Retail Watchers

Even when there was more oil money, I can't imagine Anchorage having the population base to support a Nordstrom well.

There malls are pretty uniform and have been since the wave of renovations they did to long neglected DeBartolo properties in the early 2000s.

Roz & Ali will be closing, too. The company has had an executive suite shakeup and needed a way to raise their stock price. The cheaper end of the market is probably oversaturated at this point and they reach a lot of the same demographic with their other chains.

"&pizza" is the DC equivalent. They have proliferated like crazy. The pizza itself isn't very good, but DC is a place where pizza has long been pretty bad--bland sauce, cheap toppings and a crust that gets rubbery if not eaten immediately. Blaze is in Pittsburgh and they seem marginall...

Interesting that they remodeled the Rosslyn store. I wondered if it would survive as it hadn't super busy the couple times I was there. It also has an awkward layout. I don't recall all the specifics but it was clearly merchandised in an odd way when I was there before, perhaps reflecting their loca...

Quite a few of the more viable A&Ps went to independents like Butera. I lived near one of their stores that easily could have replaced two small Jewels or a much smaller Dominick's (which was a former Kroger). The smaller Nationals, at least in Chicago proper, seemed to become Walgreen's Pete's ...

Looking at the addresses of their other Business Center locations, at least some are in areas that don't seem like retail hotspots. I would imagine, though, that they are close to other businesses that supply unglamorous services and products, which would be where you expect to find something that d...

there's nothing really new about this, regionally or otherwise. Kroger did this in a lot of their early Greenhouse stores. They called it Barney's Cafe and some of these Barney's had their own outside entrances. Unfortunately, they were selling stuff like Kroger's subpar fried chicken and deli produ...

Ingle's seems to have had a strategy of staying out of Atlanta and its inner suburbs---I think they spunoff those locations when they bought the Bruno's operations. I think the closest-in store used to be one in Tucker. If anything, they seem to have receded more to the periphery over time and I'm s...

They're really banking on high end malls outside the US. They will have a limited number of places where this would work here. The model is probably small boutique-ish operations like Jacques Torres in NYC, but that would have to deliver on really unqiue products (which Torres does) to make this work.