spaceytracey Loc: East Glacier Park, MT

Ever try to buy shoes online? I do most of my shopping online but have found shoes to be difficult. A decent shoe store would be great.

Tote1940 Loc: Dallas

Have you seen Willow Bend in Plano?
Nice as always around 30% occupied, food court a couple of shops open.
Saw plans to rebuild it by cutting retail space adding appartments, same famed Galleria in Dallas
The future looks like Legacy West in Plano, no enclosed mall, stores at street level 4 stories of shoddily built ( wood structure) appartments made very cute renting high.
Enclosed malls and huge Department stores that carried everything are going the way of horse and buggy
No large space to aircondition, or clean.
They were fun while they lasted

mhicks49

I think the process began when the mall owners started price gouging the stores. It is much like apartment owners do to their renters today. It has no ending.

BebuLamar

Since Vietnam sells furniture to the US and other countries it's a good (or bad thing) that they make them the same now. Before that no 2 pieces of furniture are the same. They are all different even if the maker wanted to make them the same.

dwermske

Twelve years ago I moved from the DFW metroplex where malls were everywhere to Austin. Wow what a surprise, Austin has only one fully enclosed air-conditioned mall. It appears that it might not survive Bidenomics. It's not just the malls that are suffering, small business are hurting just as much. Many of our stores have had to close as a direct result of inflation.

BebuLamar

Inflation and not the online stores? People are still buying jut not at the local store.

John N Loc: HP14 3QF Stokenchurch, UK

We just call them 'Shopping Centres' here (U.K.), but it's the same story. Here's the smaller of our two local ones on a Wednesday Afternoon in October last year around 2.00pm.

When you consider this Centre is a cut through between different parts of the town and still has no footfall life is short. In fact plans are afoot to provide housing here.

People want touchy feely stores then rush home to save a few pennies on Amazon et al. I think they'll miss them when there's no alternative.

(Download)

BebuLamar

And they blame the businesses and not themselves. Businesses can't do anything without the support of their customers. It's the customers that dicate how the business should run.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The chief cause of brick-and-mortar retail failures is the rise of online commerce. When you can order things you would normally shop for at the mall, and get them delivered at the same price, or for less money, there is no incentive to leave the house.

In the 1970s, big volume catalog mail order retailers, precursors of the Internet retailers, squeezed the local camera stores hard! As a broke teen, I bought my most expensive gear via mail order. I bought film, chemicals, and paper at the local shop, where I also figured out what to buy via mail order... It was "horrible behavior," according to some, but I would never have equipped myself at the local shop's prices, which were full list and never discounted...

Still, over-the-phone and mail order commerce wasn't enough to kill off the local stores... It just slowed them down.

Fast forward to today. There are no local camera stores near me. If I want it, I call to learn whether it's in stock, before I drive 75 miles. OR, I get on the Internet and click a few links. What do you think most people do? We shop the dot-coms. Even in a Prius, it costs $.44/mile to drive, and I'm not paying premium local store prices on top of that mileage expense.

Malls suffered and died off because of Amazon and other giant online retailers. The Internet, smartphones, tablets, and computers, combined with social media, have given online commerce an unbeatable platform.

The chains that have continued to thrive are those who figured out how to compete in the online space. If all you have is a physical storefront, then shame on you, Sears, and all the other Mall anchor stores who lost out. "One click buys it now" beats wandering around a mall store, hoping you'll find a knowledgeable employee who gives a hoot about what their employer sells.

As a college student, my son worked at a local Target store. He knows exactly why brick-and-mortar stores suck. It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with retail management strategy.

BebuLamar

Yes and I don't like it. But I am the minority. I love to go to the stores.

Georgia Jack

There's a mall here in Athens, GA, that is going to be torn down and replaced with 2,000 apartments! The mall had changed hands several times over the last twenty-five years, but I guess it's reached its expiration date now.

Tote1940 Loc: Dallas

They are two reinforcing events, brick and mortar stores are dying because of in libe shopping and that huge Box stores like Costco Walmart get quantity discounts no smaller chain can get, plus fewer people can afford to buy houses, partially less two working parents partially inflation so investors can get apt managers to squeeze larger returns from renters
Actually the US is an anomally, in most countries renters greatly outnumbers homeowners and many are condo owners, not single family homes

PhotoMono123 Loc: Houston, Texas

Oh my! Another thread on the changing of the times.

We were a world of "bricks and mortar" stores during my childhood of the 1940s and 1950s. So what did that mean?

It meant shopping district streets lined with mom & pop stores, many of which had everything but what you needed.

It meant moms walking to the market several days a week for groceries – only about 50% of the average
households owned a car and most moms did not drive.

It meant dads running around to a variety of stores all Saturday morning – it took a number of stops to buy
what you can buy in one store today.


It also meant that people then (about 70 years ago) were already looking for alternatives to those wonderful stores.

There were lots of home-delivery services – my own mom had milk, bread, and coffee delivery as well as
laundry and dry cleaning and some other services that I can no longer remember.

There was even a knife and scissors sharpener (a grinding wheel on his back so he could sharpen at your door)
who showed up a couple of times a year.

There were Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs in most homes so things could be (horrors!)
ordered and delivered to the door.

There was the Book-of-the-Month Club with a new hardback in your mailbox every 4 weeks.

Mom could take the train into the city to the big department stores – 10 floors of everything – and then have
her packages delivered the next day by UPS.


So we moved on. More families owned more cars, and moms began to drive.

The super market replaced the corner grocery store. Did I hear woeful lamentations when that happened?
Walgreens, CVS, etc. replaced the local druggist. How many of us weeped?

Along came K-Mart, Woolco (remember K-Mart and Woolco?), Target, and Walmart. Good-bye to the local
variety store and local clothing store and other local shops.

The department store moved to the suburbs to those new things called shopping malls that were filled with
chain stores that were really.

Self-pump gas stations replaced the old "full service" ones. This occurred because cars were much better and
the full-service business model was no longer viable. Oh, we complained that we had to get out of cars do this
menial task, but we really liked that we were in and out of the station in a lot less time.

And now we are on the move once again.

Computer-based shopping is swiftly replacing the shopping mall and "B&M" store. Don't blame Amazon. If we didn't want the concept, Amazon would have gone away. But both mom and dad work today and have little time for the mundane task of shopping. And the roads and streets are crowded, and who wants more traffic after 45 minutes in rush-hour traffic? So we have home delivery of our groceries. Door-Dash (in the U.S.) delivers our restaurant meals to our doors. For old folks like me, CVS will even deliver my prescriptions. And a few minutes on the computer and almost anything else will turn up on the doorstep in a few days – less time than from that old Sears catalog, but the same concept.

So it goes.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

Clever.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

My grandfather owned a dairy in central Illinois. In high school, and for a couple of years after WWII, my Dad and uncle ran milk routes all over Decatur and surrounding areas, along with quite a number of others.

As a kid growing up in Greensboro, NC, in the early to mid 1960s, I remember the Fuller Brush salesman, the Electrolux salesman, the Charles Chips sales truck, the "Good Humor" ice cream truck, and several local farmers who drove through our neighborhood selling fruits and vegetables and odds and ends.

There was a general store up the hill from our neighborhood that had everything, but nothing you needed, and lots of local stores downtown. No one store had everything.

If you needed a special part for a mower or a sewing machine, you were going to wait for 4-6 weeks for it, because only the factory stocked it. There was no "long tail marketing effect" of the Internet, because there was no Internet. (Reference: Chris Anderson's The Long Tail)

While the stores only carried a few top sellers, we had Top 40 radio. There was no YouTube, no Spotify, no Apple Music, no Reverb Nation, no music channels on cable TV, and only three or four local TV stations in most markets. Musicians either hit it big, or starved in bars, or taught music lessons. Today, you can find tens of thousands of great musicians online, and many of them make a decent second income from it.

We live in a convenient world, but an isolated world, and a world with so many choices we don't know what to buy, do, or believe. Our kids or grandkids are scared fartless about their futures, and the misplaced priorities of the last few generations. This song written by sisters who were 12, 15, and 17 tells it all: https://vimeo.com/210374020