The exodus from New York City this summer has claimed some prominent retail chains.
J.C. Penny, Kate Spade, Subway, and Le Pain Quotidien have closed their locations in the heart of Manhattan for good, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Other large chains, such as Victoria’s Secret, TGI Friday’s, and Gap, still have their Manhattan locations but are keeping them closed even as they reopen locations in other areas.
“There’s no reason to do business in New York,” said Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark Restaurants. “I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York with my expenses being much less. The idea was that branding and locations were important, but the expense of being in this city has overtaken the marketing group that says you have to be there.”
The report noted that Victoria’s Secret’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue has not paid its $937,000 monthly rent for four months.
“It will be years before retail has even a chance of returning to New York City in its pre-Covid form,” Victoria’s Secret’s parent company L Brands told its landlord in a legal document.
Tourism in the city has dropped since the coronavirus pandemic began, leaving New York’s normally busy shopping districts desolate. Businesses are also down on local patrons with nearby office buildings being near-empty as many New Yorkers continue to work from home.
“In the prime real estate areas, all the stores rely on having half international tourists and half local tourists or those from the local neighborhoods,” said Thiago Hueb, a founder of a jewelry company. “[Madison] avenue is no longer what it used to be.”
Businesses closing shop comes as locals pack their bags for the suburbs, citing coronavirus restrictions and an uptick in crime as reasons for their departure.
“People are fleeing the city in droves,” Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, New York, told the New York Post. “The least movement would be the Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue crowds. Those people don’t have to leave because they have second homes.”
Mothers in the swanky Upper West Side have packed up their families in recent weeks, saying they’ve “reached our New York expiration date.”
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” one mother and activist against crime, Elizabeth Carr, told the New York Post over the weekend. “Now, you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
