On the ropes
Down in Clackistan, the big mall may be going under. Like so many others, they've been Amazonned. KGW reports:
The owners of Clackamas Town Center have defaulted on $191 million in mortgage debt.
The default comes just months ahead of a slate of scheduled lease expirations affecting nearly half of the rentable space at the 1.4 million-square-foot shopping mall, according to loan servicer reports.
The prospect of losing the mall is daunting. Where will Grandma go to get her Cinnabon? Where will the criminals go to shoplift? Where will the crazies go to shoot people? Oh, well. We'll always have the Mystery Train to Milwaukie.
I feel their pain. I haven't visited a big mall for any reason for over a decade. There is simply no reason to do so. I think my last trip to a mall was Washington Square to visit the long gone cutlery store to drop off some knives for sharpening, probably in about 2005.
ReplyDeleteWhen the high end stores began to falter, the mall was doomed. The Lloyd Center saw it earlier. And like the Lloyd Center, the high end customers went away.
ReplyDeleteIs Washington Square next? If so, where will our Beaverton seniors walk in bad weather?
ReplyDeleteWashington Square is a little different due to it's newer annex of relatively popular stores. The former Sears end was slumping before Sears left, and now I've no place to return my "lifetime warranty" socket wrenches when they inevitably fail. The few times I've been to the mall overthe past few years it seemed like it was doing ok, but my visits and related spending is way down over decades past.
ReplyDeleteI've visited both Clackamas Town Center and Washington Square within the last thirty days. Town Center is toast. There's nothing happening there outside the Cheesecake Factory and a few shops in the new annex. A friend of mine briefly managed a greeting card store there about thirty years ago. The opening was delayed by several days because the carpet didn't meet the mall spec for color. It was a shade off. Fascinating the amount of control they had over every last aspect of the place back when it was rocking. Now it's just a bunch of nomadic businesses selling cheap imports. Brick and mortar Temu.
ReplyDeleteWashington Square has an Apple Store and a Lego Store. The latter had a line out the door when I visited on Sunday. The place was definitely bustling, even with the dead vestige of Sears at one end. At the other end...the exterior or the Penney's store is really something to behold. It looks like how I remember the catalog in the late-seventies. Definitely a relic.
Back in my Amazon days a few years back, a friend of mine and I hatched an idea to buy all the Sears leases across the country and create a seasonal Amazon experience in each one. The idea was to completely tear down and restock the store four times a year, making a unique experience filled with popular items from the website. I think it would be a huge hit. It'd also save malls. A true win-win. I've seen Amazon has played with a similar concept, but not to this degree.
Strange no one seems to mention Cascade Station or Bridgeport. Brick and mortar isn't dead, it's just not what it was in the 80s. Maybe the answer at Clackamas is to bulldoze it and start anew.
Or put the new Trail Blazer arena there.
DeleteHow the mighty have fallen.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that Washington Square seems to be doing fine. I think partially that the owners of Washington Square have done a good job of reinvesting in the property, and maybe partly the demographics of the location-- lots of young families?
ReplyDeleteAnd yet Washington Square and Bridgeport Village are booming. Different demographics I suppose. WS has worked hard to stay with the times though, unlike CTC and LC. WS is also almost 100% occupied now.
ReplyDeleteThe acronyms. How hard is it to type complete words?
DeleteIf you want to kill Washington Square, extend a Max line to it.
ReplyDeletePerfect observation
DeleteBeside the obvious explosion in online shopping, the malls made a big mistake in not making it more open to public life by having a reason to go to there for not just shopping. Not quite sure how that would work but wandering around window gazing has its limits.
ReplyDelete