The Day Bamberger’s Disappeared: A Women’s World, Erased
If you think this is accidental, you’re not paying attention.
→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED
Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.
A couple of months back, I wrote a piece about the demise of department stores. About my mother taking me to Bamberger’s on Saturdays. About the Kresge’s lunch counter where she ordered tuna fish and I ordered a hot dog. About later, taking my own daughter to Neiman’s in Houston, passing hangers over the dressing room door.
I wrote it because I’ve been watching these stores disappear and nobody is saying out loud what is actually happening, not because of consumer preference or retail evolution. But this: Private equity buying beloved chains, loading them with debt, gutting the staff, and walking away with the cash while the building goes dark. Their story is financial, our cost is generational.
The response surprised me. Women wrote in from everywhere. Tomi at Meier & Frank in Portland. Cyndi at a tiny store called Lasky’s in the Deep South. Linda at Garfinkels in DC. Kim at Bonwit Teller. Lois at the tall girl store in Boston, where her six-foot mother shopped because nowhere else carried her size.
Shannon, who worked retail under private equity ownership, said it plainly: PE isn’t about investment. It’s about sucking the financial life out of a company, then a group of mostly old boy cronies flying away on their golden parachutes to the site of the next destruction.
These weren’t comments about stores. They were comments about the rooms women practiced being themselves in. The mother-daughter dressing rooms. The cosmetics counter where the saleswoman knew your skin. The Saturday lunch where your mother taught you how to eat soup and place a napkin on your lap. All of it was infrastructure for us. And it is being dismantled by people who were never in any of those rooms.
The men who dismantled these spaces will never understand what they took. They were never in the dressing room. They never needed to be.
But we were.