The news out Thursday that Sears would close its Wilson Mall store is staggering, especially coming on the heels of last week's announcement that Home Depot was closing its new store in Wilson. (I would post a link here to the Wilson Times article, but the newspaper's online pay wall prohibits that.) That's two stores and scores of jobs about to vanish.
The 2008-09 economic downturn has been hard on businesses everywhere. I'm guessing (I haven't seen numbers reported) that dozens of businesses in Wilson have gone belly-up in the past couple of years. I can think of a half dozen or so without straining my memory. Each business failure marks the end of a dream and the quashing of an opportunity. The failure of Sears and Home Depot are different because they are parts of large and strong national corporations.
Home Depot seemed stillborn from the time it demolished the old Kmart building in Gateway Plaza until it gave up on the location. Competing with more established Lowe's just a few hundred yards away, Home Depot never seemed to get off the ground. The few times I visited the store, customers were scarce, and the selection seemed more limited than at Lowe's.
When Sears announced it would add onto the then-Parkwood Mall, the prospects seemed promising. The mall needed an upgrade, but Sears would bring in more traffic and help smaller shops there. But the Hull-Storey purchase of the mall and the departure of Belk for the new Heritage Crossing shopping center marked the downward spiral of the mall. Although Hull-Storey scored with a new cinema complex and an interior refurbishing, the stores the new owners brought in never matched the ones that left. Steve and Barry's took over the old Belk space but never generated much traffic. Moving K&W Cafeteria to an outside location reduced traffic inside the mall. Retailers who filled the spaces seemed to target cut-rate buyers rather than the sophisticated. City Hall at the Mall seemed like a good idea, but even that space looks under-utilized. Instead of mall customers, the complex was attracting Penney's customers and Sears customers, and too few of the latter. City Council obediently and enthusiastically weakened the city's sign ordinance to allow the mall to install humongous digital signs in two locations. While the mall deteriorates, the city is left with the two execrable eyesores and the precedent they set.
Sears' inventory of appliances, hardware, tools and gardening supplies, along with clothes and shoes, provided convenient, efficient shopping, but too many Wilson shoppers apparently have migrated to Heritage Crossing or other locations. For the first time, Wilson might be without a Sears location. For many years before the mall location opened, Sears operated a catalog store here, where customers could order products shown in the then-ubiquitous Sears catalog. Online shopping has made catalog stores obsolete, so this city will likely be without a Sears outlet.
The closings of Sears and Home Depot are another crushing blow to the face of an already bludgeoned local economy. Empty storefronts are multiplying, along with job losses. The shocks and aftershocks from this economic earthquake are leaving retail rubble that will be a long time in rebuilding.
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I have always wondered why anyone would build such a monstrosity like the movie theater at the Wilson Mall entrance. It does lively up the area and gives a local venue for the latest flick$, good or bad, but anyone with an elementary sense of visual design could see how it cuts the mall in half, creating another hurdle for customer traffic, as well as obscuring a long range skyline - seems there are plenty of vacant lots surrounding the mall to accommodate such a cubistic building, a theater is more of an end sale destination point anyway, why put one side of a potentially thriving commerce building into never never land. Is this because of such irresponsible and maybe non-localized planning? It may not matter who moves into the Steve & Barry's crooked shirt space, it will still be on the dark side of the moon.
It's possible the Belks store moving to Heritage Crossing will not save the Belks either, everyone knows that a better deal is right next door, eventually.
It's horrible to see any business close and even more so see people's livelihoods put to the curb, especially after a series of bad corporate decisions coupled with a less than optimal business location, along with a haphazard economy that has spiraled down the toilet ever since the $4.00 gallon gas epic.
...oh yeah, I almost forgot, there is still downtown Wilson.
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