More stats on Mallpocalypse from March 2017

I'm always a bit leery of videos that use electronic voices, unless maybe it's Stephen Hawking.  In any case, here's a look at our current wave of store closures in the U.S. and the horrific outlook for most American malls.  Electronics retailer HH Gregg filed for bankruptcy on March 6 and announced the closings of 88 stores.  They plan to keep the other stores open. 

The theme in all these store closures is that traditional bricks and mortar retailers have been struggling for a variety of reasons.  Some have gone out of business, and several major stores are closing dozens of locations and trying to keep their businesses going.  This is happening at a time when the stock market is near all times highs.  What happens to all these retailers if we topple into a pretty good-sized recession? 

This report says about 1/3 of malls are expected to close within about five years, and another 300 or so will probably keep struggling.  I'm 50 years old, and I've never seen anything like this in my lifetime.  This is a big deal that the mainstream media seems to be shying away from for now.  It appears this issue is going to simmer under most people's radar, but it shows no signs of going away right now.  Things are getting more and more dicey.

Another recent Tv spot about closing stores and dying malls

Here's a clip from Michigan about local Sears stores closing, and the continuing pressure on malls as brick and mortar stores close. 

Would you buy a mall for $100?

THIS MALL SOLD FOR $100 AT AUCTION.  REALLY.

Should you buy one? What would you do with a whole shopping mall?  Do you think there's a way to make a mall worth going to again? The more I look into this issue, the more I see that there are dead malls all over, and a lot more dying out with the rash of retail store closings this year.

OK, Pittsburgh Mills Mall sold for $100 at the bankruptcy auction in January to Wells Fargo, who is owed $143 million in back payments on the mall.  So now the bank is sitting on a million square foot mall running at 55% occupancy.  The J.C. Penney anchor store IS NOT one of the 138 Penney's scheduled to close this year, so that's good for the mall.

Will Wells Fargo get their $143 million back from this mall?  I guess time will tell.

How a once great mall died: the story of Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio

It's weird to hear this mall called legendary in the Urban Exploring (UrbEx) world.  I was born within five miles of this mall site, nearly a decade before it was built.  We moved out of the area when I was two, but my grandma lived in Wadsworth, Ohio, about ten miles away.  I asked my mom, and she remembers this mall.  Without a doubt, this was one of the malls I went to with my family as a kid.

Rolling Acres is also the mall that sparked my interest in dead malls recently.  I stumbled across skater Rick McCrank's Abandoned TV show on the new Vice channel.  The first episode I saw he explored this mall, having heard about it on the internet, I presume.  I figured I'd been to the mall, but didn't know for sure.

Malls were a major part of my childhood.  Many weekends were spent going to malls with my family, whining to get a big, hot pretzel, and sitting with my dad, people watching, as my mom shopped with my little sister.  I knew there were a lot of abandoned factories and warehouses and houses around the Eastern U.S., but dead malls weren't on my radar until I saw that Vice show featuring Rolling Acres.

My first question was: Why couldn't anybody figure out a way to reuse all this space?  Then... How does a mall die?

The guy in this video tells the story really well.  But what's the bigger picture here?  On one hand, malls were the capitals of the over-consumption economy of the 1970's and 1980's.  Buy some cool stuff to impress your neighbors, so they will go buy even better stuff.  Then you go to the mall and buy even better stuff... and the U.S. economy thrives.

"A house is a place to put your stuff, why you go out and buy... more stuff." -George Carlin

 The over-the-top consumerism itself has died quite a bit over the past three decades. That's one big part of the picture.  Today's young adults tend to want more environmentally friendly products.  The Millenials grew up in a tech-enabled world that didn't exist when I was a kid.  The youngest of that group, and the post-Millennial kids, now in their teens, have come to age in the struggling economy of the Post Great Recession years.  Only a small fraction of them have had the money for excessive consumption.  Most want to spend their money on better tech gadgets, video games, and experiences.  They want to spend money in a place worthy of a good selfie or two (or 50).  Wandering around retail stores isn't that exciting.

In addition, Generation Xers, like myself, brought on the big wave of action sports.  I spent my teen and 20-something years learning tricks on little bicycles and skateboards.  That was a geeky thing in the 80's, but the action sports have spread around the world, continued to evolve, and were TV fodder for most Millennials.  People pushing themselves physically and having adventures and pranking is what they grew up watching.  Malls are fucking boring... until a fight breaks out.

Another aspect of this whole picture is that it's hard to sell anything for high retail prices anymore.  The exceptions seem to be new hit video games, crazy looking sneakers, and for a decade, the latest Harry Potter book.  Everything else can be found online or on an app at a huge discount.  Why go to a mall with insane space rents and pay super high retail prices?  Oh... and then there's Amazon.com.  It was inevitable that some bright group of people would use tech to reinvent shopping, and Amazon led the way, and continues to progress online shopping.

 Then there's the last reason I can think of why Rolling Acres Mall, and so many others, have died.  They made their money selling overpriced, name brand, mass marketing crap that was boring as fuck.  Boring doesn't sell anymore.  Not well, anyhow.  The mass market world of my youth has shattered into millions of niche markets.

As the entire business and social world went through one technological revolution after another, the old school retail giants kept doing the same old thing they'd done forever.  It just doesn't work anymore.  Those business empires of my youth, like Sear's, J.C, Penney's, Montgomery Wards, K-Mart, and all the rest, didn't innovate until it was way too late.  Then they pushed whatever good ideas they had through corporate committee after committee until the ideas were completely lame.  Our current, rapidly changing, highly connected, social media rich world is a realm they can't function in. 

These are the big lessons I've learned recently from looking into this retail collapse that I wrote about last post.  The questions now are: How many of these buildings can be reused with new ideas?  And how many will die and be demolished?  That's what happened to Rolling Acres Mall in the last few months.

Who is Steve Emig and why am I doing this blog?

This is me in the photo, carving tile on my BMX bike in a pool called the Nude Bowl in the Southern California desert in 1990.  For many years when there were no public skateparks, skateboarders and BMXers would travel to this spot in the middle of nowhere, high on a hill, to ride this empty pool.  The graffiti decorated place is the ruins of an old nudist colony, that's where the name Nude Bowl came from.  This still is from my 1990 self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Here's that video and some other things I've done over the years:

-My footage from  the 2-Hip King of Dirt comp at Mission Trails, near San Diego, CA, 1991
-The Ultimate Weekend, 1990, my first full length, completely self-produced BMX video
-My edit of the first 2-Hip Meet the Street, BMX street contest, in 1989

Vision Skateboards' Barge at Will, 1989- I shot the video for Mark Cernicky's section at 19:06
I'm also sitting on the rail in the background of Ken Park's section a few times.
Tuff Skts Promo- This is the sole remaining piece of a 7 minute promo video I shot and edited in 1990 for Christian's Hosoi's then new company Tuff Skts.  Those were three fun days of shooting video.

-Las Vegas Supercross, 1991, I worked on the crew in the office and on site for this one.
-Working as a "spotter" on American Gladiators, 1992, with then Superman actor Dean Cain kicking some butt.  If you freeze this clip at 9:51, I'm the guy in black, under the silver framed tower, to Dean's left.  Dean was a really cool guy, and one of the best celebrities ever to compete on the show.
-44 Something, the 1993 video I edited for the then tiny BMX company S&M Bikes.  This video was rated as one of the Ten Best BMX videos of the 1990's by BMX Plus! magazine.

I'm now 50 years old, and I weigh over 350 pounds.  I gained the weight working crazy hours as a taxi driver.  At one point I lost over 130 pounds in a couple of years, and then went back to work driving a taxi, and gained it back.  I live in a small apartment in the quiet town of Kernersville, North Carolina, with my mom, who currently pays all the bills.  I do a number of things to help her out, but not enough I'm told.  I'm officially unemployed, and have been for years.  I've been making a little money from selling artwork, but not much. 

That's the "cover of the book" that most people around here see.  Remember when you were told as a kid not to judge a book by its cover?  I'm a good example of that.  The people of this area have mostly lived very traditional lives centered around Industrial Age jobs, family, and church.  For a variety of reasons, I haven't been able to find any job here, let alone a good paying job.  When I fill out those damn online job applications, with the 20 minute long bullshit personality profiles, I look terrible.  Potential employers see "old, taxi driver (sketchy!) and gaps in employment." I never get called.  After years in California, my attitude has been, "OK, I'll create my own job."

On the way to becoming an old, fat, former taxi driver, I've self-published over 30 zines, published three blogs that were #1 in their niche in the world, produced/edited 15 low-budget action sports videos, and worked on the crew of over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows.  I've written over 500 poems, some pretty decent, but nearly all were lost when I moved to North Carolina in 2008.  I've even written lyrics to a couple of songs and had a friend's band record them for use in a video I produced.  I'm a pretty creative guy.

But there are lots of creative people in the world.  Everyone has creative potential.  I've also worked years as a furniture mover, restaurant worker, tiny amusement park manager, landscaper, shooting range worker, porn store clerk, video store clerk, and telemarketer.  I know what it's like to grind it out in a "normal" job day after day.  I've moved about 40 times myself, and moved over 900 houses and apartments full of other people's furniture.  I know what hard physical and mental work is.  I've paid my dues... and your dues... and a few other people's dues.  In 2000, I worked weekends as a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach area of Southern Cailfornia.  At the time, I made enough money in three long days to live cheap, pay my bills, and spend my time off riding my bike or at the beach.  But technology hit the taxi business, just like most every other industry.

Long before Uber and Lyft came along, computer dispatching replaced the old CB radios, and changed the taxi business.  For most of the time from 2003 to late 2007, I lived in my taxi, working 80 to 100 hours every week, didn't take any full days off, took showers at the gym, and struggled to survive as the companies put more and more cabs on the road.  Finally, Thanksgiving weekend of 2007, I could no longer drive a taxi for both health and financial reasons.  I dropped off my taxi and walked out on the streets of Orange County, California with $15 in my pocket.  I had athlete's foot so bad that my feet were cracked and bleeding, and I could only hobble along slowly like an old man.  My family had wound up in North Carolina a state I'd never lived in, and I didn't talk to them much.  As a taxi driver, I'd drifted away from my friends in the BMX, skateboard, and TV production worlds.  I expected to die on the streets within a few weeks.

Obviously, I didn't die.  I wound up living, fully homeless, panhandling for food money and bus fare, for a year in Southern California.  In all, I've survived 8 1/2 years of varying levels of homelessness, and I worked full time for 6 1/2 of those years.  Being in the "working homeless" category is, by far, the worst form of homelessness.  Most of that time I was a taxi driver.  I don't do drugs and very rarely drink anymore.  I was randomly drug tested in my cab days.  I know that surviving all those years of homelessness is the biggest success of my life.  I should have died on several occasions. I didn't.  But the vast majority of people don't see surviving homelessness as an accomplishment.  Most people never take big chances that could lead to serious failure.  I have.  Most people go with the flow... until something catastrophic happens, like losing their job or getting a serious illness.  Or something like The Great Recession of 2008. And then they act surprised when they're suddenly upside down in their morgtage or their retirement disappears.

As a kid moving around small-town Ohio when it was still thriving, I was a dork, and a big dreamer.  As a young man, I got into the then obscure sport of BMX freestyle, doing tricks on little bicycles.  I followed my dreams, and accomplished many of them, much to everyone's surprise.  I began to dream big and accomplish some things.

 I also began to work on my multitude of personal issues.  When I moved out of my family's house in 1985, at age 19, I had more hang-ups than Kim Kardashian's closet.  I had more issues than the National Geographic magazine warehouse.  My crazy path through life, working lots of different jobs, was my way of learning new skills and working through my intense shyness, and learning to make things happen.

In the action sports and TV production worlds of California, I've seen many people go from down and out to being quite successful.  I know it's possible.  But here in the very conservative and traditional world of central North Carolina, most people haven't seen those personal success stories that I have.

With my old school BMXer and skateboard roots, and having been close friends to many entrepreneurs, when I see an old, abandoned building, I think of building a skate and bike park, an art gallery, or some other entrepreneurial idea.  As I write this, literally HUNDREDS of shopping malls in the U.S. are either dead, dying or struggling.  The huge retail shops of my youth like Sears, J.C. Penney's, K-Mart, Radio Shack and others are closing stores left and right.As these anchor stores leave malls, more malls are falling into financial trouble.

This huge "Mallpocalypse" comes after decades of Industrial Age factories closing, and after thousands of houses going into foreclosure and being abandoned after the 2008 recession.  To put it very simply, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of abandoned buildings, and thousands of bricks and mortar businesses struggling across the U.S..  We actually have much more space under roof than we need, due to a number of factors.  I'm publishing this blog, and devoting my intellectual and writing abilities, to this issue to try and find legitimate ways to productively use as many of these buildings as possible.

What's in it for me?  Well, there's at least one book to be written here, and I've always wanted to create a space that brings, BMX, skateboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, art, music, and interesting lectures into a single place.  No one has done that yet.  Maybe this will lead me to find a way to make that big dream happen, as many other dreams of mine have in the past.

If you find any of this interesting, hop on for the ride.