This is what a dying store looks like
Bright signs, bare racks and naked mannequins
This story ends with me walking down the street carrying the bottom half of a mannequin. But I’ll get to that.
I wanted to see what a dying department store looks like, so I visited Boston Store the other day. The one at downtown Milwaukee’s Shops of Grand Avenue, slowly becoming the Empty Storefronts of Grand Avenue.
First I chatted up a woman on the sidewalk along Wisconsin Avenue. She stood in the hot sun and held up a sign saying everything was 60-80% off. This is her job at the moment. She was cheerful.
Then I went inside, just as some customers were leaving with Christmas decorations in August. The ground floor still looks like a department store, but messier and less put together than we knew Boston Store to be before its parent company, Bon-Ton Stores Inc., went bankrupt.
It’s garish now. Bright signs are everywhere. They announce “Final weeks” and “Everything must go” and “Nothing held back.” I looked to see if they had one saying, “Are you happy now, Amazon?”
I examined a rack of pre-ripped fashion jeans, marked down 65% from $69 to $24.15 with an additional 30% off at checkout. Here’s what struck me. The rack they were on, labeled as a 4-way on wheels, was also for sale for $35.
Shoppers, though not many, wandered around looking for bargains. Carolyn Demers told me she liked Boston Store and would miss it. Who could foresee a day when we wouldn’t have Boston Store or Sears or Toy “R” Us?
“I was mad at them for closing, so I was not going to buy anything,” she said. But soon the 10%-off deals grew to 50% and 80%, and she caved. When I met the Brookfield woman, her arm was draped with a half dozen outfits.
Elaine Crawford, who works in what’s left of the shoe department, told me she was employed at Boston Store at Mayfair 27 years ago and came back to work at the downtown location two years ago.
We had one of those conversations that sound like you’re at a funeral. It’s so sad. What a shame. The store looks so peaceful.
“It’s devastating,” Elaine said. “I have a lot of elderly customers. This was their outing, to come down here on senior day.”
The real weirdness begins up on the second floor, where the escalators are still happy to take you. This is where they’re selling the store fixtures — “as is” and “where is,” meaning you have to figure out how to get them out of the store.
You can buy garment racks, tables, chairs, cabinets, even the artwork off the walls.
Mary Fraundorf saw me taking notes and shared that she used to work right over there in women’s ready-to-wear. Wait, do stores sometimes sell clothing that’s not ready to wear?
Mary logged five years at Mayfair and four here until quitting earlier this month. She was shopping for bargains and hugging the customers she recognized.
I asked her to join me in the corner of the room filled entirely with dozens of standing mannequins, all unemployed and for sale.
“Oh my God, they even have a pregnant one,” she said. It was $170.
Mary has an office job now. At her age, 66, she is not riding the wave of online shoppers. “I like to go to a store. I’m so short, I like to try things on,” she said.
My kids will tell you that I have a weakness for odd souvenirs. And indeed on what was likely my final visit to Boston Store, I bought a mannequin, actually just the bottom half that once was used to display men’s pants. It could work as a kitschy plant stand, I told myself.
In broad daylight, I carried that bright white, nude, half mannequin and its platform three blocks back to where my car was parked at the Journal Sentinel.
Oh yeah, people stared. “Just walking with legs,” one guy commented as we waited for the traffic signal to change.
“What did you pay for that?” another guy asked.
It was 39 bucks, I told him. And there are plenty more where this came from right down the street at the once proud Boston Store.