US malls suffer latest blow as retailers cull over 300 stores in 48 hours
- Tesla moving all car sales online, while Gap, J.C. Penney closing many stores
- Malls trying to reinvent themselves, with bowling alleys and other things that can’t be ‘Amazoned’
You can’t blame America’s teenagers for no longer congregating at the mall like generations past: There aren’t all that many stores left.
In the last 48 hours alone, several shopping centre staples unveiled plans to trim their footprints across the US
Gap said it would slash the store count of its struggling namesake brand by 230 locations over the next two years, just hours after J.C. Penney confirmed it would shutter 18 department stores. That news came on the heels of L Brands’ decision to close 53 Victoria’s Secrets in North America this year. And it’s not just apparel: Tesla, whose galleries are often inside shopping centres, just said it’s moving all its sales online.
These moves come on top of all of the chains that have already announced they’re closing down or reducing their footprints due to bankruptcy. This includes Payless, which is abandoning 2,500 stores, Things Remembered, which is closing most of its 400 stores and selling the rest, while mall favourite Brookstone slims down operations and Sears continues to shutter locations. Taken as a whole, many of today’s shopping centres are becoming little more than an assemblage of fast-fashion retailers, Apple stores and food courts.
“You hear so much about shopping centres are dying. There definitely needs to be attrition, and there’s too many in the US,” Michael Guerin, senior vice-president of leasing at mall-owner Macerich, said in an interview earlier this year. The mall “just needs to evolve.”