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

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.