Tag: shopping malls

Another Indoor Mall Bites the Dust

The end of an era.

It was called Crenshaw Center. The first suburban shopping mall in Los Angeles. It was an open-air shopping center that included Broadway and May Company department stores. My mother’s favorite place to shop in the 1950s. Now it is a larger enclosed mall, re-named Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, that is probably going to close.

It won’t be the first mall to close in the Los Angeles Orange County metropolitan area. The Laguna Hills Mall in southern Orange County closed on December 31, 2018 and is being demolished. The Hawthorne Mall closed in 1999. The Westside Pavilion on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles is now being remodeled for Google offices. The Promenade Shopping Mall is Woodland Hills has only four businesses left including an AMC theater is about to be torn down and replaced with housing, offices, and stores and is planned to complete in 2035.

Even after the corona virus has been concurred will we return to the malls? I doubt it.

Technology is Impacting our Buying Habits

Say Goodbye to Shopping Malls

America, no the entire world, is experiencing a dramatic change in the retail industry. It is very apparent in the United States. Americans are not shopping at malls as much as they have in past years. Macy’s department stores is planning to close 14 of their 800 locations in 2015. That is a company that has been a success. JC Penney plans another 40 closings in 2015. Wet Seal has announced it is closing 2/3 of their stores in 2015.

BloombergBusinessweek says “While malls stumble, mobile shopping is expected to grow 800% through 2015.”

In 2014 a long list of stores were closed. That includes 339 Sears, 170 Staples, 150 Office Depot, and 33 JC Penney. Not the only reason but a major cause has been on line sales. Many of the stores themselves have opened sales web sites.

Amazon has played a prominent role in the structural shift away from brick-and-mortar retail, and it may lay waste to several other retailers in the years to come. Without the cost burden of physical stores, Amazon can price below traditional rivals and drive recurring traffic online. But it is not the only on line business that has changed the retail climate. eBay, Etsy, are just the two other on-line businesses that I know. Want to buy anything from Hewlett Packard? They sell all of their computers, printers, and supplies on line. Meanwhile Alibaba (the Amazon knockoff) is booming in China.

While I still shop at Costco and they have seen their sales increase, they too sell many of their products on line.

Sorry old timers, this is all part of the 21st century.