Are Boston Store, Younkers missed?
A year later, some have nostalgia for convenience or brands, but many don’t
Karen McNeely misses being able to walk into Boston Store and shop for One World brand apparel for women.
“They make cute casual tops at a reasonable price that aren’t what you see everywhere,” McNeely said.
A year after Boston Store, Younkers and other department stores owned by bankrupt Bon-Ton Stores Inc. permanently closed their doors, McNeely hasn’t found a good replacement brand at a brick-and-mortar store, so she probably just shops less often than she used to, she said.
McNeely, a self-described “retail nerd” who spent the early part of her career working as a buyer for what became Bon-Ton, is among those who wish the retailer still had stores in Wisconsin.
“It’s very hard for me to drive past the vacant buildings,” she said. “I think it would be easier if they had new tenants, but seeing them empty seems particularly heart-wrenching.”
Not everyone, though, is sentimental about Bon-Ton and its passing into the ever-expanding graveyard of onceprominent retailers late last August.
Asked whether there’s been much talk in the retail industry over the past year about the demise of Bon-Ton, retail analyst Anne Brouwer of Chicago’s McMillanDoolittle paused for a couple of seconds and said, “I haven’t heard much of anything about them. Isn’t that
interesting?”
Interesting, because perhaps it shows how fast the retail industry is changing and how there’s not much time to look back as the remains of stores that couldn’t make it pile up.
Bon-Ton’s going-out-of-business sale ended just before Labor Day after a five-month wind down that hollowed out what had been a key anchor of malls and shopping centers from Milwaukee to Madison to Manitowoc to Marshfield.
In all, more than 200 Bon-Tonowned stores — about two dozen in Wisconsin — were liquidated after BonTon, which saw sales skid year after year and hadn’t been profitable since 2010, was unable to pay its debt to creditors.
For some consumers, the disappearance of Bon-Ton has left a hard-to-fill hole a year later. For others, it’s simply c’est la vie — which, probably coincidentally, is what’s written on a wall that separates the mall at Mayfair from its former Boston Store space.
“I think it is the natural life cycle of a brand, and it’s gone,” said retail analyst Bob Phibbs, owner of New York-based The Retail Doctor.
Bon-Ton, founded in York, Pennsylvania, in 1898, came to Wisconsin for the first time in 2003 when it purchased the Elder-Beerman department store chain, which had five stores in the state. Its major expansion in Wisconsin came in 2006, when Bon-Ton bought the Saks Inc. Northern Group, which was headquartered in Milwaukee, for about $1.05 billion. The Saks Inc. Northern Group included the Boston Store, Carson Pirie Scott, Bergner’s, Herberger’s and Younkers department stores.
The merchandising and marketing units stayed in Milwaukee, where Boston Store began in 1897. That gave Milwaukee dual headquarters status with Bon-Ton’s home base in Pennsylvania. At the time of its bankruptcy filing in February last year, Bon-Ton had about 700 employees at its downtown Milwaukee headquarters and more than 2,200 statewide.
The loss of Bon-Ton — an important corporate citizen — dinged local civic organizations. For example, the semiannual Goodwill Sale, in which customers of Boston Store donated used clothing, textiles and household items in exchange for store coupons, typically generated six-figure cash donations for Goodwill and more than 1 million pounds of second-hard clothes and items that could be sold in Goodwill stores.
Angela Damiani, chief executive officer of the Milwaukee social and civic event planning and networking organization NEWaukee, said that while she personally wasn’t a Boston Store shopper, losing the downtown store and headquarters office hurts.
“They were a good community partner. They were always a big supporter of things like the Night Market, which took place right in front of their facility,” she said.
Industry experts say the shuttering of a big anchor store tends to weaken overall foot traffic at malls and shopping centers, which already are seeing fewer visitors in the age of online shopping.
In the metro Milwaukee area, the Boston Store space is empty at Mayfair and Brookfield Square malls, with no news yet on whether the stores will be renovated and reused or entirely redeveloped. The Boston Store building at Bayshore Town Center would be razed as part of a new redevelopment plan for Bayshore, and in the spring, the Journal Sentinel learned the owner of Southridge Mall was studying the possibility of tearing down the shuttered Boston Store and putting up an indoor athletic complex on the site.
Real estate investment trust W.P. Carey Inc., which bought the Boston Store buildings in 2015 and leased the space back to the retailer, hasn’t responded to requests for information about potential plans for its Boston Store sites.
CSC Generation, an e-commerce company that purchased rights to the Boston Store name and intellectual property of other Bon-Ton Stores Inc. brands in bankruptcy court, hasn’t been available to talk about whether it plans to open any brick-and-mortar stores in Wisconsin to supplement its online business.
In Wisconsin, former Boston Store and Younkers sites typically are near high-traffic areas and freeways, locations that would seem to promise new life with some other use — but probably not as department stores. That possibility appears to have passed in the era of Amazon.com, analysts said.
Phibbs said he doubts the Bon-Ton department stores are missed very much. Not enough people were shopping there when they were still in business, he noted.
“I think that woman was already gone before they closed the doors,” he said. “She’d already moved on.”
He said one of the problems with department stores is that 70% to 80% of their merchandise also is sold by competitors, which means a customer may have found the same items in Target, for instance, and didn’t need to go to the mall if she or he wanted to buy those products in person.
Phibbs added: “Bon-Ton was mismanaged over a number of years. Their shopper found another place to go.”
But some didn’t. Annette MoerleHeynisch of West Bend was worried last summer that once Boston Store closed in her city, she’d end up having to travel to Mayfair and visit Macy’s to buy her favorite cosmetics. That is what’s happened.
“That doesn’t make me happy. I’m not going to run to Mayfair for everything little thing,” Moerle-Heynisch said, adding that she doesn’t shop online “because I’m not in that age group.” “I miss it,” she said.
Some younger people miss BonTon’s department stores, too. Among them is Milwaukee fashion and lifestyle blogger Riva Treasure. She said she worked at the Grand Avenue store in the shoe department back in 2008, and later partnered with Bon-Ton on a couple of blog projects. Said Treasure: “I loved the products the Bon-Ton stores offered.” “I did regularly shop at Boston Store. I worked downtown and would stop there on my lunch break a handful of times per month,” Treasure said. “I felt like the downtown location was an anchor for downtown Milwaukee and feel like it is missed.”
Retail analyst Dick Seesel said there’s no question the disappearance of Bon-Ton department stores has hurt the local shopping scene in Milwaukee and elsewhere.
“You’ve got multiple major shopping centers with a lot less choice than they used to have,” said Seesel, owner of Mequon-based Retailing in Focus.
He said Bon-Ton locations were strong in certain product categories, such as women’s apparel, shoes and cosmetics.
“I’ve got to believe it’s a loss for a lot of consumers,” Seesel said. “It may not be the same in every market where they had a store, but in a lot of them they would have been the dominant presence. Where is that customer shopping now? Is it all online? A lot of it probably is, but not 100% of it.”
Brouwer said she suspects Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, Walmart, Amazon — and at the higher end, Von Maur and Nordstorm — have picked up customers that used to shop at Boston Store. Retailers like The Container Store might have garnered some of Boston Store’s kitchen business.
“Who knows? Maybe it’s even helping guys like Eddie Bauer and Lands’ End,” she said.
McNeely said when it comes to clothes, she probably shops more now at T.J. Maxx, Nordstrom Rack or Old Navy.
“For home goods, I’ve gone to Bed Bath & Beyond, but they are trying to reinvent themselves as well,” she said.
McNeely, who is director of retail for the Milwaukee Art Museum, had some thoughts on how, if she were CEO of Bon-Ton and the company somehow magically could have erased the debt that killed it, the retailer might have better competed in 2019 and beyond.
She wouldn’t have relied so much on coupons. She said she would have continued to develop the “hometown store image.” She would have restored restaurants that were removed in the 1980s, and worked with local chefs to create changing menus. She would have held fashion shows, classes and design competitions using Bon-Ton products. In essence, she would have tried to find more reasons to get people into the stores to shop.
“Maybe ultimately the downfall was the inability to change, to think outside the box for creative solutions to compete beyond price, and to bring passion to the heart and soul of the department store,” she said.