Walmart just released its quarterly performance figures and, though they were only marginally improved over recent results, the consumer press glowed in its praise for the performance of the world’s largest retailer. In truth, Walmart is still struggling with attempts to lure shoppers into its stores and, once there, to entice them to purchase at the frequency of former Walmart customers.

The results, and the attention they command, reinforce the role Walmart continues to play in the U.S. financial community — and ignore the challenges of gaining sales and maintaining earnings at a retailer whose stores, once new, have become part of America’s traditional shopping network.

The remarkable saga of Walmart is less about quarter-to-quarter performance and more about the retailer’s ability to keep customers coming to its stores in a changing America, a country with new consumers, new economic boundaries, new retailing formats and new retailing options.

One criticism leveled at Walmart’s performance figures concerned the retailer’s online business, which is apparently not growing quickly enough to justify the increased emphasis the retailer is putting on it. Making comparisons more odious, Walmart’s performance was compared with that of Amazon, a retailer that has changed the retailing game by (until recently) selling exclusively online. Viewed against brick-and-mortar competition, Walmart is performing acceptably online, with that buying option increasingly used by customers who only recently learned that online shopping was an option for Walmart customers.

So the praise for Walmart, if somewhat misdirected, was nonetheless appropriate. The world’s largest retailer continues to attract shoppers and sales at a time when other leading retailers have seen sales increases all but disappear in a still-struggling economy that still sees a steady increase in new stores and new-store formats, options and alternatives. Foremost among these is the growth and acceptance of online shopping, as consumers in increasing numbers discover, accept and embrace this shopping option, one they initially avoided or accepted as a last resort.

With recent quarterly results out of the way, this might be a good time to access the mass retailing business. Simply put, in a difficult year it is holding its own, if not exactly prospering. Target’s quarterly performance figures were not unlike those of Walmart, and if the press wasn’t exactly exuberant, that was perhaps expected, since Target has been engaged in a series of new initiatives designed to align its shoppers more closely with the store formats Target offers. But Target is clearly on the road to recovery, and its tragic mistakes of the past two years are behind it.

The chain drug retail segment continues to evolve in different iterations. Walgreens and Alliance Boots are still engulfed in synchronizing the unified companies’ operations, while CVS still wrestles with problems surrounding its efforts to balance its burgeoning pharmacy business with its less-robust front-end business.

The biggest strides continue in the grocery business, where both traditional retailers and newer arrivals rush to open new formats and variations on existing ones. Kroger’s newest store, in Cincinnati, is as exciting as any the retailer has opened, while Whole Foods’ new 365 store, in Los Angeles, proves anew that this exciting food retailer has not run out of exciting concepts.

Withal, 2016 remains an authentically dynamic year for mass retailing, even if some of the industry’s individual components are struggling to find new and profitable ways to do business. What’s newest here is the industry’s ability to seize on new ideas and new concepts, as competition within traditional formats threatens to cloud the industry’s future. As long as the best continue to diversify — with new ways of doing business — mass retailing in America will never become stale, outmoded or in need of serious surgery.