You could smell Wicks 'N Sticks before you could see it. Bayberry and cinnamon drifting three storefronts down the concourse, a wall of scented pillars, the hand-carved candles from Germany your mom bought and never actually burned. By 1988 there were 305 of them in malls across the
Where location intelligence goes blind, and why the dataset built to fix it needs a careful hand, especially in the white and gray areas. Every foot traffic platform can show you a store dying, one quiet month at a time. None of them can tell you what to build in
Nearly four million members. More than 400 clubs. And a balance sheet the SEC later said overstated the company's net worth by $1.8 billion. If you joined in a mall or a strip center in the 90s, you remember the pitch. Low monthly rate. Just sign here.
For most of the back half of the 20th century, if you needed motor oil, a Trapper Keeper, and a rotisserie chicken in the same ten minutes, Kmart was where you went. The blue light special was real. So was the fluorescent hum, the layaway counter, the shoe department carpet
In May I moderated a session at ICSC Las Vegas called "The End of the Trade Area" with Meghann Martindale of Avison Young, Ethan Chernovsky of Placer.ai, and Sam Hall of Growth Factor. The premise was blunt: the radius-based trade area is a 60-year-old
For about twenty years, if you wanted a leather jacket, you went to the mall, and you went to Wilsons. The smell hit you before the sign did. Racks of bombers and blazers, a wall of gloves by the register, a clearance rack that swelled every February. If you got
Retail real estate is having a victory lap. Vacancy near historic lows. Rents up. J.P. Morgan talking about the strongest shopping center valuations in a decade. Landlords are taking bows. Here's my problem with the celebration: a lot of it isn't earned. Yes. This is
The parent company died in 2001. A few of the stores survived and are still open in 2026. If you ever bought name-brand shampoo off a stacked delivery case, under a handwritten sign, in a box the size of a grocery store, you shopped Drug Emporium. And if you
If you had a job interview in 1991, you shopped at Casual Corner first. The blazer. The coordinated separates. The sales associate who somehow made every woman feel like she was buying exactly what she needed. Casual Corner didn't sell clothes, it sold a version of who you
Same macro environment. Same interest rate cycle. Same headlines. Opposite outcomes, depending on whose balance sheet you're looking at. Ask anyone outside this industry what happened to American retail last year and you'll get the same answer: it contracted. Joann liquidated. Party City liquidated. Rite Aid
Fifty entries into this series, and this one might have the best name of them all. If you were a 90s parent who refused to buy whatever was advertised during Saturday morning cartoons, Noodle Kidoodle was your store. Educational toys, demo stations, kids playing in the aisles. The slogan said
The most important word in CRE right now isn't AI. It's place. It's always been place. Let me explain how I arrived at that conclusion, and why it took a trip to Las Vegas to remind me. I just came back from ICSC. Two
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Why an industry built on the Power of Where has confused data with understanding, and what it costs the people making real decisions. Walk into any commercial real estate strategy session, retail planning meeting, or lender review. You will see a heatmap. It will be beautiful. It pulses with reds
Nostalgic Retail Series
Before Home Depot owned every weekend DIYer's imagination, Builder's Square was already there. Founded February 1970 in San Antonio as Home Centers of America by Frank Denny, a former W.R. Grace executive who saw the warehouse format coming a decade before most retailers did. Unusual
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Here's a pattern nobody's naming. A VP of Real Estate or a CRO gets hired. They inherit a data stack. They spend four months learning what the platforms do, which ones to trust, which reports matter. Somewhere around month six, they start asking the right questions.
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Sit through enough data vendor demos in #CRE and you start to notice something. Every dataset is "proprietary." Every platform has a "unique edge." Every company is the only one who can give you "this view of the market." Funny thing - pull back the
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Every conference. Every pitch deck. Every vendor demo. The message is the same: AI will save you. Faster decisions. Smarter insights. Automated everything. The hype is real. And honestly? Some of it is more than deserved. AI is transforming how we work. But here's what nobody wants to
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Retail Success Is a Chain Reaction. Data Tells You Where the Links Are Breaking. I've been saying for a while now that "experiential retail" has become one of the most overused and misunderstood terms in the retail industry. The brands that succeed don't just
Nostalgic Retail Series
If you walked through any mall in the 80s and left with an acid-washed jean jacket, parachute pants, or a skinny leather tie, you probably know Chess King. In 1967, traveling salespeople from Melville Corporation's Thom McAn shoe division spotted a gap: young men had nowhere to
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A few months ago, I wrote about how traditional trade area analysis is dead. Radius rings and demographic overlays can't capture the micro-market dynamics that actually drive retail performance. But here's what I've been thinking about since: if AI and dynamic location analytics
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The Rise of Prediction Markets as a CRE and Retail Data Source The CRE industry has traditionally relied on a familiar forecasting toolkit: historical sales data, comps, macroeconomic models, demographic data, and good old-fashioned gut instinct. That has changed recently with the introduction of more refined persona data, mobile
Retailer
𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙬 𝙪𝙥 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙞𝙙𝙬𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙤𝙧 𝙋𝙚𝙣𝙣𝙨𝙮𝙡𝙫𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙖, 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙠𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝘽𝙤𝙣-𝙏𝙤𝙣 𝙗𝙮 𝙖 𝙙𝙞𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚. Carson's. Younkers. Elder-Beerman. Bergner's. All the same company. All gone. The beginning started in 1898 when Max Grumbacher and his father Samuel open a one-room millinery store in York, Pennsylvania. The Timeline: 𝟭𝟵𝟮𝟵: The company incorporates. "Bon-Ton" (French for "high society&
Retailer
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘥-𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘋𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘢 𝘒𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘓𝘰𝘦𝘩𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘯'𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘴. Frieda Loehmann, a former department store buyer, opens the first store in 1921 in Brooklyn with her son Charles. Her strategy? Pay cash for designer overstock and samples, sell them at deep discounts. No returns. No alter
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"Experiential retail" is the most overused term in CRE right now...And I think we're using it wrong. Everyone talks about creating "experiences" for customers. Immersive moments. Instagram-worthy activations. The wow factor. But here's what I keep seeing: the wow fades.