Justin Fox, Columnist

Teens Choose Apple Over Abercrombie

Clothing retailers are struggling as gadget spending drains consumer pocketbooks.

May 5, 2016 at 6:43 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Phones beat T-shirts.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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In its bankruptcy filing this week, teen clothing retailer Aeropostale reportedly blamed its troubles on, among other things, "a shift in customer demand away from apparel to technology and personal experiences."

When a company blames its troubles on economy-wide shifts in consumer behavior, it's tempting to dismiss it as a cop out. Teen clothing retailers come and they go (and go and go). Maybe Aeropostale -- which began as a Macy's private label in the 1980s, became an independent company in 1998 and went public in 2002 -- has just reached the end of its natural lifespan.

Aeropostale isn't alone in its troubles, though. Fellow teen-oriented chains American Apparel and Wet Seal both filed for bankruptcy last year, while Abercrombie & Fitch struggled mightily (it's doing better now). Maybe consumer demand really is shifting away from clothes "to technology and personal experiences." Over the long run, consumer spending in the U.S. certainly has shifted in that direction: