Why is the Retail Apocalypse happening?

Once full of customers wandering around and spending money, this mall, the Northridge Mall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one of dozens of shopping malls that have closed down, or have found another purpose.  "The Retail Apocalypse" is the name coined in 2017 for the continuing closing of thousands of retail stores across the U.S., and other parts of the world.  This UrbEx video is an exploration of that abandoned mall, about 16 years after it closed, in 2003.  

Disclaimer

Like most people over 20 years old, I grew up going to shopping malls with my family on a regular basis.  In my birth state of Ohio, Sears, J.C. Penney, and Montgomery Wards were the three main anchor stores I remember, the huge department stores where my parent's shopped for just about everything, from school clothes, furniture, to dishes, to tools.  Yes, we had big discount stores, like Kmart and Grant's in our area, and Walmart and later Target in many other areas. 

Local shops in small town downtowns, or the big shopping centers were where my parents shopped on a daily basis.  We often went to malls on weekends.  The same was true for most of the millions of Americans around the country.  Most all of you reading this have similar memories, I'm sure.  Malls were such a part of American culture, indie director Kevin Smith made a movie called Mall Rats in 1995, just about the people hanging out in malls.  You may recognize a couple of those actors, best known for their later work.  

Then, in the 2010's something began to happen.  The big department stores had been struggling for a while.  But one by one, a few chain stores, in malls and shopping centers, began to close.  Then a few more.  I don't think anyone has a complete count, but several thousand individual stores closed from about 2010 to 2016.  

The frequency was increasing, and major chain store closures started coming faster and faster.  In 2017, the term "Retail Apocalypse" was first coined, and entered popular culture.  The phrase "Dead Mall," appeared as well, later defined as a mall with at least 30% of its stores closed, and 70% or less still remaining.  In in 2017, 2018, and 2019, about 20,000 stores closed, and many major chains went into bankruptcy or completely out of business.  

In 2020, as the pandemic monkey wrenched life for just about everyone, another 9,300 stores closed in the U.S..   A few dozen of the original 1,200 or so enclosed shopping malls in the U.S. have closed down.  Some have been repurposed, some are sitting abandoned, like in the video above, and a few have been demolished.  In the obvious irony, several have been turned into Amazon fulfillment centers.  A recent report says 80,000 MORE store closings can be expected by 2025.

Not only is there a Wikipedia page for the Retail Apocalypse itself, there's one just listing the stores that have closed, and that have gone completely out of business.  So many malls, stores, factories, and other buildings have been abandoned, that urban exploration, or UrbEx, is now a hobby for lots of people in the younger generations.  

Why is all this happening?  

A lot of people blame Amazon, you know, before they tune into Prime, or shop from their phone.  Some people blame bad management 15-20 years ago, at the former behemoth store chains, like Sears or J.C. Penney.  While Amazon has taken a huge number of sales to the online world, I don't think they are specifically to blame.  

My concept, and the reason for this blog, is The Big Freakin' Transition.  It's and extension of The Third Wave concept futurist Alvin Toffler explained in his 1980 book* by that name.  The basic idea is simple, we are leaving the old Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age.  But that massive transition doesn't happen overnight.  That's where the simple idea gets really complex.  

I believe, and The Big Freakin' Transition explains, that we are in an 80 to 90 year long transition period BETWEEN those two ages.  The old, Industrial Age businesses, models, and organizations are losing steam, and ultimately, dying off.  New, Information Age models, usually using newer technologies, are being built, tested, and evolving.  

The Retail Apocalypse, in my opinion, is simply the old, Industrial Age goods distribution model breaking down, and dying off.  We have lots of new technologies, which has led to new ways of living, and new ways of shopping and buying goods and services.  As the shopping mall, shopping centers, and department stores become less appealing to people, that business model, and those stores, are dying off.  It's much easier, and more efficient, and more time saving, to buy many things online, or on our phones now, and have them shipped to us.  That's the new, Information Age goods distribution system being built.  Amazon is a huge part of that, but so is eBay, Etsy, online stores and sites on platforms like Shopify and others, and millions personal websites selling unique items.  

The Retail Apocalypse is the old, Industrial Age goods distribution system breaking down and dying off, and a new one, with much more online sales, and fewer physical stores, is being built.  The new system will take us into the full Information Age, as all necessary businesses make the transition, or are invented and built.  It's as simple as that.  

There was another Retail Apocalypse, in the late 1800's, did you know that?  A mail order business began to send catalogs to people across the U.S., and ship them goods from huge warehouses.  This had a horrific effect on the small town general stores of the time, eventually most of them went out of business.  In time, that mail-order company opened their own stores.  Big ones.  That mail order company was called Sears & Roebucks.  Later they changed it to just Sears.

* not a paid link.

Welcome to Dystopia... the future is now

This is a still shot of the opening slate of the Blade Runner (1982) movie trailer.  I didn't notice this slate until the second time I watched the trailer.  

Disclaimer

I woke up one morning early, before dawn, about the middle of October, in 2019.  I woke up in a parking lot with a big idea in my head.  No, I hadn't been on a three week binder, or had some crazy adventure like in a bachelor party movie.  I'm homeless, and I just slept in a small parking lot every night.  Why am I homeless?  I'm not sure, I think the reason is classified, they won't even tell me.  

But all that aside, I have a geeky side that reads big, weird, books about the economy, future trends, and stuff like that.  I've been watching the financial markets for over 30 years, though I've never owned a share of stock, and only bought a bit of precious metals and a few futures options, in that time.  I've been interested in the future, and trying to figure out what's going to happen in the future, since I was a kid.  Over the last 35 years, I've come across three theories that I think can help me, and others, understand our crazy world today, and why so many things seem so chaotic on an unprecedented level.  I've mentioned those theories in the last couple of posts.  They are Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Third Wave concept, P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles, and Richard Florida's Creative Class concept.  

I've found those three big ideas, in particular, explain different aspects of our society, our world, over the last 30 years.  I've also run across other cycles, like the fact that nearly every 30-60-90 year mark we tend to have a recession, if not a depression or great depression, going back to colonial days.  My geeky, brainiac side was watching these long term, and ultra-long term cycles play out, watching the ups and downs of financial markets, real estate cycles, and other stuff like that.  I find the dynamics of all these different trends interacting fascinating.  Yes, that's weird, like I said, I'm a geek, and not a typical geek, but an economics futurist geek, which makes me a geek among geeks.

Meanwhile, I was struggling as a taxi driver in the early and mid-2000's, as that industry got hit by new technology.  First,  computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios, which allowed the taxi companies to put far more taxis on the road, killing the business for seasoned drivers.  Later, as we all know, Uber and Lyft wiped out most of what was left of the taxi, town car, limo, and airport ride industries.  

I became homeless while driving my taxi, living in it for years, and eventually wound up on the streets, unable to find a "real " job.  My family offered to fly me to North Carolina to stay for "a while," and I wound up stuck there for ten years, still unable to find a "real" job.  I finally started selling my unique Sharpie artwork online to make a little bit of money.  While I was in NC, I started blogging like crazy, mostly about my BMX freestyle days, and worked to learn the basics of online and social media marketing.  That helped me sell about 90 original pieces of art, and some prints, over the last 5 years.  

Eventually, an old friend from my BMX bike riding days paid my bus fare back to California, to help promote an online business he was starting.  That didn't work out as planned, and I went back to the streets, and kept blogging and working on new ideas to get back to making a living.  I know most of you don't give a damn about all of that, but that's the short version of how I was the guy waking up with a big idea, in a parking lot in the San Fernando Valley, in October 2019.  

At that time, I had been blogging about the economy, a major recession (likely depression) I saw coming in the near future, and other Big Picture issues around the continual trend of new technology replacing human jobs, and our transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age.  That, as you probably know by now, is what I call The Big Freakin' Transition, the title of this blog.  It was just "The Big Transition," for 2-3 years, but I needed a better title to start the blog, so I added "freakin'."  That's not the most creative title, but it works. 

I had all of these different ideas and theories I had learned of, studied, and pondered, combined with my own observations of markets and trends, and what I'd learned from a couple hundred other books, in my head.  It was all this big mish mash of disjointed ideas, all pointing towards a lot more change, and some pretty chaotic times in the future.  I had not tried to organize all these ideas at that point, in late 2019.  

That October morning, the big idea was for me to go back and watch the top 30 or 40 dystopian movie trailers, and TV show intros, from the 1960's through the 1990's.  Doing that, I would see how all those different writers and directors viewed "the future" from their time, and from their personal perspective.  I realized that in 2019, at 53 years old, I was living in "the future" of my childhood and high school self, the time when I was most affected by futuristic movies.  I decided I would begin by watching the trailers, then comparing the future each of them predicted with what 2019 was really like.  How close were they?  What did they get right and get wrong?  Did they miss key elements of today's world? What did they come up with that's not real yet?  From there, I would look at the future my lifetime of interest and study saw in the coming years, the 2020's, in particular.  

So I took this old laptop (which I'm still using, now about 5-6 years old), and began that work at a McDonald's and at the local library.  I also got a notebook just for this idea, and began writing my thoughts.  It was early November, 2019, when I watched this Blade Runner (1982) trailer, and saw the silent slate at the beginning.  That stopped me cold.  Blade Runner, now 39 years ago, was set in Los Angeles in November of 2019.  But some weird trick of fate, I began really getting going on this big series of ideas about the future, in Los Angeles County, in November of 2019.  I was literally living in the real future that the original Blade Runner movie tried to predict.  That's pretty crazy.  I grew up in Ohio, and lived in Boise, Idaho when that movie came out, both of which seemed a million miles from L.A. and Hollywood.  Yet somehow I ended up in L.A county, I was bouncing between The Valley and Hollywood, as I wrote out the rough ideas of this big, personal project.  I could take bus or train around, and compare the real Los Angeles 2019 with the Blade Runner version, day after day.  Obviously, there's a huge difference. 

As the ideas came together, and I realized I had something big to write, I thought about how to publish it.  With so much of other people's work involved in what I was talking about, a free blog, in the form of a book, seemed the way to go.  I built the basic blog with 20 chapters, so it could be read top to bottom, like a book, not backwards, as normal blogs work.  I figured I would have 9 or 10, maybe 11 chapters.  From late December 2019, to about April 2020, I wrote this 20 chapter book/blog thing, and called it Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now, Book 1.  Yeah, I not only filled up the 20 chapters, I thought a "book 2" might come along.  So far, no book 2.  To date, this is the most complete version of my thinking about the future, the theories that help me look forward, and at times predict major inflection points, and why I dubbed this decade The Tumultuous 2020's right before the decade even started.  

This blog is here for me to go deep into the more minute and detailed aspects of all the various parts of this Big Picture, The Big Freakin' Transition.  As you all know, a lot has happened in our world, and everyday life, since late 2019.  I DID expect a major economic downturn to happen, and I believe it will at least feel like a Great Depression, to most people, by the time we get to about 2027.  Technically, we are in an economic Depression (3 year contraction OR a 10% or more GDP drop- we had a 33% drop in GDP in Q2 2020), by one of the two traditional definitions.  

I DID NOT see a major global pandemic coming along to amplify the economic and social change.  But it did, and we are still dealing with Covid-19.  But that is just part of what's going on in this decade.  Even without Covid, this would have been one of the most chaotic decades ever, in my belief.  

So with that incredibly long intro, here are the links to my late 2019-early 2020 book/blog thing about The Future:

Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1 

Chapter 1: We are the Mutants

Chapter 2: The Future the Media Shows You is Not the Future You Get

Chapter 3: Where the Hell is My Flying Car?

Chapter 4: Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?  

Chapter 5: Was There Anyone in the 20th Century Who Did Get "The Future" Right? 

Chapter 6: Why Care About the Future? 

Chapter 7: The Power of Creative Scenes (What I did instead of college) 

Chapter 8: How I Became and Amateur Futurist 

Chapter 9: The "Blade Runner Future" and the Future We Actually Got

Chapter 10: The Tofflers' Third Wave 

Chapter 11: Surf's Up Brah... The Long Term Waves of the U.S. Economy

Chapter 12: P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

Chapter 13:  The Big Transition- The Unplanned Revolution of Everything

Chapter 14: Disruption: Apocaplyse Past, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Soon 

Chapter 15:  Richard Florida and The Rise of the Creative Class 

Chapter 16: Blowing Bubbles 

Chapter 17: The Phoenix Great Depression 

Chapter 18: The Economic Collapse is Here... Now What? 

Chapter 19: Rebuilding America- Dream On... Time to Make Your Dreams Come True 

Chapter 20: Our Dystopia is CHANGE- It's Time to Mold a New Reality 

 That's Dystopia as I refer to it, the best collection of my thinking on the future, the 2020's in particular, and the things I saw ahead, back in 2020.  

Personally, I think the 2020's will be so crazy, that any person or business with a 5 year or 10 year plan, will simply have to throw it out the window.  There are so many fundamental things in our world that will change in this decade, many of which have layers more change built upon them, that I don't think anyone can accurately plan beyond this decade.  

I don't think the major changes will stop on January 1st 2030, I just think most of the fundamental changes will happen between now and then.  Afterwards will be more of fine tuning what has already happened, providing we, as a species, are still here.  

The dark side of all of this is that we are in a period where things can go totally off course, and it's possible we destroy our species before 2030 gets here.  We're sitting on thousands of nukes, unstable political climates, bio-weapons, and a lot of just plain ignorant fools in positions of power.  This is a decade that many things could go completely wrong.  Game over.  I DO NOT think that's how things will ultimately play out, but it's a remote possibility in times this turbulent.  Fortunately, humans have a way of coming together in the worst crises, and working for a common good in times of great change.  

Another thing that many people may notice is that I barely even touch on global warming, and today's other trendy environmental issues.  My reason for that is because this economic and social turmoil could take us all out long before environmental issues really get bad.  If humans aren't around in 2030, global warming isn't an issue.  I think we need to make it through these economic, social, work, business, and political issues before environmental issues become the main focus.  If environmental issues are your primary focus, great.  But we have a lot of other stuff, as a society, to get through first, the way I see it.  

Since there will be great change in business and social models, there's no reason not to design new things to work in a much more environmentally friendly way, with healthier production and manufacturing, and use.  But human "civilization," by it's nature, is destructive to the environment, that was the point of chapter 1 of Dystopia.

So for anyone who has stumbled across this blog, and wants to know where my weird ideas come from, this post, and the thinking and writing in Dystopia, is the best place to find out.  Thanks for reading.  Lots more to come... 

Steve Emig 10/13/2021

The "Napster moment"- EVERYTHING has to change to an Information Age model

Honestly, being a Gen X guy who began using record players when I was 4 or 5 years old, about 1971-72, it's hilarious that there are actually how-to videos on using one.  That said, I can barely operate a cell phone, which most of today's 3-year-olds have mastered.  Times change, and that's the whole point of this post.  So, thank God for YouTube how-to videos, for the young, the old, and everyone in between.

Disclaimer

In the last post, I explained that my concept, The Big Freakin' Transition, is that we are in an 80 to 90 year transition period between the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  That's one half of the idea.  The other half of the idea is that during this long, increasingly chaotic transition period, EVERY business, every industry, and every human institution, will have the old business or social model disrupted, and a new model will emerge.  So those two ideas are the core of The Big Freakin' Transition.  Again, this whole idea is basically a continuation of The Third Wave * concept that futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler discovered, and Alvin wrote about in his 1980 book by that name.  

My favorite model for disruption is the music industry.  The older generations of people, and the older Millennials, can remember when the file sharing service Napster exploded onto the scene in 1999.  Before that, the music industry was well entrenched in a stable business model.  Record label company executives looked for talented bands and singers.  They offered their favorite ones a "record contract."  The  record label paid for the studio time while a band created an "album," usually of fifteen songs.  Then the band was sent out on tour to promote the album, and build a following of people to hopefully buy millions of those record albums, usually for about $15 each.  The record label paid for the tours, where tickets were fairly cheap.  They also promoted the new record with single songs on FM radio, with coverage in music magazines like Rolling Stone, and with music videos on MTV, after it came out in 1981.  When the albums sold a lot, the record label made back their money, and tens of millions of dollars more, and the singer or band made a small percentage of that, sometimes millions of dollars.  

So the record labels put out money to find bands, record the albums, and promote them with tours, radio, magazines, and MTV.  All of that was promotion to sell millions of physical records.  That was the money maker, those big, black, "vinyl" discs.  They also sold audio cassettes, and in the 90's, CD's became the new albums.  But selling lots of the albums was the business model.  

Then, on June 1st, 1999, two guys none of us had ever heard of, uploaded a new piece of software on the fledgling internet.  Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created a file sharing software called Napster, which allowed people worldwide to share Mp3 music files with each other.  With a single click of a computer mouse in 1999, the music industry was doomed.  That's what I mean by "Disrupted."  There was an old business model that was working just fine... for the record companies and a small number of hit artists and bands.  But new technology had been evolving, and some unknown guys had a cool idea to use that new technology.  "Hey, what if we could design software so we could all share our music with other people?"  Napster Disrupted the old business model with one click. 

Now, the music industry didn't collapse overnight.  But in the next few months, 80 million users (myself included), started looking for music files on other people's hard drives, and downloading them, often burning our own CD's of personal mix tapes.  Suddenly music was free, and the traditional music industry went berserk.  They even sued their own customers for a while.  Teenage kids were getting multi-million dollar lawsuits filed against them for downloading 100 songs.  

You can argue for the rights of the old music industry.  You can argue about intellectual property until you're blue in the face, you can say this was piracy, theft, or just plain stealing.  The reality is, everyday people LOVED the free music file sharing idea, and it was simply going to happen, eventually, no matter what.  Napster, as a free service, lasted about two years, then became a paid service after being shut down by court order.  But the Information Age music revolution had begun, and other tech people, notably Steve Jobs and the Apple posse, created new business models.  

Now, 22 years later, we have far more music available to us far cheaper.  Hundreds of thousands of bands and independent musicians and singers find followings, and sell some music to their fans.  Concerts and box sets of physical CD's or vinyl LP's cost a lot.   Most people don't buy albums, they buy single songs or rent music from streaming services.  Nearly every consumer of music would say they like this system better than paying $15 for an album that had three songs they liked, back in the 1980's or 1990's.  The music industry is still evolving, but it has made the transition into an Information Age business model.  

The Big Freakin' Transition idea is that every single business, every industry, and every human institution (religion, law, education, non-profits, membership organizations, political parties, etc), EVERY organization, will be Disrupted by a new model, using new technology, and new social norms made possible by that new technology.  

When this idea was really coming together in my head, 4-5 years ago, I tried to think of some business or industry that would not be affected.  "What everyday item WILL NOT be completely redesigned or disrupted," I asked myself.  Of all things, toilets came to mind.  The toilet in my grandma's 1920's built house as a kid looked pretty much like the ones today, and I imagine the toilets in 20-30 years will still look pretty much the same.  Yes, there will be some weird, high tech versions as outliers, but the basic design probably won't change all that much.  So did that make the toilet industry immune to Disruption?  I thought about the business.  Even if the basic item, like a typical toilet, doesn't change much, the materials, the raw material sourcing, the manufacturing process, the factory location, the price, the marketing, and the distribution that got the toilets from a factory to a new house, that WILL all change due to new technology.  

Ultimately, I could not think of one product or industry that will not be Disrupted by all of our new and evolving technology, and our new social norms and lifestyles made possible by the new technology.  This is why The Big Freakin' Transition is an 80 or 90 year period.  Humans, by nature, don't like change.  We like to think we do, but we don't like very much change at all.  The initial high tech change started slow, then one new product here, one there.  They began to gain a synergy with each other, and more new technologies were developed, and as they came in to everyday life for regular people, our lifestyles began to change.  Other new changes came along, more new technologies, and our lives transformed more and more, faster and faster.  

But there are still many industries that are running on old, Industrial Age mindsets, even if they use many new forms of tech.  Banking, for example, uses more high technology than most industries.  But the whole idea of putting your money in a bank, in a physical building, so they can loan money out at interest to someone else, goes back to the Medici's, in 15th centuryItaly.  Even then, banks had been around for centuries, but that model has not really changed.  We all know now that all kinds of other options are now available, Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Facebook pay, cryptos, wiring money across the globe, even old Western Union.  But the banks, as fancy buildings, each with  a huge safe (which doesn't contain digital money, obviously), still exist.  So banking, and many other industries still using Industrial Age business models, will face their "Napster moment" at some point.  The 2020's, seem to be shaping up as the decade when all the lagging business and social models (like churches, political parties, membership organizations, etc.) that haven't changed yet, will be forced to change.  One one hand they need to catch up, and the other hand, we are in a deep financial crisis, which will drive more change, and drive lots of old models businesses out of business.  

To repeat, at it's core, my concept of The Big Freakin' Transition" is two basic things.  We are in an 80-90 year transition period (from 1956 to about 2035-2045), between the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  Two, EVERY business, industry, and institution will have to figure out a new business/social model, and put into action, to survive.  That's the basic idea.  

As a business owner, or a leader of some kind of organization, you need to ask yourself, "What is the Information Age version of my business or organization?  What is the role of this kind of business in light of all the changes in new technology, and in how we actually live, day to day?  If you don't adapt, someone else will figure out the new model, and Disrupt your business.  So that's the Disruption that every business or institution will have to deal with.   

*not a paid link

Where is our human society headed? A futurist is a person who spends time trying to figure that out

Here is the late Alvin Toffler, the futurist I most identify with.  He died in 2016 at the age of 87, survived by his wife Heidi, partner in life, and partner in figuring out where the world was headed, decades ago.  From his first bestselling book, Future Shock, in 1970, through Revolutionary Wealth in 2007, the thinking of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, in the series of books he wrote, and talks he gave, inspired and influenced tens of thousands of people around the world.  Leaders in China, notably, made Future Shock required reading for officials at one point. 

Disclaimer 

I believe their concept of "The Third Wave," first published in Alvin's 1980 book by that name, is still playing out, and can help us understand the chaotic world of the 2020's.  Like Alvin Toffler, I've spent most of my life, since childhood, thinking a lot about the future, and trying to figure out where society was headed.  I'll go into more detail in future posts, but the extension of the Third Wave concept, into today's world of 2021, and well into the future, is something I've been calling "The Big Transition."  Very simply put, I don't think we are in the Industrial Age anymore, but I don't think we're in the Information Age either.  I believe we are in an 80 to 90 year transition phase between the two, and I think we are the late part of that long transition period.  

With that idea as a Big Picture, the chaos of the 21st century world makes a lot more sense to me.  I've been able to see and sense a lot of trends coming, and I've made some financial market predictions, several of which seemed crazy when I made them, but later came true.  I've been writing on these subjects for over three years now, across several blogs.  But these posts from my brainiac side have been mixed in with posts about Old School BMX freestyle, the new, little sport I got seriously into while in high school, and which was the main theme of 20 years of my life.  And the reality is, most BMXers don't really give a damn about the future, although they've played more of a role in it than most "average" people.  More on that in future posts, as well. 

So this blog is going to focus on my thinking about where society is, why we are where we are, and where I think we are headed.  I've literally had my life and well being threatened over these ideas at times.  There are some people, more specifically, some political ideologies, that don't want ideas other then their own out in the world.  But I'm an idea guy, and I'll keep putting my ideas out there into the world as long as I'm able.  If you get something worthwhile from reading this blog, and my other work, that's awesome. If not, there are about 4.2 billion or more other web pages for you to choose from, and 129,864,880 books published, as well as other media.  I'm sure you can find something you like.

So that's the basic idea of this blog.  I knew I needed to find a slightly better name for my Big Picture concept than "The Big Transition."  There are a few other, completely unrelated things, that come up in a Google search of that phrase.  After thinking about it for a few minutes, "The Big Freakin' Transition" is what I came up with.  So that's the name of this blog.  Yeah, still not super creative, but it will do.  It's kind of a reminder to have fun with these posts, and don't take anything too seriously.  All of our best made plans get messed up, and the future always seems to surprise us sometimes, no matter how much we think about it.  Enjoy.