

The largest retailers in the US do not look very healthy - Cbasedlifeform
http://qz.com/39035/the-largest-retailers-in-the-us-do-not-look-very-healthy/

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ridiculous_fish
Fremont, CA contains a shopping center I like to call "Furniture Hell." The
shops in this center are all zombies, each and every one converted to
retailers for imported Chinese furniture. All of them claim to be near-death,
going out of business, and yet live on for years. Their banners reach out at
you, groaning "SAAAALE."

The most uncanny of the stores, what I like to think of as the Zombie Leader,
calls itself the "Furniture Depot," and as you may have guessed is built in
the corpse of a Home Depot. The new residents only fill a small part of the
cavernous building. The disused portion has all of its aisles removed and its
lights turned off, and so it stretches backwards seemingly forever,
disappearing into the darkness. Home Depots are huge.

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derleth
> The disused portion has all of its aisles removed and its lights turned off,
> and so it stretches backwards seemingly forever, disappearing into the
> darkness.

And the thing of it is, it would likely be kind of expensive to shoot a zombie
movie here.

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twoodfin
Haven't we known for years that traditional malls are dying? So-called
"lifestyle centers", typically anchored by a Whole Foods or otherwise hard-to-
virtualize establishment, have been sprouting up for a decade.

And there's still room for specialty retailers. Somehow the two highest
revenue/square foot stores didn't make it into these tables.

Yes, the traditional 50+ store indoor mall is a dinosaur, and there will be
fewer and fewer of them each year. No, Americans are not going to stop
shopping IRL.

~~~
sneak
What is a high-volume business that has mass-market appeal and can benefit
from falling retail costs?

It has to be something that you'd never buy online, or that has some major
advantage to physically handling before purchase... or maybe some sort of
service.

~~~
ams6110
Clothing, fresh food (meat, produce, etc.) prepared food (eat in and take
out), and I think consumer staples (soap, toiletries, misc) that's just
quicker to pick up on the way home than to order and wait for. Unless you're
really well organized, you tend to buy that stuff when you've run out and you
won't want to wait a few days for shipping.

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dredmorbius
Original on LinkedIn (OP's link is all but unreadable).
[http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-40...](http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-40729475-why-
malls-are-getting-mauled?goback=%2Eptf_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1&trk=who_to_follow-b)

~~~
lostpixel
Thanks for the linkedin link. Quartz seems very flaky

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graue
Third paragraph:

> _A number of physical retailers have already succumbed to online competition
> including Circuit City, Borders, CompUSA, Tower Records and Blockbuster_

I was curious about the timeline of these closures so I opened all five
businesses' Wikipedia pages to find out when each went out of business. (Tower
Records - 2006, Circuit City - 2009, Borders - 2011)

It turns out CompUSA[1] and Blockbuster[2] are still operating retail stores!
Both are now owned by other companies and CompUSA at least has a substantially
reduced number of stores, but you can hardly say something "succumbed" when it
still exists. This has me questioning whether I want to bother finishing the
article.

[1] <http://www.compusa.com/retailstores/compusaStores/index.asp>

[2] <http://www.blockbuster.com/stores/storelocator>

~~~
siglesias
We needn't be pedantic here. These guys are essentially the black knight from
Monty Python: "still alive!" but with no arms and legs.

~~~
pyre
Blockbuster still had profitable locations, IIRC. It was the company as a
whole that was collapsing. I assume that those locations are probably still
profitable now, though maybe not as much as at its apex.

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pixl97
The city I live in is building strip malls at an insane rate while the
existing ones have a higher vacancy rate then I have ever seen. A few at the
best locations will fill most of the slots, but the rest might have 50%
capacity. Who is loaning money for this? Do they think that this capacity will
be filled at some point in the distant future?

~~~
prostoalex
There's usually some gap between sourcing the site, buying out the land
necessary for build-up, obtaining permits, obtaining financing, getting the
headliner to (soft) commit, and build things out. Sometimes, as you point out,
the economic environment changes in-between those stages.

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smoyer
Sounds like an interesting story but the body content is virtually
undetectable under the floating sidebar.

~~~
benatkin
I found it confusing too. Here's the place where it was originally posted to:
[https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-4...](https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121222010436-40729475-why-
malls-are-getting-mauled?goback=%2Eptf_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1&trk=who_to_follow-b)

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ryanackley
Online clothing stores as they exist today will never replace brick and mortar
stores.

I will always want to try on clothes before buying them unless I'm feeling
really generous with my money and time. I don't like having to go to the post
office to return stuff. Online clothing as it exists today seems to me like a
form of roulette.

Build an iphone app that can take a picture of me and show me what I'll look
like in a certain outfit and give me a perfect tailored fit every time and you
can disrupt brick and mortar clothing stores.

~~~
prostoalex
What about <http://me-ality.com/locations> Unless your measurements change
drastically (lose/gain weight, grow up), a visit to one of those booths once a
year should suffice for all online shopping needs.

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wyclif
The design of this site is incredibly annoying and awful. I just want to read
the article!

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gee_totes
Ha! The site "freezes" while loading for me, and all I see is a spinny wheel
and no requests coming across the net panel in Firebug.

