Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio. Nicholas Eckhart Dying shopping malls are wreaking havoc on suburban America HAYLEY PETERSON MAR. 5, 2017, 7:30 AM Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, opened in 1975 to great fanfare as the premier shopping destination for the surrounding community. But customer traffic started to slow more than a decade ago, several department stores abandoned their leases, and the mall began to fail. It lost its last store tenant in 2013. Over that period, the mall was the scene of several crimes. A homeless man was sentenced to a year in prison for living inside a vacant store, another man was electrocuted trying to steal copper wire from the mall, and the body of a likely murder victim was found behind the shopping center. The mall was still vacant last year, and it remained a safety concern — the mayor of Akron instructed residents in July to "stay clear of the area." The city began the process of demolishing the rotting shopping center in late October. Like Rolling Acres, shopping malls across the country are dying, and, in some cases, leaving jobless communities and rotting buildings that are hotbeds for crime in their wake. Dozens of malls have closed in the last 10 years, and many more are at risk of shutting down as retailers like Macy's, JCPenney, and Sears — also known as anchor stores — shutter hundreds of stores to staunch the bleeding from falling sales. The commercial-real-estate firm CoStar estimates that nearly a quarter of malls in the US, or roughly 310 of the nation's 1,300 shopping malls, are at high risk of losing an anchor store. http://www.flickr.com/photos/fanofretail/ http://www.businessinsider.com/author/hayley-peterson http://www.businessinsider.com/author/hayley-peterson http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-suburbia http://www.ohio.com/news/mall-dweller-sentenced-for-living-in-rolling-acres-1.95704 http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/04/would-be_copper_thief_electroc.html http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/11/missing_massillon_man_identifi.html http://www.cleveland19.com/story/32361679/akron-mayor-stay-away-from-rolling-acres-mall-abandoned-mall-photos Many storefronts in the struggling Regency Square Mall in Richmond, Virginia, have gone dark. Business Insider/Hayley Peterson When anchor stores close, it can be hard to find businesses to replace them, because they occupy the multistory buildings at mall entrances that are often at least 100,000 square feet. If no replacement tenant is found, the loss could trigger a decadeslong downward spiral for the shopping mall and surrounding communities. "The communities wither away, and they never come back," said Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates, a national retail consulting and investment banking firm headquartered in New York City. When anchor stores are boarded up, traffic to the retailers in the middle sections of malls tends to decrease. That has been happening at shopping malls nationwide, and now many r.

1. Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio.
Nicholas Eckhart
Dying shopping malls are wreaking havoc on
suburban America
HAYLEY PETERSON
MAR. 5, 2017, 7:30 AM
Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, opened in 1975
to great fanfare as the premier shopping destination
for the surrounding community.
But customer traffic started to slow more than a
decade ago, several department stores abandoned
their leases, and the mall began to fail. It lost its last
store tenant in 2013.
Over that period, the mall was the scene of several
crimes. A homeless man was sentenced to a year in
prison for living inside a vacant store, another man
was electrocuted trying to steal copper wire from
the mall, and the body of a likely murder victim was
found behind the shopping center.
The mall was still vacant last year, and it remained a
safety concern — the mayor of Akron instructed
residents in July to "stay clear of the area." The city
began the process of demolishing the rotting
shopping center in late October.

2. Like Rolling Acres, shopping malls across the
country are dying, and, in some cases, leaving jobless
communities and rotting buildings that are hotbeds for
crime in their wake.
Dozens of malls have closed in the last 10 years, and many
more are at risk of shutting down as retailers like
Macy's, JCPenney, and Sears — also known as anchor stores —
shutter hundreds of stores to staunch the bleeding
from falling sales.
The commercial-real-estate firm CoStar estimates that nearly a
quarter of malls in the US, or roughly 310 of the
nation's 1,300 shopping malls, are at high risk of losing an
anchor store.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fanofretail/
http://www.businessinsider.com/author/hayley-peterson
http://www.businessinsider.com/author/hayley-peterson
http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-suburbia
http://www.ohio.com/news/mall-dweller-sentenced-for-living-
in-rolling-acres-1.95704
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/04/would-
be_copper_thief_electroc.html
http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/11/missing_massillon_ma
n_identifi.html
http://www.cleveland19.com/story/32361679/akron-mayor-stay-
away-from-rolling-acres-mall-abandoned-mall-photos
Many storefronts in the struggling Regency Square Mall in
Richmond, Virginia, have gone dark.
Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
When anchor stores close, it can be hard to find businesses to

3. replace them, because they occupy the multistory
buildings at mall entrances that are often at least 100,000 square
feet. If no replacement tenant is found, the loss
could trigger a decadeslong downward spiral for the shopping
mall and surrounding communities.
"The communities wither away, and they never come back," said
Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz &
Associates, a national retail consulting and investment banking
firm headquartered in New York City.
When anchor stores are boarded up, traffic to the retailers in the
middle sections of malls tends to decrease. That
has been happening at shopping malls nationwide, and now
many retailers are going out of business and closing
their stores as a result.
Within the last couple of months, several mall-based stores —
including American Apparel, Abercrombie & Fitch,
The Limited, Bebe, BCBG, and Wet Seal — have announced
mass closures.
Skye Gould
The process of a shopping mall shutting down is slow, often
over the course of a decade or more. As stores are
boarded up one by one, shopper traffic slows and crime in the
area tends to spike, Davidowitz says.
"Malls are big, big contributors to city and state taxes, jobs, and
everything," Davidowitz said. "Once they close,
they are a blight on the community for a very long time."
Kevin Zent, 59, of Memphis, Tennessee, said that crime is a

4. huge problem at malls near his home and that he no
longer shops at them as a result.
"Cars are keyed randomly in mall parking lots, and there is not
enough security to provide the level of safety a
family wants while they are at the mall," he told Business
Insider.
Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, in 2014.
Nicholas Eckhart
There were 890 reported crime incidents at one Memphis-area
mall between January 1, 2012, and July 15, 2015,
according to an investigation last summer by the local NBC
affiliate WMC Action News.
Zent said he believes that crime is the biggest reason mall
traffic has declined in the last decade, though many
analysts attribute those declines to shoppers' changing
preferences and the rise of online shopping.
Studies show that Americans are increasingly choosing to spend
money on technology and experiences like
vacations over apparel. When they shop for clothing, an
increasing number of them are going to discount stores
like TJ Maxx or ordering from Amazon.
"The shopping that used to be done in the mall is now at Family
Dollar, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, TJ Maxx,
and Walmart," Davidowitz said.
http://www.wmcactionnews5.com/story/29576201/police-reveal-
surprising-crime-statistics-for-memphis-area-malls

5. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-becomes-the-biggest-
clothing-retailer-in-the-us-2016-10
The food court at Regency Square Mall in Richmond, Virginia.
Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
Along with potential upticks in crime, dying malls can lead to
building vacancies in the areas immediately
surrounding them.
For example, Regency Mall in Augusta, Georgia, closed in
2002. Fifteen years later, most of the properties along
Gordon Highway where it's located are also vacant, according to
WJBF. This has made it difficult to persuade
developers to consider renovating the mall.
In best-case scenarios, malls will redevelop anchor spaces and
find tenants able to pay even higher rents, like
restaurants or apartment complexes. The likelihood of this
outcome is much higher in affluent urban areas.
Two developers are trying to make this kind of redevelopment
happen at Regency Square Mall in Richmond,
Virginia, which has lost more than a dozen tenants and two
Macy's stores over the last several years. The mall's
JCPenney and Sears stores remain open, but multiple stores in
the middle of the mall have gone dark.
http://wjbf.com/2016/07/25/experienced-retail-developer-
weighs-in-on-possibilities-of-south-augustas-regency-mall/
A former Macy's entrance at Regency Square Mall in Richmond,
Virginia, now features a boarded-up wall

6. and a vending machine.
Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
The developers that own the mall have proposed a $35 million
plan to raise the roof of the former Macy's
buildings to make room for a possible movie theater and
trampoline park.
Mark Slusher, senior vice president of Thalhimer Realty
Partners, which owns the mall with The Rebkee
Company, explained the idea behind the proposal at a recent
meeting with local government officials.
"The buzzword is experiential retail," Slusher said, according to
The Richmond Times-Dispatch. "We are trying to
create a new experience and bring people in, to attract them to
the Regency experience. What that means is we
need theaters and craft breweries and restaurants and trampoline
parks and laser tag — things that people can
experience in real life to compete with the internet. That's
becoming our big competitor now — the web. We want
to give people real life experiences."
http://www.richmond.com/business/local/article_80c623d0-
7708-5c88-9122-b749d99b6740.html
Business Insider/Hayley Peterson
Is Ecommerce Right for Your Business? 36 Pros and

7. Cons
Look Beyond the Hype: Analyze the Advantages and
Disadvantages of Ecommerce
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Updated October 17, 2016
I have already written articles about the advantages of
ecommerce and its disadvantages. But those were
focused on the primary pros and cons of ecommerce. There is a
need for a more exhaustive list.
Given below is a large list of advantages and disadvantages of
ecommerce. This list will help you look
beyond the hype and develop your own perspective of the true
value of ecommerce: to businesses and to
consumers. Interestingly there are many advantages for
consumers that might actually be a disadvantage
for ecommerce businesses.
1
Pro: No Standing in Queues or Being Placed on Hold Forever
For customers, this is one of the most popular conveniences of
ecommerce.
2
Con: Lack of Personal Touch
I miss the personal touch and relationship that develops with a
retail store. In comparison, ecommerce is
far more sterile.

8. 3
Pro and Con: Easier to Compare Prices
There are several shopping search engines and comparison
shopping websites that help consumers locate
Bambu Productions/Taxi/Getty Images
https://www.thebalance.com/advantages-of-ecommerce-1141610
https://www.thebalance.com/disadvantages-of-e-commerce-
1141571
https://www.thebalance.com/how-do-successful-ecommerce-
businesses-develop-1141608
the best prices. While buyers love this, sellers find it too
restrictive as many of them get filtered out of the
consumer's consideration set.
4
Pro: Access to Stores Located Remotely
Especially for people who are not situated in major urban
centers, this can be a big advantage. Likewise,
ecommerce opens new markets for ecommerce businesses.
5
Con: Inability to Experience the Product Before Purchase
There are many products that consumers want to touch, feel,
hear, taste and smell before they buy.
Ecommerce takes away that luxury.
6
Pro: No Need for a Physical Store

9. Since there is no need for a physical store, ecommerce
businesses save on one of the biggest cost
overheads that retailers have to bear.
7
Con: Need for an Internet Access Device
Ecommerce can only be transacted with the help of an Internet
access device such as a computer or a
smartphone.
8
Con: Need for an Internet Connection
Not just does one need an access device, one also needs Internet
connectivity to participate in
ecommerce.
9
Pro and Con: Common Availability of Coupons and Deals
Though there is nothing about ecommerce that makes it
intrinsically oriented to discounts, the way online
https://www.thebalance.com/set-your-e-commerce-business-
apart-1141662
https://www.thebalance.com/ecommerce-businesses-
understanding-types-1141595
https://www.thebalance.com/starting-an-online-business-for-
dummies-1141439
business has evolved has led to lowered prices online. This is an
advantage for the buyer, but a
disadvantage for the seller.

10. 10
Pro: Lots of Choices
Since there are no shelf size or store size limitations,
ecommerce businesses are able to list many different
items.
11
Pro: Stores Are Open All the Time
Eliminating the limitation of store-timings is a big convenience
for consumers.
12
Con: Credit Card Fraud
Consumers and businesses alike suffer from credit card fraud.
Some doomsayers go so far as to predict
that fraud will lead to the demise of online business.
13
Con: Security Issues
Consumers run the risk of identity fraud and other hazards as
their personal details are captured by
ecommerce businesses. Businesses run the risk of phishing
attacks and other forms of security fraud.
14
Pro: Ability to Buy and Sell to Other Consumers
Auction sites and listing sites allow individuals to buy and sell
from each other. This opens a whole new
paradigm of ecommerce. The most famous enabler of consumer
to consumer (C2C) ecommerce is

11. eBay.com.
15
Pro: Instantaneous Purchase of Digital Goods
No longer does one need to go and buy a CD of one's favorite
music. Within a few minutes, one can
https://www.thebalance.com/starting-an-online-business-for-
dummies-1141439
https://www.thebalance.com/chargebacks-understand-and-avoid-
reversed-charges-315219
download digital products, such as music, and start using them
immediately.
16
Pro: Ability to Have Vendors Bid for Your Business
Online business has opened new vistas for consumers. It is now
possible to list your requirements online,
and have suppliers bid for your business.
17
Con: Delay in Receiving Goods
If shopping is about instant gratification, then consumers are
left empty-handed for some time after making
a purchase on an ecommerce website.
18
Con: Inability to Identify Scams
Consumers are often taken in by fly-by-night ecommerce
websites that look good but are up to no good.

12. Scam artists often accept orders and then disappear.
19
Pro: Not About "Location Location Location"
Conventional wisdom lays a lot of emphasis on the location of
the physical store. But ecommerce has
liberated businesses from the shackles of location.
20
Pro: Ability to Scale Up Rapidly
Ecommerce businesses are able to scale up easier than physical
retailers, as they are not bound by
physical limitations. Of course, logistics get tougher as one
grows. However, with the choice of the right
third party logistics provider, one can scale up one's logistics
too.
21
Pro: Unlimited Shelf Space
Being liberated from a physical store also entails being
liberated from the limitations of shelf space. This
https://www.thebalance.com/3pl-ecommerce-logistics-1141740
allows ecommerce businesses to "stock" a wide range of
products.
22
Con: Extraordinarily High Reliance on the Website
For an ecommerce business, its website is everything. Even a
few minute of downtime can lead to a

13. substantial loss of money, not to mention customer
dissatisfaction.
23
Con: Multiplicity of Regulations and Taxation
Regulators are still not clear about the tax implications of
ecommerce transactions. This is especially true
when the seller and buyer are located in different territories.
This can lead to multiplicity of taxation as well
as higher expense on accounting and compliance.
24
Con: Chargebacks
Credit card issuers are quite liberal in permitting chargebacks
upon customer request. This puts the
ecommerce businesses in a bad position if the goods have
already been delivered.
25
Pro: Ease of Communication
Since the ecommerce merchant captures contact information in
the form of email, sending out automated
and customized emails is quite easy.
26
Pro: Superior Customization
Using cookies and other methods of monitoring a consumer's
behavior, an ecommerce website can
customize many aspects of what the consumer sees.
27
Pro: No Need to Handle Currency Notes

14. In physical stores, many customers pay with currency notes. For
a large multi-store retailer, this creates the
https://www.thebalance.com/what-to-know-about-starting-
ecommerce-business-1141592
https://www.thebalance.com/advantages-of-ecommerce-1141610
need for careful cash management. For the tax authority, it
creates a problem in being able to accurately
evaluate a retailer's earnings. Electronic payments leave a
stronger trail, and this helps the retailer as well
as the tax authority.
28
Pro: Efficient Procurement
Because the entire supply chain can be interlinked with business
to business ecommerce systems,
procurement becomes faster, transparent, and cheaper.
29
Pro and Con: Delivery of Each Individual Item
The consumer experiences the convenience of having goods
home-delivered. But the logistics involved
with delivering each individual item adds substantial strain to
the ecommerce business operation.
30
Con: Expense and Expertise Needed for Ecommerce
Infrastructure
Substantial information infrastructure is required to run an
effective ecommerce website. And when you

15. factor in denial-of-service attacks, the scale of infrastructure
needs to be still greater.
31
Pro: Superior Inventory Management
If ecommerce businesses can tune into the order processing
systems of their suppliers, they can maintain
lower inventories and still not face stock-out situations.
32
Pro: Reduced Employee Costs
Since ecommerce processes are automated to a large extent,
fewer employees are required for lower-end
jobs. Human resources can be used more effectively for higher-
level functions.
33
Pro: Gain Search Engine Traffic
https://www.thebalance.com/business-to-business-ecommerce-
1141703
https://www.thebalance.com/how-does-ecommerce-work-
understand-the-nuts-and-bolts-1141583
Close to 100% of Internet users also use search engines. With
the right ecommerce SEO, search engines
can act as a great source of qualified free traffic.
34
Pro: Ability to Sell Low Volume Goods Too
Conventional retail focuses on stocking fast-moving goods.
Pricey shelf-space dictates that items that do

16. not move fast should be candidates for removal from the
product portfolio. The economics of ecommerce
permits selling slow-moving, and even obsolete, products to be
included in the catalog.
35
Pro: Ability to Track Logistics
Since effective logistics is the key to a successful ecommerce
business, the ability to trigger and monitor
logistics online is a valuable tool for the ecommerce business.
36
Con: Need for Expanded Reverse Logistics
In the case of physical retail, customers are usually willing to
travel to the retail outlet to return/replace
goods if required. But receiving goods back is a bigger
nightmare for an ecommerce business. This has led
to the growth of the reverse logistics function.
https://www.thebalance.com/search-engine-optimization-
2948419
https://www.thebalance.com/under-the-hood-of-ecommerce-
success-stories-1141579
https://www.thebalance.com/reverse-logistics-ecommerce-
business-1141731