Our politicians are not only killing the middle class, but their favorite stores as well

Tom Lewis, Daily Impact - Familiar brands, friendly to and beloved of the American middle class, are going the way of — well, the way of the American middle class: Sears. J.C. Penney, Kohls, Radio Shack, Target,  and many more — are announcing store closings and layoffs on a regular basis.

Sears lost $300 million last year and is accelerating its store closings, with 235 now on the chopping block....

Preppy young things such as Wet Seal (teen clothes – bankrupt, 338 stores dark, 3,700 laid off), C. Wonder (preppy stuff, gone, 11 stores), and Aeropostale (75 stores closed, 75 more doomed) are sinking to their knees.

Target ... just closed all 133 stores in Canada and laid off 17,000 people. (For a list of all the US stores whose closings in 2015 have so far been announced, go here.)

In addition, the country is becoming littered with closed and rotting shopping centers — abandoned cathedrals of the Consumer Church of America. Once the acme of civilized middle class life, the cultural center-of-mass for two generations, malls are creatures of suburbia, and proliferated with it after World War II. Once built at a rate of 100 per week, there hasn’t been a major new one built in America since 2006. Those that remain have become increasingly irrelevant — and insolvent.

Veteran retail consultant Howard Davidowitz expects as many as half of America’s 1,000 or so malls to fail within 15 to 20 years. He predicts that only the 400 upscale shopping centers with anchors like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus will survive. But midmarket malls, he says, are “going, going, gone.”
What is the reason for what is becoming a mass extinction? Did Internet online sales strike like an asteroid and suck all the oxygen out of big box stores? Well, the Internet accounts for about 13% of retail sales now, hardly a crippling blow. Is it, then, a mass migration of people from the suburbs to the center cities, leaving the malls stranded in a depopulated wasteland? Hardly. A sudden, massive change in tastes? No, that’s not it.

Consultant Davidowitz knows the answer. “This isn’t rocket science,”  he says. “What’s going on is the customers don’t have the fucking money.”