Changing Times
Sears is nearly gone. Walgreens is closing some of its stores. Others are bankrupt and unable to climb their way out, and are going out of business. Some of it is due to online shopping being so popular, but some of it is just the times – they are a-changin’.
Business Insider has a list of retailers that are closing stores, including those like Payless which are going out of business. https://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-in-2019-list-2019-3
You have to read it and go through that list to get the full impact of it. What happens when shopping malls become proverbial ghost towns? Turn them into parks? That is happening here and there, even up here in my neck of the woods. Smaller towns are reviving their centers into local shopping, with small stores that may have an online presence, but want the through-the-door customers, too. There’s a K-Mart near me that has been turned into a school.
This isn’t about nostalgia for some “good old days”. Getting the Sears & Roebuck catalog was not a big event at our house. We knew that you could get literally anything from Sears or Montgomery Wards, including baby chickens if you were going to raise them for eggs and for the freezer. The L.L. Bean catalog was another one: you could get anything for hunting, fishing and other outdoor stuff, including tents and clothing, through their catalog service. Now you go to Tractor Supply to get chickens, and Bean will still send you a catalog, but they don’t print the big one any more. As much as I love to shop in a store, some online stuff is just simpler and easier.
That was before credit cards became the way to pay for everything, and long, long before online shopping was a bright idea. It was also a time when the local dairy delivered milk and eggs and butter to your door, and the grocery actually had a butcher shop where you could get the beef or pork cut to your specifications. There are still a few grocery stores like that around here, but they never went into the “expand and go broke” mentality that brought shopping malls into existence starting in the 1960s.
So what do you do with a shopping mall that has been abandoned to its fate?
Category: Economy
Shooting range? I mean, no shoppers in the way…
Yeah, why not? Or a paintball gaming spot. There’s a warehouse near me that was taken up by paintballers a while back.
Skating rink, maybe? For pickup hockey games and open skate for social time.
Yeah. Why not? A guy in Terre Haute, Indiana turned an old furniture store into a gun shop/training school/ shooting range. He even rents a few automatic firearms.
Ex wrote:
“So what do you do with a shopping mall that has been abandoned to its fate?”
Well, that means the Shopping Mall Zombies during Black Friday will become an Extinct Breed:
*smile*
Thank God! I did “Black Friday” once, and once only. I was ready to shoot some mother fuckers after a half hour.
Hmmm…after posting the above video, this one is better.
“Zombies vs Black Friday Shoppers”
Yep, not going to miss Black Friday Shoppers at any Mall:
*smile*
That is too funny!!!
That’s why I attempt to plan all my shopping WAY before Thanksgiving. ANd for Thanksgiving and that Black Friday weekend, I stay home and sleep peacefully.
WOW that’s a lot of stores. I still get LL Bean and Pendleton mills catologues. My Sister gets around 10 to 20 mail order catologues during the week. Around the holidays, I’ve seen 20+ in the mail box.
I get the LLBean catalog, and sometimes something from the hobby stores, but there’s so much online that it is drawing people to shop that way.
I can get Hello! Kitty! fabric from an online store. That kind of thing doesn’t take away from the storefront establishments.
And people wonder why the Post Office keeps losing money.
So what do you do with a shopping mall that has been abandoned to its fate?
Open up all those small storefronts to small up-and-coming start-ups, that need a brick-and-mortar “presence”, but can’t afford the high rent of a high traffic mall.
Better to have SOME, even if it’s reduced, income and tax revenue, than none from an empty store.
A good business test bed. The good ones will expand and grow, the weak will fall by the wayside and go under.
(being the Proud G’Papa of one of those small up-and-coming businesses (7 years now) owned and run by my daughter and son-in-law. they were fortunate to find an inexpensive place to start, and that’s where they’ve made their business “home”)
Good for them! As long as they avoid that ‘expand and go broke’ thing that melted Sears into nothing, they’ll be fine.
Lehman’s has only one store, but they have a full online inventory and they are thriving.
In my AO they kept building new shopping centers trying to stay one step ahead of the hood rats. Guess what? The hood rats followed the construction and brought their crime with them. For rent signs are posted in numerous locations and the developers are continuing to build new buildings. Some of the independents went out of business because the could no longer absorb the losses. Many of the chain stores lost business because of piss poor service and/or shoddy merchandise in addition to the reasons listed in the post above.
Most of my purchases are from independents. Not into the online buying as of yet. I do buy my groceries from the K Roger. Don’t, won’t buy a damn thing from wally world.
Ex:
Yes, the times are indeed changing.
The Newspaper Industry in terms of paper circulation/subscription is on the decline as well.
Call me Old-Fashioned, but am keeping fingers crossed that Libraries will still be opened along with Books that one can physically hold to read versus reading from a PC, a Tablet (Nook?) or Smartphone.
I miss those Montogomery Wards and Sears Catalogs, especially the Wish Book (Christmas).
Thank You for sharing.
My two local libraries still carry paper-print books. I don’t think that will change.
E-books are fine if you’re cramped for space, but I really do not think that print will go out of existence. How do you get a 1st edition copy of something if it only exists as electrons being jiggled?
Love the convenience of ebooks and have thousands. Also print books. Most books do not have e-book editions and until all my odd, wierd favorites are free ebooks, I will have books. Libraries, at least judging by one of the country’s largest, Harris County, only ave a few percent of their titles both in ebooks and available.
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
Me and the Spousal Unit are avid readers of paper-print books. I’ve never enjoyed reading e-books or e-edition newspapers.
I delivered the local rag for a little more than a year, until I quit in July. I started out with about 280 papers (home delivery and racks) a day (through the week, more on Sunday) and finished with about 240 daily a year later. At least 80 percent of my customers were over 60, people who are either uncomfortable with computers or still subscribe due to habit. In most places where papers still exist the real estate where the newspaper offices exist are is far more valuable than the paper itself.
In my county the United Christian Ministries took over an old grocery store and made it into a combination shelter/soup kitchen/free clinic. A couple of the old furniture factories have been turned into apartments, but others have been demolished (places where I once saw hundreds of cars parked for work). Sometimes companies prefer to hold onto failed stores so they can use them as a loss leader, but I have been around long enough to see some failed businesses repurposed into something useful, it’s the way of things.
There are some folks that are purchsing the old dead malls and turning them into something wonderful
https://www.littlethings.com/woman-lives-abandoned-shopping-mall/
Some are for the homeless as well.
That is a really good idea, ChipNASA.
Compact space does make you think more rationally about what you really need, as opposed to what you think you want.
Amazon knocked down what was left of Randall Park Mall in Ohio (once the world’s largest) and built a fulfillment center.
Waiting for the day an Amazon delivery drone accidently drops my neighbor’s shipment in their pool.
Not to mention when bored teenagers take to drone skeet…
It’s not only retail stores closing up. Don’t forget that in the past few years that a proud but humble woman owned business that sells software to the federal government filed for bankruptcy. Things started spiraling out of control when the president disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and in a futile bid to keep the company solvent, the Vice President of the company started an online business selling brick and mortar. The only mistake was offering free shipping. You could say that he lost his shirt in that idea, but he lost all of his shirts a decade ago when he filed for bankruptcy.
Now that marijuana is legal in the PDRofMA a cannabis company wants to turn the local abandoned mall into a indoor plant growing operation. Just one more reason I’m looking forward to escaping from Taxachusetts next year.
Our local mall recently put in an aquarium to try and get more people back into the mall. So far it seems to be working, but with the loss of yet another anchor store (Sears), time will tell. They finally have figured out that they need to be more reasonable charging rent to the smaller places or else they will lose all of them as well – something that seriously should have happened years ago. I’d love to see more mom and pop stores be able to move into the mall and flourish.
About the credit/retail/economy turn over: America has $3.9 TRILLION in consumer debt. Add this to the tax issues and the underfunded pensions in many states and stagnate wages….
We in for some problems.
Have a plan, get debt free, save, be prepared to hunker down.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-credit-card-debt
http://www.usdebtclock.org
https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/
One trillions 440 billion in consumer debt. That is just scary.
Roh-Dog: Have a plan, get debt free, save, be prepared to hunker down.
Absolutely, and you might add stock your pantry with what you know you’ll use, with an extended expiration date.
Ex, I was going to ‘go there’ but I didn’t want to get too far off-topic.
But to your point, I have a million calories cashed for me and the longtime gf and always follow a ‘one out, two in’ rule for canned goods (Beef stew, Hormel Chilli, corned beef hash, etc).
Please people! If you don’t eat, ya CANT FIGHT!
Add some multivitamins to that, Roh-Dog. Keep them in a box with a closed lid. They will last longer that way.
You can get bulk dry beans from North Bay Trading, American company up in Wisconsin. They carry all kinds of dry beans, rice, freeze-dried fruits and veggies, at reasonable prices. And they keep expanding their inventory.
600 multivitamins in mason jars, check! (KI too)
I found sealing rice or beans in 5 gallon Mylar bags with O2 absorbers in homer buckets is the cheapest way to go.
I’ll have to check North Bay out! Always looking for bulk fruits and veg.
My next big get is a case of gallon masons with potato flake, I just keep eating them before I get a chance to jar them…
Damn Irish heritage!!
Business Insider doesn’t allow access to stories if you have an ad blocker enabled. This is not a surprise considering that BI was started by a disgraced Wall Street securities analyst, and then flipped to the giant German publishing firm Axel Springer. The BI writers, like a lot of New Yorkers, love to write stories about how grim things are in flyover country. They also tend to move to other gigs quickly if they have any talent. The retail trade in general tends to be a cut-throat business, and operates on thin margins. The clothing part of it is also close kin to the fashion business which has it’s own trend dynamics. Success or failure is now also largely dependent on product branding. An interesting example of this is that the “Craftsman” line of Sears tools has been spun off to where it has now been picked up by Lowe’s. Meaning that the parent retail store can die, but the brand it developed lives on. Things also, at least it seems to me, indicate being cyclical in the longer term. The development of shopping centers caused a decline in towns’ central business districts (CBDs). In turn, shopping centers with the “anchor” multi-store model are now taking a hit from larger big-box stores which themselves are feeling pressure from efforts at CBD renewal. A current aspect of CBD renewal has been the attempt, with limited success, at mixed-use development which combines retail and residential. None of which, from the standpoint of local land-use planning, is particularly easy because every town and city is different. Things such as terrain, topography, economic base, existing infrastructure, and demographics all come into play. If you want to learn how that kind of stuff really works, you would be better off following what’s going on in Cleveland or Nashville than you would be reading Business Insider in New York City. I’d also venture the chances are good that existing commercial real estate, including the apparently failing Sears, has a good chance of morphing into some other use. While it’s evident that retail stores tend to have… Read more »
By “mixed-use development”, you mean like how towns used to function?!
It always kills me to drive down some old Main Street areas. My thought is always, “I’d love to live here, but…”. That ‘but’ is usually the artificial crap the town tries to bluster downtown ‘development’ and the handsome taxes they like to impose for the privilege! It’s almost always a flash-in-the-pan.
I actually live in the downtown area of a old New England farming community. The rent isn’t bad, the amenities I can ambulate to are plenty but there’s no community here. They are trying to get something started but the cost of business drives rents up and there is lest money to spend, and the whole thing seems to burn itself out.
And don’t even get me started on the willingness of development to tear down history for the ‘future’.
Sounds like my town as well.
We have a church and a graveyard.
Babbling brook. Gravel pit.
Life is good.
It’s evident that towns that grew up prior to the automobile functioned differently than they might today. It was likely common for businesses to include living quarters because there was no zoning to prevent it. The owner of the general store living upstairs on a second story might be one example; the blacksmith with a shack out behind the shop might be another.
But as time went on, the son of the same blacksmith might have become a mechanic on a new invention called the internal combustion engine, and the blacksmith’s grandson might in turn have become a Chevy dealer. At that point, the blacksmith’s shack was long gone, and the grandson might be driving to work from a big house in a strictly residential neighborhood.
That’s a classic model of mixed-use that grew from market demand. Another classic model of live/work space is a farm. So a fair question to ask, to stick to the question of failing malls, is that if things evolved to take on a different form for the same basic function, what’s to prevent them from devolving to use the newer form but with a different function? And how do you dial in that function in a way that best fits with the economy of a local community without wrecking the character of the community itself?
I don’t have any specific answers to this; it’s merely an observation based on current questions being asked by land-use planners and developers. Again, the problem of mixed residential/commercial seems to be something that a lot of people want, but is only rarely pulled off well.
As a disclaimer, I live in a 100 year-old farm house being renovated, and which is surrounded by ranches. The nearest supermarket is about 15 miles away.
Ho Lee Crap I actually have a weekend off. Rare as hen’s teeth these days. Hope everybody is doing well!
Don’t hit nothing that I wouldn’t hit.
Oh..wait…never mind.
Malls are changing and shopping is evolving for sure. However, the basic principle has remained in tact through the years- separating you from your money.
I have vague memories of the Sears Tower opening in the early to mid 70s, seemed like a big deal at the time. What is it – 110 stories? My how the mighty have fallen. If it is still there, a vid was up on youtube of two workers using a cutting torch to remove an antenna assembly from the top of the tower. Funny to watch one of the guys light a cig as they are perched 1000 feet up.
Oh, it’s still there but it has a new name, and I think peregrine falcons have a home up there, too.
Yes, it has a new name … and you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of true Chicagoans who use that new name.
It is, and always will be, the Sears Tower.
I remember when the JC Penney catalog was as
good as Playboy magazine……
Another problem you have to deal with when you shop on line, having your packages stolen right off of your front porch.
There are some … creative … ways to deal with “porch pirates”.
Emptying the cat’s litterbox into a recycled Amazon box is one method.
Cutting the bottom out of a package, and using it to hold a large but harmless snake is also noteworthy.