I think the primary problem retail was facing is too much competition. Both electronic and brick and mortar. So many sectors are just grossly over represented. With the death of book and music stores malls have basically become clothing store collections, and there just isn’t room in this world for 40 different national stores all trying to sell blouses in competition with the big box stores. And so many sectors are over saturated like that. OfficeMax, Office Depot and Staples, how much office equipment do we really need? And then of course to try to scoop up all the money they expand their offerings which really just puts them in competition with more companies, all those office stores have grocery aisles, I understand that many office environments provide free snack, but everyplace I’ve worked gets their snacks from CostCo, I don’t think these companies helped themselves adding CostCo to their competitor list.
And the icing on the cake is really that there isn’t the diversity on the manufacturing side. If these companies were selling different stuff from each other they might have a chance. But when they’re all trying to sell me the same Dockers and HP printers they don’t have anything to separate themselves. That might be the real figure to look at, not the square footage per person, but the square footage per barcode, the number of identical items we’re trying to sell in different places is where the meltdown comes form.