Big Boxes Closing Left and Right
Seems that the prime location of Brentwood & 40 (aka I-64 to non St. Louisans) didn’t help a couple of big boxes stay around. For weeks we’ve seen the “store closing” signs at the Ultimate Electronics store on Eager. Now I get word that Organized Living on Brentwood is closing. The stories are very similar.
Ultimate Electronics is in bankruptcy and is selling off stores to pay debt. The new buyers in the St. Louis area have decided to close at least the Eager location — I’m not sure about the others. Click here for more details from the St .Louis Business Journal.
Organized Living at one time had several stores in the St. Louis area including Union Station. In 2004 they hired a new CEO but she was “laid off” last month along with other employees as OL also enters Chapter 11 bankruptcy. One of the first tasks the new CEO did was to move OL’s headquarters from Kansas City to central Ohio. They were trying to go national and had 25 stores. For more background click here.
Big boxes also have big debt. Don’t think these out of town chain stores are going to help our local economies by providing sales taxes and jobs. They take what they can out of our economy until they go bust. They couldn’t care less about St. Louis.
– Steve
Big boxes also leave very big, very ugly scars on the neighborhoods around them when they become abandoned.
Even large empty downtown office buildings and warehouses don’t have a near-endless expanse of broken, overgrown asphalt and dead light poles surrounding them on three sides.
IMHO, if there’s anything more egregious than the proliferation of these big box stores across Greater Saint Louis, it’s the way in which they’re financed.
Our metro area’s Balkanized government structure and Missouri’s extremely lax TIF laws ensure that our many fiefdoms will continue to compete with one another by subsidizing big box developments.
TIF was originally supposed to stimulate development in “blighted” areas. Now we know that the definition of “blighted,” at least by Missouri standards, must included floodplains, bluffs, and small indoor malls in affluent suburbs. (I’d argue that these places are more blighted now, but that’s beside the point, I suppose.)
Despite the great things that are occuring in the city proper and inner suburbs, Greater Saint Louis will continue to lag behind other cities in real economic growth as long as we’re content to let suburbs siphon businesses from each other. No one wins with this zero-sum economic strategy.
Yup! I totally agree. I am someone living in in the burbs. However I am trying my best not to be sucked into it. I bike to work and bike wherever I can. Even to the Big Box stores (motly TARGET) They actually have a bike rack there in Florissant! The Builders Square in Ferguson has been empty for years! What a waste! I remember when it was farm land. I also remember the farm land across the street where Sam’s / Wal-Mart are located. What a total waste! They get built and then they die…someone else comes in or they are torn down and rebuilt. They won’t last forever! Reality will start to kick in and people will flee these places! As some have already expressed.
Keep Cycling,
Steve- You should do a blog on what happens when a Shopping Mall “dies”, such as Shepherd Mall in Oklahoma City. Because its not located on a freeway; and because other malls took the opportunity to expand and upgrade (and attract the big anchor stores), Shepherd Mall slowly withered and died as the stores left it. They tried facelifts to the mall in the 1980’s but it didn’t work. Its very odd to walk into Shepherd Mall and see what used to be ‘Foot Locker’ next to ‘County Seat’ next to ‘Corn Dog on a Stick’ (signage removed and stores empty, but its clear what they were). Its currently struggling to be reborn, and I believe the former anchor buildings are being utilized by AOL as a call center. The empty in-line stores are still mostly vacant. So what’s the best use for it? I believe it was OKC’s first mall. Should it be reborn as an office park? Municipal? What do you do with a dead mall other than tear it down?