3 Retail Stocks That Amazon Won’t Crush

To see how changing consumer habits are disrupting the retail world, drop by the Florida Mall, an upscale complex in Orlando owned by mall giant Simon Property Group. A few years back, with traffic declining at its “anchor” department stores, the shopping center converted a Lord & Taylor into three separate, smaller shops. Then, three years ago, a Nordstrom was repurposed as a Dick’s Sporting Goods after its lease expired, while a former Saks Fifth Avenue became a food court. Robb Paltz, a structured-finance analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, sees the Orlando complex as a case study in the evolution of shopping. “Department stores do not create the same draw as anchors that they did 10 to 15 years ago,” Paltz wrote in a recent note. And places like the Florida Mall are looking to other retailers to fill the vacuum. It’s no secret that brick-and-mortar retail has been struggling. The S&P Retail Select index has been anemic for three years, falling an average of 1% annually. Over 2017 through mid-December, even as total bankruptcies fell 37%, eight big retailers, including Toys “R” Us, filed for Chapter 11, according to BankruptcyData. And despite a holiday shopping season in which spending is expected to rise sharply, 2018 could be worse, says Garrick Brown, a retail and real estate analyst at Cushman & Wakefield—with department stores high on many pessimists’ watch lists. Read more at Fortune.