The Next Things To Collapse

I was talking with Jeff from hockeynews.net the other day and he brought up an interesting statistic. Compared to other countries, the US has 6X more retail store front per capita than anybody else.

We’ve spent the last decade putting a starbucks on every corner, and nobody’s realized that we have way more retail stores and fast food places than we need. It makes sense too. I have 3 McDonalds within a 1/4 mile of my house and 2 Marathon gas stations on my corner. There’s 2 Gamestops within a mile of me too.

There’s simply not that much demand anymore. With the economy strong and mortgages easy to get, we not only bought houses we couldn’t afford but we started up a whole bunch of redundant businesses too and crammed them into places where they shouldn’t be.

The retail industry is going to fail too, but it won’t be next. There’s a few others going to collapse.

The final nail in the auto industry’s coffin was when the banks failed. That’s why you see the big3 eliminating financing and leasing.

That leads me to believe that credit cards will be the next to fail. As more Americans get laid off they’ll start putting more and more on their credit cards. It won’t be long before they let the credit card bill go into the trash can with their mortgage payment.

When that happens, the retail stores are going to take a big huge hit.

Lots of markets need to be corrected, and it’s going to be an ugly road out of this recession – we’re still on the downslope.

December 19th, 2008