“百货公司的逝去”。
2020-04-22 09:49阅读：
今天的华尔街日报报道。
百货公司的死亡过程是...“慢慢地，然后是突然地”。大家可以引用海明威的这句俏皮话。
“Gradually and then suddenly.” The dialogue above is from Ernest
Hemingway's 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
The Death of the Department Store: ‘Very Few Are Likely to
Survive’
Shuttered flagships. Empty malls. Canceled orders. Risks of
bankruptcy. The coronavirus has hit the behemoths of the retail
world.
By Sapna Maheshwari and Vanessa Friedman
April 21, 2020
Updated 7:33 p.m. ET
American department stores, once all-powerful shopping meccas that
anchored malls and Main Streets across the country, have been dealt
blow after blow in the past decade. J.C. Penney and Sears were
upended by hedge funds. Macy’s has been closing stores and cutting
corporate staff. Barneys New York filed for bankruptcy last
year.
But nothing compares to the shock the weakened industry has taken
from the coronavirus pandemic. The sales of clothing and
accessories fell by more than half in March, a trend that is expec
ted to only get worse in April. The entire executive team at Lord
& Taylor was let go this month. Nordstrom has canceled orders
and put off paying its vendors. The Neiman Marcus Group, the most
glittering of the American department store chains, is expected to
declare bankruptcy in the coming days, the first major retailer
felled during the current crisis.
It is not likely to be the last.
“The department stores, which have been failing slowly for a very
long time, really don’t get over this,” said Mark A. Cohen, the
director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Business
School. “The genre is toast, and looking at the other side of this,
there are very few who are likely to survive.”
At a time when retailers should be putting in orders for the
all-important holiday shopping season, stores are furloughing tens
of thousands of corporate and store employees, hoarding cash and
desperately planning how to survive this crisis. The specter of
mass default is being discussed not just behind closed doors but in
analysts’ future models. Whether or not that happens, no one doubts
that the upheaval caused by the pandemic will permanently alter
both the retail landscape and the relationships of brands with the
stores that sell them.
At the very least, there is expected to be an enormous reduction in
the number of stores in each chain, which once sprawled across the
American continent like a pack of many-headed hydras.
Department store chains account for about 30 percent of the total
mall square footage in the United States, with 10 percent of that
coming from Sears and J.C. Penney, according to a January report
from Green Street Advisors, a real estate research firm. Even
before the pandemic, the firm expected about half of mall-based
department stores to close in the next five years.
Even as they have worked to transform themselves for e-commerce
with apps, websites and in-store exchanges, the outbreak has laid
bare how dependent the department stores have remained on their
physical outposts. Macy’s said on March 30 that after closing its
stores for nearly two weeks, it had lost the majority of its
sales.
The Commerce Department’s retail sales report for March, released
last week, was disastrous. Overall retail sales numbers for this
month are expected to be even worse, given that some stores were
open for at least part of March.
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Neiman Marcus has stopped accepting new merchandise.
Neiman Marcus has stopped accepting new
merchandise.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Retailers have begun taking extreme measures to try to survive. Le
Tote, a subscription clothing company that acquired Lord &
Taylor last year from Hudson’s Bay, said in a memo on April 2 that
the chain’s entire executive team, including the chief executive,
would be let go immediately. It also suspended payments of goods to
vendors for at least 90 days, citing “immense pressure on our
liquidity position.”
Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, extended payment for goods
and services to 120 days from 60 days and, according to Reuters,
has hired bankers from Lazard to explore new financing. Jeff
Gennette, the chief executive, is forgoing any compensation for the
duration of the crisis. The company was dropped from the S&P
500 last month based on its valuation.
J.C. Penney has hired Lazard, the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and
the consultancy AlixPartners to explore restructuring options,
according to two people familiar with the matter, and confirmed
that it skipped an interest payment on its debt last week. It is
expected to make a decision on what to do, including potentially
filing for bankruptcy, within a few weeks, one of the people
said.
But none of them were in as immediate dire straits as Neiman
Marcus, which has both an enormous debt burden — about $4.8
billion, thanks in part to a leveraged buyout in 2013 by the owners
Ares Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board — and
a raft of expensive rents in the most high-profile shopping
destinations, signed during boom times.
In late March, Neiman stopped accepting new merchandise and
furloughed a large portion of its approximately 14,000 employees as
the rumors of bankruptcy began to swirl. Its chief executive,
Geoffroy van Raemdonck, announced that he was waiving his salary
for April. The brand denied to vendors and its own employees at its
sister brand Bergdorf Goodman that it was engaging advisers to
explore a bankruptcy filing, but on April 14, S&P downgraded
Neiman’s credit rating. Last week, the retailer did not make an
interest payment that was due on April 15, angering bondholders and
further fueling suspicions that a bankruptcy filing was imminent. A
spokesperson for Neiman Marcus declined to comment.
Barneys offered steep discounts after declaring bankruptcy last
year.
Barneys offered steep discounts after declaring bankruptcy last
year.Credit...Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
Even Nordstrom, widely considered the healthiest department store,
said this month that it could be facing a “distressed” situation if
its physical locations closed to customers for “an extended period
of time.” Erik and Pete Nordstrom, chief executive and chief brand
officer, are both receiving no base salary for at least six months.
The chain has stunned some vendors with last-minute cancellations
via email in recent days.
Across chains, prices for new merchandise sold via e-commerce have
already been slashed by 40 percent in some cases. Order
cancellations for the pre-fall season — which would normally have
started delivering next month — have been increasing. Some brands
said shipments have even been turned away upon delivery to
warehouses, and extensions of payment terms are cascading through
vendors, who are then forced to negotiate with their own
manufacturers, marketing agencies, fulfillment centers and
landlords.
“I’ve had a showroom for over 30 years, and we have always used the
word ‘partnership,’ when talking about our relationship with the
department stores,” said Betsee Isenberg of the showroom 10Eleven,
which represents numerous brands such as Vince and ATM. “Through
9/11, through 2008, we worked hand in hand with our retailers. This
is the first time the onus has been on the brands — many of which
are losing millions and millions of dollars because of the canceled
orders. It is just not fair that it is survival of the fittest.” In
a new report, McKinsey refers to the situation as “wholesale
Darwinism.”
The resort season has been canceled entirely, and fall orders have
been put on hold, raising questions about what inventory will be
left if and when shops reopen and consumers return to stores.
The Neiman Marcus store at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. With stores
closed, retailers have seen sales plummet.
The Neiman Marcus store at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. With stores
closed, retailers have seen sales plummet.Credit...Mark Wickens for
The New York Times
“Nobody knows what Q4 will be like, but you have to start putting
the orders in now,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at
Forrester, said of the holiday season, normally the most lucrative
time of the year for the chains. “Some people don’t even have the
money to put in Q4 orders, and may have to cancel Q4 orders anyway,
and it’s a mess. There’s never been this much uncertainty.”
Robert Burke, the eponymous founder of a luxury consultancy, said
he expected brands to move further away from a wholesale business,
focusing on direct-to-consumer and a model with department stores
where they control their own space and inventory.
Shares of J.C. Penney, which has temporarily shut its more than 800
stores, closed at 23 cents on the dollar last Wednesday after the
retailer said it did not make a $12 million interest payment due
that day. Brooke Buchanan, a representative, said it was a
“strategic decision” in order to take advantage of a 30-day grace
period before it was considered in default.
Normally bustling stores like Saks Fifth Avenue are now
empty.
Normally bustling stores like Saks Fifth Avenue are now
empty.Credit...Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times
Ms. Buchanan said J.C. Penney had “been engaged in discussions with
its lenders since mid-2019 to evaluate options to strengthen its
balance sheet, a process that has become even more important as our
stores have also closed due to the pandemic.”
Cash flow for all department stores has dropped sharply. In a note
on April 13, analysts at Cowen estimated four months of liquidity
at Macy’s, six months at Kohl’s and seven months for J.C. Penney.
Nordstrom, they predicted, could withstand store closings for 12
months.
“The nature of the mall is if you lose a big anchor like a Macy’s,
you have co-tenancy issues and you have more pressure on the mall
traffic, which was already a big issue,” said Oliver Chen, an
analyst at Cowen. Co-tenancy clauses typically allow other tenants
to demand rent reductions if certain key chains depart. Mr. Chen
said that could accelerate the ongoing divide between top-tier
malls and the second- or third-choice malls in certain areas.
According to a report this month from S&P Global Market
Intelligence, department stores were more likely than any other
consumer industry to default on their debt in the next year. It
estimated the probability at 42 percent.
Nordstrom’s new store in Manhattan. Analysts predicted that it had
enough cash to withstand 12 months of stores closures.
In its April 2 memo, the management of Le Tote and Lord &
Taylor said only “key employees” were being retained to preserve
the business. A representative for Lord & Taylor and Le Tote
declined to comment or disclose the number of employees who were
furloughed and laid off.
“It appears to be a virtual certainty that Lord & Taylor will
liquidate its business in the near future, either in or out of
bankruptcy,” said James Van Horn, a partner at Barnes &
Thornburg and a specialist in retail bankruptcy. “They were already
one of the most challenged department stores prior to the
coronavirus pandemic, and when the majority of the management team
is leaving, the vast majority of employees are laid off and a
minority of employees furloughed, there does not seem to be any
other strategy but to liquidate the inventory.”
Mr. Van Horn said he expected that other chains might strategically
employ Chapter 11 reorganizations to legally shed stores,
lightening their rent burden.
“It will likely be a domino that falls,” he said. “Whether it is
first or 10th, we don’t know.”
