THE DEPRESSED ECONOMY

I went on a job hunt at the old mall I worked at in early 2001. The name of the mall is the Sierra Vista Mall in Clovis, Calif. I ran the United Artist Sierra Vista 6 theatre and it was a very nice theatre. Anyways to make a long story short there became talk of a mall expansion and unfortunately my theatre was to be a target for closure, because the center piece of this mall was a large sixteen screen theatre from the Criterion Theatre Chain. The mall manager was always under barrage by the tennants to get more business into the mall, so they decided to try and duplicate the success of the Riverpark mall in Fresno. When all of this was going down, I said that I thought it was a mistake to try and compete against Riverpark unless it was built miles North. All the new housing in Clovis is 5 miles North of the Sierra Vista Mall. Well no one listened to me and it happened. In the new section where the new theatre is located there must be 20 store spaces and 17 of them empty. I couldnt believe it. They had a cinabon pastry shop and there was a note on the door that said, "as of Sept 20, 2009 we are closed due to bad economic times." This 16 screen theatre is probably doing more business than my six screen theatre but its not helping any of the buisnesses. Also Criterion was no longer the owner ot the theatre . They sold it probably to get out from under an expensive lease that was costing them a huge amount of money. This was incredibly sad, because I still think the Sierra Vista Mall is one of the finest Malls I have ever been in. When I was talking to the girt in thereal estate office I could see the pain on her face for the situation at the mall. She told me that some of the stores that are empty have never had a tenant. I turned around fast and said, What? I also walked down the rest of the mall and there were just so few people walking around. It was very sad.