Hail & Farewell To The Local Penney’s

If you want to see how retailing comes out of the coronavirus pandemic economic meltdown, you need go no further than the Northlake Mall, just up the road in suburban Atlanta.

It’s where you’ll find a JC Penney store that is one of 136 locations being closed and, as of last Thursday, conducting its going-out-of-business sale.

It is a sad sight.

The mall, once the darling of its neighborhood, has been on life support for years. One-time anchors Sears and later Kohl’s have long since shut their stores and a rough estimate shows that probably two-thirds of the specialty stores in the center are shuttered. Those that remain are often local merchants rather than the national chains that have been the backbone of the modern American shopping center for decades. Even the food court barely has more than a couple stands still in business and they too are not exactly household mall-rat nameplates.

The Penney store and, down the corridor the other remaining anchor Macy
M
’s, constitute pretty much whatever attraction the mall still has for the surrounding community, the bedroom suburb of Tucker, 15 or so miles from downtown Atlanta.

The Penney store hadn’t been a particularly neglected location it should be noted. It sported new signage throughout, had a modern layout and even was one of the units where the parent company put a Threds Up department for resale merchandise.

But on this day, the second since the sale began, it already had that picked-over feel that retail veterans who have been through this too many times well recognize. Ubiquitous signs throughout proclaimed the store was going out of business – “this location only” – and that the “entire store (was) 25% to 40% off.” In somewhat smaller type was the qualifier “original price.”

There was a generous number of shoppers working the store – most wearing masks it should be noted – and the lines at the cash registers were probably longer than any day other than a Black Friday of the past four or five years.

Perhaps lost on these shoppers was that on a good day, you could get similar bargains at the store – indeed, probably better ones – with the ever-present panoply of Penney promotions the retailer has become addicted too. Lost, but not particularly important it seemed.

Some fixtures and shelving were already bare and others were starting to get pretty stripped. Nearby was a kiosk to put in requests to buy the fixtures themselves when the store ultimately closed.

Even though the liquidating posse – Gordon Bros., Hilco, Tiger and one or two others of the usual suspects – have been called in to do the dirty work it didn’t appear, at least this day in this store, that additional non-Penney
JCP
merchandise had been brought in for the sale…at least not yet.

There’s no official word on how long this wind-down will take or if additional Penney units will face the ax. Originally the company had talked about more closings but has only announced the 136 so far.

Northlake could get its final kick in the mall soon. The Macy’s store on recent visits has been looking particularly neglected with a clear lack of investment in both merchandise and merchandising. The department store company says it will close perhaps 150 stores and one wouldn’t be surprised if this is among them.

And then what becomes of Northlake? Once part of the Simon Properties portfolio it was bought in 2017 by ATR Corinth Partners, a Dallas-based developer that says on its website, “Our mission is to enhance communities through the re-imagination and development of commercial real estate.” CTR seemed to have started that process last year when it announced it had leased the 224,000-square-feet former Sears store to Emory Healthcare, the Atlanta-based hospital and health services company which says it will use the space for administrative offices. So far, there are no apparent signs of this changeover to visitors.

But Northlake, now and tomorrow, clearly represents the state of most of America’s once-shining and now secondary B, C and D shopping malls: empty stores punctuated by going-out-of-business anchor sales and eventual conversions to other purposes, be it offices, medical facilities, or in the case of the Redmond Town Center in Washington State a 110,000-square-foot former Macy’s store being leased by Amazon
AMZN
for its web services division. The irony of that transaction is no doubt not lost on anybody in the retailing business.

In the meantime, the Penney sale at Northlake will continue, the inventory levels in gradual decline even as the percent-off numbers increase. It is the face of modern American retailing and the pandemic only sped up the process. In an unintended homage to Penney’s founding name, it is today’s Golden Rule.