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"We Are Extremely Over-Retailed" Picturing The Death Of America's Malls
Zero Hedge ^ | 01/05/2015 | Tyler Durden

Posted on 01/06/2015 7:33:54 AM PST by SeekAndFind

Starting in the mid-1990s, "the mall genie was out of the bottle," says one mall analyst, "and it was never going to come back." While about 80% of the country’s 1,200 malls are considered healthy (vacancy rates of 10% or less), that compares with 94% in 2006; and more than 30 million square feet of malls are more than 40% empty, a threshold that signals the beginning of what one one analyst called "the death spiral."

 

As The NY Times reports, like beached whales, dead malls draw fascination as well as dismay, "nobody ever thinks a mall is going to up and die," but as the following images show - dead or dying they are.

 

“It’s depressing,” Jill Kalata, 46, said as she tried on a few of the last sneakers for sale at the Athlete’s Foot, scheduled to close in a few weeks. “This place used to be packed. And Christmas, the lines were out the door. Now I’m surprised anything is still open.”

“I have no doubt some malls will survive, but major segments of our society have gotten sick of them,” said Mark Hinshaw, a Seattle architect, urban planner and author.

“It is very much a haves and have-nots situation,” said D. J. Busch, a senior analyst at Green Street. Affluent Americans “will keep going to Short Hills Mall in New Jersey or other properties aimed at the top 5 or 10 percent of consumers. But there’s been very little income growth in the belly of the economy.”

“We are extremely over-retailed,” said Christopher Zahas, a real estate economist and urban planner in Portland, Ore. “Filling a million square feet is a tall order.”

“Everybody has memories from childhood of going to the mall,” said Jack Thomas, 26, one of three partners who run the site in their spare time. “Nobody ever thinks a mall is going to up and die.”

Nearly 15 percent are 10 to 40 percent vacant, up from 5 percent in 2006. And 3.4 percent — representing more than 30 million square feet — are more than 40 percent empty, a threshold that signals the beginning of what Mr. Busch of Green Street calls “the death spiral.”

Industry executives freely admit that the mall business has undergone a profound bifurcation since the recession.

“Our business is more regional and high-end focused,” he said. “There are gradients of dead or dying or flat, but anything that’s caught in the middle of the market is problematic."

 

“The mall genie was out of the bottle,” Mr. Simmons said, “and it was never going to come back.”

Read more here...



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: bhoeconomy; ecommerce; mall; retail; shoppingmall; trends
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To: MrB

I believe it! What a sad society we’ve become!


61 posted on 01/06/2015 8:37:59 AM PST by Roman_War_Criminal
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To: SeekAndFind
It wouldn't have anything to do with..,.


62 posted on 01/06/2015 8:37:59 AM PST by HangnJudge
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To: Dr. Bogus Pachysandra

It would be a perfect location for section 8 housing.
Load the place with leftover FEMA trailers.

(I remember riding my Yamaha dirt bike on the site when they were building that place back in the 70s, LOL)


63 posted on 01/06/2015 8:38:11 AM PST by nascarnation (....)
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To: HangnJudge
And...


64 posted on 01/06/2015 8:40:11 AM PST by HangnJudge
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To: SeekAndFind

Their empty parking lots make great places to teach your teenagers to drive and park though :)


65 posted on 01/06/2015 8:41:10 AM PST by poobear (Socialism in the minds of the elites, is a con-game for the serfs, nothing more.)
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To: MrB

ROTFLMAO!


66 posted on 01/06/2015 8:41:31 AM PST by tgusa (gun control: deep breath, sight alignment, squeeze the trigger .......)
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To: SeekAndFind
Mall deaths are twofold

1) demographics and thug kulture

2) internet

Only malls prospering are high end where big spenders want to try on Jimmy Choo or Carven or St Laurent etc first

Or the open air walk around style where youth can't hang out as easy

Some outlets seem to prosper.....Woodbury Commons in Hudson Valley for example

67 posted on 01/06/2015 8:49:58 AM PST by wardaddy (glenn beck is a nauseous politically correct conservative on LSD)
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To: SeekAndFind
Well what I have noticed about failing malls can be traced usually to one word. "RENT". It seems when stores leave the mall they thrive right up the road even as close as a block away in a strip mall or individual building.

IMO empty malls have become desirable as tax write offs. Plus as an extra added bonus the owners can play around with city planners city councils etc trying to get grants etc for pie in the sky studies, planning, etc that they have no intentions of going through with usually done so city doesn't contest sale to another corp wanting to buy a write off.

Add to this the fact the malls favorite renter seems to be government. Why? Well government will pay top dollar and isn't worried about retail profit.

The city south of me Knoxville has two. One is thriving and the newest one is dieing. The newest one has stores once located inside the mall now located outside and seem to be doing OK.

To the west of me is Oak Ridge. That mall has been dead as such for over a decade. Again most stores except the anchor ones moved out to cheaper locations across the street. This began when government began renting retail space. Several owners since construction with each new one having proposals that go nowhere.

Malls can work but owners have to be realistic. Also many miss opportunity by not having one or two Big Box as an anchor store. You have to have something to get people there first. Mix up the retail from high end to family stores. Have a well trained security force rather than making the mall a satellite precient for city cops.

Offer decent places to eat from fast food to restaurants where persons may go for special occasions. Have such things as a UPS Store and office supply/computer IOW Specialty Stores where people can do one stop shopping. Extend hours past 9:00pm till 11:00PM. Seriously, closing a mall at 9:00pm especially on Friday & Saturday is a looser. Walmart is open all night. While a mall can't support those hours it could support till 11:00pm except Sunday. A big shopper draw would be a grocery store open all night. Shoppers finish shopping inside the mall and do grocery shopping before going home. There's ways to make it work. The first thing should be elimination of all tax breaks/write offs for empty malls for more than a year.

68 posted on 01/06/2015 8:55:49 AM PST by cva66snipe ((Two Choices left for U.S. One Nation Under GOD or One Nation Under Judgment? Which one say ye?))
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To: ifinnegan

Don’t know about that.. There have always been dead and dying malls. I have watched personally malls reinvent themselves to serve higher end markets as demographics changed and watched thriving malls become weekend swap meets etc.

There is little doubt too many malls exist in some regions, middle class is getting squeezed,and social norms are changing. Face it in the 80s the mall was where the kids hung out... Not that some don’t still today but the mall today is not remotely the social hub it was.

I walk through the mall and marvel at how many clothing retailers are there, and how many of them I know from their sec filings are struggling.. It’s not hard to see why. Intense competition for the youthful buyer who’s tastes change significantly every few years. The days of having Ambercombie on your shirt has gone from a status symbol to something to be despised etc etc.

there is little doubt that the malls status is generally falling and without general demographic growth the impact would be even greater than it is in the general fall from grace. They will always be with us but the number of malls per capita is going to shrink


69 posted on 01/06/2015 8:59:09 AM PST by HamiltonJay
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To: catnipman

Colorado has low black population and your two biggest cities are boomtowns....or you’d deal with that as mall death too

In the south black creep will kill a mall quick

I’ve seen this since the early 70s

Build a mall multilevel in high end urban area or way out where its rich white bucolic

Like Franklin TN where I live...

But since we now have the only safe multi tiered mall price wise in metro Nashville we get a lot of riff raff coming out here

Its funny...the new model is like better decorated clustered shopping centers in the 50s and 60s

Like the Avenue in Murfreesboro TN

Malls are just not the ideal anymore

Nashville like Denver or Austin has a huge immigration of youth hipsters taking over city core

I expect new retail concepts to accommodate

Lupton Simon Crowe and Davenport families take note


70 posted on 01/06/2015 9:00:22 AM PST by wardaddy (glenn beck is a nauseous politically correct conservative on LSD)
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To: HamiltonJay

I refer you to posts 12, 16 and 43.


71 posted on 01/06/2015 9:02:05 AM PST by ifinnegan
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To: GreyFriar
This is why I think if we get the right candidate (e.g, somebody like Ted Cruz or even Sarah Palin), the Republican nominee for President will win surprisingly comfortably because we know what President Obama's economic policies benefited the top one percent at the expense of everyone else; there should have been fundamental changes in national taxation and business regulations that should have made it easier for REAL economic growth.

The fall of shopping malls is a sign that the middle class is failing because tax laws and business regulations are killing the middle class almost quite literally.

72 posted on 01/06/2015 9:04:15 AM PST by RayChuang88 (FairTax: America's economic cure)
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To: nascarnation

It would be a perfect location for section 8 housing.
Load the place with leftover FEMA trailers.

________________________________________________

I don’t know if you were joking, but you actually pretty close to being right on target.

in 2005 Katrina refugees were housed in the Windsor Park Mall here in San Antonio. The mall was alredy dead and vacated, so it made the perfect spot for displaced refugees.

I worked accross the street from that place at the time, and the things I saw!

Thankfully, my employer hired full time Security to guard the cars in the parking lot.


73 posted on 01/06/2015 9:05:00 AM PST by Responsibility2nd (NO LIBS. This Means Liberals and (L)libertarians! Same Thing. NO LIBS!!)
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To: HangnJudge

Hmmm... the Fed is loose on money yet, the graph tells me that it isn’t changing hands at a robust rate at all. In other words, not much transaction (i.e., purchase of goods and services ) going on.


74 posted on 01/06/2015 9:05:46 AM PST by SeekAndFind (If at first you don't succeed, put it out for beta test.)
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To: SeekAndFind

Maybe if we had politicians in congress and in the white house who cared about helping America instead of themselves and they wall street buddies then the malls would be filled with shoppers.


75 posted on 01/06/2015 9:12:12 AM PST by minnesota_bound
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To: SeekAndFind

I absolutely HATE going into malls. I got dragged into one during this past Christmas season. I couldn’t help but to wonder why in the HELL anyone would want to physically go there and experience that, when they could shop online.


76 posted on 01/06/2015 9:17:55 AM PST by KoRn (Department of Homeland Security, Certified - "Right Wing Extremist")
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To: Dilbert San Diego

#11 Circuit City did this and Best Buy does this. Loud music is not a way to entice people to stay and shop nor is having bland “progressive” music playing from today’s music karaoke stars. They should have happy upbeat music generally without words playing. I have been in grocery store where the music has sad songs playing.


77 posted on 01/06/2015 9:18:46 AM PST by minnesota_bound
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To: SeekAndFind
Are these dead malls only occurring the past six years, or have they started on this trend longer than that?

Well, the deadmalls.com website has been around since 2000, if that tells you anything.

78 posted on 01/06/2015 9:19:43 AM PST by Bubba Ho-Tep ("The rat always knows when he's in with weasels"-- Tom Waits)
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To: ifinnegan

Zerohedge is HARDLY “communist”.

If I had to assign ANY ideology to their site it would probably be ‘Libertarian’, but there really isn’t an overall ideology on the site. (there MAY be a few ‘commie/socialist/liberal’ users that post there)


79 posted on 01/06/2015 9:21:10 AM PST by KoRn (Department of Homeland Security, Certified - "Right Wing Extremist")
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To: AppyPappy
"We lost Sears and I bet JC Penney isn’t far behind. Online shopping is too convenient."

Yeah, that NRV Mall is usually DEAD, except for MAYBE around Christmas, or when college is getting started. Lots of empty stores in there. Not even a toy store.

"Four Seasons Mall in Greensboro NC is a good example. Full of nice stores and you can still get a cap busted in yo azz in the parking lot."

I had the misfortune of going to that one last year. Didn't look like there were many actual shoppers. Only shop lifters, gang-banger types, with drug dealers. The whole time we were there, I felt the need to have a weapon drawn to give cover to my wife.... and this was just after lunch during a WEEKDAY! lol (ironically *I* was the one to get bothered by "mall security" because I had an 'e-cig') I wouldn't go to that place on a Saturday night without full body armor and automatic weapons! I believe they had some sort of gang battle/brawl around that place sometime during the past couple of years with over 200 "youths" involved. It didn't make the national news or anything, of course.

I'd rather just stay out here in the woods/mountains, and shop online. They can have their malls. lol

80 posted on 01/06/2015 9:37:54 AM PST by KoRn (Department of Homeland Security, Certified - "Right Wing Extremist")
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