Credit Suisse

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Clicks-and-Mortar: Health Care's Future

The woes of the retail industry are well known, and are usually blamed on the impact of the Internet.  Credit Suisse projects that 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close in 2017, which would beat the record set in 2008, at the height of the last recession.  There are "zombie malls," full of empty stores but not yet shuttered. And then there's health care, where the retail business is booming. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims set forth Three Hard Lessons the Internet is Teaching Traditional Stores.  The lessons are: Data is King, Personalization + Automation = Profits, Legacy Tech Won't Cut It.

Health Care Goes to the Mall

It's either auspicious or ironic: decades after other retail industries, health care is coming to the mall. These are not, generally, good days for the malls. We've all seen strip malls that were never finished or that have simply fallen on hard times, but in recent years those stalwarts of American shopping -- enclosed malls -- are sharing that fate. Credit Suisse says that 20-25% of the 1,100 U.S. malls will close over the next five years. Analysts talk about "zombie" malls, whose anchor tenants -- like Sears, JC Penny, or Macys -- have pulled out, creating an exodus of other tenants. The malls themselves still stand, but their largely deserted storefronts and scarce shoppers mean they're dead but they don't know it...

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