Retail

Story Stream

Kmart Elegy January 22, 2024

LAST AUGUST, NorthJersey.com broke a story that was at once a bit of local retail news and a major national development. New Jersey’s last Kmart—in a typical 1970s strip plaza in a densely populated Bergen County community—was closing. Its shuttering...

Michael Mann’s Need for Speed January 04, 2024

Death haunts Ferrari. Michael Mann’s new film confines itself to three months in Modena, Italy, in the summer of 1957, a crucial period in the life of Enzo Ferrari and the automobile company that bears his name. Ferrari (Adam Driver) and his wife, La...

Battle of Bricks and Clicks August 16, 2023

Walmart executives were initially skeptical of online retail’s future. Amazon’s rise forced them to adapt....

Barbie’s Checkmate August 02, 2023

I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of th...

How Aimé Leon Dore Took New York July 28, 2023

On the May evening before Aimé Leon Dore was set to make its grand return to Mulberry Street following eight months of construction on an extravagant new storefront, Teddy Santis, the brand’s founder, was walking around the shop floor, sweating the d...

Beauty at the Food Court May 02, 2023

It is hard to picture the late Portuguese master José Saramago at the mall, or the very British J.G. Ballard for that matter. Yet both writers alighted briefly on that synthetic terrain and made it their own; Saramago in his 2000 novel “The Cave,” wh...

Putting on Appearances April 06, 2023

Preppy style is declared dead every 10 years or so, whereupon it dusts itself off, adjusts its rep tie and rises again. As the fashion journalist Maggie Bullock explains in “The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew...

Vintage Cars Go Electric April 04, 2023

For years, Rob Howard restored old cars. In his youth, he worked on a 1971 Plymouth Duster with his dad, and as an adult, he restored 1960s Mustangs and modernized a 1957 Chevy station wagon so he could drive it safely with his kids. But the cars wer...

How Barnes & Noble Came Back From Near Dead January 30, 2023

I remember when Barnes & Noble first opened in my hometown. Before that, we had a cramped Crown Books, and some lovely, but limited, libraries. Barnes & Noble was a revelation. There was something wondrous about a room with that many books, each of t...

Welcome to the Shoppy Shop January 26, 2023

Graza is only about a year old, but if you shop at a particular type of boutique grocer, you may feel like it’s always been here. That is part of the plan. “The small stores were very much a part of our launch strategy and go-to-market strategy,” sai...