[kurttheviking]

I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip an experience for families and diverse tastes. My working theory is that three of such small businesses are sufficient and could operate well with a common inventory strategy and manager (e.g. a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop...nothing that spoils in the very short term). When I've got a bit more time I want to try that idea and see if it works as a way to revitalize otherwise charming old downtown areas with vacant retail space and communities wishing to bring back their main street. Giving this idea away in case anyone else has tried or wants to try sooner than me and report back.

[bombcar]

The thing I've noticed is that even dying downtowns want insane amounts of rent; I think you have to be able to buy the building to make it work.

However, that's not as unrealistic as it may seem, because the city itself often owns a decent amount of downtown, and can make a deal.

[QuantumNoodle]

High commercial rent affects not only diverse businesses (good ideas that take risks) but also the quality and accessibility of goods of necessary businesses. Near me, simple mens' haircuts have soared to $35+... Except those shops that have been around for ages and own their buildings. They still charge sub $20.

Another gripe is the amount of "luxury" apartments popping up. Inviting & modern interiors but all faux cheap materials. And, like, under a highway. Nothing says luxury like being surrounded by concrete and can't even go outside and walk. Commercial real estate is really out of touch :/

[SoftTalker]

A good haircut takes about 30 minutes. So if the barber is getting $20/cut that's $40/hr gross max assuming he's booked solid every day (most are not). From that they have to cover the rent (or property tax, insurance, and upkeep if they own the shop), utilities, scissors/clippers and other instruments, consumables, their own self-employment tax, health insurance, and retirement. That doesn't sound like it would leave much.

[lbreakjai]

30 minutes? There's a ton of men with a simple hairstyle just going for a quick trim, a competent barber should be able to handle three or four of those per hour easily.

[hdgvhicv]

And you need to run them back to back all day, every fay. Not just at lunch time or before after work, with no down time, no quiet days because it’s nice weather and people are out enjoying it.

[ofrzeta]

It's really baffling that even in the shittiest areas rents or property prices are insane. It seems the capital owners just don't care or don't lose enough money to care. They should be expropriated. Of course that won't happen.

[armenarmen]

AFAIK Commercial is priced at a multiple of rent. So when an owner still has a loan on a building that was based off of multiple of 3000/mo and decides to rent it out for 1500/mo it effectively cuts the value of that building in half.

Just an accounting issue for someone who owns it out right, but devastating for someone with a loan. I think this is why you’re seeing landlords offering multiple free months of rent nowadays. It allows them to adjust to actual market pricing annualized, while being able to call the “free” months an expense

[marcus_holmes]

We had this experience with a local town centre where the high street basically died. Retailers priced out by high rents, which was fine when the economy was good and people were spending, but as soon as it took a dip there was nowhere to go and they had to shut up shop.

And this mechanism was why; almost all the real estate was owned by funds and leveraged. Property values based on a multiplier of rent. They could weather a long spell of zero rental income because that effectively cost them nothing, but if the rent went down then the value went down and they had to come up with the difference.

[salynchnew]

That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources. How long will a fund typically keep that on the books before they have to offload the asset or declare bankruptcy? At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.

[ThrustVectoring]

Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.

[gizajob]

I think that about nails it for most commercial real estate.

[mschuster91]

> That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources.

Inefficient for society? Yes. But for the capital providers aka investment (and let's be clear: retirement) funds and banks? Definitely not.

The fundamental problem at the root of all of it is how the US does pensions. In contrast to most European countries that operate in a redistribution system, aka the current workers pay the pensions of the current pensioners in exchange for "IOU tokens", the US has everyone responsible for themselves... which leads to a constant influx of cash into all kinds of asset markets, no matter the market conditions.

And that is bad, for multiple reasons.

- it ties general economic downturns to people's pensions. That in turn factually prevents politics from doing what is right (e.g. restrict climate gas emissions), because a lot of companies make a lot of money by abusing the environment and cracking down on that would lead to them losing value.

- it creates a lot of perverse incentives. When you got almost 50 trillion dollars in total retirement funds [1] with hundreds of billions of dollars in new savings each year... that money has to go somewhere where it is backed by a physical asset or a consumption in the end. A lot of that money ends up in government bonds, which "allows" the US to cut taxes for the ultra-rich without limitations and balloon the national debt without consequences because guess what, the US can "always" borrow money. It's just as bad as Japan, only less openly exposed. What does not end up in bonds ends up primarily on the real estate market, driving the nonsense we're discussing here, and what remains goes into crap like Yo [2].

- it disincentivizes the forces of the free market from holding bad actors accountable. Under "normal" conditions, the AI bubble or Tesla would simply have run out of cash years ago because no one would give them more money, but when the scam is so large it ends up in the S&P 500, cash will flow in automatically from all the dumb money that is going into ETFs and other pension investment vehicles. Once you are in, you stay in.

- To make it worse, people are increasingly going from "moderate" managed funds to the extremes: either purely tracking funds that have virtually no fees deducting profits (and, in exchange, do not exercise voting rights) or into high-yield "activist investor" funds that love to do exploitative shit like forcing companies to redistribute their liquidity reserves as dividends (robbing the company of resilience against economic downturns) or engage in LBOs, buy-and-break-apart schemes and the likes. These almost always offload the consequences of making money for investors onto society at large... like, for example, malls falling apart because anchor stores fell victim to the vultures. Toys'R'Us is one particularly nasty example.

> At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.

The entire pension based economy in the US is the true scam - in the end, it's all IOUs just like our "pension points" in Europe. If there is no economy around due to demographic collapse or whatever, the IOUs become just as worthless.

Normally I wouldn't even care, but unfortunately, the US pension market is so large that a lot of dollars flow out elsewhere, including our healthcare system, and I'm sick and tired of American vultures buying up everything in Europe Just Because They Can.

[1] https://www.ici.org/statistical-report/ret_25_q4

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

[coldtea]

>AFAIK Commercial is priced at a multiple of rent. So when an owner still has a loan on a building that was based off of multiple of 3000/mo and decides to rent it out for 1500/mo it effectively cuts the value of that building in half.

Well, if the town is dying, the "value of that building" is effectively cut in half, or worse, anyway. Asking a lot for rent is not gonna magically make the building worth more - it will just keep it unrented.

[tardedmeme]

It's not just accounting, it means enough things that they're incentivized to manipulate it upwards. It impacts the loans they can get and the interest they pay, enough that it may be worth it to forego some actual income to keep the fake numbers up.

[SoftTalker]

But at some point it has to collapse, it seems to me. You can't forever fake a high value on a property that is bringing in no rent. Unless the real value is just being a outwardly legitimate-looking place to park money.

[bombcar]

And they’re often owned by funds that are measured in the billions. A parking lot in New York covers for a bunch of empty middle America storefronts, as long as the valuation works out on paper.

[nothercastle]

Accounting rules allow you to extend and pretend which is common in commercial. Because loans are sucuritized by other assets there can be a lot of different assets that could all suddenly become distressed just by pricing down rent in one building

[BrenBarn]

I hear people say this a lot but it doesn't make any sense. Why would the value be based on some imaginary rent rather than the actual amount of money taken in? It seems stupid for anyone to say that asking, say, $2500 rent with three free months (giving $27k for the year) is better than just asking $2000 with no free months (giving $24k for the year). If this is really what is going in then the system deserves to crash.

[bombcar]

It’s just how commercial real estate is valued. It’s very formulaic based on the local multiplier of rents. It even applies down to single-family homes but those have competing buyers (families) - but in pure commercial you are the multiple of rents and basically nothing else (save in the strange case of someone wanting that particular property).

The key is home loans for normal families can’t be called - commercial loans can.

[bluGill]

Even in the best of times you will have empty places so they have to ignore unrented places since there is no formula that can tell the state of the economy from just current rent. Real estate is always local so even in the worst economies there is always some place booming

[IAmBroom]

Your suggested alternative generates a need for massive accounting by the banks, tracking each loan's aggregate monthly rental income.

A simpler rule that mostly covers today's problems, and adds very little overhead after the loan is signed, is often considered good enough.

[nothercastle]

It’s probably a bad rule in retrospect but to reprice now would be devastating

[pif]

> devastating for someone with a loan

Sorry, I can't understand why. Could you please expand a bit?

I don't get how decreasing the value of the building makes the loan more difficult to repay.

[sjducb]

Loan to Value (LTV) is a percentage that tells you how safe a loan is. You divide the amount of the loan by the value of the building. So if I buy a building for 10 million with a 6 million loan and 4 million of my own money then I have an LTV of 60%.

This means if I go bankrupt then the bank can sell the building and get its money back.

If the value of the building halves because the rent halved then I have a 6 million loan on a 5 million building. My LTV is 120%. The bank cannot get its money back by selling the building.

No bank is going to give me a loan on a property with an LTV of 120% so I’m stuck with my current bank. My current bank then increases my interest rate because I am now a very high risk customer who can’t leave. This is very expensive for me.

One way out of this situation is to get my LTV back to 60% which means I need to reduce the loan to 3 million by finding 3 million to pay off part of the loan.

Another way out is to sell the building for 5 million then pay the bank one million, exiting the deal with a loss of 1 million.

None of these are good for me. I’ll do anything to keep the value of the building high by charging high rents even if no one can actually pay the rents and the building sits empty.

Long term I might be able to exit by getting permission to convert it to flats.

[bluGill]

Don't forget that long term the current downturn is likely to end and so I will again be able to get the rent in a few years if I can just hold on for these bad years.

[com2kid]

Sounds like a solution would be to average rent prices over some period of time to account for rental market fluctuations.

[sgarman]

So how long can you collect $0 of rent on your $5000 building before the bank realizes?

[sokka_h2otribe]

The backing of the loan is in part based on the value of the asset, so you need to add collateral to accommodate a reduction in the asset value.

Basically you have to pay a lot more if the building value goes down

[LPisGood]

I’m not sure if the explanation in the second part holds water. Wouldn’t the reduction in property value be the same as the ammortized free rent?

[Arainach]

No, because the mortgage companies' valuation is based on rent and does not consider any incentives.

[BrenBarn]

Right. . . but isn't that just obviously stupid? If I say the rent is $3k a month but you get all 12 months free, why would anyone be fooled by that? Why would you base it on some hypothetical rent rather than the amount of actual money that the property takes in?

[netcan]

No. Not if the valuations and downstream effects of valuations are formulaic, which they often are.

[diogenescynic]

It's because commercial property is bought and bundled up into REITs and they would rather have a property go unleaded than to lower rates.

[wvbdmp]

I see this also, but I don’t get it. An empty building still costs a bunch of taxes and upkeep and still rapidly deteriorates without tenants looking after it. Aren’t these people hemorrhaging money? What do they have to show for it? My city actually handled a majority of the rent so a business could revitalize a large-ish property that had been empty for years. Of course it failed as soon as that deal ran out.

[bluGill]

As I've said elsewhere, when the economy improves it will be rented again.

[TheOtherHobbes]

If.

And for how much?

The system is a formalised version of "Don't tell the Tsar bad news."

Everyone has to pretend Better Days Will Come™ while the economy saws through the branch it's sitting on.

It works until suddenly it doesn't, and the banks demand a bailout.

[bluGill]

The economy has always had ups and down. While that is no guarantee, it is a strong sign. Inflation means that rent will get cheaper in real terms just staying the same. Things will be bad - again - for a few years, not that is nothing unusual.

Of course real estate is very local. There is a big difference between property in a growing city and land in a rural small town.

[g3f32r]

> and the banks demand a bailout.

Which will certainly be granted and thus Better Days *WILL* Come, at least in the localized "I'm taking practically no risk" sense.

[IAmBroom]

So what is your solution that is impervious to a permanent or lengthy and gigantic downturn in the economy?

[com2kid]

Except we have the entire commerical business districts of small and mid sized cities destroyed from these practices and there is often no bouncing back from that. Oops.

[gosub100]

I think for businesses that own multiple properties, they can claim losses on vacant buildings to offset their taxes in other profitable ones.

[anthonypasq]

land value taxes would fix this. is too cheap to sit on derelict property

[SoftTalker]

I don't think it's that simple. If the property is abandonded there's nobody to collect any taxes from.

[hdgvhicv]

On which case it’s owned by the state and the state can do whatever it wants. Like rent it out for $10 a year to the local knitting club.

[dh2022]

How would the state become the owner of the property if there are no taxes of the property? The owner would probably be the bank or someone that bought the property in foreclosure. But not the state.

[notatoad]

i don't know if it's the same everywhere, but in my town there's essentially no taxes on vacant commercial buildings. the tax rate is based on the use

and so landlords who own a whole bunch of properties would much rather a unit sit empty for a year than lower the rent to fill it, becauase it costs them basically nothing and lowering the rent on one unit might have a cascading effect that lowers the rents on all their other properties.

[izacus]

When the capital owner has thousands of properties, why spend energy on optimizing a few to make cities more liveable?

Consolidation, as always, is eating the society like cancer.

[vasco]

If the only way to be successful is to start by buying multiple downtown locations outright I think we know why the downtown is empty. Nobody is going to do that to open a shop. Not even the mega chains are usually buying anything.

[colechristensen]

The path to the return of main street is bullying your city council to attach ridiculous property tax penalties for any vacancies for whatever the central business district commercial zone is and not allow land zoned in that fashion to change.

Force the rents and property values down until a competitive market rate is arrived at naturally. Punish the greed that attempts to store or preserve value by leaving things vacant for years.

[gizajob]

You’re right but it seems like the exact opposite scenario is usually in effect.

Particularly in the UK, landlords seem stuck in some kind of bizarre logic of “oh, nobody can rent my building, it just has to sit here being worth nothing” and “oh, you want my worthless building, then naturally I’ll need ALL your profit and more.”

[colechristensen]

There are accounting practices in place where a property value is set based on rents and that value isn't reset when a unit is vacant, but it IS reset when a new lower rent is in place through various mechanisms of valuations.

[nothercastle]

Force taxes on average use. Force empty stores to subsidize existing ones.

[gosub100]

You don't think that corporate weasels have a way to avoid the tax?

In Nevada, if you have a gaming license you must "use it or lose it", and for this reason, sometimes 24-hour "casinos" pop up in vacant buildings, just to operate the minimum number of hours to keep the license. Like one day a year.

If you tried to implement a vacant property tax they would set up the most pathetic minimum-compliant "business" you could imagine. "Golfball cleaning, $3.00 per ball, open 1-4pm tues-friday".

[colechristensen]

Eh, just model the law on what shopping malls have in their leases, a "Continuous Operations Clause".

Put into the zoning ordinance business hours where doors have to be open, business has to be staffed and stocked. Property tax penalties apply for daily violations when you don't operate more than the minimum of, say, 250 days per year. Cities could also take inspiration from France in which zoning details and approves the EXACT kind of business, and you could have rules accordingly.

LLM generated lease clause just as an example of the shape of things:

>"Tenant shall continuously conduct its permitted business in the Leased Premises on all regular business days, opening for business no later than 9:00 AM and remaining open until at least 9:00 PM, or during such other hours as are customary for similar businesses in the Shopping Center. Tenant shall continuously maintain a full stock of merchandise and adequate staff to properly serve the public. Should Tenant cease operations without the Landlord's prior written consent, Landlord shall have the right to declare Tenant in default, seek injunctive relief to compel reopening, and recover damages or impose an alternative 'go-dark' rent penalty."

[andrepd]

A Georgist LVT would fix that is short order. Start making owners pay compensation for keeping a valuable space empty and crumbling, and you'll see them step to it pretty quickly or sell it to someone who does.

[ghaff]

If it's empty and crumbling, I doubt it's all that valuable to be repurposed for housing or anything else. I did note the other day in the very small downtown of a nearby minor city that the the ancient travel agent is now a party supply store. But, really, there's not a lot in that downtown.

[ishouldstayaway]

The point of LVT is right there in the name: it is the land that has value. "Location, location, location" is an old cliche for a reason.

If you let your property go empty and crumble, the Land Value Tax is there to provide the incentive for you to either fix up the property and actually use it, or sell it to someone who will.

[SoftTalker]

What if nobody wants to buy it and you can't pay the tax?

[datadrivenangel]

The state takes it, and then can either sell it off or use it. This makes it easier to do things than trying to find who owns a probably abandoned property.

[ishouldstayaway]

The same thing you do now when you can't sell a piece of land: you lower the price.

In addition to what others said, in this case the land is obviously not worth very much, and thus the taxes are also minuscule.

[hdgvhicv]

Then it’s worthless and the state will take abandoned land for $0.00.

If the land is worth less than nothing (contaminated etc) then there should have been a bond involved to ensure the clean up fee was collected.

[IAmBroom]

This is essentially saying "There's no hope; no one will ever return to downtown, no matter what!"... in a thread trying to find ways to prove that wrong.

[avidiax]

Though I am pro-LVT, I don't think this will help in the current situation.

The owner, the bank, and the city all wish to maintain the illusion that a $10M building from 2010 is still worth at least $10M today, even vacant. No party wishes to realize the loss in value. Occasionally, the city may try to punish vacancy with a tax, which is still about additional revenue and not about realizing diminished value.

[hdgvhicv]

Let’s assume that 10m is the land and it’s a 5% tax. That means the bank is paying 500k a year to keep an empty property. That’s real cash flow problems.

[expedition32]

For the companies that own all that real estate it's better to let them sit empty for years than lower the rent.

But eventually the hammer always falls.

[ncallaway]

I take my two little ones almost weekly to our small downtown area. The trip is usually a coffee shop, the bookstore, and a rotating third one (sometimes a candy shop sometimes the toy store, sometimes something else).

Anyway, we're an N=1 confirmation of that theory.

[a1o]

In our case the coffee shop is in the bookstore and it is located right in front of the third. The third is a really nice park (think lake and lots of playgrounds plus activities).

[The_Blade]

(In slight contrast to my other comment) I think Larimer Square in Denver is trying to do something akin. There was a land-edge-lord kerfuffle and gone are staples like The Market and Ted’s Montana Grill (RIP, I was also just in Bozeman). rn one side is bookstore - jewelry & artsy - African jewelry & artsy - Rioja (Denver famous food) - John Fluevog (Vancouver shoes) - Osteria Marco (Denver less famous Italian) - Van Leewuen (NYC ice cream). I hope it all works...

now, bookstores here are a whole other mess. two words, Tattered Cover. there are ample used bookstores, though, i found a copy of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for $6.50 on Colfax that should probably be handled with BSL-3 precaution which is as it should be

[tclancy]

Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza, from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion:

"The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable, transit-connected high streets with predictable pedestrian volumes. That legibility is what good urbanism produces and simultaneously what makes a city capturable."

[ericyd]

Not sure if this is an issue of Australian English vs American English but this is way too jargon-laden to mean anything at all to me.

[tclancy]

Oh sorry, the pull quote does seem nonsensical by itself. It's well down in the conclusion of the article which, while written for the semi-layperson, is very heavy on the data science. Essentially it means what we currently think of (for good reason!) as good urban design makes it easier to analyze an area to optimize for profitability.

[kevin_thibedeau]

LLMs can do English-English translations.

[ahartmetz]

I know someone who used to manage department stores (one branch at a time, several locations). He talked about clusters in a very similar way: Stores need nearby other stores to be attractive.

[me_smith]

This is a timely comment for me. I have been doing research on opening a small indie (new/used) bookstore in a small old downtown I walk through almost every day. It has restaurants, specialty shops, coffee shops and a small local grocery store. I've always thought it was missing a bookstore.

Any tips/warnings that might not be immediately obvious to a hopeful bookstore owner? Do you think there is a sweet spot in terms of square footage of retail space? Margins are low so do you supplement with sidelines/events/memberships?

One of my next steps is to join the ABA as a provisional member to get access to their new bookseller guides.

[mattbrewsbytes]

I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections.

Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc.

If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.

[me_smith]

Thanks for the comment and ideas. I was thinking through the different types of things that could be sidelines. You hit on many of them. There are some cultural festivals that occur in the downtown that can bring opportunities for some local craftspeople to share retail space before and after the festivals. Also, some branded items that go well with books like totes and bookmarks.

[pstuart]

And if there was space for it, hosting board/card games.

[InsideOutSanta]

I suspect, particularly for toy stores, there's also a weird incentive: if they stand alone, you don't want to bring your kids there because it's only going to cost you money. But if they're next to other shops, you can send your kids there to entertain themselves, while you can browse what you actually want to see in peace.

[hnthrowaway0315]

I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!

[TheOtherHobbes]

Universities are effectively ultra-anchors. You have large numbers of students from mostly middle class backgrounds, many of whom have free time and disposable income. (Or at least they're not worried about their loans yet.)

And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things.

The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons.

Clusters work well in these towns.

If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.

[ghaff]

The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and there seem very few cars in the lots.

Oh, yeah, the Toys 'R Us in the complex is long gone too.

[hnthrowaway0315]

It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.

[ghaff]

Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know.

I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.

[hnthrowaway0315]

I'm not into them either. I'm more into second-handed bookstores where I might get some pleasant surprises once for a while.

[steveBK123]

This makes a lot of sense from my own behavior. If a downtown has multiple places to stop, I am far more likely to go.

Better yet if it has attractions for both my wife and me, then we are both more likely to go.

Even better - if it has attractions open at different times of day - morning - errands like hardware shop, foods basics | afternoon - cafe, prepared food, more retail shop | evening - sit down dining, bars, checkout a book store.

It's always weird how some downtowns only cover a slice of this and as a result are dead after 6pm.. or don't come alive until 5pm.

[wodenokoto]

Tsutaya, a Japanese dvd rental store has a specialty shop in Hiroshima. It’s best described as a library hosting a small electronics store, a clothing store, a stationery shop and a coffee shop.

[twunde]

I can't comment about the minimum number of stores, but I do think its the correct idea. I live in a town of ~12000. We have 6.5 bookstores (including the good local thrift store as .5). Stores/restaurants do turn over fairly regularly, so its still tough, but it certainly seems viable. We get a good number of tourists, which helps but I do think you need a mix of restaurants, and a mix of different types of stores. Even as you go to nearby towns with big box stores, they all have downtowns that are doing ok with locally run businesses. Notably the downtowns all are small business focused with few if any box stores

[michaelbuckbee]

I'd be curious to know if you consider a Lego store a "toy store". There's one that opened in my city fairly recently and is in an area of smaller boutique shops (kind of like what you described).

[epolanski]

That's the overall premise of shopping malls.

Get 2-3-4 highly attractive shops that people go to (in Europe, Zara is an example) surrounded by shops that would otherwise die without the proximity/clustering.

[SoftTalker]

> a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop

This was Borders and B&N, in their prime. A one stop shop. They had a childrens area with books and toys. They had a coffee bar. And of course books.

[datakan]

They still do where I live. Its rather nice but seems to be rotting a bit as every time I go there the kids section is clearly not cleaned or well maintained.

[bigstrat2003]

That still is what B&N is like.

[SoftTalker]

I didn't realize there were any left. Both closed up here years ago.

[baxtr]

So basically a tiny mall?

[thepryz]

That seems to be what Barnes and Noble has become. Every store now has books, toys, and a coffee shop inside and it seems they’ve been thriving in the last few years.

My biggest complaint though is that the bargain bin no longer contains books they are cycling out but instead seems to be books and other items specifically meant to be sold in the bargain bin.

[vonnik]

This strategy has worked well for both Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and Shakespeare and Sons in Berlin. Books + Bakery + Coffee. Both of course are set in living pedestrian cities. https://www.shakespeareandsons.com

[kergonath]

I can’t comment on the shop in Berlin, but the one in Paris is a special case. It’s in a relatively central location in a 11M people metropolis, right on top of a major rail and metro hub and across the river from one of the most touristic monument in the world. And even though it’s not really in a shopping area, there are dozens of cafés within 2 minutes on foot. They don’t really have problems getting people to go there. Plus, considering how long hey’ve been in business, I assume they own the building, which shields them from the rent issue. They could still face problems (like Gibert next door that closed somewhat recently), but their situation is very different from the vast majority of shops in normal European cities (including the UK).

[ghaff]

Yeah, I walked by the block-long line of people a couple months ago and pretty much crossed it off my mental list. Didn't need another physical book and there is no shortage of cafes in Paris. Also didn't even make a special trip there. I like to stay in the Latin Quarter and happened to be walking by.

I agree it's not exactly the random indie bookstore though as it's probably listed in every Paris guidebook.

[golem14]

It has not worked for Borders in Palo Alto.

But that was a chain, maybe other locations forced closured everywhere, and that Borders could have survived. I doubt it, however.

[ricardonunez]

I always wanted to open an indie book store + coffee shop and had a similar analysis. I read recently they are having a come back.

Barnes and noble is opening in my city after a decade ago books a million closed and our local indie closed during Covid.

[yummypaint]

This is exactly the business model of Poor Richards in Colorado Springs. They have a pizzarea, book store, and toy store. It's been around for decades and is a local institution.

[eplatzek]

What about the situation where a bunch of flower sellers end up on the same area of town?

Hotelling's Law (also known as the Principle of Minimum Differentiation or Hotelling’s Spatial Competition).

[piokoch]

Yup, that's why molls were so successful. They were deteriorating because of Internet, as a new "moll", covid speed up the process. But, frankly speaking, molls also killed many mom & pops shops scattered in the cities. So this is just evolution, I am not sure if it goes in the right direction, but consumers have the last word and they have spoken, even though, in the long run it hurts them.

[IAmBroom]

"Mall": a physical aggregation of independent stores in a single location, usually renting space from a single landowner.

"Moll": a mobster's girlfriend.

Your paragraph becomes quite amusing if one assumes you didn't make a typo.

[egypturnash]

moll | mäl | noun informal, dated 1 (also gun moll) the female companion of a gangster or other criminal: I'd rush the money over to his moll. 2 a prostitute.

I think you probably mean "mall".

[carlosjobim]

Aren't you worried that your rent will be jacked up 100% or more in case you successfully revitalize the area?

[magenta4]

That is such a good idea but I always have loved small stores so I might be too optimistic.

Let us know if you do it.

[porknbeans00]

kids don't want to browse amazon. =)

[GJim]

Aside from the fact you would have to be nuts to buy kids toys (or anything that must meet a safety standard) from Amazon.

... yet some people still do.

[jmyeet]

So there are a few versions of this.

The most common in the US is the strip mall. This is a largely American, soulless construct of commercial space with parking out front, typically on a major road. There are lots of reasons why this flourished in the US. It's a symptom of society being so car-dependent, which is by design. Rents here are typically lower than other options so some businesses can survive in strip malls that can't elsewhere.

The next step up (density-wise) are actual malls, or shopping centers for the non-Americans. There are different versions of this. You have the entirely indoor mall. You also have other anchor stores that pop up nearby (eg Home Depot) that are popular but can't justify the mall rent costs. Often a bunch of other businesses will sprout around these stores, which is why they're called anchor stores. Anchor stores are also things you generally need in a mall to bring in enough traffic to make the whole thing economical eg supermarkets, department stores. Malls in general have been dying in droves. Basically too many got built in the 1970s through 1990s and online shopping is killing them. There are photography and video channels dedicated to exploring dead malls.

The third rarest option is the walkable district. This is generally the downtown of cities that existed before cars. People generally love these but public transit is an issue. Americans always want to drive even when there are viable options otherwise. That means having to build parking garages and the whole thing kinda falls apart. Or at least it losses some of its charm. The hellish end of this spectrum is Houston.

Some cities have managed to rejuvenate such areas by diverting traffic and generally investing in the area. But what tends to always happen is that businesses will rejuvenate an area and then the landlords will kill it by charging exorbitant rents. I've seen 40+ year old restaurants close because of rent hikes in areas that only really existed for that restaurant.

This is part of the problem with housing being so expensive. It makes everything expensive. That local shops? Well it costs as much to build as a house and a house is easier to sell. But a cafe or a bakery or a bookstore or some other eclectic shop can survive when the rent is $20,000/year. You don't need to pay staff as much when houses cost $100k not $1M. Expensive housing just strangles everything. But when that rent goes to $200,000 over a decade well then suddenly only chain stores and big box retail can survive there so what was once a charming downtown turns into Chili's, a CVS and a Chase bank.

So this can go wrong even in dense places like NYC. There's a real issue right now with so-called "zombie leases". Basically, companies like CVS, Duane Reade and Walgreens signed high-rent long-term leases but then decided to close the store. The store remains empty because the owner has no incentive to rent it for a now-lower market rent while the billion dollar company is still on the hook for it. Enough of these and a street can look abandoned.

I really think that when cities choose to rejuvenate an area they should acquire all of it first. Eminent domain, baby.

I saw a Tiktok awhile ago where someone posited that things we once took for granted get taken away from us and sold back to us. The specific example was walkable cities. That used to be the norm. Now it's a luxury. We can't have that. If people walk everywhere and take a train or bus well then they might not buy a car. Then they'r enot buying insurance and gas and maintaining it. Unacceptable.

Society really is getting dystopian.