CNBC's Jim Cramer said Foot Locker's stellar quarterly earnings report on Friday shows there's still some life left for brick-and-mortar retailers.
Cramer was particularly pleased with a comment by CEO Richard Johnson, who said in a statement, the "flow of premium product continues to improve" at the athletic apparel and footwear retailer.
Shares of Foot Locker, now with a market value of about $6.3 billion, soared about15 percent early Friday after the company reported first-quarter earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street forecasts. Same store sales fell by 2.8 percent, but that was a smaller than expected decline.
"The mall is still not dead," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street."
Cramer continued, "The read through here is not just good for Foot Locker, which is obviously going higher but for Nike which remains one of the strongest stocks in the Dow."
Before Friday's advance, Foot Locker had seen its shares fall 22 percent over the past year, as of Thursday's close. Foot Locker and other similar stocks have been under pressure as investors have been concerned that Amazon could expand its dominance into apparel.
There is also a concern in the retail industry about the future of malls as big department store chains such as Sears and J.C. Penney close locations.
Cramer, host of "Mad Money," has previously made the case for investors to stay in retail, particularly in apparel retail. In April, Cramer made the argument that the U.S. is "undergoing an apparel renaissance."
"These stocks are worth picking at into any weakness that we might get ... because right now, they have the best fundamentals of any large group in the entire stock market," he said at the time.