TYPICAL DAY AT THE FORTUNE OFF MALL IN LONG ISLAND ( IRONICALLY, THE ROOSEVELT FIELD MALL JUST A FEW BLOCKS AWAY IS ALWAYS PACKED ):
More communist claptrap from Zero Hedge.
Come visit beautiful Randall Mall!
If a mall is dead ... the money has left ... plain and simple
Has NOTHING to do with "being retailed"
Online shopping is part of the reason,
but the biggest reason is “teen crime”.
Shoplifting, real customers fearing for their safety, real customers having to put up with obnoxious crap...
The mall violence in recent days reminds us of an unspoken issue. And that issue is that critical numbers of gang types and a thuggish element are scaring away legitimate shoppers from some of these malls.
As legitimate shoppers leave, sales go down. As sales go down, retailers pull out of these malls. And no new retailers want to go into a mall with a ghetto reputation. So the malls slowly die off .
..
I can think of a million things better to do than to walk around a mall.
Then again, I’m not a teen girl or in my 80s.
Malls have been killed by amazon prime. Why waste time when
the item can be delivered to your door in 2 days?
Malls have turned into stores to try stuff on.
The really bad news is that software that will take a selfie and translate that into custom fit clothes is right around the corner. Once this happens, malls will be in big trouble.
Speaking of big trouble, how many of the defunct malls are carried at top value on the books of the too big to fail corporations?
We use the internet to order our Chinese made crap. The only stimulus is to UPS and FedEx. Retail dead, manufacturing killed. Ain’t it great?
Indeed, the Mall of America near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has done extremely well because they very well knew the mall must have retailers and attractions to make it a destination everybody wants to go to.
I remember plazas where multiple storefronts were reached via sidewalk vs. the enclosed mall. Seems to be a return to such complexes as malls wither away.
empty malls are the most visible signs of Obama’s war on the American economy. When you don’t have a job and have given up looking for a job, you don’t have money to go shopping at the mall. No shopping, no spending, no sales, stores go out of business.
No one has money for shopping during a depression.
A compendium of dead malls at www.deadmalls.com.
-PJ
A prime indicator of the destruction of the middle class.
That’s what happens when malls are made accessible via public transit.
My long time ex-gf’s boss was a major mall developer, he sold 90% of his malls to Simon around 10 yrs ago, He must have seen the writing on the wall.
Did get to attend some great mall opening parties at the time though.....and a lot of great Red Sox and Bruins lux box tix also.
Ah, the good old days....
I hear the Pinedale Shopping Mall in Cincinnati is still thriving. People always gobble up the deals.
This NYT story is a day late and dollar short: even their occupancy & health stats are misleading as most covered malls have already been torn down in the U.S. in the preceding decades.
I know that almost all the covered malls ever built in Colorado have already been torn down and replaced with clusters of drive-up big box stores. There’s only a handful of covered malls still in operation in Colorado.
And it’s got nothing to do with haves and have-nots, which of course is the prism that NYT exclusively views the world.
The real reasons covered malls have died:
1. Internet shopping: infinitely better selection, much better prices, MUCH more convenient, and MUCH quicker than mall (or any other kind) of shopping.
2. Shift in merchandise preferences: most people are more interested in buying stuff like electronic gadgets from Best Busy and the like, rather than candles and Hallmark Cards and the other kind of useless crap sold in covered malls.
3. Time: most people are in a hurry and don’t have time to browse and/or walk for miles past hundreds of stores they could care less about to purchase something from the store they DO want to buy something from; they want to drive up to the front door of the store they need something from, go in, buy it, and then leave.