Jan. 16--Like the unceremonious stripping of a Christmas tree, retail chain stores are coming down one after another, dimming the lights in shopping centers throughout Western Washington.

KB Toys has gone bankrupt and must now sell off everything from Lego sets to Barbie dolls at soon-to-close stores in Centralia, North Bend and Vancouver.

Shoe Pavilion walked away from stores in Seattle and Bellevue after filing for bankruptcy last year. Clothier Steve & Barry's recently shuttered stores in Everett, Auburn and Olympia. And Linens 'n Things put about 325,000 square feet of hard-to-fill retail space onto a beleaguered real-estate market when its stores went out of business in the fall.

Nowhere are the closures more evident than at South Hill Mall in Puyallup, where an old Linens 'n Things sits empty next to a Circuit City, another national retailer on the ropes.

Thursday, South Hill's Youngstown, Ohio, owner, Cafaro, announced plans to begin renovating the 20-year-old mall in March, saying it has enough money "at a time when many commercial developers are delaying or abandoning projects for lack of financing."

Virtually all types of retailers are struggling as consumers worry about rising joblessness and shrinking retirement funds. Nationally, December retail sales fell 2.7 percent, confirming fears the 2008 holiday shopping season was the worst in 40 years.

Locally owned Underhill's Furniture said this week it will close all four of its stores by the end of March, citing the credit crunch and housing-market crisis.

Chico Ortiz, who manages the Just Sports store at South Hill, said he counts customers in 20-minute intervals, the average length of time that passes between visits.

"It's very slow. One day last week we did $80" in sales, he said, subtracting Christmas returns. "We've already had to cut half of our part-time hours."

In the past five years, developers built 35 new shopping centers totaling nearly 6.5 million square feet in the Seattle area, according to brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Although most new centers filled up quickly, they could make it more difficult for old developments to attract and keep retail tenants, especially in a bad economy.

"Most tenants are looking only at locations they've been dying to get into and not expanding their chains," said Ron Sher, managing partner of Crossroads Bellevue, a 480,000-square-foot shopping center with 25,000 square feet of vacant space, including an old Shoe Pavilion store and Chili's restaurant.

"There are some tenants in the market, but besides that, you get creative," Sher said, describing his strategy for filling space.