A Bona Fide Retail Opportunity for Non-store Merchants, Or Just Another Entrepreneurial Misfire?

For cash-poor catalogers scrambling to find ways to mail catalogs profitably and make ends meet with the new punishing postal rates, the new concept could be worth a shot.

Shorter-term Leases

As Lee points out, a regular store can run anywhere from $300 to $600 per square foot to establish. And most mall operators require 7- to 10-year leases. Epicenter, however, is allowing merchants to sign leases as short as three years. What’s more, because Epicenter will provide most overhead, Lee claims that merchants’ overall cost is 20 percent what it would run them to set up a typical mall store. “You get store payback on your investment in less than a year,” he pitches. “A regular store takes three to five years for a payback.”