And that's not counting their vast parking lots. Alamosa, Colorado, already scarred by an abandoned Kmart, will soon have an empty Wal-Mart, too. Two factors are driving this problem. First, chain stores are multiplying at a staggering pace and have created a glut of retail space. In the last 12 years alone, per capita retail space has increased 34 percent, from 15 to 20 square feet.
Many communities have more retail space than residents can support, so vacancies inevitably follow.
The second factor is that corporate chains reinvent themselves every 10 years or so, abandoning existing outlets for new formats. First there were small strip malls, which gave way to enclosed malls. These in turn failed as developers built successive waves of ever-larger regional malls. Then hundreds of malls closed following the first wave of big box stores in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the big boxes themselves began to shed their skins, vacating existing stores only to build larger outlets across the street or across town.