#1 As you read this article, approximately a billion square feet of retail space is sitting vacant in the United States. #2 Last week, Radio Shack announced that it was going to close more than a thousand stores. #3 Last week, Staples announced that it was going to close 225 stores. #4 Same-store sales at Office Depot have declined for 13 quarters in a row. #5 J.C. Penney has been dying for years, and it recently announced plans to close 33 more stores. #6 J.C. Penney lost 586 million dollars during the second quarter of 2013 alone. #7 Sears has closed about 300 stores since 2010, and CNN is reporting that Sears is expected to shutter another 500 Sears and Kmart locations soon. #8 Overall, sales numbers have declined at Sears for 27 quarters in a row. #9 Target has announced that it is going to eliminate 475 jobs and not fill 700 positions that are currently empty. #10 It is being projected that Aéropostale will close about 175 stores over the next couple of years. #11 Macys has announced that it is going to be closing five stores and eliminating 2,500 jobs. #12 The Children’s Place has announced that it will be closing down 125 of its weakest stores by 2016. #13 Best Buy recently shut down about 50 stores up in Canada. #14 Video rental giant Blockbuster has completely shut down all of their stores. #15 It is being projected that sales at U.S. supermarkets will decline by 1.7 percent this year even as the overall population continues to grow. #16 McDonalds has reported that sales at established U.S. locations were down 3.3 percent in January. #17 A home appliance chain known as American TV in the Midwest is going to be shutting down all 11 stores. #18 Even Wal-Mart is struggling right now. Just check out what one very prominent Wal-Mart executive recently admitted... David Cheesewright, CEO of Walmart International was speaking at the same presentation, and he pointed out that Walmart would try to protect its market share in the US – where the company had just issued an earnings warning. But most of the growth would have to come from its units outside the US. I mean, via these share buybacks? Alas, outside the US too, economies were limping along at best, and consumers were struggling and the operating environment was tough. Were seeing economies under stress pretty much everywhere we operate, Cheesewright admitted. #19 In a recent CNBC article entitled Time to close Wal-Mart stores? Analysts think so, it was recommended that Wal-Mart should close approximately 100 underperforming supercenters in rural locations across America. #20 Retail consultant Howard Davidowitz is projecting that up to half of all shopping malls in America may shut down within the next 15 to 20 years... Within 15 to 20 years, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz expects as many as half of Americas shopping malls to fail. He predicts that only upscale shopping centers with anchors like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus will survive. So is there any hope that things will turn around? Well, if the U.S. economy started producing large numbers of good paying middle class jobs there would definitely be cause for optimism. Unfortunately, that is just not happening. On Friday, we were told that the U.S. economy added 175,000 jobs during the month of February. That sounds pretty good until you realize that it takes almost that many jobs each month just to keep up with population growth. And according to CNS News, the number of unemployed Americans actually grew faster than the number of employed Americans in February... The number of unemployed individuals 16 years and over increased by 223,000 in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In February, there were 10,459,000 unemployed individuals age 16 and over, which was up 223,000 from January, when there were 10,236,000 unemployed individuals. Meanwhile, the labor force participation rate continues to sit at a 35 year low, and a staggering 70 percent of all Americans not in the labor force are below the age of 55. That is outrageous. And things look particularly depressing when you look at the labor force participation rate for men by themselves. In 1950, the labor force participation rate for men was sitting at about 87 percent. Today, it has dropped beneath 70 percent to a brand new all-time record low. The truth is that there simply are not enough jobs for everyone anymore. The chart posted below shows how the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has changed since the turn of the millennium. As you can see, the employment-population ratio declined precipitously during the last recession, and it has stayed below 59 percent since late 2009...
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:59:56 +0000
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