No Outlet

St Augustine Prime Outlets

…were my “home” in college and for the first few years afterward, as I weathered the recession. I held multiple jobs, frequented several stores for cute outfits and made many friends whom I would go around and talk to each day.  

In 2005, when I arrived, the outside of the mall was very bland and had little appeal. In 2008, the renovation began and a few dozen outward-facing stores were created as well as a decorative archway in the entrance, a fountain, and a free-standing Sak’s outlet. Around Halloween that year, the new installment opened up with some 60 new stores inside and outside, most designer names. That new development created a few hundred jobs that holiday season, including mine. I worked at Hugo Boss as a commissioned sales associate and loved it for the first few months. The recession began to really hurt the retail in the area in 2009 and it resulted in the cutting of many part-time jobs, including mine. I would eventually find full-time work in banking in 2011, but the mall continued to be a place I would go to hang out. 

Sometime around 2015 or 2016 it became painfully obvious that things were winding down. More and more stores were departing and entire sections were dark. Almost every one of the shiny new designer stores that graced the mall in 2008 had shuttered. The advent of Covid-19 put the nail in the coffin for the mall in 2020.

It was decided sometime in 2021 that the mall would be redeveloped into other types of businesses, with the original plan being to use part of the structure.

https://www.staugustine.com/story/news/local/2021/11/16/st-augustine-outlets-close-st-johns-county-homes-retail-stores-businesses/8637632002/

 On January 31, 2022, the mall closed forever. The remaining 6 or 8 stores had transferred across the road to the premium outlet mall and the SAKS had gone out of business. The mall sat empty for the rest of the year until summer, when demolition began. The plans changed at some point, and the entire structure including the 2008 exterior installment was torn down. Only the SAKS building remains. 

https://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/news/2022/jun/03/demolition-starting-on-st-augustine-outlets// 

An empty lot is all that remains of more than a decade of memories. 

Anchor Faith Anchors a Mall

https://www.staugustine.com/videos/news/2022/01/23/anchor-faith-church-buys-ponce-de-leon-mall/6611143001/

Trouble ahead for Orange Park Mall?

See this News 4 Jax article about the filing of chapter 11 bankruptcy by Orange Park Mall’s parent company: 

https://www.news4jax.com/money/2021/06/14/orange-park-mall-parent-company-files-for-bankruptcy-protection/

How has Covid-19 and the ever-evolving retail landscape affected Jacksonville in the past few years?

 How has Covid-19 and the ever-evolving retail landscape affected Jacksonville in the past few years?

 

·      The Avenues Mall

The Avenues, now 30 years old, is slowly declining. The defunct Sears remains blocked off and has not been replaced, even after a year. This does not mean that it won’t be filled by something in the future. 

More and more brands have made their exit from the Avenues, leaving empty spaces for rent that are getting filled by off-brands, bottom dollar fashion lines and small independent retail ventures such as a wine boutique and an olive oil specialist. 

The Gap, Banana Republic, Jos A Bank, New York and Co, Cotton On, PayLess Shoe Source and now Francesca’s have all shuttered their stores at this location. Some of these brands have closed in other locations as well.  In the case of NY and Co and Payless, all of the stores have closed.

Major retailers JC Penney and Forever 21 have seen some financial woes and face possible bankruptcy, which could mean the shuttering of two more anchors in the future.  

·      The St. Johns Town Center

The Town Center continues to add on to itself and change, but it also has faced some decline in parts. Most recently, when a high fashion brand left its spot on the corner outside of Nordstrom, Tommy Bahama’s new concept restaurant and Marlin Bar took over. After months of remodeling, it is open.

A new large structure is being built across the main strip from Nordstrom.

An entire line of shops that was directly outside of the Nordstrom, that opened in 2014 with the new department store, have all vanished except for Free People. An independent boutique, Disney Store, Yankee Candle, a formal wear store and Natural Life have all closed down. This is in the newest part of the town center.

In the older portions, most of the stores are still open and only a few have been replaced by something else. The Gap and Baby Gap closed and are still vacant, Justice for Girls is also gone. 

Along the lifestyle plaza section of the town center, the Pier One has gone alone with all other Pier One stores. A Christian bookstore and the Dress Barn brand have all closed in the past few years. 

Across Town Center Parkway, where a series of new restaurants and an Aldi were built along with a new location for Best Buy,  and on the other side where Best Buy used to sit, several of the restaurants have failed. 

Brio Tuscan Grill has gone this year, BlackFinn closed at least a year ago, a Moe’s location has closed and Pei Wei has closed. Toys R Us and Buy Buy Baby closed when Toys R Us went bankrupt. A large furniture store has also closed down. 

 

·      Regency Square Mall

I have not had a logical excuse to drive over to the Arlington district of Jacksonville for a long time, but from a recent update I saw that Regency has continued to dwindle to almost nothing and the Dillard’s Clearance was the only anchor left.  The mall suffered an air-conditioning failure last year and it was unclear if that was repaired or not. Plans for a large company to turn it into outlet stores fell through. A new investor was recently considering taking the mall on and possibly demolishing part of it to create shopping centers. A church has taken over the Belk space in the center of the mall and has also shown interest in utilizing other parts of the mall.

 

·      The Jacksonville Landing

The Landing, which counted as a shopping mall, was opened in the late 1980’s. When I would visit it in the late 2000’s, most of the mall shops were closed or occupied by bottom dollar independent retailers. There were only a few restaurants left, and they were tourist-trap style establishments with “so-so” food. There was a nightclub, but this later closed. The whole interior portion of the Landing had a tired old “inner city subway” vibe to it, with its dim lighting in places, dirty tiles and musty smell. It was clear, even ten years ago, that it was on its way out. 

City of Jacksonville developers had been proposing ideas for replacement structures since the early 2000’s, but only recently was something done.

In 2018, a deadly shooting occurred in a gaming bar inside the main building.

This hastened the City’s decisions to make change happen.

In spring of this year, amidst all of the Covid-19 shutdowns, the entire Landing structure was demolished. 

Now as 2020 draws to a close, a plan for the vacant site to be sodded temporarily has been called for. I have been near that part of downtown this year, but have not gone close enough to the site to see if it was covered in lawn grass or not. Over the course of the next few years, proposals have been made to build apartments, restaurants and maybe a museum. 

 

·      The St. Augustine Outlets

The Premium, outdoor-facing outlet mall has lost some stores in the past few years including Zales, Nine West, Cotton-On and a few others. Nine West and Cotton-On closed all of their stores nationwide from what I understand.

Overall, the mall is still very busy. Perhaps it is not racking in the sales numbers that it was ten or fifteen years ago, but it is still packed out on some days with minimal parking. 

The Prime Outlet, on the other hand... it continues to shrink much like Regency Square Mall. Now almost every forward-facing external shop that was newly opened in the 2008 expansion has closed down. On the left side of Saks (Which is still open), only Talbots and Guess remain from the original lineup. Vanity Fair filled in the old Cold Water Creek, but had only moved from its former space where Old Navy is now. Francesca’s opened in the mid-2010’s but was formerly Juicy Couture in 2008. Hugo Boss, Kenneth Cole, BCBG, 2B Bebe and Escada have all gone. On the right side of Saks, more stores have survived than on the left including Michael Kors, Loft, Cole Haan, Dooney Bourke and a sunglasses store. Gucci was the first to close just one year after the new stores opened, and American Apparel closed when most of the stores nationwide were shut down. 

Inside the mall is another store all together. Entire corridors are vacant now.

To me, it seems like the mall is basically kept afloat (just barely) by Saks, Old Navy, Vanity Fair, Bealls Outlet and H&M. Lucky Brand is still open as well. It opened on the interior in 2008 when the exterior opened. There is also a Famous Footwear, Bon Worth, a tool store, Bath and Bodyworks, Zales, Nautica, a fudge shop and a couple of NFL and college football themed stores. 

Stores like Disney, Body Shop, Coleman and Dress Barn left some time ago. One by one, the other interior stores on the more populated side of the mall have shuttered. Journeys, Rue 21, Papaya and Charlotte Russe closed a few years back, as well as the “as seen on TV” store on the other side.

Pacsun shut down not too long before the pandemic, as a bankruptcy filing caused them to close a few but not all stores. New York and Company closed this past summer, along with its other stores. 

In the food court, one space has been vacant for years and the Pretzel Twister shut down recently. The other four spaces are (I think) still occupied. 

       

·      Brands that vanished in 2020

Label scars are not just peppering local malls. Some big names in retail have met their demise this year possibly at the hands of Covid-19.  

o   Stein Mart stores are completely gone, the last of them having closed this fall.

o   Pier One imports began liquidation of all of its stores and officially closed down at the end of the summer.

o   NY&Co closed all of its stores, but is still operating its website.

o   Jos A Bank and Mens Warehouse, owned by the same parent company, filed for Bankruptcy but so far have only planned to close 500 stores and not all of them.

o   Justice For Girls was already ailing but closed its remaining stores, or made plans to close them in a few months, this year in the midst of the pandemic. 

 

Brands that may still vanish in the near future

 

o   Ascena, the company that owns Justice, also owns Ann Taylor, Loft and Lane Bryant. The company has filed for bankruptcy and closures of a number of those stores is yet to come in the next year or so

o   Brooks Brothers will close a number of stores after its bankruptcy this year.

o   GNC has been closing stores as malls fall into decline, but the entire chain may soon be defunct.

o   JCPenney filed for bankruptcy and was already ailing before the pandemic. It plans to close many more stores, but not all yet.

o   JCrew filed for bankruptcy this year and may close many stores next year

·      Brands that will shrink by a few hundred locations because of the pandemic

o   Bed Bath and Beyond

o   GameStop

o   Tuesday Morning

o   Victoria’s Secret

o   Chicos

o   Forever 21

o   Walgreens

o   Office Depot

 

And these lists only cover the affected stores we have in the Jacksonville Metro area... there are many other brands, such as Lord and Taylor or Modell’s Sporting Goods, that don’t have locations near our area. 

 

 

Whatever Happened To...

Whatever happened to some bottom dollar but popular fashion names of my youth?

 I crossed the threshold into becoming a teenager in the year 2000.

That means, for me, those ever so crucial years of scoping out fashion trends from teen magazines and weekend mall-hopping with my mother and besties fell during the early 2000’s.

My favorite mall stores in 2003 and 2004 and beyond still exist today. The early 2000’s were part of the heyday of preppy teen fashions like polo shirts, low rise boot-cut jeans with “bedazzling”, shirts with brand names in bold across the chest and overpriced colorful leather flip-flops. At least, that’s what was king in Florida at the time.  The “cool kids” (AKA the rich crowd with no rules) donned Hollister hoodies, LaCoste Polo shirts, Abercrombie and Fitch Jeans that were so low they bared the entire midriff and American Eagle graphic tees. Each tee had a secret hidden adult message in its image, like an ad for a fictitious Laundromat that said “Drop your shorts here”.

As one of the more oddball children in my class, I was not wealthy enough to drop hundreds at these stores each month nor was I permitted to wear clothes that would have basically made me into a walking sexual innuendo. Still, despite all the odds, my favorite brands were Hollister and American Eagle in those days. I would buy it second hand, accept the hand-me-downs from my next-door neighbor who WAS one of “the cool kids” and shop the clearance sales. My mom would filter the content and require that I wear colorful layering tank-tops, also a trend at the time, under the crop tops that didn’t leave enough to the imagination. (That’s right. Crop tops aren’t just something that’s become popular since the late 2010’s.) Both stores still exist to this day, as well as Abercrombie and Fitch and LaCoste, but most of them have had to re-brand at least once. Some have gone through financial hardship, and all but LaCoste have had to adopt and adapt the “hipster” look that became huge for the youth of the late 2010’s. Form-fitting polos in bright pink (for BOTH men and women) have been replaced by loose-fitting, over-sized black “cozy” sweaters, grunge plaid and purposeful tears.

Since I was NOT one of the wealthy “it” crowd, and my parents did shop on a budget, I also got acquainted with some lower-end but still cute names in fashion. My mother always preached “quality over quantity” but sometimes I would indulge these made-in-China knockoffs of the most popular styles for teenage girls. Around that time, Forever 21 was starting to rise to fame. In my area. It might have already been popular in bigger cities but in my neck of the woods in central Florida, it didn’t exist. To have a shopping spree at the gigantic low-cost fashion retailer, one would have to trek 45 minutes to a very classy upscale mall in Orlando. Once I moved to an area south of Jacksonville, I had to make a trek to one of two not-so-upscale malls to go to a mini version of this store, until the two-story one opened in an old Belk space at the closer of the two malls. Forever 21 still exists to this day, but is falling into some hard times. And the quality gets cheaper every year.

But what about some of the other names? The names that were very common at that time, but that you never see now? Models in Seventeen would be wearing cute outfits with at least one piece being from one of these stores. My friends would want to go to these stores on our girls-day-out, because most of the time, we didn’t have $100 between us. These stores were in every mall and sometimes the large strip malls in the area.

Welcome to “Whatever Happened To...”

#1: 5-7-9

This low-cost fashion retailer was created in the 80’s to cater to young women that were three of the most common sizes in America at the time. It neither catered to emaciated girls nor curvy ones.

Today it has evolved to offer sizes for all body types, from petite to plus. Most of the stores have closed, but the ones that still exist seem to be owned by Rainbow. These two companies were intertwined.

I only saw the stores in the malls of bigger cities than mine, like Tampa and Orlando. I frequently saw an article of clothing from the store on a model when I would paw through Seventeen or one of the other teen magazines for outfit ideas. The girl would be wearing an outfit with a theme, like “spring weekend” and her cute jacket worn over her floral, flowy top would advertise as being from 5-7-9. I don’t think I personally ever shopped there, though.

#2: DOTS

If Forever 21 was lower-cost fashion, DOTS was bargain-bin fashion. We’re talking about the types of clothes that start to unravel or fade within a few washes. Still, I would happily join my girlfriends in burrowing through those bargain racks on a Saturday to find essentials like tanks and tees for only $3.

The DOTS store in my town was located in the largest strip mall on the Southside at that time. This strip included a movie theater and three discount “department stores”: Marshall’s, Ross and Stein Mart. A larger outdoor shopping center has since been built, and while all three of those stores are still there, the movie theater is now Hobby Lobby. DOTS has been extinct for at least a decade.

DOTS filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014 and closed all 360 of its stores since then.

#3: Gadzooks

This store was fun. Every location contained half of a classic Volkswagen Beetle, either coming out of the wall or attached to a display table. This store also seemed to channel remnants of 90’s “Rave Culture” well into the 2000’s. I was too young to be part of that, but I liked some of the looks, especially the resurfacing of 60’s “flower child” style. I remember being fourteen or fifteen and finding huge platform sandals, bell-bottomed jeans and colorful tops that looked like party clothes to me.

Gadzooks, like 5-7-9, had also been created in the 1980’s. It was originally just meant for T-shirts. Where they went wrong was when they reduced the merchandise to only women’s in 2003, they ran some backwards-seeming ads that went against the feminist culture that’s been slowly rising up in America since around that time. Later on, they would have to file bankruptcy twice. Forever 21 Purchased many of the stores as the brand went defunct.

I actually remember this merger. It was in the late 2000’s. I lived south of Metro Jacksonville by then. There was a tiny Gadzooks store in the mall closest to me that informed me one day that Forever 21 was buying them out. I was happy... I loved Forever 21! The tiny store received its Forever 21 logo above the door. Then, Forever 21 rented out a huge two-story space in the mall and that store closed to merge into the larger one.

#4: Anchor Blue

This one was not on my radar for most of my youth. In fact, it didn’t even exist in my area at all until (I think) after I left that town to go to college. Somewhere in that time frame, an Anchor store opened up in the mall in my hometown. I still would not have known about it, if it weren’t for a boy I dated in my senior year of high school. While he liked more gothic-seeming attire, His younger sister and her friends adored Anchor Blue. They had gotten familiar with it during the few short years he and his family lived in Arizona. They talked about it more than once, which made me curious.

During one visit home while I was in college, most likely one of the two summers I went back, I went for a walk through the Anchor Blue store that had opened up in the mall there. To be honest, it wasn’t anything special to me. I saw a collection of jeans that were mostly embellished on the back pockets. This was popular in the mid-2000’s. I also saw a wide selection of graphic tees with either band references or comical content, and some short dresses and other popular teen fashions for that time. To me, it looked like a mash-up of Hot Topic’s graphics minus the “goth”, Don Ed Hardy jean knockoffs, Forever 21’s skirts and dresses, and all of it Beall’s Outlet quality at American Eagle prices.  I’ll be honest: these friends I used to have talked it up so much, I was actually kind of looking forward to it. Then when I arrived, I was disappointed. I don’t even remember if I bought something or just kept window-shopping.

If that was around 2006 or 2007, its run was short-lived. In 2011, the brand filed for bankruptcy and closed all of its stores.

To be continued...

*I do not own these logos or images

Panama City's Abandoned Mall

Panama City Beach, FL, is a tourist destination. The coastal highway running through that area is lined with resorts, night clubs, mini theme parks and restaurants. Inland of that, by only about 10 or 15 minutes, is the mainland Panama City. It is small, largely business and industrial, with one central hub for all the residents and tourists alike.

The “shopping and restaurant” district of Panama City includes several strip malls and free-standing chain restaurants. There are well-known brand names like Target, Lowe’s, Books a Million, Beall’s Outlet and TJ Maxx as well as Olive Garden, Chili’s, O’Charley’s, Chick Fil A and more. This “district” stretches out west along 23^rd street, towards the beach. But much of it seems to be consolidated into several blocks that center around the old Panama City Mall.

In October 2018, Hurricane Michael ripped through Panama City and caused significant damage. As of now, more than a year later, the damage is still prominent in places. Businesses that were already shuttered before the storm have been left standing half-demolished by the winds. Their rooftops are peeling back like cat food cans. Some other businesses were open at the time but never returned, and also look like they were part of a war zone. The biggest casualty of it all, however, has to be the mall.

Panama City Mall opened in 1976. It was small, at only a little over 600,000 square feet. It boasted just three anchors. At the time that Hurricane Michael struck in 2018, those anchors were Dillard’s, JC Penney and Planet Fitness. Present day, all three of them are still open and operating normally. The mall itself is permanently closed. It sustained so much damage to its interior corridors that the company who owned it, Hendon Properties, determined permanent closure was the only option.

Apparently, they didn’t think it was worth what would have to be borrowed and sunk into it to restore it.

The mall’s website is still up and running with only the surviving anchor stores and surrounding restaurants listed. The building itself is covered in boards and looks rather ominous. Pictures of the interior can be found online, taken before the storm closed it down. I don’t know much about what was there before the hurricane, but whatever stores were inside must have been doing just “not-well-enough” to warrant the mall not being worth the trouble of restoring.

New Orleans had the same type of thing happen, but on a larger scale. A few malls were left permanently boarded up and rotting away after Katrina flooded them in 2005. No one has ever tried to rebuild them due to the areas surrounded being left largely vacant when residents decided not to return.

I’ve watched a few malls steadily decline here in Florida over the years, reaching dead-mall status. (Jacksonville’s Regency Square HAS to be the worst case of this.) I’ve also read up on some that have closed due to economic shift or decline in the past few decades and have since  been replaced by shopping centers. But this is the first case I’ve seen up close and personal of a mall that was taken out by what they call an “act of God”.

My Retail Predictions for 2020 and Beyond

Christmastime 2019 is upon us, and at the Avenues Mall in south Jacksonville, Florida, the anchor and corridor stores are bustling with holiday shoppers. Except for one massive shopping space that instead sits silent, dark and empty with its mall entrance covered up.

In fall 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. While the department store that sold affordable clothing, shoes, housewares and appliances once saw its heyday in decades past, it has become obsolete much like similarly structured Montgomery Ward. Many of their stores began to shut down earlier this year. The Avenues mall location began to close in the fall.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, my husband and I made a trip up to the Avenues Mall with our baby to purchase a Christmas dress for me and a few gift items. We were all aware that Sears has been struggling, but unaware that this location was closing. We never even frequented Sears. It was always just “a large entrance to a store in the background” for us. (This sort of mentality among my millennial generation may be what killed it. ) I took a walk through Forever 21 to look at dresses and also to pacify the baby in his stroller. When I came out of the store, my husband was nowhere to be seen. I called him and he said “I’m in Sears”.

When my husband and I were younger and still dating, we would often go to the mall to visit the puppies at Puppy Avenue, which is housed right next to the mall entrance to the lower floor of Sears. I remember glancing at middle aged men and women strolling lazily around between the refrigerators inside that entrance, but never paid it much notice beyond that. He had certainly never gone inside the store. “Why are you at Sears?” I asked. “It’s closing and so I’m looking for good deals”. 

This was only six days until Black Friday so I figured when he said “Sears is closing”, he meant “They just announced it, and now things are 20% off”.  When I arrived at the upstairs entrance, I was shocked to find that there were only a handful of merchandise tables and racks left in a vastly empty space. The items on them were largely picked over and of the “odd sizes and colors no one wants” variety. The few small appliances left were those that had missing parts or scratches. Everything was as much as 70% off though. I have learned in the past few years that buying anything that I either didn’t need, that didn’t fit right or that I didn’t love, even if only 99 cents, was still a waste. With this in mind, I browsed lightly but walked on by most of what I saw. I located one single large bluish knit blanket that had once been $45 and was now less than $20. We always need blankets. My husband looked more intently at things but found nothing he wanted. 

I did not return to the mall on Black Friday, but based on how little was left, I can only guess that Sears was completely shuttered by then. Now that set of mall entrances is completely covered over with a light colored wall, as if that had always been a dead end. The outside still looks like Sears, but the logos are gone. I am not sure if the Mall will compensate by bringing in a Burlington Coat Factory or a Dillard’s Clearance or something of that nature that usually inhabits the abandoned spaces left by original mall anchor stores as they die off. 

I have lived in the general area for fourteen years now, and this is only the second time that I’ve seen an Avenues Mall anchor jump ship. The first time was at the end of the 2000’s, when Belk decided it only needed ONE anchor, not two, in the same mall and closed their “mens and kids” store. They consolidated it all into the women’s one and remodeled. That old Belk space was taken over by the fantastically large Forever 21 within a year (Grand opening fall 2010). Unfortunately, Forever 21 is even in the early stages of bankruptcy now.

Which brings me to an intriguing topic: I’m going to make a retail prediction based upon observations made since I was a teenager at the beginning of the 2000’s and how other companies have closed as technology and internet advanced over time.

From 2000 to now:

·      I watched Montgomery Ward close all of its stores, though in my early teens I didn’t really understand why. I recently watched a history report on this on Youtube.

·      I observed Circuit City’s way of selling technology become obsolete and lose to Best Buy, resulting in all of its stores disappearing in I believe the late 2000’s.

·      Around the same time as Circuit City’s demise, I stopped seeing Comp USA stores. I don’t know if they still exist in other regions, but in north Florida they do not. I assume it is also because of the internet and Best Buy.

·      I saw Kmart also become obsolete in the late 2000’s and disappear by early 2010’s. (my mother never liked them to begin with, and the one that was in my college town was very run down and simple compared to Target and even Wal-Mart. Yes Wal-Mart. That’s never a good sign)

·      In the late 2010’s, the last Radio Shack stores finally vanished. Their 1980’s way of marketing mixed with their too-high prices on some things made them lose to Best Buy and also the internet as Amazon gained strength and power.

·      Brookstone and The Sharper Image vanished between 2007 and 2015. These stores specialized in seemingly “cutting edge” inventions for personal use, such as portable air purifiers, massage tools and various desktop objects with USB ports in them. As those types of things became accessible online or in big-box stores for a much better value, these two specialized retailers went extinct.

·      I watched “Linens N’ Things”, which I always perceived to be kind of a knock-off of Bed Bath and Beyond fail in the late 2000’s or early 2010’s.

·      Over the span of most of the 2010’s, the major bookstores like Barnes and Noble began to stagnate and even shrink because of Amazon. The store in my hometown has long since closed down. Virgin Records closed its massive store in Orlando, as CD’s became obsolete Also, in my area at least, I’ve stopped seeing Walden Books and ... what was that other Seattle-Based one? It was huge. Why can’t I remember it. Oh Right! Borders.

·      Just last year, in 2018, I saw Amazon’s success as well as Wal Mart and Target’s selling strategies for toys run Toys R’ Us and its other affiliates into the ground and finally kill it off after the holiday shopping season in (I believe) 2017 was an epic fail for them. 

·      Though they were not in my part of the US (southeast), I am aware of a store chain called Ames, a department store ran much like Kmart, that also folded for similar reasons in the early 2000’s.

My predictions for 2020 and beyond:

The next five years

·      I think that JCPenney will be the next “Sears”. It has tried to update some of its stores to a more modern vibe and has maintained low prices, like Sears, but in the past several years it has struggled a bit. The small store in my town has already closed. JCP in other areas, like the one in Gulfport, MS, that I went into with my aunt last year, are starting to become a little run down and disorganized. They advertise often and frantically on the radio and on Pandora. They have huge “blowout” sales for every occasion. I think that within the next five to ten years, they will also cease to exist.

·      I wouldn’t be surprised if the next five years of Amazon growing larger and more like a monopoly result in the official death of ALL large-scale bookstores. Books a Million and Barnes and Noble have gotten increasingly quiet inside as more and more books can be purchased online in different formats and for less money.

The next ten years

·      I have a feeling that specialty stores that have a certain theme but sell the product for much higher prices than what can be found online are going to start to vanish. This would mean the beginning of the end for Bed Bath and Beyond, Pier One Imports, Bath and Body Works, Family Christian stores, Hallmark, Cost Plus World Market, Victoria’s Secret, FYE, M.A.C., Spencer’s, Hot Topic and more... In fact, I think some of these have already begun to close some stores.

·      For the stores that decide they are DEFINITELY going to survive, some brand names are going to grow, monopolize and be the death of other brand names.

o   I can see Dick’s Sporting Goods causing all the other sporting good stores to implode. Gander Mountain already closed in our town.

o   I think eventually either Michael’s or Hobby Lobby will win out and become prominent in every town, but not both.

o   Best Buy will probably become THE only brick-and-mortar place for shopping all types of technology and getting it repaired. It already kind of is.

o   Common Jewelry store names will probably all conglomerate and get absorbed into each other until there’s only Diamonds Direct and names like Kay and Zales  (The fast food restaurants of the jewelry industry) will be no more.

o   Ikea will choke out all other large-scale furniture stores, leaving only a few hand-made-family-owned types of operations standing. For those who want cheap furniture but don’t want to assemble it, there’s Wal-Mart, Target, Big Lots and WayFair.com.

o   Office supply stores will be no more. Either Staples will be the only one still standing, mostly operating through its website, or they will disappear all together.

-I think a handful of middle-tier and upper-middle-tier department stores will survive (Belk, Dillard’s, Nordstrom etc...), but many more overpriced upper-tier names will fold (Like Saks or Neimann Marcus) and more “faded old has-been” lower-tier names will also fold (Like if there’s still any The Bon-Ton left). Yet, department store liquidators will continue to flourish and open more new stores in brand-new massive strip malls everywhere. These names, like Marshall’s, Ross, TJ Maxx and Home Goods will eventually be the only way everyone acquires department store grade fashion and home décor. Except without the department store.

-Clothing retailers for women and teens that dominate every mall will gradually shift towards only being available through their websites.

-More malls will begin to close. Now only larger metropolitan areas will have one. Small towns will get new strip malls instead.

The next twenty years

-All of the indoor malls will be extinct. Either they will have been torn down and replaced with lifestyle centers or they will have been repurposed as churches and offices.

-Amazon will own everything, sell everything online, and what is left as brick-and-mortar will have their name incorporated into it somewhere. Much like how Whole Foods stores have a deal with them and the shoppers get special deals for having a Prime membership. Amazon will probably even sell cars and might even own housing and sell/rent it through online services instead of one having to consult a realtor....

- Since 90% of all shopping will take place on the internet, every town will have an amazon warehouse so that no one has to wait for their fresh produce or medication for long. Instead of malls, open-air lifestyle centers will be prevalent and will include businesses such as restaurants, spas, salons, cafes, cinemas, banks, gyms, pet care services, walk-in clinics, gaming rooms, entertainment, religious centers, art galleries.... but not much in the way of shopping.   

 

How accurate do you think my predictions are? If you have a lot more in-depth knowledge of the economy than I do, maybe you can shed some light on where I could be wrong.