Have you recovered from Black Friday and all the shopping you did this past holiday weekend? Perhaps you have come to the conclusion that there are too many places to shop.
The United States is over-stored. Jennifer Waters, the Chicago Bureau chief for Market Watch, spoke last week and I listened to her. What she said is that we might be upset to hear about certain stores closing, but the reality is that the stores are not failing there are just too many of them. This is not news to the retail industry. They knew this day would come. When the economy was bursting with money, the stores could handle their large numbers. Now that the economy is in a slump, the truth of the number of stores is hitting home.
Daniel Gross from Newsweek magazine wrote about how bad the retail culture is. He calls it a carnage. Developers do not stop. By the end of 2008 34 million new sq. ft. of retail will have been created. The saturation of certain stores, such as Starbucks, has been scaled back. Shoppers might have to drive a little farther to satisfy their thirst.
Judith Levine authored "Not Buying it: My Year without shopping." She sites that there are 159 million sq. ft. of vacant stores in the United States. That is like 5.5 miles or six times the size of Monaco. Her theory is that the bombardment of advertising has wounded the shopper and they don't have the strength to get out and shop. The backlash to all this advertising pushes the people to buy less.
Get prepared, you might have to watch the football game this Super bowl as the number of ads will be pulled back. The creative ads that we waited all year for are projected not to be there this year. Already the automotive company that sponsored Tiger Woods has stopped the contract with him and now he'll have to drive a car other than his Buick.
Don't worry the malls you have loved to walk will not be graveyards. It is estimated that once the slump is over Americans will come back and shop. You can't take away our desire to buy the shinny objects in the window. The stores might not look the same, but they will be there for our dollars.
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