A Look at the Future of Main Street America

By Rigucci @ Shutterstock.com and Young Research & Publishing.

UPDATE 11.21.23: Worse than nearly all other cities in America, San Francisco has surrendered its streets to homeless drug addicts, leaving small business owners and pedestrians to suffer a gauntlet of abuse and crime as they commute around the city. But, recently in preparation for the APEC summit meeting between Joe Biden and the leader of communist China, Xi Jinping, California at least proved they still know what clean streets are supposed to look like by hauling away the homeless drug addicts and clearing their feces filled tent villages away from the summit area. Now that the summit is over, residents are wondering if they can expect the homeless to return, or if the state will keep the streets clean. Aaron Tolentino reports in KRON:

Last week’s 2023 APEC Summit brought thousands of visitors to San Francisco, including President Joe Biden and other world leaders. In preparation for the week-long event that concluded Friday, San Francisco streets underwent a cleanup. For example, homeless encampments were relocated from around the Moscone Center where many APEC events occurred.

The APEC barriers set up around the city used for security were removed on Sunday. With many tourists and world leaders out of San Francisco, a question arises.

Will the streets of San Francisco remain clean even after APEC?

At the National API Elected Officials Summit on Saturday, KRON4 asked SF City Attorney and District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan if clean streets in the city are sustainable.

Chiu was asked how confident he is in that proposition.

“There’s been an incredible amount of work this year to continue to move our city in the right direction. A lot of what has happened this year was in part building up to APEC,” Chiu said. “(APEC) has also been incredible work to address what’s happening on our streets, cleaning up our streets…”

“My profound hope is that we’re able to continue the momentum that we’ve built for APEC week and into the future,” Chiu added.

Chiu’s full soundbite can be viewed in the video player below.

Chan said “a lot” of resources were used to clean up the streets.

“To be able to maintain that, I think there’s a lot of questions about what can we do. I think there are a lot of lessons learned during this week,” Chan said. “I think what’s going to happen and what should happen all around the city is that we continue to keep up our work. Focus on day-to-day operations of the city — making sure we keep our streets clean.

“We continue to offer our outreach to homeless individuals and continue to make sure that city services are actually efficient and be able to deliver on a timely fashion — not just when it’s a time like this.”

UPDATE 11.8.22: Americans are voting today, and it’s the first opportunity they’ve had since COVID-19 to show politicians exactly how they felt about the business-killing, child-harming, family-destroying regulations promulgated by the country’s weak and radical mayors and governors. Federal Reserve estimates show that 200,000 businesses failed thanks to COVID-19 lockdown measures. Of those, around 130,000 were small businesses. Now, voters get to pass judgment on the politicians who drove their dreams into bankruptcy.

Originally posted December 28, 2021.

That’s no joke. Amazon is planning to open 1,000 mini-warehouses in suburbs and cities around the country. How long will it be before Bezos decides to expand to rural towns across the country?

Amazon became a behemoth on the back of a special provision that allowed it to charge consumers no sales tax when all of its brick and mortar competitors had to charge sales tax. Amazon has now grown to a scale that has allowed it to put the mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar stores which define the character of many towns across the country out of business.

How does a small retail operation survive Amazon’s onslaught?

Bloomberg has more on Amazon’s plans.

A recently opened warehouse in Holyoke, Massachusetts, exemplifies Amazon’s answer to this existential challenge. Located not far from a once vibrant mall, it’s just a short drive from more than 600,000 people. The goal is to creep closer to almost everyone in the U.S.

Beyond Amazon’s retail rivals, the mass opening of small, quick-delivery warehouses poses a significant threat to United Parcel Service Inc. and the U.S. Postal Service. Being fastest in the online delivery race is so critical to Amazon’s business that it doesn’t trust the job to anyone else and is pulling back from these long-time delivery partners. Amazon is basically duplicating UPS’s logistics operation. Many of Amazon’s new hubs are within walking distance of UPS facilities.

“In just a few years, Amazon has built its own UPS,” says Marc Wulfraat, president of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International Inc., who estimates Amazon will deliver 67 per cent of its own packages this year and increase that to 85%. “Amazon keeps spreading itself around the country, and as it does, its reliance on UPS will go away.”

Amazon declined to comment on its expansion plans, and the company has said its last-mile delivery efforts are meant to supplement, not replace, its long-time partners. “Our dedicated last-mile delivery network just delivered its 10 billionth package since launching over five years ago, and we’re proud to provide a great service for our customers,” an Amazon spokeswoman said.

The company’s appetite for real estate is so strong that many analysts have speculated that Amazon would convert vacant department stores into distribution centers. In fact, that option is only a last resort, said the people privy to the company’s plans, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

Department stores such as J.C. Penney are often two stories and lack sufficient loading capacity, they said, meaning they require extensive remodeling to accommodate an Amazon delivery hub. Moreover, mall leases with existing tenants often prohibit the owner from introducing a delivery hub that could spoil the shopping experience, and city officials might not quickly approve an industrial use in a retail area. It’s more likely that dead malls will be bulldozed to make way for an Amazon warehouse, as they have in the Midwest, than for an Amazon delivery station to sprout in a half-vacant mall to coexist with Kay Jewelers and Cinnabon.

Still, analysts expect underutilized retail space to make way for more e-commerce delivery stations due to rising rents for industrial space, along with a surge in store vacancies. “Any time you see retail being occupied by non-traditional retail uses, they’re just holding off what’s inevitable,” says Rick Stein, principal at Urban Decision Group, who estimates the U.S. has 50% more retail real estate than it needs. “It’s a Band-Aid, and at some point that mall is coming down.”

In the past three years, 13.8 million square feet of retail space has been converted to 15.5 million square feet of industrial space, including vacant shopping malls razed to make room for new warehouses, according to a July report by the commercial real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. That trend will continue but not quickly enough for Amazon, which is building new facilities and moving into existing warehouses where it’s faster to get a hub up and running.

Amazon usually puts new delivery stations inside existing warehouses or signs long-term leases with development firms like ProLogis Inc. to build them to its exacting specifications. Typical delivery stations are about 200,000 square feet—about one-fourth the size of one of the company’s giant fulfillment centers—with large lots where workers can park their personal vehicles and Amazon can stage delivery vans. About 20 tractor-trailers arrive each night to drop off packages, which are loaded into hundreds of vans each morning before drivers fan out to make their rounds. In the afternoons, hundreds more Amazon Flex drivers, who use their own cars, arrive to deliver whatever’s left. A typical hub can generate more than 1,000 vehicle trips each day, often in areas where roads are already congested.

Read more here.

Originally posted September 22, 2020.