Drove past the old strip mall near my mom’s place last weekend. Joann Fabrics? Gone. Big Lots? Gone. The Party City where I bought my nephews birthday stuff for fifteen years? Boards on the windows.

Fifteen thousand stores are closing this year. That’s the estimate from Coresight Research. More than double last year. And nobody seems to care.

Remember when we bailed out the banks? When we saved the auto industry? Where’s that energy now? Oh right, these are just retail workers. They don’t matter.

The body count: Joann: 800+ stores. Party City: 740 stores. Big Lots: 680+ stores. Rite Aid: 1,200+ stores. Forever 21: 354 stores. And that’s just the big names.

My sister-in-law worked at Party City for almost a decade. Assistant manager. Good coworkers. Customers who came back every year. She found out her store was closing from the news. Not from her boss. From the news.

That’s how it happens now.

Bisnow reports 123.7 million square feet of retail space got vacated this year. Only 74.5 million in new openings. We’re running a massive deficit. Empty storefronts everywhere.

They blame Amazon. They blame online shopping. They blame inflation. But you know what they don’t talk about? Private equity.

These vultures bought up retail chains, loaded them with debt, extracted every penny, and let them collapse. Leonard Green & Partners owned Joann. Thomas H. Lee Partners had Party City. Same pattern over and over. Buy the company, take out loans, pay yourself dividends, leave the workers holding the bag.

My take: This isn’t “market correction.” This isnt “creative destruction.” This is communities dying in slow motion while Amazon gets tax breaks and Wall Street pops champagne.

The ripple effects are brutal. Store closes. Landlord loses rent. Shopping center starts dying. Other stores lose foot traffic. They close too. Property values drop. Tax revenue falls. Schools get less funding.

Were not just losing stores. Were losing the infrastructure of communities. The places where people worked and shopped and ran into their neighbors.

My mom asked me last week where she’s supposed to buy yarn now. Joann’s gone. I didn’t have an answer. Amazon, I guess. Order it online and wait two days. Its not the same. She liked going to the store. Picking things out. Talking to employees.

Cant put that in a box from a warehouse in Nevada. Cant automate community.

15,000 stores closing. And the line keeps going up.