I think it gets worse before it gets better. On-line will continue to get better (cheaper, faster, quicker, wider assortment) and that will continue to put pressure on the retailers.

I see a reset in retail rents that bring the cost of having a storefront down as a potential impact, which would hit the REITs and other real estate plays. That could lead to a renaissance in smaller, service-oriented retailers that can compete against the on-line offerings through niche categories and over-delivering on their service proposition.

drn92

I also think it's going to get worse. Retail is really over built around here. Consumer debt is building fast. I think credit card debt passed where is was in 2007? Put auto and school loans on top of that and housing cost increases and at some point all of this cheap money is going to have to start ringing warning bells.

I was thinking about what it would take to switch up a mall into senior living. Seems like it would be a great environment for seniors to have space to wander.

I'm wondering what the future looks like for restaurants. They seem to be doing fine overall but there are just so many of them.

Retail is becoming much like the baseball parks of old. Unless there was something else to do besides watch a game, people weren't anxious to go. Look at the newer baseball parks and all of the different offerings.

In many areas they are using outdoor areas to have parks and other attractions in the same areas as shopping. I think this will continue as a way to attract consumers. I believe the big box aspect of the shopping mall is on its way out.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

I've been with a large retail grocery chain for 25 years. Our company seems to be flourishing even now in this market. Just started a few division and scheduled to open 30-40 new locations this year. Competition is getting tough but we still seem to be raking in the money. People gotta eat!

I see grocery (perishable items) as something that the online retailers have not yet cracked. I have a great grocery store right down the road and like to pick out my own meats, fruits, and veggies. I do not trust that someone from Amazon will do the same (or even the online section of our local grocery). Since I am there, it is easy to get other items at the same time that have a bit more shelf life (cereal, sauces, etc.)

Retail consumer goods on the other hand ... Amazon and Internet retailers make life really easy to purchase shoes, socks, electronics, etc. from the comfort of my couch.

drn92

Lidl is coming this summer.

Your experience and opinion is exactly why groceries have been the slowest category to gain any traction online. However, that time is over. By 2025 and probably sooner, 20% - 25% of groceries will be purchased online.

Both Walmart and Amazon have publicly stated that they want to own 50% of the online grocery market. Both of them basically have unlimited capital to achieve that objective. What that means is that there will be further consolidation in the grocery space and those companies that don't offer the service, either themselves or through a third party provider (Instacart, Shipt, etc) will ultimately be acquired or just go out of business...as they see 20% of their revenue disappear.

Experiential retail will absolutely help (think sushi bars or coffee shops in the middle of the store) but it will only go so far as those people who are either time pressed, tech savvy or in need of convenience shift to online.

It's not a matter of "if" it's a matter of how quickly. Based on our conversations with pretty much every retailer in the grocery space Walmart inc and Amazon will absolutely be the winners in the space. There is definitely room for others...but not much. We think 3-4 others entities that will also see hyper growth and gobble up share.

Lidl and the expansion of Aldi will also wreak havoc on the industry...

We are in for an interesting and challenging ride.

yeah, one is supposed to open up a few miles down the road. We'll see how it much of an impact they have soon enough.

Agreed, we are definitely in the early stages of a wild ride.

For me, I do not see a day when I will order perishables on-line (unless I am physically unable to go to the store). I am open to the idea, but just like to pick and choose my produce.

Our local grocery store has an on-line option now (they renovated part of their store to provide a "service" area where customers can quickly stop in and pick up their orders. They have staff walking through the store with blue bins picking product for orders. I have noticed the number of order pickets going up (making the store more crowded!).

Amazon's expansion into same day delivery will help, but the sheer number of WM stores across the country will give them an advantage.

drn92

I did some shopping in Lidls in Ireland last summer and I don't think it would ever be my main grocery store. Really random assortment of stuff in there. however, I do most of my shopping at Trader Joe's expect for some name brand stuff I can't get there (Cokes, etc.), so maybe I'd change my tune if one was down the street from me.

Whenever I walk into a Safeway (our main 'traditional' grocery store chain) I walk out enraged at their shitty customer service. They deserve to die.

I work for a online retailer in Seattle.
All I can say, people are changing habits fast.
It is fun to take part in it.

Enraged is exactly the right word for how I feel every time I'm at my local Stop & Shop - it's atrocious. It would be a better experience if they had no staff there other than stockers filling the shelves.

The hardest thing about retail is finding good people to staff the stores and keeping them. There is a lot more that goes into running a grocery store than most people realize. No excuse to have shitty customer service but the people that complain about special products and things that are out of stock sometimes Just piss me off. Can't tell you how hard it is to stock a store doing over a million in sales a week and try to keep out of stocks at a minimum. Very hard to predict what 20,000 customers will buy any given week. I get an earful daily...just a tough business to be in really.

I have to believe a lot of this is due to the lower pay and shitty inconsistent hours. I worked retail when I was younger and not being able to set anything up due to such a fluctuating schedule made me quickly get out of that industry.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

The hours are consistently shitty yes, it is retail...evenings, weekends holidays are our busy times. Serving the public is a hard business. As for pay, there are close to 100 job classes throughout the store with a minimum and maximum pay for each job class. The starting pay for an entry level position at my location is $10/hr to bag groceries. Not bad pay for a high school kid. Meat cutters can make well over $20/hr for the higher paying positions. Each department has a manager Meat, Deli, Bakery, Produce, Grocery and customer service, all managers make over $60k and store managers makes over $100k. Our company is very competitive with pay compared to the rest of the industry and it is still hard to keep good help. Retail is just a hard thankless job.

When i say bad hours, I mean inconsistent. One week you work 4 on Tuesday in the afternoon then 4 Wednesday in the morning and then maybe 6 in the evening on Friday. The next week it's completely different and the schedule only goes out 2 weeks.

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TEAM HD
Each day is what you make of it so make it the best day possible.

yeah for part time associates, hours are a little sporadic, for full time associates hours are a little more consistent.

Aldi has been in Australia for a few years now and has made some pretty big inroads into our current grocery market duopoly
Prices are quite low, but you have to sacrifice a much lower number of lines, many of which are house brands for that lower pricing.

My wife actually works part time at one of the large retailers, and we do maybe 50% of our weekly shop at Aldi.
Quality is excellent (on food at least, some of the special lines they bring is, quality can be hit and miss) and they source much of their lines from local suppliers which is a big draw-card for us

I work in commercial RE. You are correct: 2017 is a year of reckoning. You're going to see very bifurcated outcomes: big box lease rates and occupancy rates will take a big hit... big enough that I suspect some REITs could get into trouble financially. Malls will see very diverse outcomes as well. Some will just be left to rot, some will continue to do well, some will be redeveloped, and some will be like quicksand in that fresh capital will come in with the intent of redeveloping only to fail quickly. Inline retail space will be more influenced by local supply/demand factors.

Circling back to the elephants in the room, big box retail and malls, I think a very legitimate case can be made that there will be some sort of financial fallout this year from these sectors.

Oh yeah, we waaaay over-built apartments too (at least here in the south east). I suspect to see fallout from that sector as well.

I'll go one at a time:

• Yes, retail is overbuilt in general. We probably need to see 10-20% of built square footage disappear or be repurposed.
• It's a compelling idea and we actually looked at potential redevelopment along those lines up in Oviedo FL. A busted out mall was for sale (not yet in bankruptcy iirc but it was inevitable) and we were thinking of keeping some of the common areas, and scraping the big box space and building multi-unit residential inside of said areas. Between Revit and some sophisticated spreadsheets we have a pretty good idea of what we can pay for a given property. For that property, the ceiling was $15/sf for the project to be viable. I don't know what the property ultimately sold for (some group is redeveloping it... and I'm pretty sure they'll fail too in the next 3-4 years) but I do know it was 5-8x what we were willing to pay (in other words, some still think the big box retail space has value as it currently sits).
• The restaurant business is terribly saturated. In today's market you can have a restaurant in a great location, with great food, great reviews, etc. and still lose your ass. Across the industry, IIRC, same store sales comps were down ~1.1% last month and that was considered a "victory". The pain has been real in the restaurant industry for over a year but most people don't seem to notice because.... for some reason.... investors continue to think that they know what the "next big thing" will be and they invest accordingly while telling themselves when they go to sleep "people have to eat."

There will unquestionably be adjustment to the downside but that process will be bumpier than most expect. Many REITs have a higher cost basis than you'd expect and if a property/company enters into bankruptcy it could be a long time before there's any sort of adjustment. Banks SUCK at managing property that's in receivership. Also, land prices are sticky. Here in FL plenty of cattle farmers have heard about friends getting $500,000 for a pad from a Wawa developer so they assume that a corner of their farm at the intersection of State Road X and Highway Y is worth at least that much and they'll continue to believe that for some time because they *want* to believe that's what it's worth. So long as they can afford to hold on to that land, prices will remain sticky. You won't see meaningful adjustment until some sort of financial distress forces people to sell. You can copy/paste that scenario to any odd lot that has potential to be commercial property in your own town.

I agree with you. I will say that in FL they're really struggling to find workable sites. Publix has done a damn good job of gobbling up corners and/or encumbering land to block out competition. If they're smart they'll be patient and take some abandoned big box space (even though virtually none of it fits their store model so I doubt that they will).

That's very location specific. The northeast is very under-built for apartments, as is the SF Bay area.

I should take and post some pictures of the construction going on in Boston, but it's all housing and commercial towers. Many have street level retail, but not all.

Nationwide, Architecture firm billings are up, but barely up in the west, just 0.2% over the baseline. The midwest is 5% over baseline. But the AIA thinks that retail is the 2nd softest market, after amusement/recreation.

I'm absolutely w/ you... For completely standardized/packaged 'factory' items like toothpaste, ketchup, or a box of cereal, it's not really any different than ordering a box of Clif bars along with your last shipment of bike tubes & tires, but I'm much more picky about things like produce and meat. I guess some people are casual enough that a tomato is a tomato is a tomato or a steak is a steak, but I'm definitely not one of them. When I want a steak, I will absolutely look over the available offerings at the butcher counter to find one that is the best combo of size/weight, cut, peripheral fat trimming, marbling, etc. Maybe one day it's a NY and the next it's a rib eye, even though I didn't necessarily have my heart set on a NY vs rib eye when I walked into the store.

There's also the packaging/landfill cost.... I always cringe when I see how much styrofoam and extra bags or whatever the home meal delivery services use to ship more delicate perishables. That alone is enough to put me off from ordering fresh items in the mail. If anything, we've gone the opposite direction several of the past summers and bought a local farm share where we get a weekly box of veggies that are dropped off at a handful of centralized locations around town, and then you go pick them up by transferring them from the farm's reusable plastic bin to your own tote bag or whatever equivalent. (Although, in this case you do trade off the ability to pick which individual beets or onions, etc, you want out of the lot, or how much; you just get whatever your fractional share is of whatever got harvested that week.)

Imagine the malls lose their anchor stores, what will they look like without them and who will go there?:

Macy's (M, -13.19%) shopper exodus continues.

The retailer's stock fell sharply on Thursday morning after the department store operator reported another batch of dismal results that suggested it is not succeeding in keeping current customers, let alone recruiting new ones.

The company reported a 5.2% drop in comparable sales for the first quarter, the 8th such period of decline in a row, and a bigger drop than in recent quarters. While Macy's had told analysts in February to expect sales to drop in 2017, the decline was deeper than the 3.1% decline Wall Street was expecting, according to Consensus Metrix. And the retailer's profit plunged 39%.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

I buy everything I can online because going to the mall is the worst. I pretty much only go if I need to shop for clothes and it seems like half the time they don't have my size or color in stock and they offer to order it online for you. If you know what size you wear for a particular retailer I'd rather wait for a sale and buy online.

This just in....


"Sears Holdings (SHLD, -1.89%) on Friday announced a new round of store closings, this one involving 43 locations. The company framed the move as a strategic decision, one that will aid in its hoped-for return to profitability."

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Target will be next to hop on this bandwagon. I'm sure there will be other big box retailers as well. None of the retailers are really "fighting" if you will to keep stores open... and that's because they can't. They're all cash poor. What you're going to see is a lag of 6-18 months between this wave of store closings and REIT bankruptcies. The losses from those bankruptcies will then carry over into banks, pensions, etc. Pensions are really screwed. I'm thinking of a big box portfolio CALPERS bought about a year ago... sheesh they're going to take a bath on that.

I order my groceries online from a store that is quite literally 200m from my doorstep. I browse the flyer, sit in front of my fridge with the laptop and make my order while having my morning coffee. Order shows up in the early afternoon. It's fucking awesome. No lines, no parking issues, and even being so close to the store, we feel it's worth it. Saves us roughly 30-45 min of time on a Saturday.

I also like the fact that I know the store has great quality produce, meat, etc. You can add notes to items like "no green bananas", "fish fillet cut in to so many pieces" etc. I would not order from somewhere like Amazon or Walmart where you really don't know where your meat or produce is coming from.

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Long Chile was a silly place.

I think one of the ways shopping will change with Amazon is you will know exactly where your produce and meat is coming from, and even more detail if wanted. They are going to make shopping as personal as possible using the data they collect from us. I'd be surprised if we don't get personal virtual shoppers that "teach" us about products we aren't aware of or enhance our knowledge about products we already purchase. Maybe you get a suggestion/coupon to try similar cuts of meat from two different brands of cows with similar marbling. Both grass fed but from different parts of the country. The possibilities are endless, kind of like choosing olive oil.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

That's the interesting thing about these people keep acting like they're going to get junk food from Amazon or ordering online. Amazon does screw up every once in awhile, but they also fix things easier than any company I have seen. If you get 5 bad apples or junk meat. They'll probabaly have replacements to your door in a couple hours and the qc review why it happened.

Their big data program annihilates everyone else's. Any growing pain issues with food will be alleviated pretty darn quick, it's just what they do.

Online shopping for groceries has been a challenge, big companies have been trying to make this a reality for a while now. Food is one of those things that most people like to touch and feel see before purchasing. Searching for the perfect tomato, peaches that are not too soft or hard, meat that looks fresh. Buying soap and canned food online is one thing most still prefer to shop for their own fresh items. We do have a 2 full time event planning and personal shopping associates in my store that take orders and deliver. If I didn't live 30 miles from my location I would probably use them to shop for me.

Down goes another:

After fielding takeover offers, teen clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF, -21.01%) said on Monday it is no longer up for sale, and will instead focus on fixing the long ailing business itself.

The news sent Abercrombie shares plummeting 10% in premarket trading, bringing its market value down to about $740 million.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

A surprise closing of 61 bridal shops leaving tons of uncertainty
http://www.npr.org/...elo-stores-close-abr

Damn. I pity those brides.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Just think about opening a box (after work) of cod after baking in the Texas sun for day. Yum

Down goes Toys R Us:


"The toy giant might file for Chapter 11 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Va., sometime before then -- and as soon as the next several weeks -- according to the Wall Street Journal."

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

I don't think they annihilate Walmart. That said, the details of those programs are some of the most closely-held trade secrets in the world. But Walmart was doing "big data" before Amazon really existed. Neither will Walmart go down without a colossal fight. With massive stores (read 'warehouses') within 10 miles of 90% of Americans they're going to be really well positioned to deliver quickly. They already have pilot programs.

Papers have circulated within the FRB theorizing that the "the real time price matching" practices of retailers has permanently suppressed inflation. It's a curious problem for monetary authorities to have.

My wife had a bridal shop until 2013. It was like the spigot slammed shut.
Brides expect to come in, try on dresses, get their measurements for free, and then order a knockoff on line.

My wife said when the Chinese knockoffs finally got close in quality, she knew it was time to close.

I find it interesting that Amazon bought Whole Foods to get into the brick and mortar side of the grocery business.

I also find it strange that Amazon is now opening brick and mortar book stores. What have they figured out that existing retailers are missing?

There's more to come. You'll see some major REITs go down by the middle of next year. It's a perfect storm for them honestly: most of them are leveraged to the hilt, most of that debt is coming due over a two year period starting around the beginning of this year, interest rates are rising, rents, occupancy, and recapture is falling, and occupancy costs ex rent are rising!

Basically, most of the REITs are f****d! The exception to this is anyone operating small service-rich strips.

Based on what I've seen of the Santana Row Amazon store- it seems like target rich impulse buying- or bored spending. It's in an incredibly wealthy area with lots of bored business travelers. There is some interesting data related merchandizing - shelves that say if you like this book- try these other books that people who liked the first book also rate highly. Almost everyone who went in did it just to see how it worked. But it seems almost like an airport bookstore. There's times you just need to kill time. (This is based on a co-worker's pictures- I have not gone myself).

The Whole Foods one really interests me as a Plated customer. I would prefer to swing by Whole Foods once a week to pick up a box than have it sit on my porch all day and get stuck in snowstorms. I love not having leftover food from making stuff- just the perfect amount. Less packaging would also be great. The prepared boxed meals like Plated have been disrupting high end groceries. Whole Foods recently took out a new trademark related to this. Arugula that got stuck on a truck in a snowstorm is gross to have to throw out.

http://www.zdnet.com/...y-up-on-omnichannel/

Kohl's will now pack and ship Amazon returns for free.
Whole Foods is going to do similar.

As a bad returner who tends to buy from BBY/Walmart etc when I might return- this changes the dynamics...

So what you area saying is the federal reserve basically giving away money for free for the last 10 years is coming back to haunt them?

The Fed has a limited and crude set of tools. In the absence of appropriate fiscal policy, their choices were to either flood the world with money or watch it burn.

Time to turn off the lights at Sears:

Shoppers will no longer be able to buy Whirlpool, KitchenAid or Maytag appliances at Sears, following a pricing dispute that has ended a 101-year relationship between the department store chain and the country’s largest appliance maker.
Whirlpool, which announced this week that it is raising prices to make up for costlier raw materials, said it notified Sears Holdings in May that it would stop supplying appliances to the retailer.

“We simply could not reach terms that were acceptable to both parties,” Marc Bitzer, Whirlpool’s chief executive, said on a Tuesday call with investors.

The news deals yet another blow to Sears, which has already closed hundreds of stores this year. Once a dominant seller of appliances, the company has lost much of its cachet and market share in recent years. It has not turned a profit since 2010, and last year it reported a loss of $2.22 billion.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

That's a shocker to no-one. I'm seeing really significant stress in the restaurant sector. Just in recent days you have Macaroni Grill filing for bankruptcy and Chipotle posting horrendous earnings and guidance. A friend of mine just opened up a "bowl" concept along the lines of Bolay/Fresh Kitchen. On the night of the grand opening he came over to me and asked "is there light at the end of this tunnel?" That doesn't exactly scream confidence. The restaurant equation is pretty simple: there are too many of them out there in every category and virtually every market and not enough diners and dollars. Rents are also too high. The number of restaurants will fall as will rents.

The next wave will be Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile retail outlets. You'll see that supply pull back sometime in the next 3-5 years.

Multifamily housing is getting to be overbuilt in many markets too and those properties have traded at nosebleed prices. There's a lot of pain coming down the pipe for commercial real estate.

I think the commercial markets have been contracting for sometime. As for housing, as more boomers retire you are going to see a plethora of houses start to become available BUT nobody is going to pay the price the boomers want. You will see long drawn out sales cycles until the boomers either settle or decide to keep their homes under the false belief the market will improve.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

That part of the cycle is already here. I'm witnessing it in many FL markets. Naples is a prime example. There's a huge amount of inventory available but nobody is willing to pay the prices that the sellers want. More importantly, nobody can afford to pay the prices that the sellers want. I've study the demographics of FL very closely (it's the core of my job). About five years ago we were adding 1,000 people per day to the state's population (net of births, deaths, people moving in, and people moving out). About 850 of those were over the age of 50. If you were to control for the recent mass exodus out of Puerto Rico, those numbers would be closer to 750 and 620. However, the retirees that are coming into FL now are less affluent than the retirees we had entering the state five years ago.

Think about it this way: for a given group of 1,000 people, who will likely "retire" first? Those that can afford to. So those "retiring" in their 50s and early 60s tend to be wealthier than those retiring in their late 60s and early 70s. So, as birth years "age" the wealth of new retirees from that birth year tends to decline. A qualifier here: I'm considering a person retired when they move to Florida. I can't tell you how many "3-day" doctors, dentists, and lawyers we have here anymore.

600 stores gone!

https://www.usatoday.com/...-aid-deal/799242001/

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

I need to expand this thread to include 2018:


"The collapse of Toys “R” Us Inc. is yet another blow for landlords, who now will have gaping holes of suburban retail space up for grabs. And few tenants would want them.

The debt-laden toy chain, with more than 700 stores across the U.S., became one of the largest victims of the retail decline when it announced on Thursday that it would go out of business after a failed rescue effort. The liquidation could dump millions of square feet of real estate onto a market that’s already bloated with vacancies from retailer bankruptcies and store closures, a trend that’s been escalating as shoppers increasingly turn to the internet."

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Here is one option for malls/

Ford moves into Fairlane Town Center - Dearborn Mi mall.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

The leveraged buyout heavily contributed to this.

 
Drum roll please....

"Mall jewelry chain Claire's Stores filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hoping to escape huge debts preventing the company from shimmering in a dim environment for retail."

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Its deserved. Too much focus on the death of retail. Seriously, who thinks any of the companies that are now gone or soon to be gone deserve to be around based on the way they are run and what their core competency is?

Would you start a business now to sell jewelry in malls?
If you started a toy company, would you run it the way Toys R Us was run?
Would you start a Sears style business selling both clothing and lawnmowers in the same massive store?

i don't think that retail grocery is going away any time soon. However, I think that the middle class stores are going to get squeezed out. Walmart and Amazon are pushing either delivery or pickup. We shop at Walmart a lot, and there are always a number of their employees filling orders for pickup

Separately you have the low cost retailers, Aldi, Walmart and such who will get the price conscious shoppers

Last you have the gourmet type grocery stores such as Whole Foods, and here in Texas, Central Market which will get the upper class

I don't see how the normal grocery stores survive

If you're interested in that subject, NPR's Marketplace did an interview with "Tim, Ben, and Hank" about the 2008 financial crisis. Pretty interesting stuff, regardless of what "side" you take on it. I don't think they feel "haunted" though.

Get ready for a new round of Chinese tariffs soon. I don't think the Chinese are going to like it. Seems like poking the bear.

The part that the news and the financial talking heads are not talking about is the over representation of private equity firms in these bankruptcies. The newest one is Toys R Us. The talking heads keep talking about online shopping blah, blah, blah, but they don't mention these private equity vultures. What happened to Toys R Us is that a group of a-holes leveraged the shit out of their take over of the chain, saddled it with $400 million in interest payments per year of their debt, and then blamed online sales for the failure. Total and complete bullshit.

I am not so sure about the poking the bear thing. The Chinese already have very high tariffs on foreign products and a lot of restrictions on foreign investment (Tesla wants to build a factory there, but China insists on owning it).

If we raise our tariffs, even just to match theirs, they can't raise theirs even more, and even if they did, the current tariffs are already a huge barrier, so a higher one won't make a huge difference.

They could raise prices on the junk they sell us, which is the same effect as us raising tariffs. I would think that they need the US as a marketplace more than we need China (we would love to get into the market, but they already have high barriers, so not too much to lose).

So, the question is, can they make up the lose in the US market in the Asian market?

I don't think it's a matter of economics. If they do nothing, the leadership will look weak. I don't think their leader wants to look weak against Trump, especially after tightening his grip on power. The new tariffs are as much about optics as actually making a difference in the deficit.

At this point I wouldn't touch a mall. I look at our local mall and wonder if Sears, Macy's or Nordstrom will be the first to close. Once that happens I see a domino effect which will force landlords to lower their rent or walk away. It's fascinating to have been alive during the growth and death of the mall as we knew it...

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Our local mall is falling like a rock in water. I popped in there a couple weeks ago to make a return from an online Gap purchase and just in that specific, small wing of the mall there were 4 closed storefronts, all of which had apparently been open at Christmastime. Curiosity got me, so I took a bit of a walk around the rest of the place and it was pretty much the same, or worse, in the other wings, with seemingly as many mall walkers as shoppers. And Macy's went to shit years ago, slowly distilling down from good brands to the lower quality lines within a brand to elimination of some of those altogether, completely unkempt, cluttered, beat up stores, now a total lack of the mid-level semi-luxe feel they once were known for, more like a TJ Maxx but with a less random selection and higher prices. The way some of these retailers operate, it's as if they're begging you to ignore them and shop elsewhere online instead. And since I can get higher quality online at the same or lower prices, all without the need to drive around, I'll happily oblige.

Funny your photo is of Northland Mall. As a kid before I moved to California that was the local mall for me. Saw Star Wars in the theater up the street. My first pair of converse all stars were bought there, and my Brothers friends used to go to that mall and get screen print iron on shirts made.

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2017 Cervelo P2
2017 Cervelo S2
itraininla.com
#itraininla

I grew up in Southfield and used to ride my bike to that mall. Small world...

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

Correct, and I would say "no". China has far more to lose in a trade war than the U.S. Mexico has a lot to gain. If I were a Mexican politician I'd basically do whatever I could to keep NAFTA while cheering for a trade war between the U.S. and China.

A big reason the malls are dying is that they have become a hangout for people in gangs who like to shoot at other people in gangs. The mall here that was just torn down had lots of hip-hop stores and kiosks catering to those groups and the violence even drove most of those paying customers away.

The only other indoor mall in our city has draconian rules on who can be in the mall at certain times, age limits for those without adult supervision after certain hours and armed guards throughout the mall. Another mall, this one an outdoor mall, started getting the gangs after the one mall was torn down so they had to institute the strict rules and pay for security guards after a few big fights were started when rival gangs met each other in a pack.

Maybe normal grocery stores could compete on location and convenience. As long are prices aren't too much higher, I'd much rather go to the local Winn-Dixie or Publix (Birmingham, Al.) than Walmart.

But Winn-Dixie, big Southeast chain is in bankruptcy and closing 94 stores.

W-D recently spent a lot of money renovating some local stores and adding bakery and cooked food buffet sections. That seems dumb to me. I can't see the buffet making money. If I'm going to buy cooked food, I'll go to any of the number of nearby restaurants and eat in or take out. The renovation made the stores appear nicer but the competition, Walmart, is not nice looking.

Having said all that, I realize I've added nothing to your post as I've suggested that Winn-Dixie needed to pare down to become like Aldi instead of spending money to imitate the gourmet type stores. LOL

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

It doesn't help when a business jumps into political issues and offends a bunch of customers either. Target has never recovered from their foray into identity politics and REI just poked its head into that tent too with the latest round of anti-gun political shouting.

Here's a good read here on where Retail is at - https://qz.com/...dle-class-are-dying/

It's the mid-priced market that is REALLY suffering and/or changing.

Anyone that I talk to who is working the higher-end or luxury market, and focusing on that, exclusively, they tell me business has never been better!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog