We have Office Depots spotted all over the landscape here, and one Office
Max in Mobile. Closures are a big problem here, too. Developers keep
building new shopping centers anyway, and what happens is that (a) stores
move from the relatively new shopping center to the slightly newer one,
leaving an empty storefront in the older one, and (b) companies that had
signed on to be located in the newer one go bust, leaving holes there as
well. A neighboring city offered ridiculous development incentives to a
developer building a shopping center anchored by a Bass Pro Shop; Bass Pro
did at least come through, with a huge store and apparently a lot of
traffic, but one of the other big draws was supposed to be a Circuit City,
and they went out of business AFTER putting up their sign but before
actually moving in. I have no idea how many other of the promised stores
have actually materialized, as I've not yet made it to that center.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
Staples we have plenty of. With their high prices. Office Depot seems
to be in "complementary distribution," as linguists say, with Office
Max -- you don't find both stores in the same area.
OD presumably went the way of a lot of stores across the river in
Manhattan: the landlord raises the rent, the store has to leave, the
store has been empty for a year. And since this was a big retail
location, it means almost the entire building is empty -- the second
and third floors are given over to medical offices, but there is/was a
Toys R Us competitor on the lower level. Don't know if it's survived.
(West 8th St., one of the main shopping streets in Greenwich Village,
is now empty storefront after empty storefront. TLA Video was one of
the casualties. Coliseum Books, the last big independent bookstore in
Manhattan, got priced out of _two_ locations in five years.)
