Retail Apocalypse: 2016 Brings Empty Shelves And Store Closings All Across America

By Michael Snyder at End Of The American Dream

Major retailers in the United States are shutting down hundreds of stores, and shoppers are reporting alarmingly bare shelves in many retail locations that are still open all over the country.  It appears that the retail apocalypse that made so many headlines in 2015 has gone to an entirely new level as we enter 2016.  As economic activity slows down and Internet retailers capture more of the market, brick and mortar retailers are cutting their losses.  This is especially true in areas that are on the lower portion of the income scale.  In impoverished urban centers all over the nation, it is not uncommon to find entire malls that have now been completely abandoned.  It has been estimated that there is about a billion square feet of retail space sitting empty in this country, and this crisis is only going to get worse as the retail apocalypse accelerates.

We always get a wave of store closings after the holiday shopping season, but this year has been particularly active.  The following are just a few of the big retailers that have already made major announcements…

-Wal-Mart is closing 269 stores, including 154 inside the United States.

-K-Mart is closing down more than two dozen stores over the next several months.

-J.C. Penney will be permanently shutting down 47 more stores after closing a total of 40 stores in 2015.

-Macy’s has decided that it needs to shutter 36 stores and lay offapproximately 2,500 employees.

-The Gap is in the process of closing 175 stores in North America.

-Aeropostale is in the process of closing 84 stores all across America.

-Finish Line has announced that 150 stores will be shutting down over the next few years.

-Sears has shut down about 600 stores over the past year or so, but sales at the stores that remain open continue to fall precipitously.

But these store closings are only part of the story.

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Real Estate Mortgages Expected to Become a Nightmare

I can substantiate Armstrong’s warning from personal experience. My mother sold her home on Monday. I went to the closing with her. There were three real estate agents in the room, along with a person from the title agency. As the poor 26 year old tattooed schmuck across the table signed his life away, the real estate agents made small talk.

They were old timers and talked about how a closing could be done in the 1970s with three forms to be signed. Today, there are dozens upon dozens of cover your ass forms that must be signed. Then they started talking about August and how it would become ten times worse. I inquired as to what they were talking about.

They said that Dodd Frank rules would go into effect on August 1 and make their lives miserable. Today, the agents can correct errors or omissions at the closing table. They are given some flexibility for human error. As of August 1, there will be dozens of new rules that will slow down the closing process dramatically. If every t is not crossed and every i dotted, the closing will have to be delayed. The threat of litigation will paralyze the housing industry.

Has adding 100 forms to sign and dozens of hoops to jump through made buying a house safer than when 3 forms were required in the 1970s? Who benefits, other than lawyers and government drones? Everything the government touches turns into a giant clusterfuck of failure.

CFPB

As a result of Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another agency to complicate matters, issued a number of mortgage-related rules that are not actually voted on by Congress. They will impose far more paperwork and raise the cost of mortgages while the Dodd-Frank portion to actually reform bank trading was vacated. So we now have a new agency to comply with to get a mortgage as of August 1st, 2015 and this should help to cap the real estate rally for the average American sending prices back down.

Government is great at expanding its own powers when it takes payoffs behind the curtail to allow the same conduct that created the problem to begin with. More government jobs and pensions. It never ends.