My Talking Tire Gauge says retail is flat.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: 2002 Christmas shopping season not good

No, I DIDN'T GET A TALKING TIRE GAUGE FOR CHRISTMAS. I wanted one, Lord knows, but I guess the people who read my Christmas list just couldn't figure out where to get one. They probably went to Checker Auto Parts, but, from what I can gather, the place to get the Accutire Talking Tire Gauge is Dillard's. The department store. In the mall.

Who knew?

Like the end of every year, the post-Christmas news contained a ton of information on holiday retail sales, and the news for 2002 wasn't good.

As usual, most blamed it on underlying economic conditions and a short holiday season. However, I suspect there are different reasons.

Chief among these is that retail just isn't what it used to be.

The aforementioned Dillard's is as good an example as any.

I happened to walk into the department store during the holiday season and walked out without buying anything, basically because this once-proud retailer now looks like a junk shop.

It is not alone. Imagine my surprise when I walked into Lord &Taylor. Here's a store with, I thought, a fairly upscale image and upscale merchandise, but in all the aisles -- stuffed between the Tommy Hilfiger and Polo By Ralph Lauren departments -- are kiosks selling things like TV/CD boom boxes and all manner of items normally sold on late-night television or the shopping channels on cable.

I didn't expect to see cheap tschochkes at such a store and, frankly, it made the whole place seem all the more cheap.

I don't mean to pick on those two stores.

It's the same at Foley's and Sears and JC Penney and just about everywhere else.

It goes beyond the unexpected junk, however. It's also the unexpected sameness.

All these stores, with their regular merchandise, sell pretty much the same stuff. It used to be that I understood what I was going to find at The Denver Dry Goods and at May D&F, and it was going to be different. Nowadays, the only thing that differentiates the stores are the sales; I go...