I’ve been tracking “the end of retail”—the decline of the big box store—since I came on board with Slate and continue to be interested in the question of what will happen to all those mall spaces as the population keeps growing and the economy recovers.
Sarah Kliff, citing Ateev Mehrotra and Judith Lave has what seems like the most plausible answer to me—as brick and mortar retail declines, we’ll get retail health clinics instead. The seasonal spikes are vaccines and then the green line is the non-vaccine business. Both are steadily rising, and I think both are set to keep rising in the future.
