It's hard to escape the irony in Amazon.com Inc.'s plan to lease space for an 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center where Cleveland's once-mighty, but long closed and now mostly demolished Randall Park Mall once stood. Over the next few years—the Amazon center is scheduled to be operational in late 2018—locals who had once bought stuff at Randall Park will find their online orders fulfilled out of the same property.
Billed as the world's largest mall in the 1970s, Randall Park, like other malls, fell on hard times as the e-commerce phenomenon essentially invented by Seattle-based Amazon blunted the need or desire to drive to a mall. In its traditional form, the mall model is unlikely to make a comeback. E-commerce, which accounts for just 12 percent of total U.S. retail sales, is on the cusp of making large inroads in market share. There is a surplus of mall space; real estate services giant CBRE Group Inc.'s mall "availability" rate, which measures vacant space as well as occupied space that's being re-marketed to new tenants, today stands at 6 percent, double the rate of less than a decade ago.
With their tenants experiencing declining traffic and facing a mix of falling rents and rising costs, many mall operators may have no choice but to shutter. Investment firm Credit Suisse predicted in June that 20 to 25 percent of U.S. malls could close during the next five years. The main culprit: A projected doubling of online sales of apparel, which is the principal product sold in many malls.
Yet the land will remain, as will the structures—at least for properties with the prospect of undergoing some form of repurposing rather than demolition. Many malls sit on large parcels with flat topographies that would be capable of accommodating the needs of a large DC. A large number of older malls are in densely populated residential areas, though in some cases the neighborhoods may not be particularly desirable. Many have decent road infrastructure, a holdover from an era when developers and communities invested in roads to entice suburban consumers to shop at the malls. "Where roadway infrastructure once helped shuttle people to and from a mall, it could now support the shipping or trucking of goods and materials to and from a new distribution or fulfillment center, provided there are no issues from the surrounding neighborhoods," said Aaron Ahlburn, director of industrial research for real estate services giant JLL.
Amazon, which has never before taken this route to build out its fast-growing fulfillment-center footprint, is one of the country's most influential companies. Amazon's halo effect alone could spur discussion over malls' budding potential as distribution centers or e-commerce fulfillment hubs.
Those looking to take the plunge are likely to find a buyers', or lessees', market awaiting them. For many years, retail real estate commanded higher rental rates than industrial property. At the same time, "capitalization" rates, the ratio of a property's value to its operating income, were traditionally more compressed for retail than industrial. This meant retail buyers were willing to pay higher rates for the same amount of income compared to industrial buyers. Since the Great Recession and the e-commerce explosion, however, the gap between retail and industrial has significantly narrowed, according to James Tompkins, founder of consultancy Tompkins International.
NO SLAM DUNK
Converting traditional mall property to industrial use is hardly a slam dunk, however. Repurposing an entire standing mall into a facility supporting large-scale DC operations is nearly impossible to do because of severe configuration restrictions, said Joe Dunlap, CBRE's managing director of supply chain services. Among the many shortcomings Dunlap cites: Low or irregular clearances, uneven floors, an insufficient number of dock doors, inadequate sprinkler systems to protect high-value cargo, and a chopped-up inner wall structure that makes worker mobility laborious and circuitous.
Demolishing an existing mall and rebuilding it from the ground up is an option only for the deep of pocket. Amazon is leasing the North Randall location from Atlanta-based developer Seefried Industrial Properties Inc., which will oversee what's left of the demolition that began three years ago and then build the fulfillment center at a reported cost of $177 million. It has also been reported that the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority plans to issue $123 million of bonds to finance the project. Not every mall project will have Amazon's imprimatur, or a willing public sector funding source.
Yet Tompkins said that outdated malls can be effectively repurposed in their current design, and without being torn down. Many interior malls have multi-story designs with open courtyards or atriums that would be well suited for the low-cost automated order creation and parcel sortation that is the linchpin of e-commerce fulfillment, he said.
Tompkins cites an example of a traditional two- to three-story indoor mall with stores on either side of a central multi-story courtyard. A mini-load ASRS could be used for storage in the courtyard and for doing batch picking. Totes of batch orders could be dispatched to an area of the mall once occupied by retail stores, and via a robotics unit and parcel sortation system be sorted into individual orders and then packed and sorted to delivery zones or to click-and-collect pickup locations, Tompkins said. Batch picking could be done in the mall on each level for orders to be dispatched to "stores" on multiple levels, he added.
Mall repurposing will be done opportunistically starting next year and become mainstream in 2019, Tompkins predicted. This will all be part of a larger discussion over the need to have bricks-and-mortar and digital commerce co-exist rather than consumers and companies having to choose between the two, he added.
The lease of the old North Randall mall demonstrates that, as it has been many times over the past quarter century, Amazon is positioned at the vanguard of something relatively new. Neill Kelly, a CBRE senior vice president and leader of its Occupier Restructuring and Disposition practice, has seen no interest so far from logistics companies in the department store spaces CBRE is marketing. But Kelly said the mall's time will come, especially as the retail and logistics markets continue to evolve.
"The distress in the retail space has to go a little deeper, and the e-commerce fulfillment companies are going to have find a little more justification in their underwriting for those locations. But I guarantee that they will intersect, and that will be a viable avenue for second-generation big-box space that's well located," he said.
The port worker strike that began yesterday on Canada’s west coast could cost that country $765 million a day in lost trade, according to the ALPS Marine analysis by Russell Group, a British data and analytics company.
Specifically, the labor strike at the ports of Vancouver, Prince Rupert, and Fraser-Surrey will hurt the commodities of furniture, metal products, meat products, aluminum, and clothing. But since the strike action is focused on stopping containers and general cargo, it will not slow operations in grain vessels or cruise ships, the firm said.
“The Canadian port strike is a microcosm of many of the issues that are impacting Western economies today; protection against automation, better work-life balance, and a cost-of-living crisis,” Russell Group Managing Director Suki Basi said in a release. “Taken together, these pressures are creating a cocktail of connected risk for countries, business, individuals and entire sectors such as marine insurance, which help to mitigate cargo exposures.”
The strike is also sending ripples through neighboring U.S. ports, which are hustling to absorb the diverted cargo, according to David Kamran, assistant vice president for Moody’s Ratings.
“The recurrence of strikes at Canadian seaports is positive for U.S. ports that may gain cargo throughput, depending on the strike duration,” Kamran said in a statement. “The current dispute at Vancouver is another example of the resistance of port unions to automation and the social risk involved with implementing these technologies. Persistent disruption in Canadian port access would strengthen the competitive position of US West Coast ports over the medium-term, as shippers seek to diversify cargo away from unreliable gateways.”
The strike is also affected rail movements, according to ocean cargo carrier Maersk. CN has stopped all international intermodal shipments bound for the west coast ports of Prince Rupert, Robbank, Centerm, Vanterm, and Fraser Surrey Docks. And CPKC has stopped acceptance of all export loads and pre-billed empties destined for Vancouver ports.
Connected with the turmoil, Maersk has suspended its import and export carrier demurrage and detention clock for most affected operations. The ultimate duration of the strike is unknown, but the situation is “rapidly evolving” as talks continue between the Longshore Workers Union (ILWU 514) and the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA), Maersk said.
In addition to its flagship Clorox bleach product, Oakland, California-based Clorox manages a diverse catalog of brands including Hidden Valley Ranch, Glad, Pine-Sol, Burt’s Bees, Kingsford, Scoop Away, Fresh Step, 409, Brita, Liquid Plumr, and Tilex.
British carbon emissions reduction platform provider M2030 is designed to help suppliers measure, manage and reduce carbon emissions. The new partnership aims to advance decarbonization throughout Clorox's value chain through the collection of emissions data, jointly identified and defined actions for reduction and continuous upskilling.
The program, which will record key figures on energy, will be gradually rolled out to several suppliers of the company's strategic raw materials and packaging, which collectively represents more than half of Clorox's scope 3 emissions.
M2030 enables suppliers to regularly track and share their progress with other customers using the M2030 platform. Suppliers will also be able to export relevant compatible data for submission to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a global disclosure system to manage environmental data.
"As part of Clorox's efforts to foster a cleaner world, we have a responsibility to ensure our suppliers are equipped with the capabilities necessary for forging their own sustainability journeys," said Niki King, Chief Sustainability Officer at The Clorox Company. "Climate action is a complex endeavor that requires companies to engage all parts of their supply chain in order to meaningfully reduce their environmental impact."
Supply chain risk analytics company Everstream Analytics has launched a product that can quantify the impact of leading climate indicators and project how identified risk will impact customer supply chains.
Expanding upon the weather and climate intelligence Everstream already provides, the new “Climate Risk Scores” tool enables clients to apply eight climate indicator risk projection scores to their facilities and supplier locations to forecast future climate risk and support business continuity.
The tool leverages data from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to project scores to varying locations using those eight category indicators: tropical cyclone, river flood, sea level rise, heat, fire weather, cold, drought and precipitation.
The Climate Risk Scores capability provides indicator risk projections for key natural disaster and weather risks into 2040, 2050 and 2100, offering several forecast scenarios at each juncture. The proactive planning tool can apply these insights to an organization’s systems via APIs, to directly incorporate climate projections and risk severity levels into your action systems for smarter decisions. Climate Risk scores offer insights into how these new operations may be affected, allowing organizations to make informed decisions and mitigate risks proactively.
“As temperatures and extreme weather events around the world continue to rise, businesses can no longer ignore the impact of climate change on their operations and suppliers,” Jon Davis, Chief Meteorologist at Everstream Analytics, said in a release. “We’ve consulted with the world’s largest brands on the top risk indicators impacting their operations, and we’re thrilled to bring this industry-first capability into Explore to automate access for all our clients. With pathways ranging from low to high impact, this capability further enables organizations to grasp the full spectrum of potential outcomes in real-time, make informed decisions and proactively mitigate risks.”
Third party logistics provider (3PL) C.H. Robinson has applied generative AI tools to automate various steps across the entire lifecycle of a freight shipment, the Minnesota company said last week.
C.H. Robinson said it created AI-based technology that reads incoming email then replicates tasks a person would do, including giving customers a price quote, accepting a load, setting appointments for pickup and delivery, and checking on the load in transit. The company has used the approach to automate more than 10,000 of those routine transactions per day, allowing shippers who use email to get the same speed-to-market and cost savings as customers who use C.H. Robinson’s online platform.
After starting with price quotes, the company said it has applied generative AI to increasingly complex tasks. “We announced in May that we’d been using our new tech for emailed price requests. Within a few short months, we created new models to automate more shipping steps and have already implemented them at scale,” Arun Rajan, the company’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, said in a release. “This a major efficiency breakthrough for the industry and for supply chains around the world. When you think about retailers that need hundreds of different products on their shelves or automakers that rely on just-in-time delivery for the 30,000 different parts in a car, saving hours and minutes on every shipment matters.”
The technology also saves time, cutting the task for a person to take care of an emailed load tender from as much as four hours to 90 seconds, according to Mark Albrecht, the company’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence.
“Once a person got to the email in their inbox, it still took an average of seven minutes to manually enter all the shipment details into our system – and that’s for a single load,” Albrecht said. “If the email tendered us 20 loads, a person would be stuck manually entering the information one load at a time. With generative AI, we can process all 20 loads simultaneously in the same 90 seconds. That’s an enormous time savings, especially when you consider we’ve scaled this to thousands of shipment orders per day just since June.”
An overwhelming majority (81%) of shoppers do not plan to increase their holiday spend this year over last year, revealing a significant disconnect between retail marketers and shoppers in the weeks before peak season, according to online shopping platform provider Rakuten.
That result flies in the face of high confidence levels from retailers who have been delaying their marketing spend, as 79% of marketers are optimistic they will reach holiday sales objectives, and 65% are timing their spend as late as November.
However, consumers are nervous about supply chain disruptions. Almost half (42%) of shoppers have started their shopping early to avoid shipping delays, while 32% plan to do more shopping in-store to avoid potential delays. The results come from a survey conducted online within the U.S. by The Harris Poll on behalf of Rakuten from Sept. 5 – Sept. 9 , among 2,100 consumers aged 18 and older and 101 retail marketers.
"There's a clear disconnect between marketer perception and consumer realities, but this presents a unique opportunity for retailers to capitalize on the shortcomings of their competition," said Julie Van Ullen, Chief Revenue Officer at Rakuten Rewards. "As shoppers plan to spend less overall, there become fewer opportunities for retailers. This makes it evermore important for retailers to invest in strategies that set them apart throughout the entire holiday season.”
Three reasons behind the diverging views are:
Inflated prices. Even with softening inflation rates, nearly half (46%) of shoppers report that it will have the greatest impact on their holiday shopping strategy. Conversely, only 20% of marketers believe that to be true.
Election nerves. Shoppers anticipate that the upcoming election will have an impact on inflation, with 57% believing it will increase.
Weak brand loyalty. A majority of marketers (98%) believe shoppers will remain loyal to brands, but fully 42% of shoppers indicate they will prioritize finding the lowest prices by trading down to lower-quality brands and products for more affordable alternatives.
"Loyalty is up for grabs this holiday season, and success for retailers will hinge on offering value beyond just reduced prices," Julie Van Ullen, Chief Revenue Officer at Rakuten Rewards, said in a release. "Our research revealed that shopper concern extends beyond just price, and retailers will need to address those concerns with comprehensive deals that include several table-stake incentives. Incentives like free shipping, buy now pay later services, and elevated Cash Back will be important for maintaining a loyal shopper base."