The Exodus from New York this summer has demanded some primary retail chains.
J.C. Penny, Kate Spade, Subway and Le Pain Quotidien have permanently closed their institutions in midtown Manhattan, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Other primary chains, such as Victoria’s Secret, TGI Friday’s and Gap, still have branches in Manhattan, but keep them closed even when they reopen branches in other areas.
“There’s no explanation for why doing business in New York,” said Michael Weinstein, executive leader of Ark Restaurants. “I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square footage as in New York, my expenses are much lower. The concept that the brand and places were important, but the expenses related to the presence in this city have surpassed the marketing organization that says You have to be there.
The report notes that the Victoria’s Secret flagship store on Fifth Avenue has not paid its monthly rent of $937,000 for 4 months.
“It will be years before the retail industry has the chance to return to New York in its pre-Covid form,” Victoria’s Secret parent company L Brands told its owner in a legal document.
Tourism in the city has plummeted since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, leaving New York’s busy grocery shopping districts devastated. Businesses are also falling into local customers, with buildings near the workplace almost empty, as many New Yorkers continue to paint from home.
“In the main real estate areas, all department stores rely in part on foreign tourists and partly on local tourists or local neighborhoods,” said Thiago Hueb, founder of a jewelry company. “[Madison’s] street is not what it used to be.”
Businesses are their final retail outlets, while citizens pack for the suburbs, raising restrictions on coronavirus and increasing crime as reasons for their departure.
“People are fleeing the city en masse,” the New York Post Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving and Storing in Yonkers, New York, told the New York Post Moon Salahie. “The slightest move would be the crowd on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue. These other people don’t have to leave because they have homes for the time being.”
The mothers of the exclusive Upper West Side have packed their families in recent weeks, have “reached our new York due date.”
“At best, New York is a difficult position to live,” a mother and crime activist, Elizabeth Carr, told the New York Post this weekend. “Now you have all those other things. It is a consultation for families … having to see a boy masturbating in a corner or my kids while I buy diapers at Duane Reade’s why this shoeless kid collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR.”