Driveby Economics – Mall Edition
by Tom on December 18, 2009
in Driveby Economics
Okay, I’ve got a confession to make. I took an extended lunch hour and went to the mall to finish up some Christmas shopping for my wonderful wife of almost 25 years. But what I saw at the mall made me scratch my head and wonder what’s happening……
- It took me 10 minutes to even get into the parking lot. I thought, well, that’s good for the economy, just bad for my time schedules today.
- I had to park in the “outer tier” of parking – but it’s about 30 and cloudy, so no big deal.
- I got inside and there were people everywhere. But, I went into four stores and guess how many people were in line at the cash registers before me? A total of 2. That’s right, in two of the stores, I walked right up. In the other two, I had to wait for one person to pay before I could pay for my things.
- Every store that I walked past and every store I went in had 40, 50, 60% off sales. And this is before Christmas.
So what do we have? A lot of people at the mall, not very many people buying and a LOT of sales before Christmas.
Sounds like retail sales at least in Michigan are going to end up softer than expected in Michigan.
And that, along with $1 on the McDonalds Dollar Menu, will get you a cup of coffee.
Tom Vanderwell
