In 1985, US department stores took 14.5% of all retail spend. Last year they took 4.3%. The figure is still falling. The internet is often blamed for this. But the blunt truth is that US department stores just aren’t very good retailers. In fact, most of them are abysmal.

— Neil Saunders (@NeilRetail) December 31, 2018

So true. Amazon hurt them, but they mostly hurt and killed themselves. I guess it got to be a race to the bottom, and what a benthic bottom it was. Their main problem was and is instead of competing where they were strong, the chose to compete where they were weak. It takes a well-educated MBA (or a whole herd of them) to do something as boneheaded as that.