Years of overbuilding and the rise of online shopping have come to a head; malls as ‘energy suckers’
By Suzanne Kapner
April 21, 2017 7:53 p.m. ET
American retailers are closing stores at a record pace this year as they feel the fallout from decades of overbuilding and the rise of online shopping.
Just this past week, women’s apparel chain Bebe Stores Inc. said it would close its remaining 170 shops and sell only online, while teen retailer Rue21 Inc. announced plans to close about 400 of its 1,100 locations.
“There is no reason to believe that this will abate at any point in the foreseeable future,” said Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies for Columbia Business School and a former executive at Sears Canada Inc. and other department stores.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/brick-and-mortar-stores-are-shuttering-at-a-record-pace-1492818818
Another warning about retail closings, yet the Village Council is still considering the construction of additional retail space in the proposed parking garage.
You think you have empty store fronts now? Wait till the banks start bailing…and that’s right around the corner. Except Capital One Bank…they were stupid enough to actually BUILD a branch on Godwin…what planet are theses people on?
The internet is destroying the world as we knew it.
And not in a good way…
So are shop owners here going to keep whining that their lack of customers is because of lack of parking?
Everyone I know does a great deal of shopping online.
The next big shift will be work itself and working from home The technology already exists, but fairly soon we will see major corporations eliminating expensive office spaces where millions of people commute into every day to punch keyboards in buildings located in some of the most expensive places on earth. The cost benefits will drive this, and although there is a reluctance to go in this direction, as soon as one or two major companies start, it will happen quickly due to the obvious savings. This is going to impact public transport and commercial real estate in a big way. Forget about productivity dropping and people pretending to work, modern technology makes everything we do so measurable now, there’s no way you can pretend to work any longer.