Category: retail
America’s Greatest Main Streets?
Travel and Leisure magazine has put together a list of what they consider to be America’s greatest main streets. The work of such activists and preservationists is acknowledged each year by the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Great American Main Streets Awards and by the American Planning Association’s Great Places in America: Streets. We scoured [...]
The Mauling of Enclosed Malls
We’ve mentioned this before. Enclosed shopping malls, those retail juggernauts of the 20th Century, are dropping like flies. Over at Greater Greater Washington, Dan Malouf has the latest from the Washington, DC area: The reasons malls have closed vary as much as the malls themselves. Some closed because they were housed in cheap buildings that [...]
Good news: Downtowns are Winning!
Do you remember when it seemed inevitable that shopping malls were going to completely destroy downtown shopping districts? Well, it looks like the malls have lost: For more than 50 years, retailers favored the rows of boxy single-story shops opening onto a common parking lot facing major roadways bringing commuters driving between their suburban homes [...]
The Big Boxes Look North: Bad News for US?
Retail Traffic reports that, from Nordstrom to Big Lots, big box retailers are increasingly looking to Canada for new investment opportunities. The rationale should raise a big red flag for US policy makers: Canada’s banking system did not experience the same convulsions that rippled through Wall Street in 2008 and 2009. Its unemployment rate—at 7.4 [...]
