Will Amazon Destroy America’s Malls — or Save Them?
America’s biggest mall-property owner has been in talks with Amazon to convert former Sears and J.C. Penney locations into fulfillment centers
Welcome to Buy/Sell/Hold, Marker’s weekly newsletter that’s 100% business intelligence and 0% investment advice. Each week, our writers Steve LeVine and Rob Walker make sense of the most important developments in business right now — and give them a Buy for clever moves or positive trends, a Sell for mistakes or missed opportunities, or a Hold if they’re noteworthy but too early to call.
🛍️ How America’s malls could become Amazon warehouses 🛍️
The Buy/Sell/Hold Analysis
For years, pundits have prophesied that Amazon.com would kill the shopping mall. And now the pandemic has turned many ailing malls into ghost towns while online shopping booms; e-commerce rose from being 17% of U.S. retail sales in 2019 to about 33% in April 2020, according to McKinsey, and Amazon’s profits doubled in the most recent quarter.
But what if it turned out that Amazon — of all things! — could throw malls a lifeline when they needed it most? This counterintuitive scenario came to life this week through a…
