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Phrase: End of an era
It’s sad to say, but we may be witnessing the end of an era not only in Japan but also worldwide.
The end of an era means something ends and will never return.
Until now, the Western world has been gradually switching to digital wallets and cashless transactions to make payments.
We have also been shopping online more and more.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused us to depend almost exclusively on all of those technologies now to protect ourselves from infection.
Of course, it depends on how long this pandemic will drag on, but this switch may speed up the decline of the traditional department store.
When that happens, and I am sure it will, it will be the end of an era.
That means something will come to an end and never return again.
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I grew up spending the weeks before Christmas browsing through the Sears catalogue for all the toys I wanted Santa to bring me.
I remember making a family trip to Eaton’s department store to purchase a new washing machine.
Those days are long gone, and so are Sears and Eaton’s.
Here in Japan, department stores were thrown a lifeline by Chinese tourists’ ‘explosive shopping’ trips.
It was the first time in years that department stores saw dramatic increases in their sales.
The pandemic has put a stop to all of that.
I’m sure a small number of department stores will survive, but we are witnessing the end of an era when department stores were the supreme retailers in a city.
Things change, the world turns, and life goes on.
Traditional department stores will fall by the wayside or go the way of the dinosaurs, and we will witness the end of an era.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 70.
The easier the passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.