Retail price
Good Sunday morning, friends. Our on-again/off-again dance with winter produced a small snowfall early this morning, so if you're in central Kentucky with places to go this morning, please be careful!
My wife and I yesterday made a day trip to Cincinnati, just for a change of pace and to visit some places we don't have here in Cincinnati. As I've explained in this space before, we like visiting Cincinnati, because it's the nearest "large" city to us and it's just a little more than an hour away by car.
Anyway, our primary destinations when visiting the Queen City (with apologies to Charlotte, which also calls itself the same) usually begin with the Kenwood Towne Centre, at the intersection of Kenwood and Montgomery Roads and adjacent to I-71. This mall is one of the few well-maintained enclosed shopping malls in the region (we have Fayette Mall here in Lexington that could also be described similarly) and it generally a pleasure to visit.
We arrived yesterday just before the official opening time of the stores therein, and after recognizing that we'd need to work to avoid the aggressive yet oblivious mall walkers that have free rein until the place opens for business, we began to survey the end of the mall where we generally park and enter.
Women's clothier Talbots--gone. Bankhardt's Luggage and Gifts--also gone. Other stores had relocated into other spaces since our last visit. But the sight of vacant spaces in such a bustling mall was a bit unusual in our lengthy history of visiting there two or three times per year.
To be fair, some of the relocating stores are doing so for good reasons, I'd assume. For instance, Vera Bradley, the purveyor of brightly colored fabric handbags and accessories is relocating to space closer to the center of the mall, which will put them in the middle of far more foot traffic than being at the far end of the mall. Worth noting that their current location is not far from Nordstrom's, an upscale department store, but without Talbots close by, perhaps they felt it best to be where the action is.
There were other spaces that were vacant as we made our way through the mall, but we were not able to identify what they formerly were, as our last visit had been seven months earlier. The stores we especially enjoy--Apple, Pottery Barn, Dillard's, Williams-Sonoma--are all available here in Lexington, but not with the size or merchandise selection as the Kenwood locations. All of them were enjoying a lot of traffic, but whether they were selling a lot was hard to tell.
So with the notable instance of some vacant spaces (and that's probably not unexpected in retail after the holiday shopping season), Kenwood Towne Centre is doing well.
Let me contrast that with another mall not all that far away, less than twenty miles. On our way home last night we stopped at the Florence Mall to visit their Sears store, as we no longer have a full-sized Sears location here in Lexington. My wife needed something from the Lands' End store, so that was an easy stop. We entered through the mall entrance at the Sears end of the building and were greeted by low light and multiple retail spaces completely vacant, plus we noticed that a full-service Italian restaurant located by that entrance had closed. There were vacancies in both the upper and lower levels, too.
When we entered the Sears store there were no customers, at 7:00 PM on a Saturday night. My wife found what she was looking for and then we had to search for someone to ring up our sale, which was no easy task. I'd guess this location may be on Sears' next listing of pending store closures.
By chance I visited a Sears store in the Louisville area last week, and noticed roughly the same circumstances. Really sad to see a former pillar of American retail falling on such hard times. My reason for going there was to return a Lands' End item of my own which proved defective two years after purchase, and to my astonishment, they actually refunded my entire purchase price, advising me to take it to "the nearest Sears store" or return it to their Wisconsin HQ at my expense. I will continue to buy certain items from Lands' End, especially having seen their dedication to customer satisfaction.
The decline of traditional retailing is inevitably going to continue, as our society opts more and more for the convenience and value of online shopping. Clearly, Sears is one of those retailer that did not change with the times, at least not enough to help themselves avoid their current predicament.
My wife and I yesterday made a day trip to Cincinnati, just for a change of pace and to visit some places we don't have here in Cincinnati. As I've explained in this space before, we like visiting Cincinnati, because it's the nearest "large" city to us and it's just a little more than an hour away by car.
Anyway, our primary destinations when visiting the Queen City (with apologies to Charlotte, which also calls itself the same) usually begin with the Kenwood Towne Centre, at the intersection of Kenwood and Montgomery Roads and adjacent to I-71. This mall is one of the few well-maintained enclosed shopping malls in the region (we have Fayette Mall here in Lexington that could also be described similarly) and it generally a pleasure to visit.
We arrived yesterday just before the official opening time of the stores therein, and after recognizing that we'd need to work to avoid the aggressive yet oblivious mall walkers that have free rein until the place opens for business, we began to survey the end of the mall where we generally park and enter.
Women's clothier Talbots--gone. Bankhardt's Luggage and Gifts--also gone. Other stores had relocated into other spaces since our last visit. But the sight of vacant spaces in such a bustling mall was a bit unusual in our lengthy history of visiting there two or three times per year.
To be fair, some of the relocating stores are doing so for good reasons, I'd assume. For instance, Vera Bradley, the purveyor of brightly colored fabric handbags and accessories is relocating to space closer to the center of the mall, which will put them in the middle of far more foot traffic than being at the far end of the mall. Worth noting that their current location is not far from Nordstrom's, an upscale department store, but without Talbots close by, perhaps they felt it best to be where the action is.
There were other spaces that were vacant as we made our way through the mall, but we were not able to identify what they formerly were, as our last visit had been seven months earlier. The stores we especially enjoy--Apple, Pottery Barn, Dillard's, Williams-Sonoma--are all available here in Lexington, but not with the size or merchandise selection as the Kenwood locations. All of them were enjoying a lot of traffic, but whether they were selling a lot was hard to tell.
So with the notable instance of some vacant spaces (and that's probably not unexpected in retail after the holiday shopping season), Kenwood Towne Centre is doing well.
Let me contrast that with another mall not all that far away, less than twenty miles. On our way home last night we stopped at the Florence Mall to visit their Sears store, as we no longer have a full-sized Sears location here in Lexington. My wife needed something from the Lands' End store, so that was an easy stop. We entered through the mall entrance at the Sears end of the building and were greeted by low light and multiple retail spaces completely vacant, plus we noticed that a full-service Italian restaurant located by that entrance had closed. There were vacancies in both the upper and lower levels, too.
When we entered the Sears store there were no customers, at 7:00 PM on a Saturday night. My wife found what she was looking for and then we had to search for someone to ring up our sale, which was no easy task. I'd guess this location may be on Sears' next listing of pending store closures.
By chance I visited a Sears store in the Louisville area last week, and noticed roughly the same circumstances. Really sad to see a former pillar of American retail falling on such hard times. My reason for going there was to return a Lands' End item of my own which proved defective two years after purchase, and to my astonishment, they actually refunded my entire purchase price, advising me to take it to "the nearest Sears store" or return it to their Wisconsin HQ at my expense. I will continue to buy certain items from Lands' End, especially having seen their dedication to customer satisfaction.
The decline of traditional retailing is inevitably going to continue, as our society opts more and more for the convenience and value of online shopping. Clearly, Sears is one of those retailer that did not change with the times, at least not enough to help themselves avoid their current predicament.
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