There's a lot of talk about alternative use cases for vacant retail space. Here's what is happening with some empty Sports Authority locations. Some other new use cases are floated here. Sure, sky-diving in a mall sounds amazing, right? I mean if something were to go wrong, at least you'll go splat on some hard floor where some trinket used to be sold rather than over some lake in New Zealand. So extreme, brah. Given all of the trends - exacerbated by the reportedly imminent bankruptcy of Gymboree (1300 stores) - certain investors like Cohen & Steers ($RNP) are staying away. Some commentators, however, think all of this talk about the "retail apocalypse" is just fear-mongering. Regardless where you come out on this, e-commerce is on the rise and all of it is, counter-intuitively, hurting others outside of retail too, including UPS ($UPS), which is experiencing rising costs to handle all of the deliveries - costs that it may attempt to pass back to the retailers.