It’s been a tough time for many bricks-and-mortar and bricks-and-clicks retailers. Unfortunately, this is nothing new, since the past few years have been challenging.

How about this for a new article title “The Retail Slump Is Killing Middle-of-the-Mall Brands” by Ben Roazen, writing for HYPEBEAST:

“Matchesfashion.com recently marked its 30th anniversary. The brand has undergone a tremendous transformation from its early days as an English boutique to a veritable online powerhouse in the age of E-commerce. Matches is, in a sense, an outlier: a leftover of the bygone brick-and-mortar era that successfully adapted to the Internet. According to the Financial Times, 95% of Matches’ sales in 2016 came online, an area where the brand saw a 73% increase. The 80% of total 2016 sales made outside of Britain show that the brand has burgeoned into a global powerhouse, too.”

“Matches’ success story is noteworthy because it is an outlier. Over the past decade, economic recessions and a widening gap in income inequality led to the demise of many malls across America; over 1,500 stores are slated to cross across America in the first four months of 2017. Here’s a list of retailers who have filed for Chapter 11 in the past 12 months: American Apparel, Nasty Gal, BCBG Max Azria, The Limited, Wet Seal, Bebe, Aeropostale, Pacific Sunwear and PayLess ShoeSource. (For reference: there were only eight retail bankruptcies throughout the entirety of 2015.)”

“Recession, slow job growth, and scant spending cash led to many middle-class, middle-of-the-road malls closing their doors and withering on the vine. Mall mainstays like Sears, J.C. Penney, Abercrombie & Fitch, and American Eagle have all admitted that times have been tough and that they would be shutting doors across the country, too.”

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IMAGE: PBS; PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL F. MCELROY/NEW YORK TIMES