In his 1949 play Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller succinctly described the life of a door-to-door salesman: "He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that's an earthquake."
There was a time when Australian households would look forward to a visit from the milkman, Avon Lady or a red-tie sporting Mr Jolly, which was the name adopted by all door-to-door salesmen of Electrolux products.
And then, sometime in the middle of last century, we started not smiling back.
Instead, we walked out the front door of our suburban homes, jumped in our brand new cars and drove to one of the proliferating number of Australian department stores.
But if department stores helped kill door-to-door sales, today it is department stores feeling the knife from online retailing.
Now that knock on the door is far more likely to be an Amazon or other courier.
David Jones is only the latest in a string of such disappearances, from Mark Foy's to Winns to Grace Brothers.
Meanwhile, rising interest rates, oil price shocks and declining consumer sentiment all point to difficult times ahead for Australian retailers.
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic saw dark predictions of an economic recession of a magnitude not seen since the Great…
