El Corte Inglés is not closing 216 stores: the clickbait that fools everyone
An apocalyptic headline announces the closure of 216 El Corte Inglés stores in Spain. The reality: it is a story about Macy's. We break down the clickbait and the department store crisis.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
El Corte Inglés is not closing 216 stores: the clickbait that fools everyone
Is El Corte Inglés closing 216 stores overnight? No, but you fell for the clickbait just like thousands of readers. An article by Los Replicantes, with a deliberately ambiguous headline, made people believe that the Spanish department store chain is disappearing. The reality: the story is about Macy's, the US giant, which is indeed closing 216 stores. El Corte Inglés, which does not even have that many locations in total, continues its slow transformation.
The headline that fooled half of Spain
The original article, titled "Adiós El Corte Inglés: la multinacional que cierra 216 centros comerciales de golpe" (Goodbye El Corte Inglés: the multinational closing 216 stores overnight), opens by citing the Spanish chain before swerving to Macy's. Users were quick to denounce the ploy: "Fake", "textbook clickbait", "shitty journalist". The confusion is no trivial matter: the department store model is going through a global crisis, but attributing figures to El Corte Inglés that do not correspond to it is, at the very least, misleading journalism. The Spanish chain has fewer than a hundred stores, far from the 216 in the headline.
The real crisis of department stores
Beyond the hoax, the underlying debate is real. El Corte Inglés, like Macy's, Sears or Galerías Preciados, suffers the double pressure of online commerce and a lack of renewal. Those who still defend it point to its wide range of products, its restaurants and the memory of a personalized service that has gradually disappeared. But most agree: the model of buying a product and reselling it in a physical store, with advisors and large structures, is wobbling in the face of Amazon and Chinese giants like Alibaba. The question that remains is whether El Corte Inglés will manage to reinvent itself or end up as the next chapter of a story already written.
Nostalgia versus digital reality
Among the comments, longing for the past surfaces: the tailor who could fit a wedding suit just by looking at you, the discounted items from Galerías Preciados, the smell of coffee in the old supermarkets. But there are also those who joke about bathrooms that smell of urine and shop assistants who no longer serve customers as they used to. The contradiction is obvious: people want the old ways, but they buy on Amazon. El Corte Inglés will not close 216 stores overnight, but its future depends on whether it can convince the nostalgic without losing the digital crowd.
El Corte Inglés is not going anywhere. At least, not yet. But the headline that declared it dead already did its job: it made you click.
Is El Corte Inglés closing 216 stores overnight? No, but you fell for the clickbait just like thousands of readers. An article by Los Replicantes, with a deliberately ambiguous headline, made people believe that the Spanish department store chain is disappearing. The reality: the story is about Macy's, the US giant, which is indeed closing 216 stores. El Corte Inglés, which does not even have that many locations in total, continues its slow transformation.
The headline that fooled half of Spain
The original article, titled "Adiós El Corte Inglés: la multinacional que cierra 216 centros comerciales de golpe" (Goodbye El Corte Inglés: the multinational closing 216 stores overnight), opens by citing the Spanish chain before swerving to Macy's. Users were quick to denounce the ploy: "Fake", "textbook clickbait", "shitty journalist". The confusion is no trivial matter: the department store model is going through a global crisis, but attributing figures to El Corte Inglés that do not correspond to it is, at the very least, misleading journalism. The Spanish chain has fewer than a hundred stores, far from the 216 in the headline.
The real crisis of department stores
Beyond the hoax, the underlying debate is real. El Corte Inglés, like Macy's, Sears or Galerías Preciados, suffers the double pressure of online commerce and a lack of renewal. Those who still defend it point to its wide range of products, its restaurants and the memory of a personalized service that has gradually disappeared. But most agree: the model of buying a product and reselling it in a physical store, with advisors and large structures, is wobbling in the face of Amazon and Chinese giants like Alibaba. The question that remains is whether El Corte Inglés will manage to reinvent itself or end up as the next chapter of a story already written.
Nostalgia versus digital reality
Among the comments, longing for the past surfaces: the tailor who could fit a wedding suit just by looking at you, the discounted items from Galerías Preciados, the smell of coffee in the old supermarkets. But there are also those who joke about bathrooms that smell of urine and shop assistants who no longer serve customers as they used to. The contradiction is obvious: people want the old ways, but they buy on Amazon. El Corte Inglés will not close 216 stores overnight, but its future depends on whether it can convince the nostalgic without losing the digital crowd.
El Corte Inglés is not going anywhere. At least, not yet. But the headline that declared it dead already did its job: it made you click.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (70 replies).
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