Who will be next to go?
With the holiday selling period coming to a close, retailers will take a hard look at their numbers in the coming weeks to see if they met expectations, where they excelled, where they can refine—and some may be forced to turn to the courts to restructure.
Some 28 retailers appeared on retail trade Retail Dive’s recent bankruptcy watch list, a collection that includes J.Crew, Neiman Marcus and J.C. Penney among others.
Although no OC-based companies are on the watch list, the impact of store closures could bring additional headaches for local mall landlords who have already exhausted their options when it comes to creatively putting a new spin on the life of big boxes emptied by tenants such as Sears and, more recently, Forever 21.
How many more food halls can the market support? 2020 may be the year to find out.
“There’s a cultural shift,” Craig Realty Group founder and CEO Steven Craig told the Business Journal last month. “A lot of the products [anchor tenants are] selling have greater competition. For example, if you look at the cosmetics side in regional malls where you could only buy at Macy’s and Nordstrom, that’s not the case anymore.”
