Our local Fort Wayne mall, Glenbrook Square, has been featured here at Dissident Thoughts in the past and yesterday it was the scene of yet another food court shooting.
Dude being interviewed looks like one of the guys from In Living Color‘s “Men On Film”
According to Sgt. Gutierrez, the shooting occurred in the mall’s food court. Two men armed with guns are believed to have been involved, but only one did the shooting. One person was shot in a lower extremity and has non-life-threatening injuries.
Another person was hospitalized after suffering a possible fracture during the panic that ensued following the shots being fired. They are also in non-life-threatening condition.
https://archive.fo/Q9ypR
The food court. Of course. Something about greasy food gives the fellas itchy trigger fingers.
The actual shooter is “still at large” and the police are asking for tips but somehow don’t have a description of the suspect or any video footage. Weird. This is the third shooting at Glenbrook Square in the last year. That is not a great track record for a mall in an era when online shopping is so easy.
One guy has been arrested….
Brandon D. Key Jr., 22, was arrested and faces these preliminary charges: a level 6 felony of criminal recklessness, a level 6 felony of intimidation, and a misdemeanor of resisting law enforcement.
I wonder….
Sho nuff…
If I were in possession of all of the tea in China, I would bet it all that the shooter looks a lot like “Let’s Go Brandon” Key Jr.
By failing to keep the chimps from chimping out, Glenbrook Square is going to turn into a ghost town. No one wants to shop somewhere that might turn into the OK Corral whenever two breadcrumbs have a beef in the food court.
Somewhat related, I went to 3 different stores yesterday to buy a particular item for my wife for mother’s day. All 3 stores listed it as “in stock” on their website, none of them actually had it. At only one store could I find someone to check the back just in case, and then only because I wondered into the back warehouse area and was told I couldn’t be in there. Ended up coming home and ordering it from Amazon instead. And being a Saturday, the crowds were horrendous and traffic awful. Only a few vibrants, but I live in an area where most of the color is brown, not black.
Given that example, the whole buy local crap can go to hell. Covid lockdown ruined our economy and we are now the order it online nation. Between what I went thru yesterday, and then throw in the non-negligible chance of being in the middle of a Nigger Alarm moment, I’ll just sit on the back porch, sip whiskey, and order online.
Been going through the same thing for two years. Going out of my way to support local, mom n pop, family businesses here only to be pushing on a rope. The suppliers that serve the trades are just not interested in one-off customers or anyone outside the local GC’s who are all making hay on the housing bubble. Seems they can take or leave most walk in business. Must be nice.
The general retailers, OTOH, are somehow still in business even though they can’t get labor, or managers, or inventory management under control. The places are usually a literal mess with the employees who do manage to show up and the mangers with sleeves rolled up trying to stock shelves and do two or three other jobs. The whole system is strained. You can see it in the workers eyes. There is simply no joy in public.
The commons is littered with zombies and other wrecks. Had a crackhead behind me in checkout the other day with a 5″ knife in his belt. Mumbling to himself and all jittery while grabbing his energy drank and cheetos. I asked him to go head of me as I had a full cart but mostly wanted to eyeball him in case I would have to put a group in his chest.
I don’t know how these places are even in business, but it seems both the dead-retail-walking and the haymaker real estate boomers are feeding off the massive pump and dump underway. All of the “success” in this economy is in the further bifurcation; the high end going higher while the middle falls into the bottomless low-end and everyone is running side hustlescams on each other. “Rare barn find” joo tv has ruined private rural commerce.
Amazon is total trash and full of scams but at least I don’t have to deal with the people of the great decline. Who are just as foreign to me as the bots running AMZ.
Most of the youth nogs around here are busy knocking up the white church girls while their colorblind civnat parents celebrate their nonracisms over tacos and miller lite. Soon the only restaurants will be Mexican. We can’t hit bottom soon enough.
The margins of goods in those stores is astronomical, that is the only way they are still in business. Our local “mom and pop” stores overcharge so much that I simply refuse to shop there. One local small gun store in a nearby town is ridiculous when it comes to prices, I have wholesale accounts so I know what they pay for guns and they are marking them up by hundreds of dollars.
Yea all part of the plan to get everyone to only be able to order online for all the basics for daily life so you can be shut off whenever you get out of line or your social credit score is to low…
My favorite thing to come out of Covid was the order ahead feature, I do most of my shopping at Meijer and I order what I want, pick out a time and they bring it to the car. I never have to go in the store and that makes me happy even though the clientele of my primary Meijer is as White as a Klan rally.
Hrrrrrrrrmmmmmm.
What did they call them? “Shopping deserts”? Something like that? Where the retailers are closing stores because of all the undocumented shopping going on in diverse areas.
Could that concept revive retail in those areas, Art? If the boons can’t get in the store…they can’t loot. They can be literally forced to shop AND pay with their Obama-phones. And it could be sold (and billed) as improved services…
Arthur not sure when you were in Columbus OH but it had at least two malls suffer that fate. Downtown and Northland. Became “gang” (all blaq yoots of course) hangouts (read shooting range) and surprise, no one wanted to shop there anymore. Closed. When we left, Eastland kept the doors open only by having off duty uniformed Columbus Police on patrol all the time. Tuttle Mall in Dublin was still open but it went from high end white mall to brown and every joint in the food court featuring “Halal” dishes (yes even the fast Chinese food). Not sure if Dublin OH was invaded or where the browns were coming from but you didn’t see the well off Dublin whites shopping there anymore.
We lived in Columbus during my first year of college so 1990-1991, the one mall in town we went to was very nice but I assume that is one that has closed in the meantime.
If it was downtown there was only one. City Center. Three story of course. Pity as they had a very nice annual Christmas tree display spanning all three levels with lots of trees decorated all differently. I had a customer that was at the top of the escalator someone got shot on (at the bottom). He never went back. Yeah, it opened in 1989 and closed in 2009, demolished in 2010. Internet would have you believe it was due to competing malls. Hah. And in looking up the dates I see that Eastland Mall (mentioned above closed in 2022). Actually the four malls from the late 60s (named after the cardinal directions have all closed now). Westland and Southland were victims of decreasing income demographics. Eastland mall apparently was having gang shooting prior to closing. I’m shocked.
WTF is a Mall?
I seem to recall going in one back in the 80’s.
Now, I don’t even know where any are.
Maybe up in Indy but I never go there.
My ball n chain just informed me a Mall is a place that attracts people with vast amounts of disposable income and the predators that prey on them.
Otherwise known as a “Shooting Gallery”.
The downtown Indy mall used to be very nice and high end but it is a trash dump now.
That has happened to virtually every mall in the Chicago area…Dixie Square, Lincoln mall, Evergreen…pretty much the only malls still open and not declining rapidly are in the wealthy North Shore area and the far West suburbs….As soon as the joggers move in, it’s only a matter of time…
Whoa, Dixie Square Mall in Harvey! That may actually have been the very first American mall done in by niggotry. It closed in 1978 or 79, and was only open about 10 years from the time it originally opened. It’s fall was remarkably rapid. It was also the setting for the mall car chase in “The Blues Brothers”, as a closed down mall was truly a novelty at the time.
I was lucky to grow up (and still live) in a majority White town. But we still have a black section and back in the 80s they had their own department store. Of course it soon shut down because one of the hood rats would rob the place on a weekly basis.
The funniest thing is the lot was redeveloped a decade or so ago and became the new HQ for the city police.
In my fair city (which is to say the larger overall metro area) we have seen a net loss of 4 malls in the last ~20 years. The failure of these all predate COVID, so that wasn’t really a factor. Two of them failed for reasons of increased competition, less than ideal locations, and loss of anchor stores during the shakeout of dept store mergers and bankruptcies. The other two were (I suspect) mostly down to matters of demographics and crime.
One was redeveloped as a power center with a bunch of freestanding big box and some outlying strip mall/restaurant spaces, and appears to be doing ok. Another (closest to my home base) got a similar but scaled down redevelopment with a large grocery store as the only anchor, and just a handful of small box tenants so far, maybe 30% leased. The balance of the old mall site (and it was huge) is getting new residential single family built on it.
There is simply way too much retail space built out here, and empty storefronts both large and small everywhere you look. Even the strip malls with larger anchor spots are hurting. The loss in the past several years of Toys R Us, SteinMart, Gordmans, Bed Bath and Beyond, David’s Bridal and multiple Best Buy and Ross locations have left multiple major retail centers around here with empty boxes that still aren’t filled years later. CVS is presently in a round of closures that nicked at least two stores here I’m aware of.
Mom and Pop stores are a mixed bag. Expensive? Yes, almost without exception. In the affluent suburbs they seem to do ok yet, but some that were too narrowly specialized have bowed out suddenly. I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more restaurants closing up shop, but figure that is coming soon enough. But most of these are not failures due to the incursion of breadcrumbs, as much as they are due to a failed business model.
One thing I will say as a tradesman (plumber) is that the supply houses here are damn near useless anymore. Their inventory levels are shallow and they’ve scaled back on both the selection and quantity of product kept on hand. Things like specialized PVC fittings for stack and drain work are often unavailable in quantity, and have to be transferred in from another location, or even special ordered. Meanwhile, the prices are outrageous.
This has forced me to hold more inventory myself, by preordering much more material online and storing it so I don’t get caught without something critical when I need it. While it has tied up a lot of money, it has also allowed me to hedge against price increases. I bought 10 sump pumps (I typically stock 3 at a time) on a special one time deal for nearly half off. I’ll make double my money on each pump billing them out at what would ordinarily be my cost, so it’ll still look like a decent deal to the customer. But, I had to commit $1400 up front to do so, and it might take me a year to use up those 10 pumps. Did a similar deal on garbage disposals, tub/shower valves and some toilets a few months back as well.
This requires a lot of storage space (in addition to the money it ties up) but has saved my butt numerous times already in having something I needed immediately available for use, and has improved my margins noticeably without increasing what I charge customers. All these bulk purchases were from vendors I deal with online, so the local outfits missed out on that action and got bupkis. I used to feel bad about cutting out the local suppliers, but their frequent inability to readily fulfill my product needs, and massive price jumps the last 2-3 years has soured me on them.
You are an “Adaptor”.
A predator that adapts, as it should.
You seen a condition that was an obstacle and found a way to deal with it, and in some cases, to your benefit.
This is the sort of thing “thinking” people will need to do more of as we tumble head long into the future. Go U!
I’ll take that as a compliment, so thank you. It’s funny,
because that sort of thinking has always come naturally to me. I’m a troubleshooter and problem solver both in my chosen profession, and in my hobbies, which are all fairly technically oriented. In a more general sense I think through problems and arrive at logical solutions to them, then doing what has to be done. I really can’t see why I’d chose to do otherwise. The downside, if any, if that it imposes costs on me that I’d otherwise not be carrying. Thankfully I can afford to do that, and it usually pays off nicely, even if it takes a while to realize the gains.
I see people I know who clearly don’t (or just can’t) think that way, and their lives are often a disaster from lack of planning and preparedness (and not even speaking in the “pepper” sense of the word). I guess if I didn’t have the ability to see problems forming and adapt on the fly, I’d not realize what a disadvantage it is not to have that capability, and would chalk it up to bad luck or something. It still frustrates me to observe people who can’t do it, because they just don’t get it.
Excellent comments. I fully realize Jeff Bezos is not my friend; neither is Walmart. If I am going to get the same cheap Chinesium from both, I’d rather pay half the price and not deal with the what passes for the public. Admittedly, the customer base is a whole lot better up here in the Ozarks than it was in DFW, but the point stands. I buy what I can locally, but there aren’t that many genuinely local shops left. What I can’t get here, I order online. There is also a definite shortage of qualified local tradesmen. I’ve used two different plumbers so far and was not happy with either – took my neighbor using a piece of wire to hook back up my kitchen faucet tube that the ‘assistant’ to a California-transplant plumber improperly hooked up – leaving me yet again with a flooded under sink cabinet. Same goes for electricians.
When I have the means and can build a decent-sized home with more than one bathroom (hey, we bought for land, location, and various other features; house is small but livable), I will pay extra to bring in qualified tradesmen from elsewhere. Local only goes so far – eventually self-interest comes into the fore.
Just read about Brandon of Chicago running away from attending slain Hispanic officer’s funeral even after the mother invited him.
It’s going to be juicy this fall when the useless idiots burn down CPUSA (D) shindig in a 1968 style, also the year that Elvis came back hard as a rock, his finest.
FT. Wayne does have the massive hospital complex for several plus exits and it is probably bigger than Evansville with ten exits.
I have yet to see an Ohio plate that knows how to drive. (s/)
Also read about the glorious peoples republic of Michigan (CCP/CPUSA) going full military bioweapon inspection protocol on all dairy farms.
Won’t be going back there.
Soon to be a dead mall if they don’t get things under control. Brandon is why we can’t have nice things.
I’m seriously surprised any malls survived the 2 “weeks” of Covid lockdowns. Or movie theaters for that matter.
For the most part, they haven’t been the same post covid. The two remaining super regional malls still left here are holding their own (barely) but the municipalities in which they are located have reported significant decline in sales tax proceeds from them, so that tells the real story.
The one which is considered more upscale has a definite breadcrumb problem, owing to it’s physical proximity to areas where “those people” live. It also has the disadvantage of having a light rail public transit station directly across the street. Oh, how the affluent White liberals in their great progressive enlightenment wanted that station (as if they are using public transit, rather than driving their luxury vehicles everywhere, natch) and in doing so brought the problem right into the heart of their fat, tacky little town. I kind of chuckle about it, but then in the end we all lose from this stuff happening.
The other super regional is a bit newer (was razed and rebuilt in the early 2000’s) and better located away from so much of the human debris, but is by no means immune from their influence. There have been minor shootings (no fatalities) there twice in the last 5-6 years, but they’ve somehow managed public perception to minimize the damage, so far.
The remaining regional mall is much older (60’s) and despite remodeling and expansion, it shows. It also is struggling these days being down one anchor for years now (Sears, which the other two never had) and Macy’s and Penney’s being the two remaining. The mall concourse itself has a lot of vacancy, and the clientele are clearly down-level from those who shop at the two newer, nicer malls. Interestingly, one hears little to nothing about crime problems at this #3 mall (though I’m sure it is present), but its slow decline continues anyway.
I figure the heydey of the mall officially ended in the late 90’s. Some managed to retain viability for a while past that, but now even the remaining longer term survivors are succumbing to the same problems that killed off their predecessors.