When are retailers going to figure out that their main problem in regards to driving traffic to stores is that they are competing with themselves by saturating any area with too many darn locations.

I will give a couple examples from my area:
Big Box Stores:
off the same main road as my sub-division there is a Wal Mart Super Center and I’m right near the outer belt that goes around town. One exit to the south is another Super center and one exit to the north is not only a super center, but a Sam’s club as well. They are literally a couple miles apart on this side of town. And that’s just near me, there are many others around town none over 20 minutes away.

Same is true for Grocery with Meijer’s, Giant Eagle, Kroger and also Target, although the Meijer’s at least there are only two and one is well outside the outer belt

Mall stores
At one point we had 6 enclosed shopping malls and one outdoor town center in the area and they all pretty much had the same stores.
So you essentially had a mall on each side of town, plus downtown. Eventually those shifted, 2 malls were closed and demolished and a new indoor/outdoor one was built. So now there are 2 enclosed, the town center and the indoor/outdoor mall and shops and now an outlet mall in the works that will be north of town. Any of these could be reached within 20-30 minutes or so from any point in the metro area, so it’s not like shoppers were limited to one part of town.

So pick any typical mall anchor or mall tenant like Sears or Spencer Gifts or Radio Shack…. Well how many Sears or Radio Shack or Spencer Gifts stores do you truly need in a mid-size city?
We’re talking a metro area that time was barely over 1 million people.