{"id":9028,"date":"2017-07-26T10:00:29","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T15:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=9028"},"modified":"2017-07-23T00:41:23","modified_gmt":"2017-07-23T05:41:23","slug":"anchors-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2017\/07\/anchors-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Anchors, away"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"OLYMPUS
\nJuly 9, 2017:<\/strong> The Sears store in Peru, Illinois, will close before the end of the year.<\/em><\/p>\n

Peru, Illinois \u2014<\/strong> I needed a pit stop, Wi-Fi, and food, in that approximate order. Peru Mall, the only major shopping center on I-80 between Davenport and Joliet and the first one directly<\/em>\u00a0on I-80 east of Coralville, was an easily accessible option for the first two.<\/p>\n

It ended up being an experience I wasn’t expecting.<\/p>\n

After I walked past the theater entrance and an arcade with no one in it on a hot summer Sunday, I passed one of the mall’s interior intersections. Three of the four corners were vacant. It was only slightly better down the main hallway (and forget about a food court). In the other direction was Sears, whose eventual closure had been announced days before<\/a>. That doubled the mall’s pain because J.C. Penney was already in liquidation mode<\/a>, selling everything at 70% off. The mall had announced a month earlier<\/a> it would close an hour earlier six days a week and lop two hours off Sunday time.<\/p>\n

This isn’t my first dead mall, so to speak; Southridge in Des Moines began spiraling after Jordan Creek opened or even before then since Montgomery Ward was an original anchor. Half of the interior was demolished<\/a>\u00a0in 2012 for revitalization \u2014 not too long after the J.C. Penney closed<\/a>, and a few years before\u00a0it also lost its Sears<\/a> \u2014\u00a0but that mall’s issues had an external factor and the Great Recession in general. Southridge still has a Younkers and a Target. (I haven’t been to Crossroads in Waterloo in years <\/em>and now I’m a little afraid to look.)<\/p>\n

This experience at Peru Mall was the first to make me think\u00a0Oh, that<\/strong> collapse in retail.<\/em> It looked emptier than it did even in Nathan Bush’s photo gallery from December 2012<\/a>. After JCP and Sears go,\u00a0<\/em>the mall’s largest stores left<\/a> will be Marshalls and Jo-Ann Fabrics. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Sears’ serious financial woes<\/a> and waves of closures threaten a cascade of bad effects for malls across the country.<\/p>\n

Even if the JCP was already out of three-button shirts in my size, at least the Wi-Fi was top-notch and trouble-free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 9, 2017: The Sears store in Peru, Illinois, will close before the end of the year. Peru, Illinois \u2014 I needed a pit stop, Wi-Fi, and food, in that approximate order. Peru Mall, the only major shopping center on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trip-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9028"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9031,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9028\/revisions\/9031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}