Fleeing

  • Posted by Shaun on February 22nd, 2006 filed in Rants
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Sue and I took a quick trip to the Latham Circle Mall on Monday night. It was our last stop in our search for curtains. I was a bit disappointed for a couple reasons. First, I knew there was a JC Penney in that mall, but I had no idea it would be so small. This place was tiny. The only sold clothes. Nothing else. So, we took a walk to Burlington and it just made me sad to see the shape that mall is in. It is a dying mall. There are a handful of stores and there were “relocation” sales going on that day. The food court is non-existant; there is a pretzel stand, but no restaurants in the food court.

It disappoints me seeing the mall die. It is only a matter of time where they will have to find a new use for the building. I don’t have any idea what they could use it for. This area is just crawling with stores and malls. The trip also got me to thinking about the mall down state. The pretzel shop called it quits last week. The owner has a full time job and kept the store for the heck of it, but she finally got to the point where it wasn’t worth it to keep going. So, she closed the store.

OfficeMax is closing its store too. It just isn’t the store in this mall either. If you do a search on Google News you’ll see that they are closing 110 stores in all. They just picked the ones that are doing too little business. From what I’ve read they are closing the stores by March 31st. The liquidators should be there soon.

From the rumors I’ve heard the mall is going to make an announcement as to their intentions or plans by the end of February or the beginning of March. They haven’t been very forthcoming with information so we aren’t sure if what they have to say will be good or bad. They’ll have their hands full with getting rid of the anchors (Price Chopper, etc) if they want to use the property for some other purpose, but you never know. Money talks.

Speaking of talking it is becoming a more common occurrence where customers ask when the mall or store is closing. I try to be honest with them and tell them that we have no plans to close, but we have no control over what the mall does. I also don’t have information. Some people like to tell me rumors. “I heard they were going to put a Wal-Mart here. Is it true?” The rumor-mill is working quite well nowadays. We’ll just have to see what gets announced.