When Giants Fall: Managerial Myopia, Financialization, and the Collapse of Global Retail

Abstract

The global retail sector has undergone one of the most dramatic periods of corporate failure in modern business history. Once-dominant giants such as Sears, JCPenney, Debenhams, Edcon, and Toys "R" Us collapsed not simply because of the disruptive rise of e-commerce, but because their internal systems—strategic judgment, cultural adaptability, governance discipline, and investment priorities—failed to evolve on time. This paper challenges the conventional narrative that retail decline was technologically predetermined. Instead, it shows that the decisive breakdowns were internal: managerial myopia, financialization-driven resource erosion, and cultural rigidity that hindered organizations' ability to sense, seize, and transform in response to strategic inflection points.
Drawing on eight cross-country case studies and integrating insights from the Structure–Conduct–Performance framework, Porter’s competitive strategy, the Resource-Based View, and Dynamic Capabilities Theory, the study identifies consistent patterns across diverse markets. Retail giants that collapsed did not lack resources; they lacked the ability to renew them. By contrast, resilient incumbents such as Walmart, Target, and Inditex demonstrate that reinvestment, cultural coherence, and organizational agility—not scale or history—determine survival. The study contributes a unified model explaining how strategic, cultural, and governance failures interact to erode adaptive capacity. It concludes with practical implications for executives and boards seeking to rebuild resilience in a digital, financially volatile era.