07-15-2017, 05:45 PM
(07-15-2017, 01:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(07-14-2017, 06:24 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I wonder if this is just the standard business cycle, which may be slower in real estate. Malls may have been overbuilt, leaving room for some to survive and others to die. Certainly in the Boston area, I can identify some malls that seem fine, and others that seem, if not dead, certainly not well.
I'm sure online shopping did some damage.
On-line shopping did some damage. I have bought only audio (music CDs) and video (DVDs and Blu-Ray) on line as the stores did not stock what I wanted. I will probably buy some books on line. Groceries? I like to see what I am buying. Clothes? I wear well-stocked sizes in very conservative styles. Electronics? My stereo speakers are over twenty years old, and they still sound good (although the listening area is awful). But I am a slow-adapter, typically waiting a few years before adopting a technological innovation because by then that innovation has been greatly reduced in price. That's one way to keep a budget in line -- live in the past. The other is to live beneath one's means. I'd rather own some corporate stock than a boat (unless I were to make money off the boat) or an overpriced car.
Were I black I would probably buy much more stuff on line simply to avoid unpleasant encounters with stupid, racist white people who comprise many people in the retail business. But retail attracts the bottom of the barrel in vocational aptitudes, work ethic, vocational preparation, and wisdom in choosing college majors. For the latter three, retail is simply a stepping stone to something better, like getting an MBA or a teaching credential, office or factory work, a trade or low-level profession, joining the Armed Forces, or marrying someone with a genuine profession or trade. Retail is simply bare survival for an adult or a way for a teenager to get money for consumer goodies while living with Mom and Dad.
...Boston has one of the most vibrant economies in the USA, and high-end retailing does well there, as in New York, Washington, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, and parts of Los Angeles. Definitely not so in such urban wrecks as Baltimore, Birmingham, Memphis, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit, or Cleveland. The rich typically have better things to do with their time than shopping in a mall; the poor often have little better to do but not the cash for buying stuff that makes a mall profitable. The white middle class made the shopping mall succeed. But as the white middle class shrinks a business model tailored to them adapts or dies. The malls seem unable even to adapt to non-white middle-class customers. It does not help that Mervyn's and Montgomery-Ward are dead, that Radio Shack (a key player in the boutique stores) is in an irreversible coma, and that Sears and J C Penney are in critical condition if not doomed.
I buy everything except groceries online. My kids have more discretionary income than I do and buy in stores, though more recently they have also been spending money on virtual goods online as well.
It strikes me that discretionary income may be key to mall success.