However, I do feel bad for the people that will lose their jobs over it.
Let's make towns have downtowns, with beautiful brick roads, scenic ponds with some ducks, perhaps a waterfall, some nice cafes, a lawn with benches, some parks, some nature, trees, live music, a library and museums. It's okay to have some retails stores sprinkled around here and there, as long as they're original, and not those mass market plastic selling behemoaths we see everywhere.
But really, it seems like you want a town with more parks.
My main complaint about malls is how _loud_ they are: visually and auditory-ly (someone please tell me what the right word is). Malls are crowded, adorned in bright, garish colors, filled with stale food court food smells. There is very little seating other than at food courts, water fountains are hidden far away in some corner, loud music plays almost all the time, or it's noisy because of all the people. In sunny Silicon Valley, parking is a nightmare but there'll only be one bike stand hidden in a 50 acre space. It somehow has all of the worst features of a busy bazaar with almost none of the good (local products, "authentic"-ness, ability to haggle etc). Just standing in a shopping mall stresses me out.
It's possible that the present state of the art of mall design ticks the boxes for the largest audience possible and I'm the weirdo.
Montreal and Toronto have huge indoor shopping areas connected by subway, I suppose technically they are malls.
I live in Toronto and it's wonderful to have nice streets that you can walk and bike on, even at ±30C.
Denver gets very little precipitation so rain is something that generally is not an issue though.
Sure, they don't completely isolate humans from weather conditions but these solutions significantly improve the livability and prolonged usability of an urbanization, without burning bathtubs of gasoline to keep running.
Humans are not obliged to colonize every single corner of the planet...
If you think malls are only about consumerism then you've misunderstood a big part of their appeal for a lot of people. Young people and groups of friends don't go to the mall on their own. Malls merge consumerism with social activity - they're for people who enjoy shopping with their friends.
If that's not you then fair enough, but don't disparage malls simply because they don't appeal to you. If they disappear society will be worse for many, many people.
Many malls have banned people under 18 unless accompanied by a parent or guardian. This practice started around 10 years ago.
Just in case anyone doubts me: http://www.parenting.com/news-break/why-your-teen-getting-ba...
>Up to 80 malls across the United States enforce a curfew or escort policy for teenagers
I was still looking young in 2008 despite being well into my 20s and that's when I got IDed at a mall entrance. I was so annoyed/insulted by it I never went back to that mall every again. I can understand getting IDed at a bar, but not at a friggin mall.
However, the mall isn't a public space and things a healthy society allows for - protest, hand holding, being different looking, aren't necessarily allowed in a mall.
Regardless if a mall is preferable in 100 degree heat or -10 degree cold, those other spaces are important for other reasons.
I don't think this has been true, at least in the US, since the 1990s.
They don't go at all. Because most malls nowadays (in my area, anyway) have rules saying they have to be chaperoned by an adult.
You would think! I live in Santa Monica, California, and we have exactly that in our downtown area. The retail shop turnover is insane -- a large amount of shops come and go from the area, despite the massive amount of foot traffic the area sees every weekend (and most weekdays during the summer).
I would also nominate DTLA. Downtown is lit. Parking is wack though.
Consumers are no longer interested in old retail chains. They follow influencers and their original brands, but they're mostly direct to consumer, and everything arrives in two days anyway.
As noted in another comment, Main St. is a bit better with some ok food, bars and coffee shops, but the retail side doesn't offer much. Most likely out of sheer need for survival due to super expensive lease rates, most retail is oriented towards tourists, with a little bit reserved for ultra wealthy of the area.
They have a good restaurant selection, too, with a not-depressing food court and a set of good-to-great restaurants. For families, the mall is still genuinely one-stop shopping for clothes, pet supplies, groceries, bikes, dining out, etc.
I often find myself missing my old, reliable Aeon when I'm abroad. I think malls like Aeon deliver on the promise that malls in America fall short on. Aeon is also the biggest retailer in Asia, IIRC.
A typical mall would have a food court, a large arcade for kids, a daycare (or two), pharmacies, coffee shops, a book store, a furniture store, and so on. Also, unlike from what I've seen here in the US, any decent mall must contain a large supermarket (usually Carrefour). Malls in the UAE are therefore a "one stop shop" that people go to every week to buy groceries and household supplies.
Given how hot it can get over there, it makes absolute sense to have everything in one, air conditioned building.
I think that malls could make a huge comeback with a focus on events that naturally draw people in and an emphasis on the kinds of high-touch products that people generally do prefer to buy in person.
When you're 13 it's like one of the few places that large where you can hang out without parents around.
But yeah that was when I was 13. They haven't really innovated much. It's a great place for kids but no so much for adults. I thought almost everyone had a great childhood mall experiences haha, but I guess not.
What malls do have is space, and that kind of large space owned by a single entity is rare these days within a reasonable travel time away. Redevelopment potential is definitely there.
Also, a professor of mine once wondered why we don't have great public spaces like they do in Europe. Then he realized that we do -- in the form of college campuses.
It's much more like a conventional mall than a downtown: It's effectively walled off from the rest of the neighbordood. You're expected to go there by driving your car, and it's isolated by its massive parking lots so nobody would consider walking in or out a pleasant experience.
I'm not aware of anyone there--except maybe... jewelers?--that enjoy long-term careers at a mall. It's like an entire parking lot full of McDonalds. They'll find new jobs. Everyone at Circuit City managed to move.
And I'm in no way bashing retail or food worker. I used to tell people I did a "five year tour of duty at Sam's Clubs and I've got the [five year] medal to prove it." My point is that those jobs are both 1) crap working conditions and pay. and 2) easily transferable to comparable jobs at other employers.
Circuit City disappeared and the world moved on. K-Mart is still around but everyone who values their careers has already jumped ship. Block Buster is gone and the world keeps ticking. Mall store employees will continue on.
The real question is why no malls either care to, or are unable to, attract stores that appeal to customers. We are definitely becoming more hermit-like as a society, but there's got to be "something" most non-hermits enjoy. The whole purpose of the Mall is a bunch of stores that add value to each other by being near each other. "I bring Dad for a lawn mower, and the kids hit the arcade." (Man, I miss finding quarters and taking them to the arcades.) So my point here is, single stores still exist, so clearly it's not "stores in general" going out, but more "the stores malls want" people care less about.
No, the 'real reason' has nothing to do with shopping. The article touched on the actual problem. It is way too easy to get into billions of dollars in debt. If you own mall real estate, who do you want at your mall.
Small businesses that attract customers, but have to pay you with money they earn.
Or
Large chains that earn earn billions by playing leveraged debt games, and will pay stupidly high rates for rent, no customers required.
Malls will survive just fine, the moment rents and property prices are back in touch with reality.
no reason failing malls cannot be remade into such. It has been done and no reason they cannot be a hub for such.
but as mass transportation and cars whacked mom&pop stores so the internet reduces the needs for boutique type stores and small chain merchandise oriented stores.
I'll agree with and extend your remarks on a tangent that at one point in human history literacy was nice but not required to participate in the economy. Currently shopping by catalog and spec and datasheet is for the cognitive elite like engineers, but soon enough its going to be a required new higher minimum of economic participation. You'll pick out your next bicycle by reading technical manuals and holding a ruler up to your leg, or you'll fail miserably at buying a bicycle. Just like its sad that illiterate or innumerate people get screwed in todays economy, people who can't shop like an engineer are going to get screwed in coming decades. What you're looking at is evolution of the economy to increase income inequality as it always does and increase specialization as it always does and require more work out of people as it always does. There's nothing really new about it, its just people who can't shop like an engineer are just not going to be able to shop anymore, at least not successfully, just like someone illiterate has a rough time shopping today.
Which makes sense, as their main purpose is to be places to shop for clothes, electronics, kitchenware, and so on, not any of those other things.
First of all downtown already has a purpose which is to extract middle class home equity, run it thru the retail and restaurant wringer where 95% of businesses fail in the first two years or whatever. Its easy for the city to run downtown; the city doesn't have to worry about parking, for example, because those businesses are designed to fail and new suckers appear as fast as home equity loans can be sold so they don't need parking for businesses that don't have customers LOL. This also becomes self fulfilling, downtown is for dead businesses so why would I go there unless I had to because by definition the businesses downtown suck or they wouldn't be downtown where businesses go to die?
Secondly the downtown has drunks, criminals, crazy people, panhandlers, drug addicts in various state of withdrawl, buskers, homeless, and many/most cities are constrained to the light touch, which is nice for those folks, but also means nobody wants to go there. Crazy people have to go somewhere, and downtown has the church mission and a park by the river and a liquor store for self medication. I'm not even remotely interested in hanging out with those people, so I'll go to the Target at the interstate exit instead, or more than a generation ago I'd have gone to a mall where security is at least not non-existent. Your example of a park bench will have a homeless person sleeping on it, the scenic pond will have a drunk peeing in it, the cafes nobody wants to sit at because of aggressive panhandlers and the smell of excrement from the streets and alleys... You're asking for the whites-only exburbs where the average sales price is above $800K to keep out the riff raff that's 30+ miles out of town, I live by those places and they're cool but unachievable for 90% of the population. I live in the 3rd richest suburb in my metro area and even here our downtown is dying, getting overrun. The economy of the future is clustered around interstate exits not some arbitrary place where a railroad put a depot 150 years ago.
But in the US retail has been overbuilt for decades because the tax incentive of passive loss fueled construction until the Tax Reform Act of 1986. It helped precipitate the S&L crisis. Low interest rates helped overbuilding recover by making real-estate development more attractive and creating higher relative returns from real-estate investment.
The politics of lower taxes over the past forty years has made local governments more dependent on sales tax for funding. Because sales tax increases tend to be more politically palatable due to their regressive nature, local governments tend to be very much in love with retail. The love manifests itself as ready approval of new retail development and an even greater aversion to downzoning existing obsolescent retail parcels and broadzoning existing retail zoning districts.
Oooh, I am so happy if this really happens. The entire financial industry that makes "profits" from loading purchased companies up with debt and then leaving them to die needs to burn in a fire.
The strategy certainly works in the short term (and nets impressive "profits" for the owners/shareholders of such holdings), but in the long term... let's just hope no one will ever be able to pull through this kind of "deal" again.
That's the inherent beauty of interconnected and sold loans - no one will be left spared when they eventually default.
Hell, this article could be an example. A little too tinfoil hat for me, though.
I find it very easy to grok compared to choropleth maps and similar charts that attempt to stay true to geography.
Unlike other non-map presentations of US state data, this layout preserves ability to spot regional similarities visually.
Is there a name for this kind of chart layout?
I agree, the geographic arrangement is a really nice innovation on the idea.
[1]https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
[2]https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&ei=F0IDWp75...
What's unique to retail about that graph?
But what's going on with Washington State?
IMHO, the real path forward for retail is to get their in-stock goods in front of online shoppers via their brands' web sites, their own web site and local marketplace sites. Ecommerce is not the solution because nobody can expect to compete with Amazon.
Brands are learning the hard way that they cannot go D2C (direct to consumer), nor make a profit off selling on Amazon. They HAVE to support their network of retailers: small and large.
Yes, the day of reckoning for retail is coming. But it won't be an apocalypse. 90+% of retail transactions still occur in a brick and mortar store and people love to shop. Most retailers (and brands) just don't have the data and tools (yet) to drive traffic to stores. They're still figuring out the Amazon problem.
We're getting there though.
Why? I love my local baker, but for brand name items, I'm going to order online.
> BOPIS (buy online pick up in store)
Why is this attractive to anyone? If I am making the effort to fight traffic and parking to visit a physical location, I want to handle the item. "BOPIS" seems like the worst of all worlds to me.
> knowledge of what is in stock nearby
This is crucial. This is the main reason I no longer visit physical stores. They likely don't have the item I want in stock. It's just an exercise in pure frustration. I don't want to be cross-sold or up-sold, and I certainly don't need someone to order an item that will require a return visit in 2-4 weeks.
> local delivery
Maybe if it is same day, otherwise why do people care?
really? even for things like bikes, sporting goods, clothes, running shoes, ... I could go on. And the thing is: you'd still be ordering online, just not from amazon. if you order directly from brands and the brand can inform you that there is a local shop that has it within miles, why not get it there? why waste the resources of having to have it shipped (long distance) only to potentially have to ship it back?
> BOPIS
same day delivery beats BOPIS but it is a solid option when there is limited stock. you are putting on hold. best buy and home depot are killing with this right now.
> knowledge of what is in stock nearby
yep.
> delivery
agreed.
Isn't this similar to the last-ditch effort Blockbuster tried while in its death throes?
I remember them taking on Netflix with the idea that it sucked to wait for another movie in the mail, so just come into the store and pick up a new one!
Not surprisingly, it turned out people hate going to stores more than they hate waiting.
It didn't feel very good to read your comment and then only find out at the end that you have both a personal and professional stake in the matter.
I feel like it's not that malls or retailers are dying, but instead all the revenue is going to a few places with wealthy, urban locations. Perhaps this has to do with the influx of people moving from the suburbs into cities?
#2: The Atlanta metro had about two-dozen thriving malls a couple of decades ago. Today there's, what? Lenox/Phipps, Perimeter, maybe Cumberland (?). Mall of Georgia way out in the boondocks, having killed all the others along the I-85 corridor? Even Lenox isn't as hopping today as it was in the "old Buckhead" (i.e. pre-Ray Lewis) days. The trend is pretty stark.
Anyone got a reasonable way to synthesize those competing thoughts?
But I think there will be significant, very painful collateral damage to people during this transition and I've very sympathetic to people hit by the job losses. Retail is one of the few remaining sectors in small towns. Most other work is becoming increasingly concentrated in big cities or automated away. The days of the US as a patchwork of thriving small towns is ending, but many people still live in those towns. Worse, the ones still there are often there because they are the least able to move — poverty, family commitments, etc.
The US is rapidly turning into a country that has no place for the unskilled, but is also failing to provide the education needed to deal with the millions of unskilled citizens.
I'm also confident that in all of this, it's not the finance industry that's going to be hurt. They'll pull another "too big to fail" maneuver and we taxpayers will bail them out, yet again transferring money to the ultra-rich.
I was wondering about this forcing stores to provide more expertise and more flexible inventory. In my town 2 stores in a specific industry went out of business 3 years ago and made a big deal in the papers about how too many people were buying direct from manufacturers instead of visiting their store. I had been to both stores, asked some questions about products, got dumb answers and bad attitude, so I went home and bought everything online. In the last 2 years, 3 new stores in that same industry, 2 of them MASSIVE, have opened up near by (one of them in the same strip mall), and are doing very well. The difference? When you walk into these stores the employees know what they're talking about and they VERY quickly adjust inventory based on current market trends. Now I make most purchases in one of these 3 stores and not online - because I can do research better by talking to them and I can get most things immediately. It's required bigger investment from the owners, but they have thrived where previous stores failed and blamed e-commerce.
Doesn't work with a lot of commodities, but if you're in retail, I think it's clear you need to specialize and add value - and that requires more investment. Don't just be there and expect to keep existing.
Why would this lead to less suburban sprawl? Unleashed from any interest in physical commerce, wouldn't suburban sprawl perhaps be even more attractive? There's a lot of assumptions here that these changes will have us reverting to older forms, but I don't see any reason why.
And then get shipped a knock-off product that doesn't do what the customer needs.
Or spending hours sorting through endlessly scrolling pages of choices, taking hours longer than just walking down store aisle.
Online shopping has some benefits, and also some serious drawbacks.
Instead, we'll have giant eyesore big-box empty buildings on oversized empty parking lots littering the land that nobody wants, and few who can afford to tear down and replace.
And what will they replace them with? New houses or apartments or condos few can afford? Maybe office space?
I'm reminded of an article I read last year about parents buying presents for kids at Christmas. In the 90s it was easy. The kid wanted a thing. A gaming device, a dress, or a car... there was an object that the kid wanted to own. That object was sold at a store. But today's kids don't want things. They have the iPhone. What they want is 50,000 likes on facebook. Their happiness is tied less directly to things than social acceptance. Often having the thing leads to that social acceptance, but increasingly not. Your seeing the junk as superfluous, and mentioning it here on HN, fits with that shift away from retail goods and towards social acceptance via online communities.
For example here in buffalo we have small stores for spiritual goods that also serve as community centers for such spiritual practices.
Historically, public markets have also provided a platform for important non-commercial informal civic interactions. The review section of e.g. Amazon doesn't seem to cut it.
The confluence of events that the article alludes to are that many retail stores went through a period of consolidation and buyout through leveraged debt. As anyone with big credit card bills understands, it sucks when you're spending a huge chunk of your income just to pay interest on your credit cards. (or in these stores cases their junk bonds).
This massive debt load is forcing changes faster than what one might see organically and as a result there is a lot of turmoil in the retail business.
Or you can be sentimental for practical reasons:
"Eliminating the middleman is never as simple as it sounds. ‘Bout 50% of the human race is middlemen, and they don’t take kindly to being eliminated."
-Malcolm Reynolds (Firefly)
But we don't program in a void, right? Somebody has to create work for us and those would be the ones doing "superfluous" things. In other words, nobody would need our programming if all they did was supporting our programming.
Since the Fed stopped the liquidation of bad assets and refused to allow pricing to adjust, the question is what new bubble we funneled capital into. There's a lot of evidence that banks have been reluctant to make loans to consumers, both because of real risks around modeling of real estate pricing, and also because of changes in the regulatory regime.
It seems like it's possible that we're starting to see where all the credit has been going -- rampant investment into retail. The article mostly ignores restaurants and grocery stores (explicitly so) but we've seen other articles [2] talking about those sectors starting to show weakness as well.
[1] Not a source that I'd usually cite, but here's Krugman in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/greenspan-and-the-...
I still think there's a problem with retail, but adding the above seems like salting the earth you're trying to grow a diverse farm in.
Is this capitalism in it's final form?
Retail is mostly about entertainment now, primarily for women. Women like to shop for clothes and try stuff on. They like to be taken out to restaurants and movies and go to these with their friends. They like to go see their personal trainer at the gym. They like to go and get their hair and nails done and gossip. They send their kids to the math tutor. They send their littler kid to gymboree. They have a coffee at Starbucks.
If you look at some of the retail REITs and listen to their conference calls, a lot of stores are going out, but a lot are going in. Things are definitely changing to be more service and health oriented and the Big Box and Mega Mall trend is certainly over. The smaller format residential and mixed use stuff is going to be fine because they are more about services and entertainment as opposed to merely transactional delivery of mass market goods. People still want to leave the house and go somewhere.
This paragraph is so ridiculous. All of it is just little patronizing insults about women for normal things men and women like to do. As a male, I also like shopping for clothes, going to restaurants and movies with my friends (women are 'taken'), going to the gym (women go 'for their personal trainer', because we all know they can't do it alone), and getting my hair cut and nails worked on (women also need to gossip). I've even heard tell of men sending their kids to tutors and gymborees and having coffee at Starbucks. Crazy, right?
It's interesting that you start by insulting the parent with this generalization about their 'alpha-nerd' status, and then drop straight into a parody of men's and women's stereotypes from the 1950s, and then finish with a pablum point about people still wanting to leave the house.
But buying stuff made in China was cheap, even people who made $30k/year could do that. But going out for coffee, brunch, movies, massages, trainers, that stuff is way more expensive, and so is limited to the nicer parts of town.
Yeah, I can see that.
>weird outdated stereotypes and condescending tone
Please don't.
They provide an interface between parties who wish to exchange information, goods, services, and time.
The nature of middle-people businesses is changing, but they're not going away.
The modern day middlemen are doing a better job with way less people. Hence the Retail Apocalypse...
Often they lie to producers to lower prices then lie to consumers by selling these deal at the usual rate (or faking a false discount week for appearances and then put back products back on the normal shelves).
As other said, economic and information asymmetry is not good.
Honestly .. aggregators should be a national thing, there's almost no competition to be had there. Kinda like internet, it should be way more neutral, except maybe on safety check (again, something to nationalize).
The few shops I go to, I don't go there because they have every possible product, I go there because I know their purchasing reflects the opinions and qualities that I also value.
- Transportation
- Breaking wholesale packs into something an average person can actually buy
- Holding and efficiently managing huge inventories
- Allowing you to touch, see, and sometimes try items before you buy them
- Dealing with broken items, instantly replacing them
- Providing all these services locally
I think the GP is saying that absent the LB types extracting the money in the past, these companies would be profitable even after including interest payments because they had no business need to take on that debt. It was incurred solely as a mechanism to turn the company into a debt-machine for the benefit of the then shareholders. They took a bunch of expected future earnings, as a lump sum, at that time that turned out to not be real.
First I like how there is no piechart, but box charts (easier to read). Then the 2nd path of job recovery in time since 2008 show a more recent divergence of retail job.
Finally, it is the first time I see how GIS maps can be supplemented by stacked rectangular graphs for each state where the trend in time is shown. I spotted something going on in New England on the choropleth, but the graph nailed it.
Very inspiring to read, especially for the graphs.
Large retail chains are often anchor stores that sustain retail centers. When they shut down the economy of the retail center collapses. This impact spreads beyond the retail centers to surrounding businesses. The reduced retail traffic means that fewer people are stopping for lunch at restaurants, fueling up at gas stations, picking up prescriptions at Pharmacies, dropping off dry cleaning, etc. As a result these businesses are forced to cut back on staffing and possibly reduce hours. This causes further declines in business as the quality of service decreases. Eventually many of these business are forced to go under.
The abandoned retail centers also impact property values in surrounding areas and result in increased crime rates.
This process isn't immediate and the works displaced do not immediately find new employment. Thus you have a period where these workers are either without jobs or facing ever reducing hours which results in less disposable income.
In large urban centers you might have a dozen or more retail centers to chose from within a short distance from your home but in rural ares you're lucky if you have more than one.
In a lot of rural America you'll find many communities surrounding a Walmart often on the outskirts of a dried up husk of a town. In the 80s and 90s Walmart built supercenters just outside of the jurisdiction of small towns. The retailers in these towns couldn't compete on price and eventually folded. The small shops that didn't directly compete with Walmart (e.g. nail salons, shoe repair) eventually would end up leasing space inside the Walmart.
What's being described is a company who's operations are profitable, that simply has excessive debt. In that case the operations can be sold in bankruptcy to recover whatever money is possible with the buyer assuming operations.
What kills malls is when an Anchor store is unprofitable.
the idea being that the 1% who has 90% of the country's wealth needs a little more to create jobs (from thin air)
whereas the truth is that people spending money is what will create jobs
it's such a shame
[1] Usually "we have", but sometimes "we anticipate".
Yes, i definitely pay a premium for purchases I make at each one of these. But it’s not an astronomical amount, and it makes more sense if you think about these kind of stores as local warehouses.
Why don’t I just have a 70lb bag of dog food delivered every n days? Idk, I don’t want to have to think about the dog food until I have to think about the dog food. If dog food shows up when I’m out of town, or there’s actually a weeks worth of food left because Externalities, now I have an extra dog food storage problem.
I will never order groceries. Picking my meat and fresh produce is something I will never outsource. Especially if it is more expensive.
I order online because it is usually cheaper for electronic accessories and books.
But I also live in an actual city instead of an endless sea of suburban houses.
If anything I am doing less online shopping over time as I keep getting burned. Though I also lived next door to a mall for years which changed my habits somewhat.
far more likely, i'll just put the batteries on my shopping list for the next time i am at the grocery.
You might be able to satisfy our retail needs with 1/4 the staff.
I personally think we're headed for a crash that's more than just a depression but something on a whole different level. Dependent of course on automation / job losses / politics between now and 2030.
Is there some kind of job that actually needs to be done that wouldn't better be filled by automation? If not, maybe light automation (local 3D printing and final assembly) could move to such spaces.
I realize you can effectively do that online by buying a bunch of stuff and returning what you don't want. But that's more of a hassle than just going to a brick and mortar retailer.
A breakdown of retail by their target income demographic might reveal more.
From the Wikipedia entry mentioned at the top of the article.
I'd like to see more intimate online shopping experiences involving at least a short (30s) video call between buyer and seller, at least for first-time customers. It would be particularly potent to make pleasant greetings, express joy at the opportunity to shop/serve, show the credit card on the video monitor, a photo-id, plus incidentals that give a sense for who you are. That way fraud only happens with full-blown identity theft, and now you have a good image of the thief to help the victim get relief, and you can even add the thief to a buyer blacklist. (Interestingly the video evidence format helps avoid the case where a seller blacklists people they "just don't like".)
There are real problems that brick-and-mortar solve though, mainly having instant tactile demos of products, like holding an iPhone at the Apple store or trying on clothes. Future businesses will figure out how to combine the two approaches into a profitable business model. Trunk club is a good, if expensive, example.
You can't give away commercial space here in Buffalo. Prices are <$1/sq in a lot of places. A few years ago, ~60% of the commercial space in North Buffalo was vacant.
Our malls are...problematic. Two have already converted into office space, with a third being slowly transitioned as it empties (I believe it is empty now). One of our malls is dying a slow and painful death, even as it is surrounded by a booming retail space. Our other mall has been designed very well to be a destination vs an in/out type of location.
But there are still many commercial vacancies. I don't know a lot about zoning, but many of these locations should really be repurposed to residential. There's also a large sprawl problem.
Finally, it looks like Niagara Falls was included in that statistic and Niagara Falls is an absolute shithole.
I'm from Australia which is full of them (though we call them "shopping centres"). And they seem very pleasant to me. They are convenient for many kinds of shopping. I didn't hang out there as a teenager in the '90s, but others from my school did.
Since then they have become more pleasant for socialising -- though perhaps more upmarket and less teenager friendly. They have proper restaurants as well as the old food courts. And my mother's favourite cafe is at a shopping mall -- and it is reallyp excellent.
https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/marc-squares.png?...
The big problem with this is AUS GDP is about $47k per person. US GDP is 57k. So for only $10,000 more earned per person, we have double the retail space. This can't possibly work long term. US retail is in bad shape because of terrible monetary policy.
In more recent times, they redid the food court. It is bigger, with a lot more room to sit comfortably and relax a while. They have some more upscale dining choices, organic food, vegetarian food. It makes it more likely that I would stop and eat there.
I would think the competition from online made them do this. They are in a good location and didn't have to worry much about bringing in customers before.
After the dot com bust/mini recession, most department stores stopped stocking clothes in my size so I buy much of it online. I frequently try to hold out and find some electronic item or replacement part in local stores. I almost always fail and resort to Amazon.
I'm currently looking for a cheap Bissel vacuum that is available on Amazon. I have yet to see a retailer anywhere carrying that model. Expensive, overpriced vacuums are all you can get retail these days.
Problem is, I’m a gorilla... not skinny enough to be “tall” and not fat enough to be “big”, and there is not one store out of 250 that sell size 14 shoes, or a shirt with a size 19 neck that doesn’t look like a parachute, or a 52 long jacket.
I see it in other areas. If you walk through Lord and Taylor or Macy’s, there’s a whole floor of petite women’s clothing. I look on the mall and see lots of bigger, taller or bustier women, all of whom are wearing clothes — but not from Macy’s!
When you focus on the average consumer exclusively, you miss a lot of people!
That sounds like an insignificant number -- you can get as many openings, if not way more, in a country with 10-50 million population (but less centralized retail sector, with fewer cross-country chains).
Now I'm no longer forced by stores to buy what they happen to have in their inventory. Want that obscure JPN VN? Done, delivered next day.
I do feel bad about people losing their jobs. But the discounters and upmarket stores will always survive.
(For example: Who sells empty glass bottles, a braided belt, fridge magnets, facepaint? There are probably about 10 stores that have it, but which ones? I can easily walk one or two kilometers just checking them out. FYI, this is a European town.)
timing the event is hard if not impossible.
It's likely the specialty stores are being crushed by online retailers. Their raison d'être was always having more inventory depth than general retail, e.g. the shoe store has a much better selection than the shoe department at Sears. But if you're after selection, you can't do better than your browser.
But I’m definitely a purposeful shopper: I’m always in and out with one goal in mind, I never “browse”. Maybe wal-mart and the like are more attractive to people who just kinda want to browse around and kill time?
