80,000 MORE U.S. STORES WILL CLOSE BY 2026, UBS PREDICTS. UBS, the Swiss banking and financial services giant, predicts that 80,000 more U.S. retail storefronts – about 9 percent of the remaining total – will go dark by 2026, with e-commerce taking 27 percent of shoppers’ dollars then, compared to 18 percent today.
Most of the closures will come among clothiers, which will give up 21,000 physical locations over the period, UBS said in the report announcing its findings. Electronics stores will close 8,000 and home furnishings stores 7,000.
Macy’s reported that more than 40 percent of its 2020 holiday-season sales were over the Internet; Gap says 44 percent of its sales for the entire year were online. Fifty-four percent of Nordstrom’s sales in 2020’s fourth quarter came through the web.
Auto parts, grocery, and home improvement businesses will close the fewest stores, as demand for those goods tends to remain steady, despite shifts in the economy, the bank noted.
Retailers overall shuttered 9,832 stores in 2019, another 8,741 in 2020, and 3,169 so far this year, according to Coresight Research, which reported 3,535 store openings this year as of 1 April.
The net new openings are being driven by cheaper rents for a wider variety of upscale storefronts emptied by the pandemic and economic shutdown, Coresight noted.
In 2000, there were 90,000 shopping centers of all kinds in the U.S., UBS said in its report. The figure rose to 112,000 in 2010 and 115,000 at the end of 2020, giving every U.S. household 59 square feet of shopping center floor space.
TD BANK WILL CLOSE 82 U.S. BRANCHES. Toronto Dominion Bank, doing business in the U.S. as TD Bank, will close 82 stateside locations after its American unit’s earnings slid 16 percent to $615 million in the first quarter of the company’s fiscal year.
Most of the closures will take place this month and will focus on underperforming sites that are close to other TD locations, Greg Braca, CEO of the bank’s U.S. division, said in an earnings conference call last week.
“It was a larger impact on the number of stores that we will be closing relative to the normal pruning that we would do annually for the last several years,” Braca said in comments reported by Bloomberg.
TD had 1,223 U.S. branches on 1 February, it reported, with the closures amounting to 6.7 percent of branches in the country.
“You’ll see markets in future years where we continue to invest in new stores,” Braca said. “But what you’re also seeing is the need for investment in digital and digital capabilities, and we’re doing just that.”
