AMERICAN RETAILERS MASSIVELY CLOSE THE STORES

The US retail market is going through difficult times. The experts predict that in 2020, about 3.6 thousand trade enterprises in the country will be closed. Some of the companies planned the termination of the activities long before the pandemic, but its consequences and the changes in the country's economy made their own adjustments, accelerating the collapse.

The analysts from the Business Insider Company note that 9.3 thousand outlets disappeared over the past year. This was a record number, compared to the 8 thousand that were closed in 2017. How many stores will be closed in total? Real estate agents from Cushman & Wakefield believe that previous records will be broken, indicating a forecast of 12 thousand.

Retailers are forced to close stores, and many of them go bankrupt.

According to the calculations of the American economists, a downtime within a month can “remove” from the market about 30% of trading enterprises that are not related to food.

The extension of the social isolation regime and the corresponding restrictions, imposed by the authorities of individual states for four months, may lead to an increase in the corresponding indicator of liquidation of trading counters to 65%.

According to the experts, about 68% of the state economy is formed by personal expenses of the American citizens. The obtained information indicates that personal consumption fell by 7.6% in the first quarter of this year. Moreover, against the backdrop of a pandemic, there is a massive loss of jobs by citizens. Over the past two months, about 36.5 million of the US residents have applied for unemployment benefits.

The experts note that an increasing number of Americans are choosing to order home delivery.

And although food costs have increased, the spending on non-food items began to decline. In the first place, clothing stores were hit. Their income in April fell by 89.3%. Next in the line of those who started to lose income are the sellers of household appliances and electronics (60.6%), furniture (58.7%) and goods for sports (38%).

Many well-known retailers in the United States have announced plans to close stores. At the beginning of the year, Pier1 was ready to close half of its outlets (about 450 stores). Victoria's Secret is going to close more than 250 stores in the US and Canada. Almost the same number of the stores are being rolled up by Gap Inc. Tuesday Morning Company was generally forced to start bankruptcy proceedings, and now gets rid of 230 of the 700 trading enterprises that operated in the United States at the beginning of the year.