by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Even in San Francisco: From a brand-new glitzy zombie mall to innumerable vacant storefronts.
Mall investors have long denied it. But year after year, ecommerce has been eating up brick-and-mortar retail sales, in the third quarter faster than ever, and in the fourth quarter, according to early indications, even faster. Turns out, ecommerce is a structural change that grew out of the arrival of the Internet, has been underway for two decades, and will continue until it has played out.