The free market will regulate itself.
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I would love to understand the economics of real estate that makes building new big-box stores and malls, while just a few miles away another store/mall sits vacant, good business.
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Awhile ago out of a need to pay bills I took a job away from the wife and kid with promise of being allowed to work remotely after awhile. That didn’t last long for walking back the promise and other things.
Anyway it was a small dying Iowa town. I avoided WalMart and tried the Hy-Vee for groceries and stayed with that chain as they are an employee owned company (Socialism FTW). With them, Target (yeah I know they are not much better than WalMart) and a rather nice thrift shop I didn’t need WalMart.
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I have often wondered the same thing. One thing to bear in mind: One probably cannot tell, at a glance, whether any particular retail style place of business is making a profit or a loss just by looking at it. Some ventures are disappointments, which I gather the owners often try hard to disguise.
The big retail failure in this case was, of course, the Wal-Mart itself. The people who sited and planned that were experts, and they were presumably backed up by the best business intelligence and logistics money can buy - but it’s gone because all that failed to turn a profit.
Yeah, that’s what the Walmart lobbyist said too.
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… which had a mall that was failing, then converted part of that mall to a Walmart…
https://www.statesman.com/article/20120921/BUSINESS/309219689
… this was the same mall that Austin Community College had briefly considered taking over, as a new campus.
I really wish the good people of Winnsboro would aim for education like a community college as a magnet, to train workers for the next round of small business and self-employed skilled labor, and thus income/revenue/tax base.
THIS.
Maybe I am missing something here, but if they are situated close to other larger cities, they have an opportunity to live in a cheap place and work in skilled trade industries (such as air conditioning installation and repair, which makes life in the American South livable and possible) in a larger service area.
ETA: grammar
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Even while I lived there, I never could understand why Northcross couldn’t be attractive enough to repurpose. All I could think was that it was because it wasn’t south of the lake.
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I wish my local True Value sold underwear! Seriously, though: I take it you went to the NM Institute of Mining & Technology; was the local True Value store where students would go to get components and supplies and materials for engineering projects and personal engineering shenanigans and the like?
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That’s a very accurate typo in your first sentence there.
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ACC did take over Highland mall though, it’s right by my work and they’ve done a really great job totally developing the site and are still adding more. I think their upcoming phase is to revamp the main mall building 
i’m currently involved on the utility side. It’s very ambitious but its cool to see that they didn’t just tear down the mall.
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Oh north central Austin is now a jumpin’ cool happenin’ place. Small businesses thriving. Funky restaurants. I live way south and I am a south-Austin-vibe kinda person, but I am quite worried about how north central will fare, and whether the mom-and-pop stores are going to get run out through spiraling property taxes and weird requirements about parking etc.
Northcross was definitely an older mall, an “outdoor” kind that doesn’t even have the appeal of those entirely enclosed climate-controlled malls so favored by mall-walkers. I don’t really get Northcross mall’s appeal now but in its heyday it probably was something novel, undeniably large, and perhaps useful.
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I’m in North Central Austin myself and its gunna get shitty. Mueller area and a few other places are blowing up. I see more trendy restaurants and retail spaces open up, which is not inherently bad but its the kind that’s generally not affordable. I’m looking to move within the next 6 months and i might bail on the area i’m at.
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Oh cool!
I was wondering where all those ACC “where next?” feasibility studies had led to!
Thank you for this!
Yay! 
This is what I wanted to hear. Good.
Reuse reuse reuse!
Um, sometimes the “reuses of a mall” thing ends up a bit… weird… the scenes from this book come to mind:
https://www.amazon.com/Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/0425276236
I was just thinking a great big box repurpose would be to combine roller skating and bumper cars somehow.
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Judging from the photo, it looks like one could fit a lot of stuff in there, making it a super fun center. Might be enough to draw people down from Charlotte for an afternoon/evening of entertainment?
Yeah i’ve seen a mall before get reused for a community college before and it was done half baked. There was something depressing and desperate about it. ACC i think is doing it right, its a mix of new development (student apartments, retail/food, and office) and revamping what is already built.
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Yep, that’s the one! I was a CS grad student in my late 20’s so I didn’t hang around the undergrad engineering students too much, but that True Value would’ve filled that role for them.
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They are both also owned by the retailers themselves, a sort of cooperative. Same with Home Hardware in Canada.
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Not necessarily because they failed to turn a profit - just not enough of a profit.
https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/store-closures-reflect-focus-productivity
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Vampire capitalism in a nutshell.
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