Surely You Are Mistaken?

 We ran a few errands this afternoon: grocery shopping, dropping donations at the local thrift shop, that sort of thing. When we reached the last item on our list, I punched LL Bean into the map app on my phone to find the fastest route. I was irritated when it returned a location 35 minutes away when our trip should have taken no longer than 10. I x-ed out of the app and started again. 

"Bethesda?" Heidi said, looking over my shoulder. "What?" 

I gave up and entered "Tysons Corner" instead. "We know where it is when we get there," I shrugged, and Heidi agreed.

And it wasn't until we were actually approaching the shopping center that it occurred to me that the store might have closed. It had been many months since last we had ventured to any mall, let alone this enormous, ever-crowded one. Even so, we parked and walked inside, making our way around to where the first LL Bean outside the state of Maine had been since 2001. 

Of course we were confronted by an empty store front. It was only then that I bothered to search the internet to discover that the place was shuttered on January 17. Apparently, retail real estate is at a premium these days: all that shopping online during the pandemic has given consumers a new appreciation for brick and mortar, while subsidies and bail outs have driven bankruptcy down. In short, everybody wants a physical presence, so when Bean negotiated with the mall owners to downsize their huge operation, the two sides couldn't come to terms.

The article said that the company is actively looking for another location in the area, and that for now they are directing customers to their Bethesda location.

Just as my map app tried to tell me.