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.