There is a phrase that, over the past several months, has become something of a cliché, but like most clichés contains an essential truth: “The COVID pandemic has accelerated trends that had already been set in motion.” This is probably a recurring theme throughout this issue, especially in our year-end wrap-up features. It’s also especially true in the world of retail.

It doesn’t necessarily apply to all retail. “Retail”—at least in terms of what government data tracks—is a broad sector that includes food service and gasoline, both of which have been subjected to brand new trends that had most certainly not been set in motion before the pandemic. Restaurants had not been forced to close or limit dine-in capacity, there had never before been quite the gasoline glut that we saw in the spring and early summer, and not since the heyday of the hippies had so many people forgone haircuts. So for a lot of retail businesses, March was a sucker punch.

But then there are segments of retail that had been struggling even before the pandemic. I and others have been writing for the past few years about a “retail apocalypse” among big national chains, mall anchor stores, and prominent brands, and as recently as last January (before The Event) Forbes asked “Is the retail apocalypse over?” (Spoiler alert: no.) A Yahoo! Finance storyfrom early September summed up some high-profile bankruptcies: “It’s getting outright ugly in retail ahead of the critical fall shopping season.” They accompanied their story with a chart depicting retail bankruptcies to date (see Figure 1).