Yes, bleak. As Mark Morford explicates:

One fine and sunny Saturday just recently, I visited a sparkly new Lowe’s home-improvement megastore to spec out a replacement oven for my apartment, an experience I was dreading not merely because it was the last place I wanted to spend a pristine Saturday, but because on weekends those places tend to be crammed and torturous and teeming and such crowds generally give me hives.

I needn’t have worried.

And not a single human in sight.

Check that: a handful of humans milled about, but most were sales clerks looking equal parts bored, lonely, confused. The few actual customers I finally noticed were barely visible at all, swallowed up by the gleaming mountains of unsold goods, like a few tiny ants in a farm designed to hold ten thousand.

It was, in a word, disquieting. It was, in six more, strange and dreamlike and unexpectedly sad.

With shopping gone to hell, what is left?