What We Lose When Retail Stores Disappear

Second-act careers for women vanish with the demise of department stores and malls

Illustration: Nashra Balagamwala

It was a job rooted in routine. That’s what I thought at first when my mother worked for JCPenney in a suburb of San Diego in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a customer service representative in the catalog department. She worked evenings, taking orders…