It's a shame: Shopping was once central in urban areas, then suburban, then online

Owner lady let me salvage these from walls of closed down retail store in old part of city that was once a vibrant shopping district.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/283923563451

Hello Vista,,
It's not just online buying causing the problem.
It's the Malls
It's the virus.
It's the rents
A friend of mine has a small shop in Surry Hills and the rent is $2300 per week, that's before insurance, wages etc.
He has now closed down.
In Albury where I live on Mate street which is the main Street coming into town there is nothing but empty shops ,row after row of them.here the shops are cheap to rent and an old shop on the street is only $ 280 per week but still there all empty.
Pete

We had a lot of those lights on bedheads in the 60s and 70s and the lampshades were usually on goosenecks. The four primary colours usually featured with the anodising that was also fashionable at the time.

I live on Mate street

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx7fGmmHayU

Yeah I have lots of these 5os anodised lamps and lights , I have ,red,gold,silver and a beautiful ceiling one in green which looks like a rocket with 2 flros running up each side.
There is a trick to cleaning Anodising.
Rub it with dish washing soap and then Amor all it !.....I've done a bit of Anodising in the past ,it's not hard ,but getting the same colour spot on can be . It's what dye is available.
My lamps are original and the anodising I did was for car parts years ago.
Pete
By memory ,all we used was distilled water , motorcycle Battery acid, the dye powder and battery charger, gosh must be 20 years ago now

..shop in Surry Hills and the rent is $2300 per week..

Retail landlords are out of touch with reality. There's a run-down strip-mall near me on S.76th St. Its previous owner was Australian Centro-properties. They pulled out of the US with steep losses. Other Australian group Westfield sticks to affluent east & west coasts, avoiding the depressed 'rustbelt', 'cornbelt' and 'biblebelt', but they too will come undone as the Mall crisis deepens. Good thing Lowy sold Westfield to the French just before the Covid and Online boom!

Back around the time of the GFC, Centro almost went belly-up here too. They owned what was once Bankstown Shopping Square back in the days when it, Carlingford Court and Top Ryde Shopping Centre all had a common owner. Centro's shares were at around 17c and nosediving like a Stuka.

I didn't keep up with the news on Centro so they probably don't exist anymore.

Sir Frank Lowy sold out of Westfield mainly because of his age. I think he's around the 90 mark now. Not young enough to be controlling billions of dollars and thousands of employees. He won't need the pressure that'd bring him. I think he has retired in Israel now though he still pops back to Sydney now and then. His sons run the Australian Westfield operation which was separated from the global empire before the offshore part was flogged.

A typical shop in an Australian mall will cost something like $20,000-30,000 a month plus 8% of revenue. Tenants also have separately metered electricity, water and gas to pay for. After that you can replenish stock and pay your staff and accountant. At the best of times I hardly ever see people in specialty shops so it baffles me how any of them make a quid.

These rates skyrocket when the "mall" just happens to be a recognised glitzy shopping strip like George Street or Pitt Street or the shopping mecca of Westfield Centrepoint.

This is one reason mall shop rents are so high: outfits like Centro are working with billions of borrowed money and must service that debt - with steep interest payments - (because their credit ratings are often poor.) If things go south in the economy, they can quickly go under. Were they naive rubes investing in US Malls? Yes.