Welcome to the Retail Crash... MALLPOCALYPSE

The Oak Hollow Mall in Highpoint, North Carolina just closed a few days ago.  As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I happened to wander through the huge, empty, but still clean and intact mall a week before its demise.  The recent Business Insider clip above gives a good synopsis of why so many malls are dying.  No one seems to know just how many malls have died at this point.  Obviously Amazon.com and other online shopping sites are part of this picture.  But they're not the whole story.  Here's some info to the Retail Apocalypse I've found.

There were about 1100 enclosed malls in the U.S..  Four hundred of those malls have closed already, like Oak Hollow, or are expected to close in the next few years.  There are about 300 "high performing" malls, which seem to be mostly the high end malls, which are still doing well.  The remaining 400 malls are questionable but alive at this point.  A massive shift in retail shopping habits seems to be the main factor in this huge Retail Apocalypse.  Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT's) own about half of the U.S. malls, so this will be a huge hit to them.

In addition to the hundreds of malls and retails stores that have closed since The Great Recession in 2008, hundreds more are scheduled to close soon, which will put even more pressure on struggling malls and shopping centers.  Here's a partial list:

-Macy's announced it will close 100 stores in August 2016.   Three have closed, 63 more are scheduled to close in early 2017.  Management expects those store closings to save Macy's $550 million.
-Sears/Kmart is closing 150 combined stores soon (as of January 2017)
-Walmart has closed 269 stores worldwide, 154 in the U.S..  (Jan.2016)
-J.C. Penney has actually made a bit of a comeback in the last couple of years, but plans to close up to 140 stores in the U.S. to continue streamlining its business.
-Aeropostale went into bankruptcy in May of 2016, and has already closed 113 stores.
-H H Gregg has closed or is closing 88 stores.
-Abercrombie & Fitch is closing 60 stores.
-The Limited has closed all 250 stores.
-Crocs is closing 160 stores.
-Wet Seal is closing 171 stores.
-American Apparel is closing 110 stores.
-BCBG is closing 120 stores.
-CVS is closing 70 stores.
-Family Christian (bookstores) is closing 240 stores.
Pac Sun is out of bankruptcy after closing 110 to 120 stores so far.

Get this, the German supermarket Lidl is OPENING 150 stores in the U. S., spurred on by the success of German grocer Aldi (which is an awesome store).


The vast majority of the stores and malls closed or closing are in rural and small town America.  Yeah, all those people that voted for Trump because they can't find local jobs are about to lose tens of thousands more local jobs and tens or hundreds of millions in local revenue.  Rural America, by and large, is dying in the tech heavy 21st century.  This is a HUGE issue we need to address as a nation.  These store closings will have a huge ripple effect on other chain stores because of reduced foot traffic to malls and shopping centers.  I think we're likely to head into another recession soon.  That's just a hunch.  We'll see.

We, as a country, have far more square feet of retail space per person than other developed countries.  A report in Business Insider says we have 23.5 square feet of retail space per person in the U.S., compared to 16.4 in Canada and 11.1 in Australia.  Another report I found claimed 48 sq.ft of retail space per American.  In any case, it's a lot, and millions of square feet of retail space under roof is either already empty or will son be empty.

What should we do will all those empty buildings?  If you have a good idea, now's the time, because those retail stores will be available for pennies on the dollar of their former value.  

The website deadmalls.com writes about the closed malls.  Their list contains well over a hundred.

Source info:
Business Insider article
Retail stores closing- Clark.com
Hundreds of shopping malls at risk- Clark.com 

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