The author misses an important point here. The U.S. has something like 23 square feet of retail space for each person living here. This is a very high number and can’t be sustained over time. Many stores would be likely be closing even if Amazon didn’t exist, and even if the U.S. economy was very strong today.
I was thinking about this stat overnight. And I’ve decided it’s another one of those “lies, damned lies, and statistics” stats. 23 sq ft of retail per person sounds huge. But it isn’t. A queen sized bed is 32.5 sq ft. So that retail space is less than 1 queen sized bed. And given the percentage of folks with spare bedrooms and rollouts and hideaways that means the average person probably has in their home more sq footage of bed per person than there is retail space per person. Add in hotels, hospitals, homeless shelters and the like and there’s probably over 100 sq ft of bed in this country for every person. And nobody thinks that’s unsustainable.
And of course that 23 sq ft of retail space includes the actual stuff being sold too. Plus fixtures. So while that number sounds huge when you first see it, when you start working it you realize that if we all went to the store at the same time it would be freaking crowded.