Holiday shopping season brings questions for retailers, like, who will survive?

We’re getting closer by the hour to the launch of holiday shopping — some retailers have jumped the gun already with advertised specials — and anticipation continues to build for that moment when children of all ages unwrap presents wrapped in paper decorated with that widely recognized symbol of the season.

The question mark.

Retailing is always fraught with uncertainty, but 2019 seems particularly packed with unknowns about what sort of year this will be. Questions abound, including:

▪ Will this be the last Christmas for Sears? Not to keep beating up on what was once the king of American retailing, and it’s only somewhat true that on a slow business-news week we can always get a column out of the latest development in Sears’ running demise.

But eventually you reach a point where there’s nothing left to close or sell, and Sears is very close to that point. Transformco, the entity that currently owns the retailer, has announced the closing of 96 Sears and Kmart stores, including locations in Lacey and Spokane Valley. The going-out-of-business sale starts next month.

When this latest round is done, Transformco will have just 182 stores under the two names; when Sears and Kmart combined in 2005 they had about 3,500 stores.

Transformco says it plans to concentrate on “better-performing stores,” leveraging real estate it owns and leases, as well as the Kenmore and DieHard brands.

“These businesses will also benefit from the recent acquisition by an affiliate of Transformco of Sears Hometown — a network of more than 400 independently-owned and operated, dealer-managed smaller-format stores that are known for offering customers a range of home products, including appliances, lawn & garden, tools and sporting goods,” the company said in a release.

Sears might have been the place to buy a baseball glove, a refrigerator, a lawnmower and a set of socket wrenches 50 years ago. But there are other retailers that do many of those things well in more locations — Home Depot comes to mind. It used to be you could find almost anything in the Sears catalog. A viable rescue plan doesn’t appear to be among them.

▪ Sears aside, is the era of retailing chain consolidation and contraction over? Macy’s isn’t in as dire shape as Sears, but its footprint is shrinking. The downtown Seattle store, formerly the Bon Marche, is closing; the Northgate store and Redmond Town Center stores are already closed. Meanwhile, 2019 continued the trend of large-scale retrenchments in physical locations, one of the latest being Forever 21, whose 111 store closings include a half dozen or so in Washington.

How much more of this is there to go? Bricks-and-mortar retailing in this country has been beset by multiple factors — online retailing, economic uncertainty, outdated business models (see: Sears) and the fact that the sector was overbuilt. After a decade’s worth of painful winnowing of stores and entire companies, the weakest, least sustainable operations have been pushed aside. There’s still more pain to come, but the sector will be left with a core of financially stronger retailers with more viable long-term strategies.

▪ How much more growth is there in online? To judge by the store closings, by the money Amazon is spending on its distribution network, and by big investments in online by physical retailers, the conventional wisdom would seem to be, “plenty.” This holiday retailing season will be a good measure of whether there is no limit to how much online will grow, or if there is at a certain point a plateauing of market share that online will represent.

▪ How comfortable are consumers with spending this year? The economy is doing well (if you’re in certain in-demand sectors, it’s doing really well). Inflation is low, energy prices are higher but still moderate, and interest rates are tame. From a personal-finance perspective, conditions are good for retailers; remember that a decade ago we were in the trough of a brutal recession.

There are some nagging concerns, on the micro level having to do with everything from student-loan debt to rising debt levels generally, on the macro level having to do with trade disputes and the recession that is overdue. But none of those seem oppressive enough to make consumers sit out the holiday retailing season. Retailers can always find a reason to fret — a late Thanksgiving, bad weather, the lack of a hot product that shoppers have to have — but for this year, at least, they’ll have to work hard to whip those concerns into full-fledged threats.

▪ Of all the segments of retailing, the grocery business might be the toughest. Margins are paper-thin, both capital and labor costs are high, the market is crowded with competitors, the supply chain is complicated and crucial (with items like produce and dairy being time-sensitive and highly perishable).

For some reason Amazon finds the grocery business endlessly fascinating, to the extent it has invested in buying Whole Foods, in grocery pick-up and delivery services, in grab-and-go small-format stores with automated check-out, and now with yet another grocery chain being launched, according to multiple press reports, in the Los Angeles market. Since there’s plenty of retailing space available — one Amazon store is going into a former Toys R Us location — the company can move quickly to build out its storefront network.

From the sound of those reports, this new Amazon grocery venture won’t play in the upscale territory of Whole Foods. While Amazon brings a lot of muscle to the competition, it will also be going up against lots of other companies with a lot more strength than it encountered in its original business of books.

Nor is Amazon the only retailing company with plans to expand in groceries. Because readers are always asking, here’s the update on two of them: No, neither Aldi nor Lidl, the German-based discounters, have said when or if they’ll be coming to the Pacific Northwest.

But they’re likely to be here someday. So will Amazon’s newfangled store concept. And maybe some more. Why not? When you’re already counting the number of grocery-shopping options in the dozens, what’s a few more?

This story was originally published November 16, 2019 at 6:00 AM.