I would guess 90% of malls in the US have a vacant anchor space that used to be a Sears.
We don’t, but we used to have Rax in these parts of Pennsylvania. I knew someone who was a manager at Rax. They were here for a few years in the mid-1980s and suddenly gone. I don’t remember what their food was like.
Boston Market (originally Boston Chicken before adding turkey and ham) was big here for a while. Their food was good, but it seemed like they were always running out of whatever you wanted. I remember stopping there for 2 turkey dinners and they only had one. They offered me two ham dinners at the same price as one turkey dinner to make up for it. It was a good deal if you like ham, but my wife doesn’t like ham and I’m iffy on it, so I passed. Not long after they closed.
I remember going to Boston Market in Westchester County, NY (suburbs just north of New York City) about 35 years ago. I liked the roast chicken and some of the sides were decent. And then a few years later, the chicken piece seemed to have shrunk to the point that it looked like it came from a Cornish game hen.
die to bad management, there’s only about 16 BM restaurants still open
One is in walking distance from me, here in the Bay Area. Haven’t been in ages, but it is across the street from a big shopping center. When we first moved here, almost 30 years ago, we went when we wanted somewhat real fast food.
A couple of months ago I went into the Brookfield Square Mall (Brookfield, WI) because I wanted to buy a dress shirt at the JCPenney.
The place was a ghost town. There are more shuttered stores than open ones. It has a creepy vibe to it. Like something out of a scary movie. There were almost no customers in there, including in the Penney’s.
We have Bayshore Mall which used to be an indoor mall now everything is outside, more like a plaza. When you drive through there it feels like a Hollywood movie set. It’s very hokey.
We had a mall that was built in the 80s and despite having decent stores like Macy’s and Bon-Ton, it went belly-up and new owners decided to demolish most of it and turn it into a “Town Center.” They kept Wal-Mart on one end, Kohl’s on the other, and Regal Cinemas in the middle. Everything else was gone. The new spaces were filled almost immediately by stores like Petco, At Home, Kirkland’s, Home Goods, Hobby Lobby, a state liquor store and a number of smaller specialized shops, and a few decent restaurants on the perimeter. The gamble worked. It’s more successful now than it ever was as a mall.
The mall on the other end of town, which was initially newer and more successful, lost all but one of its 4 anchor stores and is mostly a ghost town on the inside. They turned one former anchor store into a casino, another into a storage facility and one half of another into a health club. It’s really sad. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually turn the mall into apartments.
IOW, only the big box format has the lower per-unit overhead to make the rent while selling at the prices the customers are willing to pay.
Thus we see the future of American midmarket retail: it’s cheap or it’s dead.
Man, yer invading MY stomping grounds out here. You go to the Brickyard or something!
Oakbrook is quite close to me, and seems to regularly do quite good business. If you go there on off hours - like a weekday afternoon, it will be quite empty. This time of year the parking lots are quite crowded. But if you go on a weekday evening from now tile xmas, shoppers will be few. I generally plan my driving to avoid the intersection of 83 and 22d - even after Oakbrook Terrace was forced to take down their redlight cameras.
Yorktown is - as you say - sad. But I think Von Maur is more of their main tenant than Pennys. They seem to be working on redeveloping themself with a big gym. They keep developing restaurants in their outlots - an Olive Garden opened within the last year. And the theaters seem to do a good business. To my mind, Yorktown is almost less of a standalone mall, than one element of a retail stretch from the Target NE of the mall, through the stores on either side of Butterfield to the west up to 355.
Another thing - for whatever reason, Yorktown now allows dogs. On the very infrequent times I went there recently, I would catch the occasional whiff of piss/poop…. Really enhances the deserted vibe. 
That’s a good point, I think that much of that grew up as an adjunct to the mall, and to attract shoppers who were already going to the mall…and now those non-mall retailers probably do better than the mall itself.
Well, Kohl’s is giving out Peace Prizes and a $50 gift certificate, so we got that going for us.
(They should do this to troll Trump)
I went to a downtown mall in my small city for the first time in months. It has been reduced to a library, a bank and a dollar store. Dozens of stores were closed and empty. I was kind of shocked.
There’s a big mall a mile from my house. I drive by it on my way to work, and my daughter worked there part-time until 3 years ago, but the last time I was inside was around 4 years ago, when it looked like it was still going strong.
I asked a friend at work how it’s looking these days since she mentioned mall walking there recently, and she says that it’s crowded, with lines last Thursday evening with families having photos taken with Santa.