Towns that once welcomed these giant stores, sacrificing locally owned businesses, now regret it. The roots of the retail vacancy problem are twofold. Chain stores are multiplying at a staggering pace. They've created a glut of retail space. In the last 12 years, per-capita retail space has increased 34 percent, from 15 to 20 square feet.
Many towns now have more retail space than residents can support.
The second part of the problem is that corporate chains reinvent themselves every 10 years or so, abandoning existing outlets in favor of new formats. First there were the strip malls, which gave way to the enclosed malls. These in turn failed as developers built waves of ever-larger regional malls. Hundreds of malls weakened and died following the arrival of the first wave of big-box stores in the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, the big boxes themselves began to shed their skins to build larger outlets elsewhere.