When the Sears at the Montgomery Mall in North Wales, PA, closed, the mall started to go downhill and has never managed to recover. It was not able to find a new tenant for the space, other tenants followed suit and started leaving, the mall defaulted on a loan and is now being put up for sale for a ridiculously low price. Apparently, our path of destruction knows no bounds.
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A class malls continue to do good business even into the pandemic. It seems like a lot of malls got knocked down a class or two precisely because poorly maintained Sears were in them, starting the vicious cycle of declining foot traffic and unleasability of a given location at a decent price. Eddie methodically and incompetently destroyed value at Sears because he never had the first clue as how to run a business be it retail or real estate, and destroyed his hedge fund clients' money (of which he himself was the biggest) all the whole. Making money off of real estate isn't rocket science.
Sorry, that mall sucked to begin with, nothing to do with Sears leaving. The sears building wasn't even useful to use for the county's Covid clinic as the A/C broke a few weeks after they set up. But anyway, it's not like people were flocking to Sears in years prior to its closure.
It’s a vicious circle. Less traffic at malls means less traffic at Sears, causing Sears to close which means even less traffic to malls.
In the areas where Sears closed and sold their real estate before letting the store die on its own, they were replaced by successful stores and the malls are still thriving. But in areas where they didn’t have that foresight, Sears died a painful death (traffic was already low), closed, and that put other retailers barely hanging on in peril, and eventually caused other anchors to close.
Also, as bad as this company was/is managed, malls are dying. All the major anchors have been closing stores. The business that hasn’t been lost to Amazon is either going to places like Walmart/Target (discount) or back to specialty stores like Auto Zone/Tires Plus.
Like all real estate success, it depends on location. The Sears in the Paramus Park, NJ mall got a Stew Leonard's and a - slight - mall expansion within 15 minutes of closing. (And the auto center has recently been occupied as well.)
The problem is that most malls were already in bad shape and one less anchor store - even a poor performing one - doesn't help matters.
Shopping malls have been dying in droves for years now. I don't think the demise of Sears has had much to do with the issue.
The former Kmart by me is becoming a storage place. Based on the parking lot near the end it should mean an uptick in traffic for other stores in the area.
Well, with only about 2 dozen Sears stores left, I don't think they will be taking much of anyone else down with them. Even the Sears stores that are left aren't a draw for shoppers at any mall.......more of a blight actually.