When I was a kid, my mom bought my clothes at Mervyn’s or JCPenney. If we were lucky, we went upscale to Macy’s. All three stores were at Sunvalley Mall in Pleasant Hill, California. I hated clothes shopping, so perhaps I should feel vindicated by what has happened to all those apparel stores. Mervyn’s closed forever—all 177 stores liquidated in 2008. JCPenney filed for bankruptcy in 2020. They’re still around but have closed over 150 stores. Macy’s is downsizing, averaging about 80 store closings a year. Even the stores where we bought my kids’ clothes—Banana Republic and Gap—announced major downsizing between 2020 and 2022.  

Why did these stores close? The answer forces me to bring together history—namely the history of globalization—and the historical thinking skill causation. 

Thinking causatively 

Causation is one of my favorite historical thinking skills, partly because it’s so useful. History is about continuity and change over time, and most of my favorite scholarly books and articles about history are structured to tell the reader how we got from condition A to condition B. For example, how did British colonies become a republic? How did a world of peasants become a world of factory workers? But the vehicle that drives us from point A to B is causation. In this case, the specific question I’m asking is how did we get from a world of Mervyns, Macy’s, and malls to a world without? Or, more broadly, I’m asking how and why the world of merchandising and business changes around us.

There are lots of causation-focused tools you might use to understand why change happens. My favorite, however, may be causal mapping. Rachel Phillips introduced this tool in a blog post back in 2022. Causal maps are a type of thinking tool that helps organize and visualize the complex factors behind historical events. They support nonlinear thinkers in expressing ideas visually, and they challenge linear thinkers to move beyond single-cause explanations. By mapping out events, students engage with the messiness of causation and begin to understand how multiple causes and effects interact. A good example is the Causation: Revolutions activity in the OER Project: World History course.

Globalization causation

But to interpret change, we need not only a skill like causal mapping, but also some information to provide  context and an interpretive lens. For understanding the recent past, perhaps the most useful lens is globalization. Globalization features as the final unit in all OER Project: World History courses. And in Big History, globalization is part of the larger story of the Modern Revolution. Both courses look at the upside and downside of globalization. We examine the ways in which it connects us to each other through new technologies, helps both desirable commodities and deadly diseases spread more quickly, and has the potential to both to flatten the world and create inequalities.

Globalization is a useful frame for looking at the factors that helped to cause the decline of department stores like Macy’s and JCPenney. For example, today, the internet plays a key role in drawing the world together more than ever through communication and e-commerce. Platforms like Amazon—or China-based Temu and Alibaba—have reshaped our behavior, so much so that we see going to the store now as a chore. In the clothing business, big retailers like Shein and direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and Gymshark offer fast, cheap shopping-from-home experiences. Brick-and-mortar stores, which rely on foot traffic and in-store browsing, are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The shift has been especially damaging to mid-tier and mall-based apparel stores.¹

Globalization was found to have contributed to the rapid spread of COVID-19 in 2019–2021. The pandemic played a critical role in the decline of many mall-based and ”Main Street” stores. During lockdowns, physical stores shuttered temporarily, losing money every month while online retailers businesses surged.  Unable to keep up in this new digitized e-commerce space, some brick-and-mortar stores never reopened. But the pandemic had another impact as well. It changed our clothing culture. Remote work and social distancing reduced our need to buy clothes. Stores like Macy’s saw a dramatic drop in sales, and they never recovered. Even as restrictions eased, retailers found that our expectations had shifted permanently.

Of course, globalization doesn’t explain everything. Many economic trends are a mix of global and domestic conditions. So, in the United States, wages for retail workers—although still quite low—rose rapidly once the pandemic ended, due more to labor shortages than global conditions. Then, starting in 2023, spiking inflation made the problem worse. These trends meant higher material, manufacturing, and shipping costs, but it also meant that customers had less money. Young adults, lower-income families, and middle-class professionals began to look for strategies to cut spending. They found that while they still had to pay rent and eat, new clothes had become a luxury item.

In fact, resistance to globalization may also have had something to do with the decline of brick-and-mortar apparel stores. Lots of apparel stores rely on global networks to provide cheap clothes produced by underpaid labor. In the last few years, there has been a growing cultural backlash among young shoppers against these trends. Some youth have been inspired to abandon businesses that have what they see as unsustainable production cycles, poor labor practices, and environmental harm. Movements like #WhoMadeMyClothes and the rise of thrift-store shopping have chipped away at clothing consumption.²

Today, antiglobalization sentiment is shaking up the apparel industry again. As my coauthor and I predicted in our article “Transnationalism and the Revival of Nationalism,” nationalism hasn’t gone away. Nationalists have begun to use international trade policies to advance national policy. In particular, the United States government has been pushing tariff-based policies against China and other states. These policies have seized up the global supply chains of American stores. Apparel, as one of the most globally integrated sectors, has been hard hit.  Companies that make and sell clothes might get their raw materials on one continent, manufacture on another, and sell them on a third. Tariffs raised costs for imports, forcing American companies to either absorb the difference or pass it on to customers. They have also hit China-based online retailers like Temu and Alibaba hard. This shock may usher in yet another change to the apparel business.

If I were to try to make a causal map of these forces, it might look like this:

Causal maps aren’t reality, of course. They can’t capture everything. And even the simplest of them can sometimes get pretty complicated. But when students create maps of causality, they are investigating questions in ways that take them beyond the everyday kind of thinking that they find boring. This kind of critical thinking, in fact, is part of what makes us—as humans—so irreplaceable. Unlike my local Mervyn’s, which was replaced by a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

For more OER Project materials on this topic, check out our Causation page.

¹ Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 92–99.

² Elizabeth L. Cline, The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good (New York: Plume, 2019), 115–118.

About the author: Trevor Getz is Professor of African History at San Francisco State University. He has written eleven books on African and world history, including Abina and the Important Men. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Cover image: A Mervyn’s store closing in Irvine, California. I remember getting my striped 1980s socks at my local Mervyn’s! By Amin Eshaiker, CC BY-SA 3.0