The decline of shopping malls and department stores

I frankly have no idea how Internet Shopping replaced malls.

>Literally relying on customer reviews which can be shilled as fuck instead of seeing the product in the flesh so to speak.

Our society is collapsing due to domestic enemies. I'll give you a hint, his name is like a Jewish philosopher's name and he likes remote controlled aircraft with lasers.

>But the fact is, you still had to drive there and spend hours wandering around

And that's how you get an obesity epidemic.

While malls are dying, there is a rise in some places of these high density planned communities of apartments with shops and restaurants on the bottom floor. These are generally high-rent, priviledged areas for young professionals though. It has an creepy, artificial feel, at least to me; but I'm not sure why its any worse than a strip mall on its face. I guess a strip mall doesn't try to pretend it's something it's not or make an effort to have an image of a lived in space.

Our local mall is quickly dieing. It lost two of its anchor stores this year and will lose Sears this winter.

Many of the smaller stores have closed as well.

Myself I ran a small retail business there for a year. The mall owners/managers really didn't care for small business. While I was there every two months they tried to raise my rent. For the Christmas season they wanted $10,000 a month. I hadn't even made that much in gross sales in any month that I had been there.

After I left and it has been two years, no one has moved into that space.

In their golden age in the 1970s.

Malls in the US are dying because the pavement ape population use them as a hang out spot meaning stay away from malls as much as possible.

At least we are better off economically than North Kor-

I wouldn't call this history but I'll let this slide. There's surprisingly few indoor shopping malls around where I live. Outdoor shopping centers still fare pretty well.

Its history in the sense that the rise of the shopping mall in the post-war American economic boom shaped American society in a lot of ways during the rest of the 20th century.

It’s sad, it’s especially prevalent in blue collar areas. It speaks to the decline of the middle class and that’s time period.

Bumped for interest as well.

I'm just kinda disappointed I grew up reading and seeing malls in US culture and it's too late to actually go and "experience" them now. They're still alive and kicking in the Middle East and East Asia as far as I'm aware.

youtube.com/watch?v=lGXzE-V61qw

Guy did a YT documentary series touring through dying malls. I found it pretty interesting to watch.

>Malls are a bit like fax machines, in that they emerged to imperfectly serve a demand that existed before technology could adequately satisfy that demand, and like the fax machine, have been rendered obsolete by the internet.

>This story is at odds with the broader narrative about business in America: The economy is growing, unemployment is low, and consumer confidence is at a decade-long high. This would typically signal a retail boom, yet the pain rivals the height of the Great Recession. RadioShack, The Limited, Payless, and Toys“R”Us are among 19 retail bankruptcies this year. Some point to Amazon and other online retailers for wrestling away market share, but e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2017 only hit 8.9 percent of total sales. There’s still plenty of opportunity for retail outlets with physical space.

newrepublic.com/article/145813/cause-consequences-retail-apocalypse

tl;dr Wall Street killed the mall.

America's "golden age" was from 1947-2001

America's golden age ended in 70's. When the baby-boomers gained the age of majority.

The current aims for development now consist of using space more efficiently by replacing the large outdoor parking lots with underground indoor and multistory car lots and developing public transportation with things like more rail lines and making things less car oriented and more pedestrian friendly.

No man, the Golden Age is coming back. Fellow Kekistanis we've ushered in a new golden age already with the God Emperor Trump. 2017- the present my Magapedes!

They didn't really screw things until they elected Reagan twice. The soft coup they helped solidify culminated in the 2001 attacks, thus beginning phase two; the reshaping of American culture. Surely a political shift took place after JFK's assassination/Nixon's ousting but that was the new government seizing power and ironing out its kinks. The effects of this power shift are more reflective of America in 2017 than even in 1997, much less the 80's/70's

Maybe but don't hold your breath, he's up against a deeply entrenched group of oligarchs who've hijacked the Empire to suit their own financial needs. If Trump makes the right moves he can decentralize power and return it to the people. That's of course assuming he isn't a puppet, whether or not he was in 2016 is irrelevant to President Trump

>being able to see a box with some customer reviews in comparison to being able to see a box
I have no idea

>seriously implying that walking around a fucking store would impact obesity
I'm a fat fuck, i used to be something like 330 pounds, and i started trying to lose weight a while ago, and got down to 300, having a tiny walk around a store isn't going to impact obesity in the fucking slightest, all it will do is get fat fucks like me off their asses to shop, which isn't going to be a significant daily change to make people lose weight, getting people to do one small bit of excercise isn't going to change anything, it's long term changes to dietry and fitness lifestyles.

Kill yourself, fatass.

>online shopping being popular means society is collapsing

Blacks were directly responsible for several malls going to absolute shit in my state.

It was 2nd only behind the Interwebz

Keeps the riff-raff out instead of indoor malls.

to build an ugly mall in the middle of nowhere is just a bad idea

In Europe they build beautiful malls in popular places. E.g. in main train stations.

>but we didn't see a boom until after I believe WWII and the beginning of the "Golden Age" so to speak for America in the post-war era.

Wrong.

Department stores are so old that Édouard Manet remarked on there rise in France. Pic is not of the subject matter of department stores but when interviewed said that ( about to use modern terms for added directness here) the painting was about retail and the retail worker. He did talking about the quick rise of the Department store inside France during that interview.

Just look at the eyes, is it not the same soulless look of a modern retail worker?

Anyways department stores first got big in the US during the 1920's. The 1950's were a rebirth of Department Stores in America.

Wall Street kills damn near every it touch because Wall Street traders thing that they know a lot more about business management then they do. They do not understand the ins and outs of a great many industry's.

In the first place, indoor malls and shopping centres came into being as a result of post-war suburbanization and the spread of automobiles and related infrastructure, allowing for the concentration of commercial activity in areas outside of city bounds. This coincided with the rise of commercial chain stores. Thus, it became possible to find everything one needed in one place, without having to frequent a shopping street, often inconveniently located in densely-populated and less accessible locales.

2008 was the watershed moment for retailers because of its effects on consumer habits, but this was arguably long in the making as a result of broader societal and technological trends. Suburbia is in decline, partly as a result of gridlock and higher gas prices. Urban living is on the rise, and there is now a move back to more decentralized and pedestrian-friendly planning. Trends currently favour more specialized, distinctive products. The advantage of convenience has now shifted to online retailers. People, especially those on lower incomes, shop increasingly at discount or factory outlet retailers.

Fewer and fewer people go to malls simply because they don't offer what people want. Big box retailers were previously the dominant aspects of malls, taking up most of the floor space and providing the lion's share of the rents necessary to sustain operations. Now, their bloated stock and generic product lines have become a liability, and they struggle to adapt to changing circumstances. This has affected the fortunes of other stores, who are dependent on foot traffic brought in by these stores.

Interesting article. I am personally familiar with just how poisonous private equity and hedge funds can be to business, but I wasn't aware of how deeply the rot has taken root.

If you own a company, never let the public in and grow it organically from your own retained earnings.
Short-term thinking is a fucking disease.

This. No Macy's even comes close to the mall in Milan or Moscow's ГУM

Here in Portugal they started to boom in the early 2000's. They're much less crowded now but 2008/10 fucked them up, not sure what's the role of online shopping replacing them. We even have Chinese shops in some of them nowadays

If the tax reform bill doesn't get passed, SHTF in the market as all the hype (Trump Bump) is riding on it (especially the reduction in the coporate tax rate).

What do you mean?

Personal example, we had two local shopping malls in my city, one was the old version of the newest one and was eventually refurbished and now lays empty. The newest one is still clinging to life, but it wasn't nearly as busy as it once was, being now mostly made up of a few restaurants, JC Penny, Sears, and a Best Buy. Most of the local unique store have given way to chain stores in their place.

Before this thread, I never really gave it any thought and just assumed the issue of the decline of the mall was local.

He's crashing this plane with no survivors

I always think of those places as pre-arcologies, a sign of the future in which entire city blocks become habitats with every amenity for its citizens available such that the citizen never has to leave if they don't want to. While I understand how efficient such a place would be, I can't ever see myself living in one, even though it makes convenience, security, and even possible student education incredibly easy for the people who live there.

What's the issue? You can't even be in the same shops as blacks?

>People didn't like malls

Stop talking about things you have zero knowledge about. Malls for years went just for shopping, teenagers and even adults would go there to just hang out. I mean there's multiple movies about exactly this.

One of the two decent sized malls in my town is visibly in decline. I remember it being a very busy and vibrant place back in its 1980s heyday.

Now its space is about 1/3 mostly struggling smaller businesses that seem to come and go with alarming rapidity, 1/3 empty stores, 1/3 (and these are the most up to date looking and heavily trafficked areas) medical clinics.

Retail may change and go online, but you'll always have local people on hand to get old, sick and need medical care, and there is BIG money in that business. The same thing happened to a Home Depot location that went out of business across from the mall, now it's all medical offices.

The mall also has one remaining anchor store, a Sears. I'm pretty sure it's inhabited by ghosts. I went in there for about 10 minutes recently and saw not another living soul, though the place did look well kept and fully stocked. You have to wonder how much longer they'll be around.

I work at sears! Always dead as can be.

No.

How does it work

Alaska here, maybe it's our remote location, but malls are still growing strong. Our biggest one gets new additions each couple months and our other three end to juggle services based on who can afford what the particular year rather than actually downsize. What was once a rundown little block a decade ago has been steadily rebuilding and now has a homely, local sort of feel.

But that's maybe because we're so isolated from the rest of America and Amazon and other online services aren't nearly as effective here where they always take their sweet time to send things over. Sad to hear things are dire in the lower 48 though, I hope by the time I move there the Mall of America doesn't close down!

I feel the same way, fellow white Americano. G*d save Trump.

>Toys R Us' profitability was increasing by the time it declared bankruptcy
Jesus, we need to kill these predatory fucks.

This leads to an interesting question. Couldn't just any idiot borrow millions of dollars to purchase majority of a corporation and then take from the corporation itself to pay it back and still have some money in reserve?

No because this is an idiotic article that greatly misunderstands private equity