Our local shopping mall.
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Chavtown (Crawley) has a shopping mall and during the last two or three years a number of shops in it have closed down or moved to lower rental units. The shops that closed looked grim from the outside with piles of uncollected mail, stacks of removed shelving and broken display cabinets, that sort of thing. The managing agents of the mall tried to cover the frontage with display posters but for Debenhams, the major retail tenant, it must have negated their brand image to some extent. There were many shops involved in the closures. Roughly one third of a side (ground and upper levels) have closed. It looked really horrible. Now, the managing agents have cleaned it up. They've spent a lot of money putting plasterboard over the entire frontage of all the shops that they can't rent out. It's professionally done and if I could get a plasterer to redo my house as well as they've done there I'd be very happy. It's all been top-coated in white paint and whether they'll dress it up decoratively remains to be seen. The impression I'm forming is that they're trying to eradicate any evidence of the trading decay that set in. Dressing it to look like a wall that's always been there will make it look nicer (which it has) but as I walk around the mall I see other smaller units closing down or reopening with other blink and you'll miss it, here today, gone tomorrow shops. I worked in Farnborough for three months and the local paper carried the sad story that of some 68+ retail units in the main shopping hub, some 35 or so had closed down and that was in early 1998 not long after we moved over from Joburg. I don't know if you can blame internet trading for the decline as clearly, places like Oxford Street buck the trend. Then again, who'd want to go to Farnborough except for people who live local and then again who'd want to visit Crawley either? Whatever the reason, it's kind of sad to see major shopping areas going down the toilet. A couple of kilometres away the County Oak (not a bloody tree in sight) retail park seems to be thriving. I know trading conditions are difficult and in some stores they have 160+ applicants for every job on the shop floor. I'm not sure what the point of all of this is but now that I'm spending time at home and I walk into the mall for a coffee most afternoons I'm starting to see things now that normally I'd never notice.
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any
When there was only one store and people had very limited options for travel then that single store lasted for years. When there are multiple stores and even different ways to shop and various ways to travel then people use more criteria for deciding how and where to spend their time. Some of that is based on entertainment and new can be entertaining. Additionally when there was only one store then if it wasn't well run then it didn't matter because there was no choice. But with more options small problems can result in larger losses over time.