Month: August 2016

What’s Up With Retail?

 

Early this year Macy’s announced that it was closing 40 of its department stores. In April, Sears Holdings said that it would close 10 Sears and 68 Kmart stores. Then last week, Macy’s announced that it would close about 100 additional stores. Do these retrenchments represent just the normal ebb and flow of company fortunes in a competitive marketplace, or is there something more profound going on in retailing?

Well, there seem to be three strong crosswinds impacting the retail sector today, and the large department stores are taking the brunt of them. The three are middle-class income stagnation, globalization and the internet.

Through 2014 (the last year for which data is available), the average real incomes of none of the five household income quintiles had recovered to their pre-recession peaks. However, the recovery of income has been more complete for the higher income groups. While the average income of the lowest quintile of households had recovered to only 88 percent of its pre-recession peak, the average income of the highest income quartile had recovered to 98 percent.  The share of total income garnered by the three middle quintiles declined from 46.9 percent to 45.7 percent, while the share of the highest income quintile went from 49.7 to 51.2.  Retail chains that cater to higher-income shoppers are reportedly doing well, but for many large chains the three middle groups, with annual household incomes from about $21,000 to $112,000, is where the volume is, and income growth for those households has been slow.

Competition between name-brand retailers and discounters is not new, but in recent decades the out-sourcing of dry-goods production to China, Bangladesh and elsewhere has tilted the playing field in favor of the discounters. Epitomized by the Walmart formula, which combines a cheap foreign supply chain with monopsony buying power and a no-frills “supercenter” shopping experience, the discounters have increasingly pressured the department store chains (as well as smaller chains and independent retailers) that traditionally marketed fashion and quality. Warehouse clubs like Costco have also made inroads among middle-income families whose incomes have stagnated. From 2000 through 2014 the number of department stores nationally declined from about 10,500 to 8,000 while the number of supercenter and warehouse club outlets has grown from about 1,800 to 5,300.  Walmart alone operates over 3,400 supercenters. Total retail sales in warehouse clubs and supercenters are now about triple the sales volume of traditional department stores.

Traditional retailers also face intensifying competition from internet sales. In 2015, internet sales topped $432 billion. While that represents only abut 9 percent of all retail sales, e-retailing has captured about 30 percent of the retail sales growth since 2007. As a consequence, in-store retailing has grown at only a 1.2 percent real annual rate over the past eight years, compared to the 8.2 percent growth rate of e-retailing.

Continue reading “What’s Up With Retail?”

Corporate Eisodos

On August 1st the NY Times ran an article on corporations leaving the suburbs for downtown city locations. Featured in the article are GE’s move to Boston, McDonald’s to Chicago, and Chemours’ decision to stay in Wilmington. The exodus of corporate headquarters to suburban locations shaped metropolitan development in America for half a century, and a reversal of the trend could have equally profound implications.

(Oddly enough, there is no direct English antonym for ‘exodus.’ The English word derives from the Greek ‘exodos’ meaning an exit or departure, and of course is associated with the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. Unfortunately, the English language never got around to expropriating its Greek antonym, eisodos, which mean an entrance or act of entering.  Anyway….)

The article is mostly anecdotal so it might be premature to extrapolate an inversion of metropolitan geography from it. Nevertheless, such anecdotes have been accumulating, suggesting something might really be going on.

Two basic explanations are offered for the increasing appeal of urban locations. One is the tax incentives (increasingly?) being offered by municipal governments to companies that are considering downtown relocations. The other is the increased livability of urban areas and corporations’ desire to access a skilled labor force that prefers city living. What’s interesting is that those two reasons represent very different philosophies of urban redevelopment, and are even somewhat contradictory. The first reflects a 1970s-era belief that it’s all about tax competition.  The second reflects a Richard Florida-type strategy that if you make cities attractive enough, the creative class will flock to them and corporations will have no choice but to follow suit. The potential contradiction is that if cities give away their tax base to attract business, there won’t be enough of it to make the quality-of-life investments necessary to attract the creative class.

But maybe they aren’t ultimately contradictory.  If a virtuous circle takes hold, opposite of the vicious cycle that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, cities could both lower tax burdens and improve the QOL. There is nothing to suggest that central cities are at an inherent tax disadvantage; economies of scale in metropolitan infrastructure and services might even give cities a structural tax advantage. Maybe we’re reaching that stage of city-suburban competition. In any case, the $7.9 million in grants given to Chemours, cited in the article, came from the state of Delaware, not the City of Wilmington, as the DuPont spinoff was considering a move to Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

 

 

 

 

Homeownership and Retirement

The New York Times today presented a “Room for Debate” feature on the declining rate of homeownership, which has declined 6 percentage points from its peak. The debaters include Dean Baker, Elyse Cherry, William E. Spriggs, A. Michele Dickerson and Ed Glaser. Though I have some qualms with Cherry’s prescription of mass principal write-downs for underwater borrowers, the debaters generally offer reasonable takes on the pros and cons of home ownership and the implications of a declining ownership rate.

It is surprising, however, how little attention these reasonable commentators give to the retirement security benefits of homeownership. That oversight is particularly stark in Glaeser’s comments, where he states bluntly that “there is little public benefit in pushing people to own rather than rent homes.”

Consider a simple example where two identical families earning $75,000 annually at 30 years of age are contemplating renting permanently or plunging into homeownership. Say the first choses a permanent rental apartment for 20 percent of their gross income (about $1,250/month) and the other purchases an equivalent house with a similar monthly mortgage payment, although they will have to pay another 10 percent of their income in property taxes, insurance and maintenance expenses. To keep things simple, let’s ignore the tax benefits of homeownership and the opportunity costs of the home buying family’s initial down payment. Furthermore, assume that all rental and ownership costs inflate by 2 percent per year, except of course the homeowners’ mortgage expense, which is fixed for its 30 year amortization period.

Initially, in this simple scenario, the buying family would be paying a housing cost premium of 50 percent to own rather than rent. But since their mortgage costs are fixed, that ownership premium falls steadily, so that by the time they are 60 years old they are paying only a 6 percent monthly premium over their renting counterparts. By the time they are 61, their mortgage is fully amortized (No refinancing! No home equity loans!) and their ownership costs drop to 50 percent of their counterparts’ rental costs.

In nominal dollar terms, at age 65 the renter family will be paying $2,451 in monthly rent while the home-owning family will have total monthly housing costs of just $1,225. That difference will make a huge difference in the retirement welfare of the two families, not to mention the benefit of cost predictability enjoyed by the homeowners.

Of course, many embellishments to this simple model can be made, but the basic conclusion will stand under a wide variety of assumptions. The renters would have to display a great deal of savings discipline over their working lifetimes to generate enough investment income to offset their housing cost disadvantage and be better off overall than the homeowner at retirement age. I haven’t done a lit review of renter/owner savings behavior, but I’ll guess that very few renter families would display such savings discipline.

So, if there is a public benefit that the elderly be securely housed there is a public benefit to encouraging home ownership. If there isn’t a public benefit to homeownership in this sense, is there a public benefit to other retirement security policies, such as Social Security or 401-k tax advantages?