Bye, Bye, Retailers

Here’s a Yahoo!/Tech Ticker interview with retail consultant Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates.  He predicts about 220,000 retail stores closing in 2009, with luxury retailers on “life support”. Among the brand name stores he says are in trouble:

• Nordstrom
• Neiman Marcus
• Tiffany
• Zales
• Saks
• J.C. Penney
• Sears

I drive past the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania in my daily 2 hour drive to work on Wall Street. It’s the largest mall in the U.S. in terms of retail square footage. I don’t see the amount of vacancies in the KOP Mall as I do in the local strip malls, but if those luxury stores listed above start to close, it may be the death of the mall as we know it. Here is a N.Y. Times article on the love affair with malls and how the current economy will shape the future of malls in America. It also mentions a website that keeps track of dead malls.

There does need to be some major consolidation in retail and auto makers. How many different brands and models of cars do we need? Don’t most of them start to look alike after a while? How many stores that sell khakis do we need? I buy my shirts and pants online anyway.