Interesting. So what does the Ghetto Grocer think, James? Could this work? Could using supermarkets to replace the closing big box anchor stores save suburban malls? Or would this just make the malls even more of a magnet for dindu muggers and mob violence? Which is no doubt part of the reason any number of these malls are failing to begin with, coupled with the rise of online shopping. If you can shop at home on the Internet, why risk running the dindu gauntlet? That’s another “elephant in the room” social problem that nobody is allowed to talk about, isn’t it? How do you make shopping malls, as well as the parking lots surrounding them, an unattractive target for dindu thugs?

-Jeremy

Recall that malls began as places where people could safely shop outside of the cities the retailers were fleeing circa 1970 before the tsunami of civil rights inspired crime. When a target of violence runs he [or it] may expect to be pursued.

Okay, Jeremy, here is the real ghetto deal. When the first malls opened up in the early 1970s in Maryland and Pennsylvania, their anchor businesses were supermarkets!

Yes, but the malls failed due to crime and the supermarkets at Mondawmin and Cedonia Basics, closed due to siege conditions. The giant food store that sprung across from Mondawmin mall and was the focus of the 2015 riots, is currently under siege, the lone police officer on duty fighting crime like a Dutch boy plugging the proverbial North Sea dyke with his finger.

The Giant Eagle in Washington PA left the Washington Mall because the space reserved for supermarkets in the 1970s is now only adequate to serve center store needs. Supermarkets must be 100% to 300% larger than in the 1970s to carry the variety that a broad-base clientele wants. More specialized food markets can be smaller, But to be a supermarket you now need to be as big as a mall, that is as big as Wegemens, a vast high end retail food behemoth which sends its managers to Italy to train in cheese and wine manufacture and fine dining, and sets up mall-sized outlets on deep suburban hilltops.

Ironically, the Shoppers supermarket in Towson has just closed and is being subdivided into a strip mall!

What is going on, is that any mall, strip mall or major food retailer must have a bus line to bring in the low paid help. Jeremy, supermarket wages have gone down, unadjusted for inflation. As a clerk in 1992 I started at 11.40. Top rate. I now make 10.50 at an independent grocer. If I went back to the Union job they would start me at 8.50 [despite my experience the Union contract states that I cannot start at top rate] and take me up to 10.70 over three years. Adjust this for inflation and count in the fact that the Affordable Health Care Act eliminated full time employment in retail food and you will find a work force which cannot afford to drive but must use mass transit. This is the same problem with Walmarts in suburban locations. [However, the Walmart in Cody Montana, in the city limits, was effectively rural and utterly unlike suburban locations back East.] They have to bus in their help, and along those same bus lines will come the predators that hunt these clerks in their neighborhood when they get off the bus. Why not stakeout the watering hole? Why stay up on the game trail when you can get the juicier meat down below?

Jeremy, people are just changing to change, in hope it will save their failing business. Landlords who hosted supermarkets that failed inviting chain retailers to subdivide their space and malls that failed inviting supermarkets to take up residency.

Retail Food is in a tail spin.

The Baltimore Area has lost three chains in four years.

Wiess, the Pennsylvania retailer that took over the failed Baltimore Mars chain's five best stores, are in a panic, gushing loss and loosing volume, like a ship with a hole in the hold and the fuel tank.

The future of retail food is threefold:

1. Gourmet stores and superstores in rural or enclaved areas without mass transit access

2. Niche markets, either specialty or discount, farm stores and dollar stores, in marginal locations

3. Fort Apache locations with uniformed municipal police backed up by company security

That's it bro. Food stores are too hard to defend against the mob. Delivery by mail and truck will serve some upscale needs, but for the most part you are looking at the "food desert" of liberal myth, created by the very criminals liberalism lionizes and patronizes.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, peak retail food hours, three miles from a dying East Point Mall [which is only remaining open because it has a Baltimore County Police Substation within it!], on the #4 bus, I passed the Avenue Thrift Store. This location is a howling waste at night, where I and assorted survivor types might straggle in one or twos to board or offload from a bus. At 1:30 P.M. this store, which was once a small 1960s era food store, but now sells used clothes and household goods, had two hundred cars packing the lot!

Jeremy, there were forty cars on the 20-times-larger East Point lot, on the same shitty bus lines. Yes, security matters. The thrift store closes at dark. But there is also the reality, that in Eastern Baltimore County, people that work, are four times more likely to buy used clothes than new. When I get off the bus at this thrift store lot tonight, it will be me against an empty wilderness peopled by thugs, the few homeless that hide from them, and Eunice, the African woman who sings church hymns to me while I stand guard with my cane, at the mouth of the bus shelter, both of us swiveling our heads in search of the next danger to rise from this urban wilderness that is no less predatory than the one our ancestors gathered for protection from in the mouths of caves.

This, Jeremy, has become a choice shopping venue by day. Imagine how bad the malls are, the two that are served by the bus lines that connect here, Towson Town Center and East Point mall, each facility requiring a precinct substation worth of cops to keep the swarming Dindus at bay? And these mall ownership-police efforts are being attacked by the NAACP and BLM as racist. Jeremy, the suburban mall is the heroin shooting gallery and gang den of the future—gaurandinduteed!