Posted on 10/25/2019 9:15:35 AM PDT by C19fan
You and me both.
All my local shopping is at Ace Hardware, Home Depot, the grocery store, and the gas station. If somebody started home delivery of gasoline, I could cut one of those out.
This really isn’t a shopping mall as much as an entertainment center with some attached shopping; the fact that they charge for parking, and the entertainment venues are the only ones open this year, gives that away.
This is a few miles from me; it was so eerie to have a complete shopping mall built and never opened for more than a dozen years.
From the road it looks like ghettos of Rio..
The retail is secondary; this is an entertainment destination. Years ago many of our malls here in NJ started focusing on food instead of merchandise because there is less and less discretionary income here - so people looking for deals were looking online. Another mall about 20 minutes west of this waved the white flag years ago when they opened a tattoo parlor there - really said it all. Others nearby (in Jersey City and Paramus) have theaters as part of the “experience”.
The few times I’m in malls today, I see foreigners that look like they are visiting a museum (no packages, just gawking); few Americans go to malls in north Jersey.
I watched an Indian-looking guy try on shoes with bare feet in a store there years ago (he was out in sandals); just gross.
Good points. In the medium sized city I live in when I walk to work downtown, it is remarkable if you really look how much empty retail space there is. Yet in the outer suburbs they keep building new retail space.
Apparently pension funds back east in Canada own a lot of this retail space, and they rather space be empty than reduce their ridiculous rents.
That’s interesting.
A lot of our new “retail” space is food-related, or for small cellphone dealer-types (with apartments built above them). Of course, as The Great Replacement (of Americans) continues apace, there are plenty of travel agency/money transfer places around - as well as new restaurants (replacing old pizzerias/sub shops) for the new “replacement Americans du jour” (whoever is the flavor of the month for that month’s shipping container passengers).
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