Key takeaways
- Department store sales grew just 0.63% in 2024–2025 after a 1.6% decline the year before, while bankruptcies, mass closures, and a stubborn consumer confidence gap continue to deepen the sector’s structural challenges.
- The IGDS World Department Store Summit 2026 arrives in Mexico City at a key moment to determine how fast the sector can move from managing decline to building what comes next.
- Cautious optimism is emerging, but it belongs to operators who stopped waiting for conditions to stabilize.
The numbers are uncomfortable. Global department store sales rose just 0.63% in the 2024–2025 financial year, according to the International Association of Department Stores — a modest gain that followed a 1.6% decline the previous year, pointing to what the industry itself is calling a phase of “cautious normalization.” Meanwhile, in the first quarter of 2025, US department store sales fell 4% year-over-year, even as broader retail and food service sales grew by 2.8%.
The structural pressures are not new, but they are deepening. Saks Global filed for bankruptcy in January 2026, with several locations expected to close. Macy’s, meanwhile, is executing a plan to shutter 150 stores. Retailers announced 67% more store closures in 2025 compared to the previous year, according to Coresight Research, a sign of sharp acceleration that reflects the industry’s ongoing transformation.
The causes are well documented: the rise of e-commerce, value-conscious consumers migrating toward off-price and direct-to-consumer brands, high real estate costs, and a consumer confidence crisis that no macroeconomic improvement seems able to shift. Looking ahead, industry analysts describe 2025 to 2026 as “even more volatile,” with US tariff policy making long-term forecasting difficult and forcing retailers to sacrifice growth in favor of resilience.
This is the landscape the IGDS World Department Store Summit 2026 walks into.
The summit that takes the sector’s temperature
For 17 years, the IGDS World Department Store Summit has been the room where the department store sector stops performing and starts thinking. This year, for the first time, that room is in Latin America — Mexico City, 19 and 20 May 2026 — a location that is itself a statement. Department store culture is alive and deeply embedded in this part of the world in ways that Europe and North America can no longer take for granted.
Organized by the Intercontinental Group of Department Stores, whose 43 members across 38 countries generated over US$43 billion in combined sales in 2024, the IGDS WDSS 2026 is not a trade show or a networking event dressed up as a conference. It is where CEOs from some of the world’s most significant retail organizations sit in the same room, under the same pressure, and try to work out what comes next. It is that spirit of serious, cross-border retail leadership that led RLC Global Forum to partner with IGDS on this edition.
From survival to strategy
Seven sessions over two days, and not one of them is about survival. That framing matters. The questions on the table in Mexico City — unified commerce, AI in retail, customer loyalty, the future of fashion, the role of physical space — are the questions of a sector that has decided to move forward rather than manage decline.
The speaker lineup reflects that ambition. CEOs and senior leaders from GAP, Kurt Geiger, Nordstrom, Thom Browne, MECCA Brands, and El Palacio de Hierro are not gathering to discuss what went wrong. They are there to compare what is working and at what speed the rest of the industry needs to move to keep up.
What is striking about the program is how squarely it confronts the forces that have been reshaping retail for the better part of a decade. AI is an operational reality, and the retailers who are pulling ahead are those who moved from experimentation to implementation; unified commerce is the baseline expectation of any customer who shops across channels, which is to say, virtually every customer; and the physical store, far from being written off, is being reimagined as the sharpest tool a retailer has for building genuine emotional connection with consumers who are increasingly difficult to reach any other way.
Can the sector turn things around?
That is, arguably, the question.
“There is more hope for the department store model today than there has been for a while,” GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders noted in January 2026, while acknowledging the sector is “still swimming upstream.” That tension between genuine optimism and structural difficulty, is precisely what the IGDS World Department Store Summit 2026 is designed to navigate.
The operators who are finding their footing share a common thread: they stopped waiting for the market to stabilize and started making decisions as though it never will. That is a different kind of leadership, and it is exactly the kind of thinking that makes this gathering matter.
For the full program and more information: www.wdss2026.org/en
