It was another brutal year for mom-and-pop shops on the Lower East Side and in New York City as a whole. But in this neighborhood at least, a new report shows that chain stores aren’t moving in to replace shuttered independent businesses.
An annual study from the Center for an Urban Future indicates there are 39 chain stores in zip code 10002, down one from 2016. [There were 46 chain store locations in 2015, so there is a downward trend.] Meanwhile, the number of chain locations grew by 1.8% in NYC as a whole.
The East Village continues to be a hotbed for chains. In 2016, there were 162 chain store locations in zip code 10003, the second highest of any neighborhood. There were another 26 chain locations in zip code 10009.
Here’s more from the report:
The tenth annual ranking of national retailers in New York City by the Center for an Urban Future (CUF) shows a 1.8 percent increase in the number of store locations over last year.1 Though this is the ninth consecutive year with a net increase in national chain stores across the five boroughs, the growth was limited to a relatively small number of retailers. In a year in which the challenges facing brick-and-mortar retail have burst into view, this report finds that New York’s national chains are not immune to the pressure. Although food establishments continue to show strong growth, retailers that compete most directly with online outlets—such as shoe and electronics stores—have experienced significant contractions. Overall, a fifth of all national retailers in the city closed stores in the past year, and only one-in-seven retailers on our list increased their footprint–the smallest share since we began keeping track a decade ago.
You can see the full study here.
