Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
...and thereby driving low-margin sellers out.
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And that's a problem they're just not seeing, because people
don't to to malls only for the highest-margin stores. For instance, when the mall closest to where I used to live lost its bookstore, its Discovery Channel store, its kite store, the DVD store that had action figures, and a couple of others, I pretty much stopped going there. So the clothing stores didn't even have a chance to sell me anything -- you can't sell to a customer who's shopping elsewhere. One of the reasons malls have been successful has been their mix of stores: you can go to a mall and do all your buying (or all your browsing, if you're so inclined) in one place. If you
can't -- if you can only buy clothes there, which is what it's coming to -- you're less likely to go to that mall as often, or even at all.
So by driving down the business diversity in malls, to the point in some cases of nearly nothing
but nationwide teen clothing chains, the management is slowly destroying the very source of a mall's intrinsic appeal. This is really not a good thing to do in a recession.
If I ran the zoo ... I would want a law regulating the distance between stores of the same type. We joke about Starbucks on every corner of an intersection, but there are cases where it really is almost that bad. Companies build stores so close together they can't help but cannibalize their own business, not because they want to, but because their competitors are doing it, and if they don't match them -- if there isn't a CVS across from every Walgreen's -- they'll lose out. Having a law that applies to all of them would level the playing field. It would reduce the expenses incurred by stores who are knowingly over-saturating a market but doing it because the alternative is worse, possibly keeping some of them in business instead of exhausting their resources in an unwinnable real-estate arms race. It would reduce the level of sprawl centered on those stores, and we already have too much sprawl. It would reduce real-estate prices overall (admittedly to the detriment of commercial landlords) by lowering demand, returning them to a level within reach of people starting new businesses. It would free up space for local businesses who are otherwise driven out by the high rents possible to stores benefiting (at least until they go broke trying) from the economies of scale from having one on every corner. While it has some down sides, they are fewer, and the benefits to buyers and even business owners are greater, than the system we have now. Of course, I don't run the zoo, so they'll continue running themselves into the ground because we have a system set up that doesn't allow them to do anything else ... but it would be nice if I did.