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Unsurprising. Not because of the state of retail, but because they were purchased in 2012 by an investment firm (Blum Capital) and a private equity group (Golden Gate) that's known for leveraged buyouts. They closed their Australian stores in 2016, and now they're doing the same to the rest of their stores. They've slowly been dividing the assets up and carving/dividing the corpse up to squeeze blood from the stone.

I'll leave it up to someone smarter than I am to tell exactly how much of this was corporate raiding and how much was actually unsustainable business.

Yup, blaming this on “the age of Amazon” is a mistake. Same with toys r us and Sears: crushing debt from private equity with no retail competence.
Yes, although private equity generally gets involved in the first place because the company is already on the ropes. Resuscitating a failing retail chain in this day and age has a pretty high degree of difficulty. (Although it can be done; I'd probably argue Best Buy is an example.)
It's a worldwide phenomenon. Bain Capital brought a huge, thriving retail business (Edcon) to its knees in South Africa, after a botched leveraged buy-out:

https://www.biznews.com/sa-investing/2015/07/15/bains-strate...

Don't these private equity firms earn piles of money in the process in exchange for wiping out creditors and investors? (not to mention staff)
The market for Toys-R-Us is absolutely still there, and currently there is a vacuum for a better company to step in place. People are simply not going to buy their children's items online; moms just love to try things out in the store for their kids.
Wow. As a kid, I always went to Payless for my "dress" shoes up until _maybe_ high school. Going to private Catholic school I always needed new "dress" shoes each year and it was a bit ritualistic for me to go to Payless before the new school year to get a new pair. I believe I also got a lot of my casual sneakers there when I was younger as well.
Clothing is surprisingly easy once you've settled your sizes for that brand. Add free return shipping and it's almost more logical to order online since you save the time of going to the store and physically finding the item (which may not even be in stock in your size).

I also like that it is much easier to use coupons online than in person, not to mention the extra percent or so off from using affiliate links.

Exact same situation here!
I have a hard time understanding the future macro-economy of the U.S. Where does the money come from and where does it go? We've all seen towns and cities decimated when the factories close or shrink because the thing that's buying raw materials, adding value, and selling it for a profit to generate revenue which is used to pay its workers, taxes, etc. is no longer there. A whole generation or two then moved to becoming simply middle-men, where goods were made somewhere else, marked up to pay rent and employees, and then sold. Now that model is going away as markets become more efficient and Walmart, Dollar General and Amazon (my employer for transparency, though I don't work for the store side) cut out the middle man. Where do 245 million American adults go next to make a living? When robots are driving all the trucks, picking all the fruit, and making most of the goods (all will come to pass within the next 50-100 years), and stores become more about shipping than shopping, where do people work?
Well that’s the argument for Universal Basic Income in a nutshell.
> where do people work

Work isn't the end goal is it?

The point is, people want produce and services. They use these to survive and to entertain.

Normally, it was the case you couldn't by yourself produce and serve all the things and needs that you had for survival and entertainment.

So up till now, everyone had to work and divide the tasks.

Now, we can produce and serve without everyone needing to work.

The end goal is still, how can we produce and serve for everyone. That will be a political and social challenge. But when you think about it on a technical level, we've never been this close to reaching this goal. Where as before, this wasn't even technically possible.

The question is, will social progress catch up with and follow technical progress?

> Work isn't the end goal is it? The point is, people want produce and services. They use these to survive and to entertain.

False. People also want--need--to have a purpose in life and to contribute to society in some way.

Are jobs disappearing or just geographically concentrating? It's obvious that some jobs are, if anything, even more lucrative than before, leading to wider disparities in productivity and, consequently, income. And when that happens, historically, you start to see things that we haven't seen yet, like large numbers of live-in domestic servants. Maybe the current "service economy" or even "gig economy" is basically the same thing at heart. But when that happens, jobs don't disappear; they geographically concentrate. And because America doesn't do density and urbanization very well, this causes more disruption than it otherwise would.
> Where do 245 million American adults go next to make a living?

For any arbitrary company, its not their problem. They're there to make shareholders an extra buck for the quarter. Or at most, they hold a 5 year look at the far end. Further? 10 year? 20 year? Nope. Not at all.

For the individual, of course we care. But there's not much to be done about it. Id say voting works, but with regulatory capture and money in politics/legalized bribery where it is, I'm not seeing much difference.

Maybe we should just cash in on the momentary money while we have a chance.

A common sentiment but one rooted in a basic misconception about there being a maximum amount of work available to do. There's no such thing. The amount of undone work at any given time is effectively infinite. There are always jobs being left undone, always. Many of them.

That's especially obvious today when we have huge debts in terms of infrastructure building and city development. Or just general stewardship. There are so many waste disposal problems in the developed world that are currently in a holding pattern. For non-nuclear waste there are very clear routes toward remediation and disposal, for example. And yet all these projects languish on the back burner because we just can't afford them. Consider just one example, Seattle is currently in the process of installing sidewalks throughout the entire city, at present rates of progress it will take 1800 years to finish. Think about that for a moment and then consider that a lot of basic infrastructure and urban development projects in other cities are in similar shape.

And this doesn't even include new jobs that don't exist currently. In 1850 there were no movie stars, no TV advertising studios, no e-sports players, no vloggers, and there were vastly fewer and less well paid professional actors, musicians, and writers. Also, people in 1850 didn't have toilets, showers, dishwashers, refrigerators, televisions, instant pots, smartphones, or insulin. The amount of labor needed to supply the standard of living of 1850 in 2019 is vastly less than the labor that was used to supply it in 1850. The same trend will continue in the future. By 2050 the labor needed to supply a 2019 standard of living will be less than what was used in 2019. There will be jobs that don't exist today in 2050, and 2040, and 2030, and even 2020, that's how the economy works. That's been true throughout the entire holocene.

The problem is not fundamentally about the size of the well of labor to be done, that well is bottomless. The problem is rather one of economics and monetary systems. And this is not a new problem either. When wealth is hyper concentrated it actually reduces economic activity (which, remember, has nothing to do with money and everything to do with goods and services) because it shunts a huge percentage of the population out of active participation in the economy.

Imagine an alternate world with different money systems in circulation, for simplicity let's just imagine two sets: rich and poor people money. Imagine that it is illegal to trade one for the other (meaning you cannot use rich people money to buy up poor people money), imagine that you take all of the money as it exists today in the developed world and you label it "rich people money". Then, you introduce a new set of currency, the only thing special about it is that people in the top 1/4 by income (of rich people money) are legally prohibited from owning it or using it. Now you have this entire sub-economy of the bottom 3/4 who are isolated from the rest. Will people do jobs, provide services and make goods only for "poor people money"? Of course they will, because ultimately the money is just a medium for exchanging labor and value. People whose labor isn't valued in the rich people money economy will likely still be able to sell their work in the poor people money economy. And, as I said, there is an effectively infinite pool of work to be done so there will be jobs for people to do. Everyone in the developed world today has needs that aren't being met currently, all an economy is is a way for people to meet each others needs through labor via a medium of exchange.

Now, you can get to a state of having just one set of money and one whole economy where everyone is fully participatory but you need to bring up the wages and decrease the inequality in the system. If the wage floor in the US were closer to the $20/hr norm from the mid 20th century instead of the $7/hr it is today then there'd be a lot more money in the hands of those in the bottom 3/4 of the economy. And those people would be able to build their wealth, employ others, spend more money on more goods and services, etc. and result in a more fully participatory economy. We've spent the last nearly half century practically wrecking our own economic system, raiding it for the benefit of the hyper-elite. This is not a natural nor necessary development, it has been a choice. And we can just as easily choose other things to do.

You're forgetting that things are getting automated. More and more work is done by robots and software. Faster, cheaper, better than human labor.
Have you read the article on disability being the new welfare for blue collar workers in middle america? I suspect that's already filling the gap. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Ez ... goes from the poor to the rich until the economy busts open
We need to create laws about ethical data management so companies like Google and Facebook will be forced to hire more people. The algorithms don't work; hate speech, Russian trolls, anti-vax, etc, are all screwing up things too much.
Its amazing to me how many shops I walk past are completely empty these days. I don't know how they can afford to keep the lights on, let alone stock the place.

I myself swore I'd never buy clothes and shoes online, but have started doing this too. Its so much easier and cheaper.

All of this will have repercussions to the commercial real estate space. Who's going pay for the mortgage if there is hardly any tenant? Who's going to buy any more commercial space from the banks that forecloses them?
Commercial real estate is already feeling the effects and trying to figure out how to react. My main street is turning what was formerly used as retail space into microbrew beer venues and experiences like escape rooms and craft shops where people do things together. I'm not convinced it is a bad thing that we no longer waste so much space on retail.
Suburban/rural-ish malls are a particular problem because they're based around the idea of anchor tenants (like Sears) who draw people into malls with lots of smaller shops that people mostly go to because they're already in the mall for the anchor store.

I have a friend who follows retail for a financial firm. She's of the opinion that the bloodletting in retail is just getting started.

>All of this will have repercussions to the commercial real estate space. Who's going pay for the mortgage if there is hardly any tenant?

Converting them to residential could be one solution. With climate change intensifying weather events, an arcology where you can live, have a few shops, and a food court without ever going outside could be quite useful.

"I myself swore I'd never buy clothes and shoes online, but have started doing this too. Its so much easier and cheaper."

The main reason I don't buy shoes online is because it's so difficult to find a good fit.

In a store I can easily and quickly try on a whole bunch of shoes, and if none of them fit or I don't like them, all I do is just walk out of the store.

With online shoe purchases, I have to not only wait for delivery but then if they don't fit I have to send them back. Also, I've heard of Amazon closing people's accounts when they made too many returns, so even though Amazon has a great return policy, I am wary of trying on and returning too many shoes. I'd just rather shop in a brick and mortar store when none of this is an issue.

As for Payless, I love them. I could find much cheaper shoes there than anywhere else in my area, and I had no complaints about the quality of the shoes I bought. Their closure means I'll have to pay more for shoes, which is something I can ill afford to do.

Not to shill, but with Amazon Wardrobe, they explicitly expect you to send some of the products back. The other differences are that you are not billed until you decide what to keep and (to me, the biggest innovation), they use a box that is perforated with peel-and-stick strips for you to use to mail back and also include a pre-printed return label.

That last one is huge for me because the local UPS store got wise to Amazon returns and now charges $1.50 for the first printout, but only if you email them, which neatly captures everyone who needs to print a return label, but doesn't have a printer of their own.

I recently lost a lot of weight and so I wasn't sure what size I was for a lot of items. So I just ordered a couple different sizes and sent back the ones that didn't fit. Such a better experience than trying to find multiple sizes of the same thing in a store, then going to the dressing room where everything is counted because I'm assumed to be a criminal.

Biggest down side is that they use their very lowest priority and slowest shipping for it. But for me, clothes are rarely urgent.

> I myself swore I'd never buy clothes and shoes online

Curious, what made you swear you would never do that?

Yep. I'm so surprised there haven't more solutions to get even short term tenants in these places. Pop-up shops on the cheap until a longer term tenant signs.

Then I'm also surprised how many salons and banks however can keep filling in these empty stores.

We have 3 shoe stores in my town of ~30k (not sure how they can continue), but it seems e-commerce is bringing more efficiency to the market and allowing cheaper pricing.

Edit: E-commerce is projected to increase to 15% of retail sales by 2021.

Another one to add to the list -KB Toys, Sears, Kmart, Blockbuster, Montgomery Wards, Circuit City. Thanks for the memories.
Weird Stuff.
Most of our tired strip malls across the US should be demolished for housing.
Most of them aren't worth it. If a mall is failing, it probably exists in an area that is failing as well.

Malls with primarily upper middle class consumers and up are doing quite well.

"Someone" will doubtless do so if it makes economic sense to do so. In practice, even leaving aside zoning, there isn't a lot of residential demand for apartment buildings in the middle of a strip mall. They actually exist. I'm familiar with a few. But they're not some panacea for housing demand in the highest priced areas.
Just as a random tid-bit, I take walks after lunch through a shopping plaza.

There was a Payless store that opened around 2016 and stayed open for less than a year until being closed. Not sure what that was about. Guess it was never doing that well.

To clarify - Payless is putting more people out work than the entire coal mining industry in the US. But don’t worry the government is supporting the miners. And subsidizing their employers.
That seems unlikely.

Coal mining: ~50,000 jobs (per BLS, described here: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jun...)

Payless globally: ~18,000 jobs (and international stores are not closing, per https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/business/payless-closing-stor...)

There are, give or take, 50k employed by the coal industry in the USA [0]. Payless employs only 18k worldwide [1].

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_St... 1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/business/payless-closing-stor...

> Payless is putting more people out work than the entire coal mining industry in the US

Source?

Most comments seem to quibble about exact numbers. That the number of people let go is comparable is enough to give you a pause.
I thought they ALREADY closed. wow.
I think it's premature to lament the loss of 18k ultimately low quality jobs. The trend of retail giants going out of business means that commercial real estate gets cheaper.

For most people starting a business means opening a storefront.

It takes years for retail space to be renovated or converted. Meanwhile, people who are now out of a job will need to eat until then.