12-31-2016, 06:23 PM
(12-31-2016, 11:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(12-31-2016, 10:21 AM)Bronsin Wrote: Know that this has been a few years in the making.......
http://www.businessinsider.com/stores-cl...rs-2016-12
Donald Trump is NOT to blame for this. He will be to blame for much else, like a likely erosion of civil liberties and further degradation of working conditions and intellectual life...
The retail-merchandising business has long relied upon impulse shoppers, and people burned in the 2007-2009 meltdown are no longer the free-spending shoppers that they once were. People now plan what they intend to buy. If they buy something on impulse it is inexpensive and small -- like a video or a pop CD.
Let's be blunt: retail profits depend upon people buying schlock at the low end (Wal*Mart) and overpriced stuff at the high end (Neiman-Marcus). people are beginning to recognize. Dry-goods retailing is just another chain in the conduit from raw-materials extraction to the landfill. Americans now have a surfeit of stuff, and the tiny dwellings that many Americans now are in have little room for more stuff. If you want to see the stuff that people bought a few years ago that they now find embarrassing, then just look for "Big Mouth Billy Bass" at a local thrift store, along with VHS tapes and novels that nobody now reads.
Retailing is not a smart business. I have seen many college majors derided with the warning: "It will get you a job in retailing", the lowest-paying economic activity that there is. Low-paying activities do not attract the Best and Brightest. Maybe the under-paid anthropology major who got excited reading about the discoveries of Lewis Leakey but can't get a job paying more than the minimum wage in white-collar work finds that driving a truck at least pays for something more than food and a dingy flat.
...Because of the modicum of success that dry-goods retailing (basically anything small-ticket except for groceries) used to have but no longer has, the infrastructure that dry-goods retailing used to have is now orphaned as the "dead mall". So it is with strip malls, outlet malls, and enclosed malls. Just think of all the failures... like Borders', Radio Shack, Montgomery-Ward, the Bombay Company, Sharper Image...
I had a thread on Dead Malls in the old Forum. The economics of retail failure and the absence of replacements for failed stores, as well as the rigidity of the high-cost shopping mall that cannot adapt even to ethnic shifts have little to do with politics. The grocery business is safe because people must eat, and even poor people can at least get food aid fairly easily.
I wonder if there could be nontraditional solutions to the empty space. An anchor location would be just the right size for an electric go cart place. Some people might prefer restaurants that are quieter because they have more space between tables, such that one could actually carry on a conversation. These things might become feasible if the rents per square foot come down enough.