I just posted excerpts from this necessarily shortened article.
So, you can go and read the whole thing on Bloomberg: believe me, there will be many, many more like it over the next twenty years of the remaining two waves of the secular Kondratieff Tsunami.
Even though it is four months old, it is still quite relevant to all retailers: very sad and related blog posts are those of:
Tuesday, March 4, 2014 Middle Class Evisceration
and
Thursday, December 19, 2013 It Ain't Just Detroit -- Folks!!
Can you guys feel the
cold winds of the Kondratieff blowing away your former means and methods of
doing business?
Do you have even the
slightest understanding of what winds of deceit and betrayal to American businesses
have been sweeping over this land these last forty years?
Can you retailers out
there vaguely understand the internet and the madly racing Fed Ex and UPS
trucks, and what these two phenomena portend for your businesses?
Have you devised a
counter strategy?
If you haven’t a clue
then go to our website at polestarcomm.com
and sign up for our services and find out what so many others are now discovering!
and sign up for our services and find out what so many others are now discovering!
The Impossible American Mall Business. 'We Surrender'
Nov
21, 2014 12:00 AM ET
Townsend/Bloomberg
On a crisp Friday evening in late October, Shannon Rich, 33, is standing in
a dying American mall. Three customers wander the aisles in a Sears the size of
two football fields. The RadioShack is empty. A woman selling smartphone cases
watches “Homeland” on a laptop. “It’s the quietest mall I’ve ever been to,” says Rich, who works for an education consulting firm and has been coming to the Steeplegate Mall in Concord, New Hampshire, since she was a kid. “It bums me out.”
… It’s a time of reckoning for an industry that once expanded pell-mell across the landscape armed with the certainty that if you build it, they will come. Those days are over. Malls like Steeplegate either rethink themselves or disappear.
This summer Rouse Properties Inc., a real estate investment trust with a long track record of turning around troubled properties, decided Steeplegate wasn’t salvageable and walked away. The mall is now in receivership.
…. ‘We Surrender’
“Rouse is basically saying ‘We surrender,’” said Rich Moore, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets who has covered mall operators for more than 15 years. “If Rouse couldn’t make it work and that’s their specialty, then that’s a pretty tough sale to keep it as is.”….The suburban mall once sat at the center of American life. It was a place where parents one-stop-shopped and their kids hung out. The Galleria in Sherman Oaks, California, featured prominently in the seminal film “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” as well as Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl.” Today malls represent a darker mood in the popular culture. Consider the shuttered shopping center colonized by the dispossessed in “Gone Girl.”
….
This year, amid dwindling cash flow, Rouse wrote down Steeplegate’s value by almost half to $27 million. With a $47 million balloon payment due in August, the owner handed the mall’s keys to the lender.
