I apologize for the length of today’s “question.” I was channeling my inner Admin today while taking a stroll through Plymouth Meeting Morgue, I mean, Mall. There was easily 15 people strolling through the mall, not counting the mom’s who dumped their kids into the free indoor playground, so they could sit there immersed in their I-gadgets, rather than their children. The Mrs wanted to stop at New York & Company, so we headed in.
I realize it is a Monday at 11:30am, but there was not a soul in the store, save the 2 employees. While this might not seem unusual, let me say that it was the first day of a store wide 50 percent off sale. 50% off EVERYTHING and they can’t get a single customer. What are your thoughts on the economy today, and more specifically, mall retail?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-16/american-malls-meltdown-economic-recovery-complete-utter-fraud
Same here, a complete ghost town. If it weren’t for dippin’ dots, another 1/3 of the maybe 200 people…..counting all store employees, would be gone. Zero bulging shopping bags, lots of old people walking on the ‘five laps is a mile’ seniors program – and the closed stores! Lots of dark, gates down, gone fishin’ forever story’s. Parking lot is crumbling asphalt, and the anchors stores don’t seem to be holding the ship steady. But I remember when that place was ‘it’. Man ‘o man.
30,000 empty Radioshacks dot the landscape. After this Christmas season, there will be many more vacant Sears, Macys, JC Penneys, and dozens of other dying bricks and mortar stores.
Malls are dead. More empty stores than open ones in our local “mall”. And the main drag through town has 5 or 6 100k sq ft buildings abandoned with weeds growing in the parking lots.
Mike
I expect answers will range greatly depending on LOCATION. Naturally.
I’ve questioned such stats in the past (respectfully, of course) because I DON’T see it here. Then, Admin gently reminds me that there ARE areas of growth …. like living a stone throw from Wall Street, or the whorefuk area of Washington DC and environs.
Time of week matters a lot. Even here the malls are relatively sparse during the week. But, the weekend? It’s a fucking mad house zoo with hardly a parking space to be found.
On a NATIONAL scale … well, I read the internet news as well as anyone. It seems most malls across the country — with noted exceptions above — are Dead Men Walking.
Garden State Plaza was packed at 10am Sat in Paramus. I don’t ever go in that mom infested shithole but I had to pass it by as I was heading to Hackensack to pick up a new pair of Red Wing boots at their store. As I was there I was told by an employee that they make all their boots in China now except for certain designs. I of course bought the Made in USA pair and they ran me $330. But I saved some $$ since there is no tax on shoes and clothes here in the Peoples Republic of Joisey.
“Retail chains are a fundamentally implausible economic structure if there’s a viable alternative. You combine the fixed cost of real estate with inventory, and it puts every retailer in a highly leveraged position. Few can survive a decline of 20 to 30 percent in revenues. It just doesn’t make any sense for all this stuff to sit on shelves.” (Marc Andreessen)
The shopping malls have always been high-cost sales venues, their viability depending upon the ways in which consumer traffic is drawn to those venues. When middle- and lower-class Americans had been gainfully employed and not subjected to the recently increasing costs involved in housing, utilities, health insurance, food and fuel (the transient bobble in gasoline prices still doesn’t get the level down below what it had been when Obozo first put his feet up on the Resolute desk in 2009), they were happy to mall-crawl as a form of amusement, and this drove foot traffic into anchor stores, past kiosks, and through the specialty stores.
Now? Consumer confidence is GONE. People don’t jockey for parking places outside the zeppelin hangers on their way home from work (if they’ve still got jobs at all), don’t aggregate in the food courts on weekends, don’t indulge in see-it/grab-it impulse purchases once they get into the habit of tracking down the best possible bargains online.
Strip malls essentially died more than two decades ago. The enclosed malls are going much the same way.
The causes have been sufficiently discussed, and are known to everyone who cares to consider the laws of economics rationally and honestly.
Such analysis intrinsically implies the cure, but those who govern will resist this with force of arms, so remediation without bloodshed is unlikely in the extreme.
With this in mind, I’ll join H.L. Mencken in that “My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”
Keeping the Malls around, keeps the illusion of a stable economy going despite the facts of economic decline. All gov data is false again to prop up the illusion, keep the public pacified. A shift to online shopping? Maybe but this data is also manipulated and the numbers exaggerated. Much buying here is directly because of many who receive monthly gov financial assistance.
Most want this assistance instead of earning prosperity from decent educations and enough opportunity to find good jobs. The “give me something for nothing” mentality and support of corrupt gov is largely why our country is going down the drain.
I had to make a forty minute to the closest Tractor Supply to pick up another half mile of high tensile fencing- I dread driving anywhere to make purchases but sometimes…
I noticed that the Ford Dealership went tits up since my last trip to town, directly across from the abandoned Sears, adjacent to the recently shuttered Auto Zone. The local family style Steakhouse had plastic letters on the sign CLOSED, ditto the chain drugstore, a tire shop, shoe store, pet shop and a smoke shop. About a half dozen pedestrians in what is definitely NOT a pedestrian strip looking dazed and overweight, men unshaven and all pharmed up. It was right about lunch time and I looked at the fast food joints to see how many cars were lined up and noticed there weren’t any. There was a young woman waving a sign for an all you can eat pizza buffet on the edge of the four lane road. The largest surviving stores in that burg were WalMart (lot looked about 20% full, maybe less) Home Depot- 30 cars tops, everything else looked like it had enough cars in the lot to staff it, but not much more.
I got the wire I needed and one of those copper elbow sleeves (impulse buy, but my right arm has been killing me lately and I don’t do aspirin). Employees were uniformly disgruntled and unhappy looking, no greeting, no upselling attempted. There was a noticeable dearth of stock on the shelves and prices seemed inflated from my perspective although I don’t shop often enough to be sure. Met a neighbor in the parking lot on my way out- she was price shopping for birdseed and we chatted for a minute before I headed back to the farm. All in all it was a deeply depressing trip and it made me wonder what things were going to be like when it really goes down because right now it has all the hallmarks of a Depression from what I can see on the surface.
That’s my report from the Great White North.
In parts of the Intermountain West (no crap, a generally-recognized term for this neck of the desert) things are going swimmingly; partly because there is so much real desert, the population is crammed into a string of valleys, most alongside a few viable rivers, that malls can still survive; there are enough fools within travel radius (because EVERYONE is with travel radius, pretty much; outside of travel radius is generally TOO FAR to manage within daily convenience) that malls can still get enough traffic. That, and the prevailing religion around here actually encourages commerce, at least within the group …
Be that as it may, there are some empty spots; one mall was reduced down to one anchor store a few years back to allow redevelopment, which never happened; one lonely Macy’s standing all by itself is all that’s left of that mall. But ever since I moved here eight years ago, there’s been a fair slow ferment of stores closing, new ones opening and moving, some closing again – capitalism still sort of works here, in that:
(1) Wild Oats went out of business in a strip mall nearby my house, when Whole Foods took it over and opened a WF store nearby
(2) Hostess had a factory two streets over, making Twinkies and such; when Hostess went over and was bought out by somebody else (Franz?), they kept it open as a warehouse / distribution point for a year or so, then closed it down. Now we hear it will become ~270 apartments (like we need more apartments in this desert valley town? Where will their water come from?)
(3) Various small shops come and go; I hear American Apparel just filed for reorganization, so that store will likely disappear. Before they moved in it was a rug merchant, and a men’s-suit shop before that; no telling what’s next.
Around here people with lots of cash still shop at the mall, if they want; we have several around town, upper-class to middle class, with plenty of strip malls as well. Nationwide, I expect the economy to tank further, until the government figures out that stones are not mammals.
Went in a Best Buy a couple weeks ago at home in Charlotte NC.It was booming with customers. The Target department store beside it was packed. So was the Books a Million store. It was a Wednesday afternoon about 6 pm.I guess it depends on where you are.
A lifelong friend owns a small trucking company. Six semitrailer refers and four single axle, refer body jobs. In times past he used to get ‘back load’ freight and ‘fill in loads’ with no trouble. He said that much of the back load freight was construction material like asphalt shingles, paving bricks, concrete products etc.
Now he says this back freight has disappeared and that his fill in loads are much less than it used to be. He’s still hanging on with his few contracts left for transporting fresh meat to two large grocery chains, and doing local deliveries of same to smaller grocery stores. However he could not raise rates for fear of losing his last solid contracts and therefore his drivers go without a wage raise.
His drivers report how the loading dock scene is now mostly open at any time and how the docks and ramps themselves are much cleaner, because the warehouse staff push a broom to keep busy!
The malls he delivers to are slowly going dead. If not for the low oil price for fuel, he doubts if he could maintain his fleet at it’s present size and is seriously considering selling off 50% of his fleet, as he says; “If he can find someone stupid enough to buy it”!
Way down in the South Land – Central Florida for me, things are neutral to slightly positive. Everyone around here in the retail business makes all their money between October and May. Snowbirds (i.e. old better off yankees) fly down after hurricane season to avoid the snow and crap that Northern kin have to put up with.
They spend money. Stores prosper more in the Winter here. Between mid-May and Mid October, businesses suffer euthanasia, laying off people that can’t make over the minimum wage anyhow and the welfare rolls and Free Shit Cards hit a peak in mid summer.
So we appear to be better off than many other places (30 blocks, etc) but over the past 15 years, a slow fade is beginning to set in as a number of snowbirds are getting to poor to commute. Large 20 year old gunboats still glide here and there in the winter but not as many as a while ago.
MA
I forgot, we were going to eat lunch there, but there is not a single non-fast food place in the whole complex, unless you get takeout from Whole Foods. We went to IKEA for lunch.
Denver is nothing short of booming. Restaurants are packed, malls are busy (at least on weekends) and they are building fucking everywhere (cookie cutter apartment buildings for the most part).
I’m sure its all bullshit, just happens to be a good part of the country right now. I think a big part of it is so many people move here from other parts of the country and they are mostly well-heeled. Real estate is off the fucking charts. My former neighbors bought their house for ~$315K in 2013 and sold this spring for almost 370…they got 17 offers in 3 DAYS.
The end result, of course, is I sound like even more of a lunatic than most of you when I say the economy is fucking mess.
On a side note, I am back in Newcastle, PA this week…this place seems even more dead than it was in August. I bet there aren’t more that 20 guests in our 90 room hotel.
@admin
You should get the internet. You can shop on that shit. Get it delivered. Free. Never go to a mall again.
Here in Northern Virginia we have Tysons Corner Mall. I remember riding my bike with a friend to the opening day in 1969, when Route 7 was being widened to 4 lanes and the new lanes were still dirt and unpaved, so it was a safe ride.
Anyway, that mall has been very successful it’s entire life, since the surrounding area has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. About 20 years ago they built a sister mall across the street, named “Tysons II”, and the anchor stores are Neimann Marcus and Saks 5th Avenue. It’s a much smaller mall but the stores are top shelf.
I worked across the street from the Tysons Corner mall from 2008-2011 and used to take my lunch breaks there and when strolling through the mall, which was sometimes not very busy, I could not help but wonder how they could ever sell all that stuff (mostly clothing). Over the last 10 years the turnover of companies has been dramatic, but the foot traffic overall continues to increase. In 2013 the Metrorail was extended through Tysons Corner with a direct stop at the mall, so now they get people who ride in from D.C. and Maryland. With all the ethnic groups living in and around the D.C. area, it’s like walking through the United Nations when you shop there.
There are some good restaurants and a Barnes & Noble, those being the primary reasons the wife and I go there a few times a year.
I’d love to find a list of all the stores that have come and gone there since 1969. I know there was a Woolworth’s back then.
This picture of Woodward & Lothrop, a Washington-area department store, was one of the anchor
stores back in 1984:
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I rarely go to the Plymouth Meeting Mall anymore, though it definitely seems less trafficked than when I was growing up. Which is odd, considering it was only a few years ago they decided to make a huge expansion that included the Whole (wallet) Foods. I usually goto Willow Grove Mall instead these days, and it also seems more empty, though it’s not as striking as PMM.
Even though you’d expect less traffic on Mondays, it’s not always the case. There’s lots of stay at home moms married to high earners working in Phoenixville and King of Prussia, and they like to get all their shopping done when the filthy riff raff isn’t there.
I’m really the last one to ask though, you can usually only find me in a mall once every 5 years, once a gaming system is at the end of its life and I can grab all the games for <$5 I will pop in to EBgames.
@Rise Up
I lived in DC before they put the Silver line in, and I was impressed at the volume Tysons was able to handle. To be fair, the whole DC metro area only lives and breathes on profligate government spending, so it’s not an accurate read on the retail heartbeat of the nation as a whole. We’d usually goto Tysons for retirement dinners, and maybe some specialty stores. But my most memorable part of that place was the immense labyrinth you call the Tysons parking garage.
Shit, they just opened one Huge Outlet Mall in Little Rock next to Bass Pro and they are both Absolutely packed, parking lots are completely full.
http://youtu.be/G6CB7Nmz-7c
Seattle here.
Shopping is pretty dead and has been for the 7 years I’ve lived here. This is one of the boomingest towns in the US right now, but all they’re building is residential condo cubes and highrises downtown. Nothing in the way of retail.
Most of the the retail storefronts downtown that were empty when we moved here in 2008 are still empty. There are only a couple of shopping malls around here and they suck, depressing places.
I’ve noticed the places where I do shop – supermarket, drug store, the occasional drudge to Target, they never have what I want. I feel like product selection is reduced and often find empty shelves where the product I want isn’t there.
The only western wear store in the Puget Sound closed last year. Mr. Gizmo wears western cut clothing because it fits his big and tall frame and character. Now that there’s no place to get it here, any clothing he buys we’ll have to order online. Good quality western wear is getting hard to find all over the country, he’s wearing shirts from 10 years ago. Clothing workmanship and fabric quality have really deteriorated over the last 10 years.
Outside of immediate daily needs – food, toothpaste, socks – we don’t buy stuff. The quality of everything seems to be poor and the prices quite high. 5 bucks for a decent loaf of real bread?! That’s crazy.
Why go shopping when there’s nothing worth buying?
I had some temp work over the past two weeks, my first income since August. So I went to the mall and stocked up on some lotion, make up and such. Very small crowd.
I live in FL too. Eastern central. Went to the mall a couple weeks ago, it was raining out and it’s a good place to let the 2 year old go play in their kids area and let him walk around. Not that many people there, but I’ve seen it worse too. The biggest thing I noticed was that in macys (we parked outside macys and entered the mall there) had between 25-75% off on pretty much everything. Most of what I saw in the men’s section was just racks full of stuff marked 50% off. Went across the mall to Dillard’s and it was the same thing. I did get a nice Columbia fleece jacket for less than 30$ though, should come in handy when traveling north in a couple weeks.
One thing I did notice near the mall though- discount store like Ross and beales were booming , a lot of cars in the parking lot. They sell essentially the same shit as the big dept stores but much cheaper. Those are the places that are getting all the business. I’d like to think it’s because Americans are getting smarter and realize that those dept stores like Dillard’s are a ripoff and they can get the same shit elsewhere for less money, but it’s probably because so many people just can’t afford anything else.
I have been a clothing road salesman for thirty five years. When I started in 1980 the older guys told stories of the amazing 60’s and 70’s. Thousands of independently owned specialty stores. Everyone with A-1 credit. Many of these retailers, Jewish, worked smart, invested in real estate and sent their kids to college to become professionals.
As they retired or sold out, the next immigrant groups, the Koreans and Indians replaced them in the 1980’s. They too wanted better for their kids and sent them to Ivy League schools. They became doctors, lawyers and Wall Street professionals. Most of them are now gone and are replaced with new middle eastern retailers. We will see where their kids end up.
As I look back the 80’s were amazing, with an abundance of stores and business was solid. The 90’s started a more severe decline. Specialty chains, Merry-Go-Round, Jeans West, Oak Tree, J Riggins, Chess King, Silvermans and I’m sure there were others, totaling at least 5000 stores went away.
The independent retailer who survived the early 90’s thrived.and peaked by 2001. After 9/11 the shtf again. JC Penney’s high flying inner city stores started to shut down. Mismanagement, external shrinkage, as well as internal shrinkage was a major cause. More independents closed their doors. More retired or went broke.
Of course they were replaced with the big boxes of all flavors. The Targets, Macys, Dillards, Mens Wearhouse and Jos Banks. How do they operate? Which brings me to your posed question above about no one showing up for a 50% off sale.
50% off means nothing in these operations. How do they “Buy one get two free”? Very simply, they mark up 600%. So unless you see more than 70 percent off of a single item price, you are not getting a deal.
Went to Vegas for a couple of days, M-F, the sexy mulatta said, maybe you can get it up while we’re there. I said, I could go out like Lamar. She laughed, fat chance.
The place was packed for a Wednesday, Caesar’s, PH, the castle..Wynn’s is terribly lonely, the bling is almost an eyesore, no, it is an eyesore.
They have added 3 or 4 CVS to the original one on the strip, they added a White Castle’s and a couple of Denny’s.
Lots of looky-loos at the malls in Caesar’s and PH. Most folks seem ready to party with abandon, I could imagine quite a few TBPers among the crowds, middle age ambulant white goats out to grab the last rays of sunshine before the end of the year.
I collected maybe 2 decks worth of Hot Ass and Girls to your Room cards, I tell the church lady that these are models, Lamar didn’t have these beauties at his disposal for $150 full service at his miserable mobile home ‘suite’ in the desert even after paying ~$75,000 for a week or two.
Downtown is a miserable sight full of local yokels and families on a budget. Don’t go there. The outlying casinos are full of old folks spending their social security checks on the slots. Never go there.
LV is the place to rub elbows with losers, whores and idiots who don’t understand that Las Vegans are nothing but sophisticated pick-pockets. The machines get a little loose on weekends, they are very tight on weekdays when the old folks on a biennial trip dump their stash.
Guy says: @Rise Up
…To be fair, the whole DC metro area only lives and breathes on profligate government spending, so it’s not an accurate read on the retail heartbeat of the nation as a whole… But my most memorable part of that place was the immense labyrinth you call the Tysons parking garage.
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Absolutely correct, Guy, re: not an accurate read of typical retail because it’s the DC (District of Criminals) area. As to the parking garage, last year they put in an automated system where each parking space has a LED overhead indicating red or green–red means space is taken and green is it’s available, so you can look down the rows and quickly see if there is a space or not. When we go there, we make sure it’s early to get a close spot to the B&N.
As a contrast, in 1998 they built Dulles Mall in Loudoun County, out closer to where I live. It opened in late 1999 and my wife and I tried a business there–a bakery in the food court. We got crushed as we were the only non-franchise in the mall and grossly underestimated our build-out construction costs. Then the mall raised the rent semi-annually. Then 9/11 hit and the entire mall tanked. We lost a ton of money and learned some very hard lessons. But it was my wife’s dream and even though we failed, we don’t have to wonder “what if?”.
A couple more things about that Dulles Mall vs. Tysons. Although it’s only 10 miles west of the Tysons Corner mall, the clientele is starkly different–many H1B Indians in tech jobs live out that way. So many, in fact, that it has a store for traditional Indian clothing. I’ve never seen that ANYWHERE. And the anchor stores there are JCPenny and Sears vs. Bloomingdales and Macy’s at Tysons (although there is a Macy’s at the smaller Dulles Mall). But that area is growing, too, and they just added a Regal movie theater in the mall with 10 screens including an IMAX.
There does not appear to be any economic slowdown around here. Tons of new cars (or leases) and still building McMansions. Where the jobs are that support this, I have no idea. That’s the mystery to me.
Down in DC, the Navy Yard area in southeast Washington near the Washington Nationals baseball stadium is undergoing a renaissance of sorts is taking place of late. What used to be a rundown, mostly minority row house section of the city is now an upscale waterfront with classy townhomes, green open space, and restaurants.
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So you’re near the Reston town center then? I went there during an Oktoberfest event and thought it was a charming little area, though the prices were horrendous.
If I was gonna buy looking to flip in the area, the Navy Yard, as you said, and Capitol Hill would be my picks. Lots of hipsters moving in and pushing the ghetto back to Anacostia.
My father lives in DC. He says the economy is “fine”…of course, he’s been there thirty years and has always said this – he’s a barometer for just how deluded the Beltway inhabitants have become. Beltway folk are completely disconnected from reality because their “reality” is so different from anything happening only a hundred miles away and beyond.
The health of retail in Florida is geographic with the high-end malls in larger cities (Tampa, Orlando, Miami, no doubt Miami etc.) apparently doing fairly well. Mid-level consumer and older malls are hurting, though.
I live an hour from Tampa and Orlando, in rural Florida and everything has slowed, even Wal-Mart. There are 5 “Super Centers” within 25 miles, (and yes, I wander into that over-sized 7-11 once in awhile…and always leave feeling less alive for having done so. God, what a depressing experience) and all of them appear to have less traffic, two of them dramatically so. They over-built to begin with, so closings are probably in the works. “Wal-Mart Where America shops for cheap plastic crap.”
I’d be curious to know how many people now shop on-line as opposed to journeying into physical store fronts? Due to the distances I have to travel for unique items, particularly tools, I order online almost exclusively. Amazon, for example, has two-day delivery often for less than a round-trip drive would cost, and a far larger selection with the ability to browse and compare. Online competition combined with less discretionary income is putting a serious dent in traditional retail.
Brick & mortar retail seems to be dying. Undoubtedly there will remain geographic areas where it stays viable, but for the most part it’s a gasping industry, not long for the world, or rather, the US landscape. Thank God.
@Backtable
I know the Beltway sentiment you speak of. A few months ago I was in a barbershop, and when asked how the economy was, an investment adviser in the chair over said it was good. When they speak of how great the economy is, I ask if government spending has gone up or down in the past few years, and wait for them to make the connection. Where I lived before, house prices continued to climb even in the worst depths of the housing bust.
Guy says: I know the Beltway sentiment you speak of. A few months ago I was in a barbershop, and when asked how the economy was, an investment adviser in the chair over said it was good. When they speak of how great the economy is, I ask if government spending has gone up or down in the past few years, and wait for them to make the connection.
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Yes, the DC metro area is directly tied to gov spending. One interesting phenomena is when the presidential administrations change, there is usually a tick up in real estate prices, since a new administration will bring in lots of “their own” from wherever. When Obummer was elected in 2008, there were thousands of cars with Illinois license plates that migrated to DC. Mostly black-owned.
Most people here in NW Indiana are lucky if they earn enough to pay rent and utilities .
Up our way he malls are full weekdays and weekends doesn’t seem to matter however most of the cars in the parking lots have Canadian tabs. People crossing the border to shop the sales and keep the cash registers spinning. Another anomaly is the local Olive Garden, I don’t really understand why but there is always a line out the door to get into the joint. It seems folks have plenty d disposable income, I don’t know.