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What you're writing makes a lot of sense to me as a non-American where car culture is much less strong. I think that the US currently is undergoing a shift towards less car usage, replacing some of it with delivery services, home offices, more central living and public transport. There are still strong forces that counter this movement in the US, namely the way overregulated metropolitan housing market (compared to Japan or even Europe) and the political difficulties and ballooned cost of public infrastructure, but nonetheless the shift is happening albeit slowly

What does this mean for malls? Just look abroad. We do have malls, just smaller ones that you drive 30min to at the maximum, after that the added value becomes too weak. Japan kinda shows the endgame, with malls fully integrated in many train stations, so you can go for some shopping with minimal loss of time. Amazon is extremely strong in Japan, with same-day delivery for prime members, yet this doesn't seem to affect the more upscale malls that you describe much. Specialised stores for electronics or clothing meanwhile compete mainly on service, in some areas also on price (Amazon does have quite a different cost structure that makes certain things quite a bit more expensive).

Tl;dr: The only constant thing is change - looking abroad helps to see possible versions of the future.

This, I don't have a car right now. Anything I can buy from Amazon, I do. Otherwise, I have to lug it by hand back from the store.

Until the stores start offering delivery

Or someone starts up a city-wide drone delivery service for brick & mortar retailers. It could also offer a huge safety improvement for herb & powder retailers.

The safety and regulation issues that would need to be overcome kind of ensures that this drone delivery service would only be started by Amazon or some other giant, probably also making it available to others.

But brick & mortar retailers would end up competing with the company who owns the delivery infrastructure... boy this would be candy crush for anti-trust lawyers...

I have shopped at Macy's, JCPenny, and Sears a handful of times in my life, including for myself and when I was there with other people. These stores carry higher quality, but much higher price merchandise and I just don't want it. It all seems stuffy, the sales are never really any good, and the brands can be had elsewhere for cheaper (timing is key here).

But the couple of malls near me seem to also have a number of more innovative brands. Clothing stores that sell at much cheaper prices (ethics be damned), like H&M, Old Navy, etc. do quite well with the millennials and younger crowd especially because they change their merchandise very frequently. I read somewhere that H&M has a turn around for a new style measured in weeks from inception to shelf, whereas traditional brands take months. So these guys respond quicker to trend changes.

Other types of stores are also interesting. Compare Macy's makeup counter vs Lush. Lush, for those not familiar, is an ingenious brand that sells organic personal care products, made by hand, never tested on animals, and often in very innovative categories. Did you know there is such a thing as "skin conditioner" or "face shampoo" or "lip scrub"? I didn't until someone showed me their recent Lush purchases. These small stores attract a lot of people.

I think what's dying is Sears, etc. Not malls in general.

"High quality" and "high price" are about the last thing I think of in relation to JC Penney and Sears. I've always thought of them as kind of lowest common denominator, lots of private label poor quality stuff that's perpetually on sale.

I suppose it depends. I was recently shopping for a blazer. Found a name brand one at JC Penny for $400 (!). I found a very nice middle ground of a sports coat at H&M for $70.

Yikes. If $70 is a 'middle' blazer, what's left for low?

Sears and Penney always offered better clothes than discount stores like Woolworth's, Wal-mart and K-Mart; you could get pants or a suit that might be worth tailoring and keeping for more than a season. One of the memorable lines out of the Millionaire Nextdoor was that most millionaires bought suits at Sears.

Today, fast fashion and casual office is killing off even semi-formal clothes. In almost every situation, Americans wear jeans or shorts, and don't want to pay much for those. Sears is hopelessly lost, and Penney has been limping since the Ron Johnson debacle.

The thing that kills formal dress is the total bullshit known as dry cleaning.

Basically fuck dry cleaning. If clothes can't withstand soapy water and hot air, those clothes can go get fucked and eat someone else's paycheck for no reason.

Rot in hell, dry cleaning. I shall never patronize thee.

I mean you can always find good stuff at places like Goodwill or Plato's closet, but that's hit or miss. And a blazer or sport coat and jeans is a classic enough casual look that I wanted to try it. Worked out well for me.

Its totally dependent on where the store physically is located and some kind of rating of how "fashionable" the area where the store is located. I used to do a lot of my school shopping in department stores. The selection in my mid-size city was decent. Not amazing but fine. Fine enough that I could usually find at least a couple things I wanted even if I didn't want to buy everything there. I visited a friend in a very rural part of my state and found absolutely nothing I would buy at my favorite department store back home. Visiting a Macy's in a major city like NYC or Chicago and they are multi-story buildings with basically every major brand.

Nike does something similar, their shoes are put into fashion-ability tiers and only retailers that are at that tier or above are allowed to sell that shoe, be it a certain color way, brand (Jordan for instance), or even a style.

There's also some genius in figuring out new mixes of online/b&m services. For example, my wife shops almost entirely at a handful of stores. The B&M stores tend to be low-end retailers where she can buy clothes to mess around with for next to nothing. The rest tend to have on-line stores with returns happening in their B&M stores.

This is brilliant, because for her to return the items she'd have to drive to a UPS or Fedex location (depending) anyways, so why not just end up at their B&M presence instead and since she's there do a little shopping? She ends up buying about 1/3 of her clothes at the physical store just because of this smart policy.

If the on-line option wasn't available she'd buy far fewer clothes overall, but by making it easy for their customers to part with their money, they get better sales. By itself the store isn't as convenient as just finding another on-line retailer.

This model doesn't seem to be as easy to replicate with store types that sell more generic goods, and less likely to need B&M interaction.

I have worked on a lot of Amazon accounts and I even do a fair amount of retail arbitrage from TJ Maxx / JC Penney -> Amazon both online and in-store. Given that the bulk of my income either comes directly from Amazon sales or indirectly through consulting for Amazon sellers you would think that I would be in the ra-ra-ra-Amazon-will-annihilate-traditional-retail camp.

The big advantage that discount retailers like those have for shoppers over Amazon is price and being able to physically inspect merchandise before you buy it. The selection of certain brands is also often better at the physical retail stores.

The fact that you can make > 75% profit margins per unit in some categories flipping from discount retail to Amazon FBA demonstrates the advantage that these retailers have over Amazon. Amazon's fee structure also makes it so that certain price points are just about never going to be profitable for Amazon unless fees go down -- and fees have been going up quite substantially.

If you want good prices, you should not shop at Amazon - you should shop at a physical retailer.

So, Amazon has some issues with its model especially in categories like apparel that make it a pain to earn continual profits from. I prefer to sell men's to women's apparel for example because women return products for fit reasons at much higher rates as compared to men. Fitting measurements for women are also much less standardized because there's a lot of variance in female body shape. A return on Amazon is more costly to a seller than it is to a physical retailer.

Also, JC Penney generally has a minimum quality standard and often really impressive prices per unit that Amazon's fee structure makes it impossible to beat. You are not going to profit from selling a $7 polo shirt on Amazon unless the quality is awful and maybe if Amazon is buying it from you as a vendor. If you buy a $7 polo from JC Penney the quality might actually be great and JCP will earn a profit.

I have different opinions about Macy's because they generally do not have a price advantage. There is really no benefit to buying stuff at Macy's unless you really want the name brands and you don't mind paying a higher price. For a certain kind of shopper, that's what they want and that's what they'll get from Macy's.

This article is just as cherry picked as some of the 'death-of-the-mall' stories are. I could do a similar cherry picking locally by comparing one successful shopping complex about 30 miles distant from another one that is failing. Depending on which direction I drove I could tell a different speculative story about the future of the mall in small town America.

A lot of what is missed in the retail discussion is that while online retail is where a lot of the growth is, physical retail is where the bulk of the transactions still happen in the US. There is a limit to how much of that Amazon can 'eat.' Some if it is regulatory: in the latest issue of Total Retail, two of the biggest online sellers in 2016 were Walgreens and CVS. That's 'cause of online prescription pickup. If Amazon did go into that business -- as it might -- then the picture might start to look significantly different.

> If you want good prices, you should not shop at Amazon - you should shop at a physical retailer.

I've noticed that this has been pretty true across the board. I've basically given up shopping for things on Amazon that I know I can find locally, and going to other, more specialized, online retailers when I can't.

Here in rural northwest Kansas the nearest Walmart is an hour away. All the local retailers cost more than Amazon. And whereas I have fiber optic broadband, I'd rather shop on Amazon. I can, after all, return an item to them for free if it doesn't fit.

Absolutely, there are exceptions. I used to live in northeastern non-rural Kansas and local stores were generally cheaper. In high cost of living areas also prices may be cheaper on Amazon.

> If you want good prices, you should not shop at Amazon - you should shop at a physical retailer.

Is it so in America? In my country it is the other way around: you would sometimes go to physical retailer to just take a look of the product, evaluate it, and then go find cheaper deal in some online store.

Interesting. Was this different when Amazon was still taking on losses ? I ask because, over here in India, certain items are almost definitely cheaper than in retail stores. There are of course other factors at play such as India's 'broken' logistics infrastructure and so on.

Then again, now that Flipkart has taken a beating and Snapdeal is being sold, things may be more real soon.

Anecdotally, the Westchester mall in White Plains, New York is starting to show a fair bit of softness in terms of keeping tenants. There are many empty stores and it seems to be getting worse. This is the same mall with many luxury brands and even a Tesla store. It once had a thriving food court, but it has been closed for years and only recently seems to be ready for business once again, hopefully not too little too late.

The crappy mall down the road (forget the name) will probably go before the Westchester does.

Yeah, that's the Galleria. I haven't been in there for at least 20 years, but it seems to be doing well enough. I think that they have lower rent and a more central location that factor in to staying afloat. I also thought they would disappear, but it seems that the Westchester will have to go down market to fill their space and that would be counter to the image they are trying to project. It's a tough place to be. They do have quite a few more kiosks around nowadays, but still without making the place less classy.

Also anecdotally, from Silicon Valley - Vallco in Cupertino and Target/Macy's in Sunnyvale are dying, Stanford Shopping Center is kinda humming along ... but Santana Row in San Jose and San Antonio Center in Mountain View are thriving. Both of the latter are in (historically) poorer areas than the former, so you would expect them to do significantly worse.

I suspect that it's a combination of outdated brands and car-centricness that does malls in. People don't want to drive to go shopping anymore, when they can just get stuff online and have someone else drive it to them. But malls that are built new mixed-use developments, or ones that go up near walkable downtowns, tend to do fairly well. The local residents provide a critical mass of foot traffic, which makes the area seem like a "scene" where it's cool to hang out, which draws out car traffic from the surrounding area.

Was Vallco ever alive? Serious question; it's seemed dead ever since the mid 90s

My wife (Cupertino native) tells me that it was semi-alive when she was a teenager; her first job was there. That would've been the mid-late 90s.

Other than AMC, it's certainly been dead since I moved out to the Bay Area (2009). My wife was living elsewhere for the whole decade of the 00s, so she doesn't really know when it died.

It was very much alive in the early 1980s. (I worked in Cupertino from 1979-1985, and Vallco was a place we often went for lunch.)

It's under reconstruction, finally. It was always a weak mall - but it had some niche offerings and I liked that my kids could run around there on hot summer evenings without having a press of people nearby.

Apparently there was a sort of ownership struggle, and now I think that's been resolve in one way. Hopefully the new design will a) reach fruition and b) eliminate some of the bad feng shui about the place.

This is a problem with all the greater NYC malls. They're packed with upscale stores an have limited offerings for the proles.

A good portion of the trouble retail is in is due to leverage. Neither they nor their lenders baked online in to their models. The leverage kills the flexibility to adapt to new trends, or in some cases even survive a 10% sag in earnings.

Amazon is terrible for clothes, but non-Amazon is fantastic.

>Amazon is terrible for clothes, but non-Amazon is fantastic.

Key barriers in this space are fit and fashion. Either those suffer, or the retailer has to eat a lot of returns.

I'm between sizes. If I shop online and want things that fit, I have to order multiple sizes and keep the best one. I wonder how that cost compares against a B&M.