Shoppers flocked to malls on the weekend of 21 and 22 November, telling journalists they wanted to buy holiday gifts ahead of the anticipated Black Friday mobs or before stores were once again shut down amid the surging pandemic.
The shoppers may have been prescient: on 16 November, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered non-essential stores to shutter for two weeks to stem the COVID virus’s spread.
The new shutdown extended through the Black Friday shopping weekend.
Other states may impose their own new wide-ranging lockdowns.
Still, malls may continue to see stronger-than-expected traffic during December.
“Mall visits are rebounding and the pace is picking up heading into a critical holiday period,” according to a report by Placer, a research firm that uses cell phone data to gauge mall traffic.
As an example, the report cited Albany’s Crossgates Mall, where August visits were 46 percent fewer than the year before; in October, traffic was down only 29 percent year-on-year, a gain of 17 percentage points in two months.
However, foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores was still down 31 percent year on year during November’s third week, according to RetailNext, an analytics firm.
Holiday sales this year are likely to rise 3.6 to 5.2 percent above 2019’s, the National Retail Federation has forecast, with online sales swelling 20 to 30 percent from last year’s.
In 2019, the season’s overall sales rose 4 percent from 2018 to $729.1 billion.
TREND FORECAST: Again, we have long forecast the “Pall on the Malls.” Clearly, even when (and if) the COVID War ends and restrictions are lifted, as the “Greatest Depression” worsens and unemployment rises, more malls, large and small, will go bust.
And, as the data shows, plans to reconfigure them for other purposes have, and will be, economically negligible. Thus, bankruptcies will continue to escalate, as will retail real estate values, as mall traffic, which already was in long steady decline, slumps lower.
Beyond the malls, with prime city streets such as those in NYC having been plastered with “For Rent” signs before the COVID lockdowns, both rental prices and real estate values will continue to drop much lower.
