Celebrating Two Years of The Mid-South Retail Blog!

It's March 17th again, and you know what that means... well, okay, yes, it means that it's St. Patrick's Day, sure. But more importantly (at least as far as this website is concerned), it's the blog's anniversary! Today marks two years that the Mid-South Retail Blog has been up and running. It's not the most frequently updated site by any means, but I enjoy operating this outlet for retail news, photographs, and stories (in 2016, I was especially proud of my Aftermath of Seessel's essay), and I hope you guys enjoy reading and commenting on my posts, too. (The fact that you keep doing both of those things at least implies to me that you do, haha!)

As with last year, here are a few statistics to mark the occasion. We are inching closer to the milestone of 50,000 visitors (!), sitting at 39,592 right now. December 2016 has been our most popular month so far, receiving 7,549 pageviews in those 31 days alone. We also had over 7,000 pageviews in January of this year; currently, halfway through March we're at 2,500 or so, which is still well above our highest point prior to late last year, which was March 2016 at 1,221 pageviews. I'm not sure what brought on that huge spike of visitors, but it's certainly a welcome sight! And as far as individual posts go, here are the top five as measured by pageviews:

1. Mid-South Kroger Marketplace Expansion; February 2016; 1,098
2. BREAKING: East Memphis Kroger Closure, Target Remodels (UPDATE: and Sears Replacement); March 2016; 1,047
3. Kmart Memphis (Bonus: Sears Poplar Avenue); March 2016; 928
4. Closings and Openings in Memphis and the Mid-South; January 2016; 911
5. Olive Branch Crossing Construction; September 2015; 877

Speaking of Olive Branch Crossing... the blog's second-anniversary special treat comes not from me this year, but instead, WMC Action News 5! As they reported earlier this month, the aforementioned shopping center's highly-anticipated Fresh Market store has unfortunately suffered a setback: due to the chain switching owners, its opening date of spring 2017 has been pushed back to summer 2018. The Commercial Appeal reports that the store itself is an empty shell, completely finished on the outside but nothing but dirt on the inside. They chose to use a recent picture of the store to illustrate that fact, while WMC Action News 5 decided to use a picture taken earlier in the construction of the store. And as it turns out, that picture came from this blog post! As you can see in the screenshot from their mobile app above, they even credited the blog, though I did have to contact them to make that happen. I also sent them a more updated picture, but looks like they were fine sticking with that one. In any case, it made my day to see my photo featured on my favorite local news station's website, and I'm very happy that the MSRB was credited in the end! Now we're famous XD

One final statistic: the blog's first full-fledged contributor post, featuring a project created by blog commenter 11110, fittingly holds the record for the post with the most comments thus far, at 21. And speaking of contributions, yours are always welcome! I know I plug the blog's email address, midsouthretailblog [at] gmail [dot] com, incessantly, but more than ever I find it worth mentioning in this post, since it has seen a pretty good amount of activity all its own since its inception back in July 2015, not long after the blog itself was founded. It's open not only to your Mid-South retail photos and stories so that they may be featured on the site, but also to simple retail conversations, a string of which I have indeed held with readers of the blog as of late.

In theory, I have two contributors with future posts in the works, although I'm not faulting them if those don't become reality because I've learned firsthand how hard it is to develop content for a blog! For what it's worth, despite the fact that I only hold myself to posting once monthly for only ten months out of the year, I'm doing my best to come up with new content to feature soon. Specifically, I'm trying to branch out into other counties besides just DeSoto and Shelby, so that the blog might become at least slightly closer to covering the whole Mid-South as its name implies and not just the Memphis metropolitan area! Of course, it goes without saying that I'll still have plenty of material from those two counties as well, including my feature post for this month, which should hopefully be posted tomorrow unless something else comes up. Bottom line: I'm excited for what I've got planned for the blog as its third year in operation begins, and I hope you are, too!

Until next time, and as always, thank you for your support, and have fun exploring the retail world wherever you are!

Retail Retell