As Sears stores go dark, will middle-class votes disappear?
Bad news in retail impacts the voters politicians are trying to court
“Retail politics” doesn’t sound all that smart or easy these days in Canada.
It’s been a bruising week for the retail business, with the imminent collapse of the Sears department store empire and accompanying job losses all over Canada.
There was also the news that the Canada Revenue Agency had some plan to treat employee discounts as taxable benefits — a move that, if enacted, would be a direct hit to thousands and thousands of low-paid retail employees across the country.
That crazy tax idea was in retreat by the end of the week, but the massive failure of Sears is not as easy to make go away. Roughly 12,000 jobs are on the line, which is about 2,000 more jobs than those created overall in Canada in September, Global News reported this week.
More than 130 big stores are also due to go dark in malls and communities all over the country as soon as this Christmas. Assuming one store to a political riding, that means more than one-third of the MPs in the House of Commons will be dealing with those darkened shop aisles.
Retail failure, like manufacturing failure, hits at the heart of the suburbs, where politicians have been aggressively courting their voters for decades.
In happier times, the retail industry was something for politicians to cultivate and imitate — a symbiotic relationship I wrote about in my last book, Shopping For Votes. Now, the shopping business in Canada is a constant source of concern and disruption for the political class.
Retail analysts have been warning for some time now that e-commerce is threatening the very nature of shopping.
Those same analysts are saying, however, that you can’t draw a straight line between the rise of digital shopping and the downfall of the big stores such as Sears or Zellers.
“The bigger thing is the shrinking of the middle class,” Barry Nabatian, market research director of Shore-Tanner Associates, told Ottawa’s local CBC Radio morning show this week.
Politics watchers are familiar with that concept. In the 2015 election, if voters got a nickel for every time a politician, of any stripe, mentioned the middle class, we’d all be part of the wealthy 1 per cent.
But think about it. If Sears and other midclass stores are failing because they’re losing their target consumer demographic, that also means that Canada’s political parties have also been pursuing a segment of the electorate that’s shrinking. Aren’t they worried they’ll end up like Sears?
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau keeps saying “the middle class and those aspiring to join it,” we can probably assume that his hopes for political growth are pinned more on the second part of that phrase.
Aspiration is a big part of our ideas of middle class — the old American (or Canadian) dream. It’s called the pursuit of happiness in the U.S., not the attainment of it, after all. Shopping is a big part of that old, middle-class dream, too.
So if politicians want to fix the middle class, the whole retail business bears some close scrutiny — at least as much as trade and manufacturing or a favourite economic fix these days, infrastructure.
The current troubles in the Canadian retail business have at least three dimensions, fallout-wise. When things go badly, we have to worry about the people who work in the stores, the people who shopped in the stores, and, as a Star story pointed out this week, all the businesses that supply the shops, too.
“The list of suppliers left in the lurch by the Sears Canada insolvency reads like a who’s who of retail and it circles the globe,” the Star’s Francine Kopun wrote, describing the tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars Sears owes to a vast array of businesses whose products fed into the once-great store empire.
Politicians often urge people to go shopping in times of upheaval. George W. Bush famously told people to go out and buy things to get the U.S. economy moving after the 9/11 attacks. I’ll always remember how Jean Chrétien, campaigning to be prime minister in 1993, argued that when people see construction equipment, it makes them confident enough in the economy to go shopping. Maybe he was right. Who knows?
What we do know is that bad news in the shopping world is bad news for politicians, too, most particularly among exactly the voters all the parties are trying to court. Retail politics may be all about gladhanding and salesmanship, but the politics of retail in 2017 is a little more serious and sobering. sdelacourt@bell.net