Two of the major chains in my area merged a while back and they were required to close down a few of their stores to prevent having a monopoly.
So of course they closed the stores that were under-performing, which just means they closed the ones in poor neighborhoods.
They still owned or kept the leases to the buildings and sub-leased them out with the stipulation that any business taking them over could not carry groceries.
Not only are the people in those areas having to drive a lot further (or spend more time on public transit), but a lot the surrounding businesses to the stores that closed down ended up going out of business themselves.
There's at least one nearly abandoned mini-small, shopping plaza in town due to this.
Wow never realized it but same. Clemens and Acme went under, then Superfresh. All those shopping centers are still empty or near barren and that was like well over a decade for those to go under
that seems like anti competitive behavior, I wonder if those kinds of stipulations could be made illegal. Also a commercial vacancy tax probably wouldn't hurt.
They are legal. This is/was Walmart's M.O. for anticompetitive behavior when one of their stores closed. Any competitors couldn't lease, other businesses failed when they moved and didn't have the traffic, and so you are left with both an unoccupied eye sore as well as a food / product desert....
Good idea on the vacancy and potentially changing the law to prevent anti-competitive stipulations like that.