This discussion about Wild Tiger Pizza in Westlake Center closing reminded me of a conversation I had last week with another downtown retailer.
I was at Delusional Bird, a neat little vintage clothing shop downtown at 5th and Pike. There were several customers in the store and I asked how business was. “Pretty good,” I was told. The shop was looking to get a permanent lease, but the land lord (managed by the big real estate firm Unico) was not willing to let their small shop sign anything beyond month-to-month. I thought that was shocking considering vacancy rate in the immediate area – here was a shop looking to sign a lease and getting told “no.” Is driving them out of downtown and creating another empty storefront better than a rent paying vintage clothing store?
Also, apparently the building was in the process of being bought by Nordstrom, who mostly wanted to use the building for the office space upstairs (it is a block from Nordstrom HQ). One would hope that Nordstrom would be more willing to keep small neighborhood retail stores open, purely selfishly even, to improve the network effects and foot traffic to their own nearby stores. Delusional Bird seemed hopeful the new ownership would be more willing to sign a lease with them, and I wished them well.
Time will tell how this all plays out. I hear often on this subreddit that rent and “they’d prefer to keep the stores closed than to lower rent” is behind a lot of downtown’s retail vacancy problems. This seems to be a real life example of such a phenomenon, perhaps coupled with “that type of store isn’t the vibe we’re going for” gate keeping.
Anyway, grain of salt anecdote, but I thought the whole saga was interesting and would maybe be informative to the reddit hive mind when it comes to downtown Seattle retail.
submitted by /u/TheStinkfoot
[link] [comments]