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The retail
blight that has laid waste to malls and shopping plazas across America has
claimed yet another high-value victim near our Colorado neighborhood: The Great
Indoors, a remodeling and redecorating megastore in Broomfield’s
Flatiron Marketplace. When the Sears-owned emporium goes darks in
mid-December, it will leave 58 people jobless and a 155,000-square-foot
building empty. It could also sink the entire Flatiron Marketplace, since the
closure will more than double the facility’s vacancy rate to 67%. That
number had hovered near 30% for the last couple of years after Office Depot,
Linens N Things and Nordstrom Rack departed in quick succession, leaving the shopping
center’s manager with the daunting task of finding new tenants even as
retail vacancies continue to soar locally and nationally.
The huge new
hole in the retail landscape comes at a bad time for nearby Flatiron Crossing
Mall, a 1.5 million-square-foot, $220 million shopping center that itself is
reeling from the recent closures of Borders Books and Ultimate Electronics.
Other stores that have closed there in recent years include Abercrombie &
Fitch, which mistakenly thought its snob-appeal pricing would survive the
Great Recession; Fossil, McDonald’s, Godiva Chocolates, Sharper Image
and numerous smaller retailers. The exodus actually began about eight years
ago when one of Flatiron Crossing’s anchor tenants, Lord & Taylor,
became a casualty of a 32-store closing by the parent company. The two-story
building that had housed Lord & Taylor, an upscale department store, sat
empty for six years, a gangrenous appendage of a mall that has been in
survival mode ever since.
Will City Survive Loss?
An even bigger
casualty of these closings could be Broomfield, which depends heavily on
sales taxes to fill its coffers. Years ago, the City of Broomfield split off
from Boulder County and re-incorporated as a county in order to pursue
commercial growth aggressively. Regardless of whether this strategy backfires
on them, sending Broomfield into bankruptcy, the grim retail picture is
certain to necessitate severe budget cutbacks. Towns have gone bankrupt
before, and if it were to happen to Broomfield, it wouldn’t be the
first time that a an overly ambitious municipal
growth scheme put taxpayers on the hook for more than they’d bargained
for.
We
can’t speak for other regions of the country that may be experiencing
similarly hard times on the retail front. In fact, our observations have
downplayed the extent of the local problem, which has seriously affected or
shuttered several malls in the area. We can’t imagine who will
eventually fill the huge spaces being left by The Great Indoors, Borders,
CompUSA and too many others. Even more worrisome is the possibility that the
few big-box store chains that remain will go out of business, creating more
vacancies than could be filled, even, in a decade of prosperity. It took much
longer than that to bring U.S. consumerism to a full-boil, and even if it
should return, the big-box concept may be dead, replaced by online shopping.
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