Mall apocalypse
From shopping mecca to retail ghost town
Good morning, faithful mallrats. This is your Stock Market Rundown for August 3rd, 2023. Thanks for joining me once again. Let’s dig in:
TODAY’S TOP STORY: MEET ME AT THE FOOD COURT 🛍️
Hey, want to hit Abercrombie for some ripped jeans, grab a pretzel at Auntie Annie’s, then head to Foot Locker to grab some new Sketchers? No, you haven’t fallen into some cursed time portal firing you back to 1992.
You’re at your local mall—if it hasn’t become a hollowed-out husk with decaying atriums and collapsed escalators.
The mall used to be the spot for teens to gather, whether for fries and gray in the food court, or some casual shoplifting at Claire’s.
But in recent years, tenants that used to be cash cows like The Gap and H&M have shuttered less-profitable locations, leaving malls as empty as a one-way flight to Antarctica.
In the 80s and 90s, America become “over-retailed” thanks to developers speckling the suburbs with malls. By the late 2010s, changing consumer tastes killed off dowdy, inconvenient department stores. A while back I tried to buy a swimsuit at Nordstrom and felt like I was searching for Shackleton’s lost ship.
Real estate analysts say that out of around 1,000 US malls, there are about 750 vacant “anchor boxes”—the big-footprint retail spaces that used to house the outposts of now-bankrupt chains like Sears, KMart, and J.C. Penney.
Stripped to the fixtures, the only foot traffic these spaces get these days is when Spirit Halloween moves in for a month to sell you a Sexy Wario costume.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
US stocks are on a tear, with the S&P 500 up more than 19% in 2023. RIP to anybody who heeded calls for a recession and stayed on the sidelines.
If you sell to the wealthy, your target market is flush with cash: high-income households have over a trillion sitting in savings. Awesome news for my yacht upholstery side hustle.
Annoyed you can no longer use Dad’s Netflix password? Netflix doesn’t give a damn. Cracking down on password sharing helped them add 5.9 million subscribers in the most recently-reported quarter.
China and Russia, best friends 4 ever: Putin and Xi are trading friendship bracelets as Chinese imports of Russian oil spike to all-time highs amidst Western sanctions.
That old windbag the King of England made £1 billion in windfall profits from six offshore windfarm lease deals. Remember, kids: real-life kings and queens aren’t magical fairy-tale characters—they’re just inbred rich people.
That’s it for today, see you bright and early tomorrow. Yours in capitalism, The Axe