Malls and Stand Alone Business

When malls became the commonplace back in the 70's the trend was to shop at the malls and the stand alone businesses started to close up shop. Many stand alone businesses suffered because of the new landscape of shopping malls.

In the 70's my wife and I bought a stand alone business and began our journey of paying very high interest rates on our business loan. If I remember correctly, I think we paid 15 - 20 percent interest for a few years on our loan. This cut into profits severely. Another thing that hurt our stand alone business was the surgence of shopping malls.

It seemed that everyone loved shopping in malls. It was so different than any other shopping experience that had been available before. I loved to go to malls myself and I even looked into moving our business to a shopping mall. The rental cost for floor space was unbelievably high and coupled with the high interest rates we were already paying on our business loan, it was not a move that I felt we could make.

I remember another local business owner telling me the shopping mall would turn stand alone business sections of towns into ghost towns. The building that housed our business was 4,000 square feet and at one time was worth over $100,000. But, soon after shopping malls showed up to dot the landscape, our building was not worth $20,000.

Even though shopping malls were the places to be in the 70's, I made the statement many times that it was just a trend and shopping would some day return to the stand alone businesses. And that has happened in 2014. For many years now businesses have been leaving the high priced rent of the shopping mall to become stand alone businesses again. Malls have turned into ghost towns. It is almost sad to walk through the once bustling malls to see the lights out in the empty stores.

But, just like everything else, the high overhead of the shopping malls have made these places into dinosaurs that may never recover. With profit margins becoming smaller because of competition, ways of keeping overhead down will have to be used. Malls may continue this downward trend if they can not find a way to cut expenses.

One Enormous Warehouse

Back in the 70's I used to constantly coin the phrase 'Our country will become just one big warehouse'. Manufacturing in the United States was being replaced with warehouses. Instead of the U.S. striving to lead the world in manufacturing, we were settling for becoming a huge warehouse for the rest of the world's manufactured goods.

Our corporations were becoming exporters of ideas and raw materials that were becoming finished products in other parts of the world. Whether the reasons for this were cheaper labor, convenience, labor disputes, or just plain laziness, it doesn't matter. The reality was that factories became warehouses. Our jobs became less skilled (loaders and unloaders), instead of the many skilled positions that manufacturing had required.

The garment industry in our small town was a casualty of this kind of thinking. We had both a dress factory and a shirt factory. The dress factory closed around 1982, and the shirt factory closed before that. Then in 1982, the shirt factory reopened as a cutting room and warehouse of supplies. It employed about 10 people. The factory received all the raw materials to manufacture shirts, spread the material on cutting tables, and cut out the parts for the shirts. After the parts of the shirts were cut and bundled up, the thread, buttons, and all the other materials used to make shirts we're shipped to Costa Rica to be sewn together. Then the finished product was shipped back to a warehouse and distributed to stores here in the U.S.

The trend in 2014 is to change the U.S. back to more of a manufacturing country as a matter of pride. Many people are trying to buy U.S. made goods as a first choice, which has created a boom of small manufacturing firms and skilled positions to dot the American landscape.

National news programs have been highlighting American-Made products and the grassroots organizations that are digging deep to become successful to put America back in the manufacturing business.

It is going to take all of us in this country to change the habits of 30 to 40 years so that America can become what it once was in the manufacturing industry.

Buy American!