Nordstrom plans to shutter two department stores next month as the retail industry faces a challenging economy and shifting consumer behavior that has led to the nation's highest level of store closings since the onset of the pandemic.
The Seattle-based retail chain plans to close its stores at the Saint Louis Galleria shopping mall in St. Louis and the Santa Monica Place regional mall in Santa Monica, California, a Nordstrom spokesperson said in statement emailed to CoStar News.
The Nordstrom store in the 1.1 million-square-foot Saint Louis Galleria is slated to close Aug. 24. The luxury retailer is among a trio of anchor tenants, along with Dillards and Macy's, at the mall owned by Brookfield Properties.
The 132,000-square-foot Nordstrom store at Santa Monica Place, near the Third Street Promenade, is slated to go dark on Aug. 26. Prism Places took over management of the high-profile beachfront mall this year as part of a court-ordered receivership after the mall's longtime owner, Macerich, defaulted on a $300 million loan in 2024.
"We believe we’ll be best able to serve customers in each region by leveraging our surrounding stores and through our digital channels," the Nordstrom spokesperson said. "Decisions like this are never easy, and we understand the impact they have on our team members."
Nordstrom joins Macy’s, JCPenney and other U.S. department store chains that have announced closings this year as the retail industry faces among the highest levels of store closings since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Consumer shift
The announcement also comes less than two months after the Nordstrom family and Mexican department store conglomerate El Puerto de Liverpool completed an all-cash transaction valued at about $6.3 billion to take the company private.
Nordstrom announced in 2023 it would shut down 15 stores in such high-profile locations as downtown San Francisco, blaming theft and declining shopper traffic for eating into profits.
The retailer’s closing of its store at San Francisco Centre, the city’s biggest mall, in 2023 accelerated a downward spiral into foreclosure after the mall's previous owners, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Brookfield Properties, walked away from the troubled property. The nine-story downtown mall last month lost Zara, its largest remaining retailer, with other retailers expected to close as the property faces a public foreclosure auction.
With a number of traditional retail chains downsizing formats and closing stores during the past decade, property owners across the nation are now counting on non-shopping, experience-focused tenants to fill space and increase customer traffic.
In a sign of shifting retail trends, Nordstrom's replacement in St. Louis will be Dick's House of Sport, a new experiential retail concept by the Dick’s Sporting Goods chain that has activities such as indoor climbing walls, golf simulation booths and batting cages, mall owner Brookfield told media outlets.
Even as Nordstrom has closed department stores, the retailer has opened dozens of discount Nordstrom Rack locations to capitalize on growing demand by price-conscious shoppers stung by years of rising interest rates and inflationary pressures.
Store closures
Far more stores closed than opened in the first half of 2025, with closings up by nearly two-thirds from the same period last year, according to a report by Coresight Research.
Coresight this week said it tracked 5,822 U.S. store closings representing 123.7 million square feet of retail space as of June 27. That outpaces the nearly 3,960 announced store openings — totaling just under 75 million square feet — during the same roughly six-month period.
The nearly 6,000 store closings represent a more than two-thirds increase from the 3,496 store closures announced in the comparable period in 2024, according to Coresight. The research firm predicted at the start of the year that there would be a record of roughly 15,000 store closings, compared with 5,800 openings, for all of 2025.
The rise in closures has put over 15 million square feet of retail space back on the market since the start of the year — the most space to be vacated in the first half of a year since the start of the pandemic, according to Brandon Svec, CoStar's national director of U.S. retail analytics.
Retail space demand remains far from weak, however, with overall availability near historic lows as dozens of large national retailers pursue significant expansions, Svec said.