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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Everything in that area dies.  [/quote]

Yep, they tried to revitalized that area with the high end shops but man, what a dud that was.  FH is where retail goes to die for some reason.[/quote]

It was the wrong kind of high end: way too flashy.  The older department stores, Brooks Brothers, Tiffany’s and Saks Jandal all did quite well there.  Post-Covid though, could be a serious hit. [/quote]

FH was not good for retail because the area was poorly planned. You have a mall like Mazza that has a Neiman Marcus right next to a McDonald's and TJ Maxx that features a decrepit garage, for example. Moreover, what's the purpose of sticking all these department stores across major roads and sticking Saks so far from Neiman Marcus? The area doesn't have a consistent character and these department stores are across busy streets and far enough apart to not entice people to walk around the neighborhood.

[b]These high-end department stores would get more business if they were in a place like the White Flint Mall site, especially if it was paired with high-end boutiques[/b] and restaurants in an open air Pike and Rose concept, with luxury apartments, condos and hotels thrown in, not to mention a much nicer garage. It would entice people to spend hours there and the residences would create a built-in client base as well.

If you had all of the property of Mazza and these department stores in a developers hands, and threw in the Geico headquarters as well, you could have a really nice development. And you wouldn't need tax incentives to do so. Developers are probably chomping at the bit to put $2-$3 million townhomes in the area and high rise condos at the Saks location since it doesn't have to deal with the height restrictions like in DC. [/quote]

That's Tyson's Galleria (but not the open air part). Pike and Rose is a nice concept but the stores are kind of underwhelming.[/quote]

Enclosed malls are a dying breed. Places like Pike and Rose and the Mosaic District are the future. There's no reason you can't create a high end version of Pike and Rose with three department stores anchoring the property (Saks, Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus) like they used Target to anchor the Mosaic District.[/quote]

The market for high-end brick and mortar retail is small and shrinking.  When everything is available online, the importance of convenience goes up.  But convenience is much less driven by "close to my house" and much more driven by "everything I want is in the same place."  No one really enjoys driving long distances from store to store.

Which is why I think that downtown + Tysons is really the future when it comes to high-end clothes shopping.  No new development will be able to compete at the scale of these two, and having just a handful of high-end shops is just a vastly inferior consumer experience to having them all in one place.[/quote]

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