In some ways, a lot of the retail carnage is a correction to the overbuilding of malls, stores, and outlets. There are no less than 5 (FIVE) outlet malls in the DFW metroplex (that I know of), on top of the countless shopping malls the area is home to. None of those numbers include the random stirp malls, or random stand-alone outlet stores and off-price retailers built into strip malls: Beall's, Skechers Outlet, TJMaxx, Factory Connection, Marshall's, Ross, Burlington Coat Factory, Tuesday Morning, and dozens of others that I'm forgetting about right now. I remember my hairstylist in the 90s, Damon, lamenting the newest Walmart superstore going up just a few minutes drive from another Walmart superstore: "How many f@$&ing canister sets with geese painted on them do people really need?"
Damon wasn't wrong. While it is absolutely a shame that so many companies are going bankrupt, and even more awful that so many people are losing their jobs with little opportunity to find a new one, it was inevitable that some stores would have to close because they were cannibalizing shoppers from other locations. I'll use my favorite evil empire example yet again: Walmart came into many many small towns in Texas and built "neighborhood market" grocery stores; in less than a year, many of those stores had closed because there just weren't enough people to support them. Not only did those Walmart workers lose their jobs, so did all the workers at all the stores Walmart ran out of town and out of business. Waskom TX was a prime example of this. Situated on the Texas/Louisiana border, equidistant from Walmarts in Shreveport and Marshall TX (Shreveport has multiple Walmarts, Marshall has one), waskom got a Walmart neighborhood market and lost its local grocer. Within one year, Walmart was closed and waskom was struggling to find anyone to rent the space.
Retailers overestimated the potential for growth, overbuilt, overpromised, and under delivered. The coronapocalypse has hastened a slow decline, and retail workers are paying a very expensive price. Shoppers are paying a price as well, in the form of limited options for in-person shopping, limited options for extended sizes (petite, tall, plus), limited options for different style aesthetics, and limited options for quality products. All that expansion and building had to be paid for somehow, and quality is what suffered.
I remember back-to-school clothes shopping in the 80s. It involved a trip from the Northside of Atlanta to an aunt's lake house on the Georgia/South Carolina border so that we could spend the night there, drive to the outlets in South Carolina in the morning, shop all day, spend a few nights at the lake house, and return to Atlanta after a couple days spent swimming and skiing and such. It wasn't even just my family. Mom's best friend had a lake house literally next door to my aunt's lake house, so we all piled into cars and made it a festive outing for everybody. Shopping and outlets used to be a big deal because there were so few and they were so far apart. Now, outlets are rarely filled with imperfect items; instead they're filled with lesser quality, licensed versions of already not-so-great quality clothes, shoes, and accessories.
Didn't mean to hop on my soap box about this and write a doctoral dissertation. I do get that, for many of us, retail bankruptcies are not good: lost jobs, fewer options for shoppers, empty buildings, unused parking lots and streets that prevent water from absorbing into the earth and cause flash flooding nightmares, collateral damage in the form of lost jobs at restaurants and other secondary businesses that grew around malls and outlets, the list goes on and on. It's awful all around.
