By Selena Drivas

The Coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately closed many stores and businesses including Lord & Taylor. Lord and Taylor is the largest and oldest department store in the United States, and it has been around for about two hundred years. According to Wikipedia, “the flagship store at the Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue in New York City operated from 1914 until 2019.”  Lord & Taylor has already permanently shut down eighteen out of thirty eight of their locations. Lord & Taylor was going through bankruptcy, but the pandemic has caused  tons of sales loss, which forced more stores to close. According to CNBC, “mall owners face an especially heavy burden when a department store closes permanently. Those spaces, which can span multiple levels and more than 100,000 square feet, are increasingly hard to replace with new uses.” Many other retailers  filed for bankruptcy this year, such as Century 21, JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, and Pier 1 Imports. The department stores have been hurt by online websites such as Amazon, Walmart, Target and so many more. According to Abc7, “like many retailers, Lord & Taylor was already struggling with the shift to online shopping even before the Coronavirus pandemic struck this spring”. In the end, many department stores were hurt since the beginning  of  the pandemic, which caused low sales and many online websites gained since the pandemic started. This terrible loss to the fashion industry is just an addition to all of the awful events of 2020. Unlike Lord and Taylor, hopefully other department stores can recover after the pandemic.