Too Many Stores

 

 

From an older article though still relevant:

 

American civilization has its perfect expression in Union Road, in the entirety of its run from Orchard Park to Williamsville. Union Road is a succession of strip malls that link the marquee suburbs of Western New York. It is what the anti-suburbanites call “Generica,” and it is a refutation of every fond hope for “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” “transit-oriented development,” and “green infrastructure,” because Union Road is all about automobiles. If gasoline spikes in price again as it did in 2008, whether because Goldman Sachs speculators bid oil futures up, or because the BP disaster in the Gulf gets worse, or because Sarah Palin and Ron Paul’s racist spawn win the mid-term elections, Union Road will be just one more suburban commercial thoroughfare clogged with angry consumers with not enough money to shop because their cars ate all their discretionary disposable income.

 

Union Road exists in the form that it does because since the mid-1950s, it has been the connector between consumers and retailing. At its north end, the traditional retail establishments in the Village of Williamsville predominate. Driving south toward Genesee Street brings one to the wide-setback strip plazas of the 1960s, where nowadays the somewhat downscale stores are. Further south, there is layering: regionally owned grocery chain stores are mixed with various national big-box stores in a plaza that was well established more than 40 years ago, while opposite, some locally owned stores and service centers predominate up until the entrance roads to the region’s largest shopping mall. Past the next big intersection at Walden, which is itself a mile of big-box stores intermixed with discount houses and a few relatively downscale stores that are not to be found in the premium-rental malls, there is a gap of only two miles before the 1960s strip mall pattern repeats.

 

The village centers have a vestigial existence as retailing zones; of the 16 villages in Erie County, only Kenmore, East Aurora, Hamburg, Williamsville, and Orchard Park look like villages, but even they have shopping plazas that have more retail space than each of their main streets does. Springville’s village center is obsolete as the area’s center for commerce, having long since been supplanted by the cluster of big boxes and Wal-Mart on Route 219. Angola village’s drugstore succumbed long ago to the big boxes on Route 5. Lancaster is a curious amalgam. Akron still looks like the New England Yankee place its Civil War veterans knew when they erected the tall pole to show support for Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign, because Akron still has a village commons of the type English settlers established before they came to the Niagara Frontier when it really was a frontier—but Akron shoppers shop like Angola, Lancaster, Sloan, Clarence, and also Buffalo shoppers shop: on big roads, at big-box stores, at gigantic grocery stores, and at the Galleria, Boulevard, Eastern Hills, and McKinley malls. That’s where the retail trade is. Change the names of the roads and the municipalities, and you could be anywhere in the contemporary United States.

 

But there’s increasing evidence that behavioral changes driven by the internet and by age-specific consumer preferences will change all this. At the Urban Land Institute and at many other institutes and think tanks, and in the real-estate industry’s own publications, there’s a growing consensus that there is way, way too much square footage devoted to retailing.

 

More below:

http://artvoice.com/issues/v9n21/too_many_stores

Well yea.  If you look at the amount of retail space per person in this country compared to Euro. counterparts, its staggering.  Something to the tune of 25sf/1person in the US compared to 2-3sf/person in Euro. 

We've pinned success in this country for too long on the  "growth, growth, growth," model that now we are suffering from a 30 year oversupply of single family housing and now commercial retail space.  This is the long term price this country is paying for endless unsustainable expansion. 

Looking at that picture reminds me of 71 S in the Mason area and 75 S in the West Chester area. Lol

 

But yeah, America is certainly saturated with retail, and Cincinnati is no exception. I can't help but scratch my head about the Millworks project. It would be located dangerously close to Rookwood Commons, so the two would essentially end up competing against each other. I'm not a conservative by any means, but it sounds like a diaster waiting to happen.( Another Cincinnati Mills possibly?) Look at the 'rotting' structure along side I-71 at Kenwood Towne Center!

 

The hope is for Millworks to create increased demand for retail and attract residents, but all it will probably do is stretch the retail market thin in the area. I envision it competing with businesses at Rookwood and driving some of the already struggling businesses along Madison Rd. out of business. 

 

It seems like this city thinks that "If we build it, they'll come." I'm a transplant to the area, and shopping was nowhere near the top of my list for making a relocation decision. Cincy really needs to invest in expanding public transit, and revitalize and preserve it's historic architecture to make the city really attractive to people outside of the region. It's ashame seeing some of the rotting historic architecture in Cincinnati. The city certainly has architecture that distinguishes itself from other cities, but sadly some of the architecture has been neglected for so long and is in such bad shape that some if it probably isn't even salvageable.

 

But to get back on topic, the lack of big box retail is what makes Erie, PA, Buffalo, NY, most of upstate NY and New England really attractive to me.

Well yea. If you look at the amount of retail space per person in this country compared to Euro. counterparts, its staggering. Something to the tune of 25sf/1person in the US compared to 2-3sf/person in Euro.

 

Not all retail is the same though.  Here we've traded small shops for big boxes, which probably skews the sq ft ratio.  They put a premium on space for the sake of space. 

^Blockbuster stores were gigantic compared to the size of their product and their sales per square foot. It's one of the major factors in the chain's impending demise.

It's all about volume based sales now.  Stores make marginal profits on each item, but sell enough of them to come out on top.

 

I'm not one of those "rearview mirror" old farts.... but I do long for the past with regard to retail.

 

I remember my family doing our grocery shopping at Deli's, a small family owned business on Noble right across from the library.  Couldn't have been more than 2,000 square feet.  Bob and his wife Charlene were typically at the register.  Bob's brother Sam and his son, Sammy Jr., manned the butcher shop in the back.  An old military vet named Nigel who knew how to turn his war scars into humor for the kids always seemed to be sweeping up.  Now, we have Giant Eagle, Costco and Trader Joe's.  The prices have gone down, the variety has greatly increased (as have the checkout lines), but nothing will replace that running invoice the folks at Deli's kept behind the register which my mom would pay off whenever she remembered to bring her checkbook (or whenever it fit our budget best).  Shops like that can't survive anymore outside of small towns that have somehow fought off the invasion of the big box stores.

IMO, the greatest threat to brick-and-mortar retail's return isn't oversupply, it's out-of-paradigm competition from the online world.

 

For the Christmas season, I signed up for Amazon Prime.  I am already hooked.  The Internet is among the first places I look for electronics, too: Newegg and Amazon are household names, and I actually got my new PC from a Cleveland business, but over the Internet anyway (they run an eBay storefront that allows one very good customization options, so I was able to configure a system with a much stronger power supply than one would typically find in an off-the-rack computer from Best Buy, for example).  Even for retailers that have brick and mortar options, I often find myself going to their online offerings: my last few Kohl's purchases have been online, and I wouldn't go to a brick-and-mortar Bed Bath & Beyond if I could use their 20%-off coupons on their Web site.

 

Blockbuster, as someone already mentioned, bit the dust.  It wasn't taken down by a superior brick-and-mortar competitor or a return to local, independently-owned movie rental shops.  It was taken down by Netflix.  Blockbuster is bust; Netflix has been among the hottest stocks on Wall Street for the past two years.

 

I strongly doubt we're going to see a resurgence of small-scale, inefficient local retail, with its higher prices, lower selection, shorter hours, and customer service that was (in my experience) often not really all that much better than you'd get at many big boxes, though the higher variability in the independent sector means that one can always point to the rare exception.  The Internet, though, can often offer even lower prices, more selection, and of course better hours than even the big box chains can.

Over-Retailed?  What kind of LIE is this!

 

 

You can never have too much retail, especially GOOD retail!

could be worse -- this summer it seemed like the usa was under-retailed vs japan!

Legacy Village is like a minute away from the Beachwood mall which is like 5 minutes away from the Richmond mall. And there are plenty other strip centers in-between.

 

Edit: Beachwood mall is also about 10 minutes away from Severance Town Shopping Center and about 5 minutes from the University Square shopping center.

 

Even worse then I thought

Legacy Village is like a minutes away from the Beachwood mall which is like 5 minutes away from the Richmond mall. And there are plenty other strip centers in-between.

 

Edit: Beachwood mall is also like 10 minutes away from Severance Town Shopping Center and like 5 minutes from the Cedar Shopping Center.

 

Even worse then I thought

"is like minutes"?  :wtf:

Legacy Village is like a minutes away from the Beachwood mall which is like 5 minutes away from the Richmond mall. And there are plenty other strip centers in-between.

 

Edit: Beachwood mall is also like 10 minutes away from Severance Town Shopping Center and like 5 minutes from the Cedar Shopping Center.

 

Even worse then I thought

"is like minutes"? :wtf:

 

is about?

OH laaaaaaaaaawd.  You whippersnappers.

OH laaaaaaaaaawd.  You whippersnappers.

 

???

 

:type:

Whippersnapper - This expression originated among the cowboys of England, at least as far back as the Elizabethan era. Young boys who weren't yet capable of herding cattle from horseback were taught how to drive livestock by loudly cracking a bull whip. Proud of their ability to produce the explosive "bang" of the whip, those youngsters often became an annoying nuisance to others by their constant racket.

 

What are you implying??  :lol:

OH laaaaaaaaaawd.  You whippersnappers.

 

:?

 

:type:

Whippersnapper - This expression originated among the cowboys of England, at least as far back as the Elizabethan era. Young boys who weren't yet capable of herding cattle from horseback were taught how to drive livestock by loudly cracking a bull whip. Proud of their ability to produce the explosive "bang" of the whip, those youngsters often became an annoying nuisance to others by their constant racket.

 

What are you implying??  :D

 

It's all about volume based sales now.  Stores make marginal profits on each item, but sell enough of them to come out on top.

 

I'm not one of those "rearview mirror" old farts.... but I do long for the past with regard to retail.

 

I remember my family doing our grocery shopping at Deli's, a small family owned business on Noble right across from the library.  Couldn't have been more than 2,000 square feet.  Bob and his wife Charlene were typically at the register.  Bob's brother Sam and his son, Sammy Jr., manned the butcher shop in the back.  An old military vet named Nigel who knew how to turn his war scars into humor for the kids always seemed to be sweeping up.  Now, we have Giant Eagle, Costco and Trader Joe's.  The prices have gone down, the variety has greatly increased (as have the checkout lines), but nothing will replace that running invoice the folks at Deli's kept behind the register which my mom would pay off whenever she remembered to bring her checkbook (or whenever it fit our budget best).  Shops like that can't survive anymore outside of small towns that have somehow fought off the invasion of the big box stores.

 

I would just be happy to go back to the original smaller footprint Target that used to be in Rocky River, they closed that

3 years ago (and it still sits there empty) when they opened the new mediium footprint one at the revamped Westgate. I loved that store I could walk to get something from the far end of the store and still be out in 5 minutes. Now I just wander around. Much like I do at home depot.

 

On the bright side Steelyard Commons obviously addressed a deficiency of accessible retail with in the city of Cleveland. Now what Wal-Mart was thinking opening stores at Steelyards, City-View and Ridge Road/Brookpark road I will never know. Good they had that sewer gas excuse to close the one in City View. :(