Struggle continues for retail sector

Notable exception includes Atlanta-based Home Depot.

The beat-down goes on. The retail sector, a huge – if often under-noticed – piece of the economy, continues to struggle.

With just a few exceptions, big chains that had dominated malls and big boxes across the American landscape are now in retreat. Some national chains — Circuit City, Borders, Sports Authority, CompUSA — are gone.

Chains like Kohl’s and Target struggle to adapt, while others have fended off disaster by shrinking or restructuring: JC Penney, for example, has tried new strategies and closed stores.

Icons like Sears and Macy’s have warned of potential doom if they cannot regain traction.

The successes are fewer, but notable: Atlanta-based Home Depot is one, along with chief competitor Lowes, as well as Costco and Wal-Mart.

Some of the damage is surely digital: nearly $103 billion spent in online purchases during the final three months of last year. And some of the shift is a matter of structure: there were just too many stores built and opened during the boom years.

Some economists call this kind of upheaval “creative destruction.” Creative it may be, but destructive it surely is. In the past five years, while the U.S. economy steadily expanded, department stores lost 16.1 percent of their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Metro Atlanta data is not as up to date, but it was following the same downward trajectory through 2015, the most recent date for data. If it has tracked the national pattern since then, there would be about 23,444 department store jobs in the region. That would be a loss of 5,619 jobs in six years – a 17.3 percent drop – while the number of overall jobs was surging.

The nation has more than 446,640 department store employees, according to the BLS. The sector has hemorrhaged 259,000 jobs since 2011.

That is more than three times as many employees as in America’s coal industry. But there’s not a lot of political rhetoric spent on those disappearing jobs.

But then, there are some big differences between coal and retail. For one thing, retail jobs typically don’t pay that well — an average of about $22,040 a year, according to the BLS.

Mining jobs – whatever the dangers, health risks or stresses – are generally seen as a bridge to home ownership and a middle-class lifestyle. The sector pays an average of $59,380 a year, according to the BLS.