can buy a little time with sales, but the story almost always ends badly:
holding an average of 12 percent more inventory in the December 2016
holiday season, retailers increased sales promotions from 34 percent
to 52 percent.^24
How did we get here? Let’s take a brief walk down retail’s memory
lane. In the United States and Europe, there have been six major
stages of retail evolution.^25
The Corner Store
Retailing in the first half of the twentieth century was defined by the
corner store. Proximity ruled the day. You walked to the store and
carried what you could home, sometimes daily. Retail establishments
were typically family run and played a key social role in the
community, disseminating local news before radio and TV became