As
my husband and I were taking our regular walk through our local mall, we
discovered that overnight, another store had closed. We “walk the mall” five days a week. You never need to worry about weather, the
walking surface is level, and there is no traffic nearby about which we need to
be concerned.
We
live in a city of only about 40,000 people, so our mall is pretty small, but
vacancies are high. There are two anchor
stores and about 25 other businesses. Of
those, six are now vacant. This is not
unique to our local mall, and malls nationwide are struggling to fill their
spaces and increase the number of shoppers.
When
thinking about why there are so many vacancies, of course, the poor economy and
high unemployment are the first reasons that come to mind. However, there are other reasons that likely
will not change as the economy improves.
There are far more “big box” stores, with stores like Walmart and Target
becoming one-stop-shopping stores.
Consumers can buy nearly everything they need from clothing to electronics
to groceries without going from store to store.
Online
shopping has increased dramatically, taking a big slice of business from
shopping malls. The majority of big
chains have now opened their own online stores to regain some of the business
they lost at their retail stores.
I’ve
noticed a large increase in vacancies in strip malls as well. Just yesterday, I was going to purchase
something from a local flooring store, only to discover the store is no longer
there. That strip mall had one open
store out of six that were available. We
noticed two other strip malls in town with only a couple stores occupied, with
the remainder empty.
At
the beginning of 2012, for the first time in four years, there was a slight
decrease in the number of mall vacancies.
That small improvement may be due to the fact that new mall construction
has decreased because of the economy. In
fact fewer new malls were built in 2011 than at any time in the past 30
years. Each time a newer, nicer mall
opened, it hurt the existing malls.
A lot of the major department stores, like
Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, J.C. Penney's, did major renovations and
held very attractive sales, which likely contributed to the slight improvement.
As we became more observant about strip
malls and our local mall vacancies, we realized that we had previously given no
thought to this part of the economy and how it has suffered over the past
several years.
I am not a “shopper” and won’t particularly
miss shopping at malls. However, Sears
and J.C. Penney’s have always “been there,” and it is just a bit sad to think
that sometime in the near future, they may exist only online - or not at all.
