Hey, it's Teddy. This week, Rico daily is on Spring Break.

All week will be bringing you our favorite episodes from the last few months.

Hope you enjoy and see you again next Monday.

Today is Cyber Monday. It's a great time to get good deals online and keep on

shopping for the holidays. And this year, like last year, Cyber Monday sales are likely

going to be bigger than they were on the other big day of the post Thanksgiving rush,

Black Friday. This is all part of a trend accelerated by the pandemic, the death of in-person

retail shopping that stuff you do on Black Friday. Jason Delray, Rico is retail correspondent.

This year, talk about it. Hey, Jason. Hey, Dylan, Teddy.

So bring me back to before the pandemic. What was happening to the mall, the department store,

even before any of us knew about COVID?

Department stores were really, really struggling. This is not a new thing in so much as it's been a

slow contraction of the department store sector that's definitely gone on for the last decade

and probably some signs of it even before that. The department stores and the malls,

their fate is somewhat intertwined. Department stores are often what's called the anchor tenants

that sit on the outside of the malls and are charged with sort of attracting the foot traffic

that then, you know, proceeds into the rest of the mall. The malls in a lot of parts of this

country have also been struggling with the exception of, you know, some of the big premium malls

that have sort of top tier brands that attract the one or five percent of the US population that

has a lot of disposable income, like those who largely have done okay. But outside of that,

been basically a disastrous, you know, last five to 10 years, even before the pandemic.

Tell me like what happens to the retail industry over the last couple of months?

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