Sports Authority has just announced that they will be closing all of their stores due to debt. However, the sporting goods industry as a whole is actually rising. Sears is also in an inescapable death spiral. I have a feeling that Sears is going to take a lot of malls with them when they die. Many malls have a lot of empty space. Has online shopping finally killed malls? Malls seem to have two types of stores in them, which both fall prey to online shopping. Stores like Sears and Sports Authority, that try to do too many things, and end up not being good at any of them, and wildly overpriced clothing stores.
Possibly a subcategory, but I swear some malls are 50% shoe stores. Which going by my experience and that of my friends makes sense. The slightest variation in your feet’s shape from the ideal means you cannot count on a particular size of shoe being a good fit, even within the same manufacturer. 
You simply have to try on every pair or accept that you’ll be shipping back at least half of all the shoes you by on the web.
70’s and 80’s style traditional indoor malls certainly have some very serious problems all over the country. Their design means that they are vulnerable to rapid decline when even one of their anchor stores (generally a department store) pulls out. A few of them have successfully transitioned to being an upscale shopping experience but the more general trend is for them to become slightly ghettoized and then go into a rapid death spiral as the customers with actual money stop going there.
However, the general idea isn’t dead. The newer trend is upscale or outlet outdoor malls without any true anchor stores. Those are doing quite well in many places. Individual stores can freely come and go without jeopardizing the entire collection of businesses.
You might want to see this recent thread on the subject.
There is also a web site devoted to dead malls if you are into gory capitalism autopsies. Some of the deaths are really gruesome:
The last time I visited the Baltimore/Washington area, almost every suburban mall I visited was a ghost town with tumbleweeds. Owings Mills was in the ropes, but Columbia Mall was still healthy. Tyson’s Corner was going strong, but White Flint in Rockville, Landmark in Alexandria, and a couple of others were a store or two away from becoming tombs.
I’ve often wondered if internet sales would eventually negatively impact the value of commercial retail space. Wouldn’t be surprising.
we have 2 doing well. Another 2 have lots of empty spots. One of the ones in trouble has lost 2 anchor stores but they still have 3 left. It’s not that big and it’s only 1 level.
We have an outdoor shopping center that is doing really well, it’s about 10 years old. It was built on the site of a former indoor mall.
Curious that Malls in the US seem to be declining but in the UK, they are (mostly) doing OK. What do seem to be on the way out are the vast (by our standards) out-of-town supermarkets.
Looking round our town center mall, the shoe shops, once the majority, have dwindled down to one of the original (pre mall) shops and a couple of others, one a discount chain. There are loads of phone/gadget shops, chain coffee/fast food shops and several large department stores, one of which has just gone into receivership. Fashion, as ever, still does fairly well, although brands seem to come and go.
Malls rose and fell on the strength of anchor stores. Anchor stores are dying, so malls also are.
There have been multiple attempts to repurpose malls for more service-oriented businesses, everything from libraries to dentists. Game complexes seem to be the new trend. The problem is that malls are inherently far more costly to run than strip centers. Rents and leases are high and so volume is necessary, something service businesses often find hard to sustain. (So do fashion stores, but they’re more easily swappable.)
If Macy’s, which absorbed the vast majority of competing department stores, goes under, then malls will die shortly after. They’ll stagger along until then. Unless both Seas and Penneys drag each other under first.
This is better suited to IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
In the parts of Texas that I’ve lived (Dallas and Tyler), the malls there are going like gang busters. It’s still THE place to shop if you have a certain amount of disposable income. They show absolutely zero signs of even slowing down, let alone going under. So, there’s one data point (roughly the equivalent of seven malls that I can think of off the top of my head) of them actually thriving.
It’s not malls per se, but simply that for quite a time developers were creating more malls than was sustainable. It was a real estate issue, more than anything.
My local one has six chain jewelery stores not counting department store jewelry counters, kiosks or cheap teen-oriented junk. Which, again, I suppose most people still prefer to purchase jewelry in person rather than order it online.
“Lifestyle centers”, where you have an outdoor mall with entertainment spaces and green spaces, are still being built and so I imagine are doing fairly well. The lease costs are far lower than traditional indoor malls so they’re easier to lease and keep full.
My own local mall also seems to have more child oriented stuff these days: a play area, a store full of bouncy castles ($9 for an all day pass), fake turf covered climbing rocks and a kiosk selling rides on these slow moving ATVs decorated to look like giant stuffed animals. Maybe the hope is to make it more of a destination to keep the kids amused, though that probably works better in January than in May.
Yes, I notice that too when I am there but everything is booming in Dallas so it doesn’t represent the general trend for the country. The Dallas area is the only place that I regularly go to traditional malls. In the Boston area, there are only a couple of traditional malls that I would go to voluntarily and they are both upscale. However, there are lots of outdoor malls and shopping centers that are doing extremely well.
I don’t think retail is dead, it just has to evolve. 80’s style malls are based on outdated ideas that deserve to die. However, retailers like Bass Pro Shops and Cabellas seem to be doing extremely well because they are like a theme park combined with a superstore. I take my kids into the nearest one sometimes even when we don’t plan on buying anything because they have gigantic fish tanks, hiking trails, activity lessons and contests for free and the place is always packed. That is one strategy that retail stores can use to beat online competitors. Oddly enough, it is also very similar to the same strategy that the venerable department stores used back in the day. It was supposed to be a pleasant experience with surprise perks rather than just grab and go.
Heck, indoor malls used to have music performances, chances to meet (low tier) celebrities, art exhibitions and other stuff. I remember my mother used to sell handmade crafts at art/craft shows in malls all the time back in 70s & 80s. These days the only events in the mall are photo ops with Santa and the Easter Bunny.
Haven’t been to Collin Creek or Valley View lately, huh? Valley View is surreal, and Collin Creek is starting to look pretty thin. The very high end Malls–Northpark and The Galleria–are doing well. Northpark is a weird mix of “normal” mall shops and very, very high end places and somehow those two things create a synergy that lets it keep going. And some of the far suburbs have still-functional malls, but even there the trend is more toward the outdoor shopping plaza. I feel like Stonebriar and it’s mates will eventually face the same fate as Valley View, because they aren’t fundamentally any different.
The mall close to our house (Crossroads) is interesting because it still seems very much like this, despite them doing a pretty good job renovating. The big store by the food court is a Half Price Books, the mall has many tables for craft group meetings and board games (including a large sized floor chess board). All are constantly in use. Oh, and the grocery store is essentially an anchor store, with indoor entrances. Also, the library has a presence with a kid’s reading room, as well as a city hall outpost and a number of kid’s activity stores (painting, playing, etc).
Its very different from what I see as the traditional American mall, and seems to be thriving. It may be a peculiarity of the neighborhood: there is a heavy immigrant population that perhaps demands more of this. The food court seems a lot more diverse as well. Its actually a useful place to go.
The indoor malls I grew up with in South Africa were a little different, in that it was typical to be anchored by a huge grocery store. This might be more resilient to the change of fortunes to some of the more traditional US anchors.
Maybe there are just too many of them. Even before online sales were eating into the brick and mortar locations it didn’t make sense to have so many of them. There were always a few big anchor stores and then lots of smaller places that barely seemed to survive. Now there are too many of the big anchor stores, but for the smaller specialty shops the competition was always too tight when there was another one at the next small just a few miles down the road, and they were stuck with high rents and often no control over their hours, and often no guarantee of exclusivity either that larger stores could obtain.
When we were newlyweds, our main, cheap source of entertainment was mall-walking. We’d window-shop, wander around in some stores, maybe have supper in the food court, watch people, perhaps go to a movie. The mall would have auto shows, craft shows, home shows - it seems like every weekend something was going on. But that was the mid-to-late 80s.
I honestly can’t recall the last time I was in a mall. The fact that the nearest one is about 25 miles away and has a bad rep is part of the reason, but mostly, we’re not interested in mall-walking any more. If we go shopping these days, it’s with a particular purchase in mind, and much of our shopping is on-line. If all malls disappeared, I doubt that I’d notice, but that’s just me.
Roosevelt Field in Garden City, LI just finished a major expansion and is extremely popular as is The Green Acres Mall on the Nassau/Queens border. Gateway Mall in Brooklyn continues to grow and grow also.
The Mall at The Source is slowly dying, however. When Fortunoff (the Source) went out of business, it took it down. Also, it is less than a mile from Roosevelt Field and a new, smaller one, Gallery Mall. Me, I always considerd East Garden City as one big, gigantic, sprawling Mallapalooza. In addition to The Gallery, Roosevelt Field and The Source there are countless strip and mini malls that connect them. It is an amazing example of Mallification.
Too bad I missed the meeting, but my stock investing club just bought a few thousand dollars of a REIT that mainly owns/manages malls (Simon Property Group). It shows pretty reasonable performance over the last ten years. It’s up 600% over a 2009 low, and about 100% over the previous 2007 high.