also not usually union shops the way the safeway i grew up with was amazon destroyed them says howard davidowitz chairman of davidowitz associates if you needed clothes or almost anything else you had to drive an hour or two and go to a department store shopping habits are changing on a per capita basis according to a report by rreef a real estate investment advisory service the us now has about 43 sq m of retail space per capita nearly double the united kingdoms 23 sq m its nearest competitor and roughly 20 times whats on offer in india and there is a lot of shopping to be found right there enough to keep them busy for a full day with their aunt molly who herself is a store manager successful retailing in the us is now about the experience mcmahon sees three lessons to be learned from the american example this will be a good thing if you want to know what were they thinking the stuff you buy also feels different somehow when you walk out of a big box in other words various concepts get hot there are home improvement stores and garden supply stores and even a store for hobbies all of them vast food will get cheaper clothes will get cheaper housewares will get cheaper the good a lot of good things came out of these big boxes sears a depressing midmarket store and a regional department store meier frank they were smart companies too at least survivors such as walmart why would we go crazy more recently mcmahon blames municipal zoning agencies that were too eager to zone retail in the hopes of boosting local taxes traditional groceries made their vendors pay for shelf space a practice that earns some money in the short run but turns out to be stupid in the long run because they werent necessarily stocking what would sell best everybody grows like crazy never thinking about wait a minute how is this all going to be rationalised now they have none right they have none right now for example its extreme value dollar general and family dollar this year are building over a thousand stores those jobs paid a reasonable wage howard davidowitz a new york investment banker and consultant who specialises in retail blames wall street we have a motivated insanity sooner or later an even more profound retail revolution will hit the subcontinent when i was a kid growing up in oregon in the 1970s there were only three stores we went to with any regularity folkstadts pharmacy coast to coast hardware and safeway the supermarket thats why all the banks went broke and they had a free lunch the rest as much as 30 million sq m will simply need to be demolished if you plan development for people you will get more people if theyre full time thats 16755 a year in a country where the poverty line