Spoilers: it isn't to McDowell County, WV.
They really only talk about department stores going downwards which if they're being honest with themselves never cared about shifting to what millenials would find appealing. Trying to be hip is probably just Sears death rattle. If you have to hide your name and and make big signs saying #weveCHANGED, it was over a long time ago.
Growing up, when we needed clothing or bedding or towels or toys or basically anything that qualified as "dry goods", we'd look through the Sears catalog, or the JC Penney catalog, or the Spiegel catalog, and find something. Then you'd call up and give them an order number and if you were a big spender, a credit card. If not, no big. Then you'd wait two weeks. Then you'd drive five miles (if Sears) or 45 miles (if JC Penney) or 80 miles (if Spiegel) to pick up your order at the nearest store. If you prepaid with a credit card, you showed them a driver's license. If you hadn't, you showed them a driver's license and wrote them a check. Then you could put on your fucking Michael Jackson t-shirt. At my feet are a brand new pair of Nike Janowski's in size ten anthracite. They are leather. They cost me $60. I ordered them on my phone day before yesterday. That Sears still exists at all is a testament to their valiant efforts to reinvent themselves. They are fighting the tide in every possible way. If they were simply resting on their laurels they would have ceased to be six months after every person in North America received their first AOL CD.
They're still kicking because you're still kicking. They don't have another generation of people who grew up with sears being relevant. I have one memory of looking through the sears catalog in a hospital, maybe if I had more of those I would feel some sort of nostalgia for sears but I know like one person my age who does. I don't even care much about The Bay, it used to be the first door you reached from the bus station at the mall that you went through to get to the rest of the mall. I went through that place as fast as possible because of the perfume counter. These are my memories of department stores, getting away from them and their stink. Very little they've done targeted my generation and now that we aren't irrelevant 12 year old's they realized they needed to shift their brand to get a new following of shoppers. Opening a pop up store where they barely admit they are sears and have the slogan we've changed just seems like to much of a desperate "please love me" thing. I have a great dislike for corporations because they are so out of touch with what everybody wants. We didn't want Canadian Tire to stop the commercials we all laughed at !
It's not that large companies are necessarily out of touch, it's that they're often so big that they can't easily change overnight. When you factor in the amount of money, time, and effort it takes to develop new approaches, for a larger company, there's often a lot of risk because if the market changes again overnight, they might lose out on a lot of money. So a lot of the time, they change what they can, and that often involves advertising and public image and the like, not rebuilding distribution models from the ground up. Though I will admit, I think Sears dropped the ball in competing against Amazon. If any big retail company had the chance to compete, it was them, and man, they really didn't try.I have a great dislike for corporations because they are so out of touch with what everybody wants.
I used to work for a garden centre for a big grocery chain that did very well even though they shared a parking lot with a Walmart that had lower prices. The reason we did better was because we had older staff who were very knowledgable and had been there long enough to build actual connections with customers who came back every year. After they started cutting benefits and buying out employees a lot of these people left since they were only there for the benefits. So now we were just the same garden centre with dumb young people and higher prices. Then there's the other place that had no plan for training new staff how to do their job. One girl found that weird because even mcdonalds had a whole training system in place. Don't even get me started on some other places I've worked. They forget the most important stuff because they are just obsessed with image. As long as it looks good everything is a-okay.
Quality training costs money. Shareholders don't like it when companies spend money that could go in their pockets instead. Companies are often worried more about shareholder perception than good business sense. This shitty math and lack of logic leads to shitty training. You hit the nail on the head though. How do you make up for negative shopping experiences due to insufficient training, overwhelmed and sometimes disgruntled employees? Advertising and image control.