Deck The Malls With Lots Of Pink Slips

I've been talking about retail closings for some time now and the fact that a whole hell of a lot of retail jobs are going to permanently vanish, but the Yahoo Tech-Ticker crew puts it all in some scary perspective.

About 220,000 stores may close this year in America, says our guest, retail consultant Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates. As more Americans save and spend less, it's clear there's too much retail space. Just visit Web site deadmalls.com and track retail's growing body count. And luxury retailers? They're on "life support," Davidowitz says.

It's bad, folks. Real bad. Doing back of the napkin numbers, 220k stores x 10 employees average = 2.2 million lost jobs in 2009 just from retail. If you count big box and mall anchor stores going under with 40-50+ employees per store, that's closer to 3 million or more jobs lost, not to mention the fact that this will leave thousands of malls across the country gutted.

Those gutted dead malls will close, taking even more stores with them, more jobs, more consumption, etc. It's a nasty, nasty death spiral we're looking at here. We're talking losing about a third of the retail space in this country by the time the retail crash settles out, not to mention several million jobs gone for good. There won't be anyone left to afford spa pedicures, soy lattes, reciprocating saws and fresh pretzels.

It's going to be pretty damn horrible, pretty damn fast.