Our landscape is littered with “dead malls”. Once vibrant places of commerce, now empty shells.
Obviously the internet played a part. But it seems to me that internet shopping only came into its prime about 10 years ago and malls were dieing off before that. What some insiders have told me was the high rent drove out most of the smaller retailers. There was just no way the cute little pet stores, hobby stores, record stores, and specialty shops could make it. Then the shear glut of malls built in the late 70’s and 80’s, along with the growing competition from WalMart and other big box stores like Best Buy, wiped out even the bigger stores. Some also blame the growing problem with teenagers and gangs hanging out in the malls committing crimes and driving away customers.
What I’m seeing in our area of southern Kansas City is one mall, Oak Park Mall, is still doing well while the others are being torn down and replaced with new shopping areas that combine retail with offices, hotels, and apartments. Stores are still going in but instead of the open mall they prefer their own entrances facing the parking lots.
I think you need to give us some cites for the claims you are making. Anecdotes are not cites. Perhaps this is a local phenomenon, or perhaps it is confirmation bias on your part. So, let’s see some statistics to determine if your assertions are correct, and then we can go from there.
I don’t know how malls survived during their heydey. Sure, people flock to them on the weekends and on holidays. But during the middle of the day, who is doing a bunch of heavy-duty shopping? I know that if I need to pick up something from the mall in the middle of the day, it’s a specific something most likely sold by an anchor store with its own entrance and exit. So I can see how Macy’s can manage, but not all the little kiosks and smaller stores that comprise the “inside” of the mall.
Stay-at-home wives and husbands, people with non-standard working hours and the self-employed, senior citizens, children and teenagers after school hours… only a minority of the population actually works nine to five.
Retail businesses don’t always rely on having custom around the clock every day, so it didn’t matter whether malls were deserted during weekday work/school hours.
In the '70s and '80s, enclosed malls were a major venue for evening socializing. There are probably many factors contributing to their demise but at least one has to be video games and social media.
And that’s an issue that faces all stores, anyway, not just malls. If anything, malls would have it easier, since the rare person who just needs to duck in for one thing might be enticed by the presence of other stores nearby to buy two or three other things.
People working nine to five may be the minority…if you’re counting children and teenagers. Forgive me for not considering children and teenagers to be “heavy duty shoppers”, especially since they spend a good chunk of business hours in school. I’ll give you the other groups (though I’m skeptical that retirees are throwing a lot of money at mall kiosks). But I don’t think the survival of malls rests on the backs of kids. When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at the mall. But not a significant amount of money (though I did do my part to support the food court and arcade games).
“Category killer” chains and Wal-Mart probably played a big role. Around my home town in West Virginia, it seems like there’s a Wal-Mart just down the road from every dead mall.
Teenagers are a force to be reckoned with in the retail world and they have been for more than eighty years now. In 2000 teens were estimated to spend 155 billion dollars in the United States. You’re probably right that there aren’t very many teens you could classify as heavy duty shoppers but they’re a serious demographic to court.
Dead malls certainly aren’t a new thing. The Dixie Square Mall, the one where they filmed the infamous Blues Brothers car chase scene, closed down in 1978 and stood as a decayed blight on the landscape until it was finally torn down in 2012. University Mall in Little Rock was built in 1967 but for as long as I’ve been in Arkansas it was run down and on life support before finally being torn down in 2007. Park Plaza Mall across the street and McCain Mall in North Little Rock continue to be doing well though.
The OP is correct. A new enclosed shopping mall has not been built in the United States since 2006.
Here’s an article from the New Yorker describing the death of the shopping mall.
There are enough hits returned by Googling “death American shopping mall” that I am willing to concede that the OP’s observation is a national phenomenon.
There are a couple of reasons I’ve heard:
The internet (obviously) - People would rather order online than drive a half hour and then navigate a sea of cars in a parking lot just to pick up some new slacks.
“New urbanization” - There seems to be a newish trend where cities and towns are trying to create a sort of walkable “town center” with access to stores, dining and commercial services. Sort of like an outdoor mall.
IMHO, with the exception of high-end mega-malls like King of Prussia Mall in NJ, many shopping malls do seem to have developed a reputation as attractive nuisances for loitering teenagers, petty criminals and gangs.
At the very least, without expensive renovation, a lot of enclosed shopping malls just end up looking gross and outdated.
I currently work at a Big Box retail store that’s open 24/7. No, we don’t have shopping hordes thundering through all the time. That’s OK - when shopping traffic is light we have lots of other stuff to do, like restocking, inventory, cleaning and so forth. For small stores/kiosks there’s also paperwork and other business admin details to work on while waiting for the rare customer during hours you don’t get much foot traffic. Then, then the hordes arrive, you concentrate on them.
Even so - a surprising number of people do shop during 9 to 5 hours.
I would say that the mentioned glut, the Big Boxes, the death of the regional department store, loss of other industrial/commercial activity in the vicinity (the customers need an income), the growth of exurbia, which meant customer base scattering moving even further (and its mirror counterpart, the gentrification and revival of urban centers), combined.
Since the late 80s/early 1990s I saw a lot of Mall decay in different states. Some ended up completely redeveloped into housing or office parks, some were absorbed by one or more Big Boxes, some found a way to be recast as the “Towne Center” multi use concept.
Two anecdotes from my experience. When I was growing up in the 80s, Wal-Mart was part of the local mall in the small town I grew up in. The Wal-Mart store moved to it’s own location in the 90s, but when it did the mall had already started declining. Where I live now, in Corpus Christi, TX, there are 2 malls, a block away from each other. One of them is always full, the other mostly deserted. In this case, I think it was just poor management of the second mall, which is the newer of the two.
Chris Rock once said “every town has the same two malls. The one where the white people go and the one where the white people used to go”
Amongst the many big and small strip malls, Milwaukee has two HUGE, two story malls. You, know, the kind with a two story Sears and JCPenney in them and bunch of jewelry stores in the middle. My family lived closer to one of them and went to it on a pretty regular basis. Then, I very clearly remember my mom saying “I won’t go there at night any more, it’s getting kind of ugly”. Then there was a stabbing* in a parking lot in a nearby restaurant. Then (and this is over the course of years) she said “I’ll only go there if I know exactly what I need and I’m in and out, no shopping around”. Then, it was only if I really have to go and I can find someone to go with me. Then, finally, it was ‘I’m not going anymore, the gangs have taken over’. Now, she goes to the ‘other’ mall on the other side of town.
Eventually, the first one closed and then other one got much, much nicer, I’m sure due to the influx of new customers.
*Just looking into that stabbing. The person that went to jail for it was killed by the same person that killed Jeffery Dahmer, and at the same time, he took them both out at once with a steel pipe.
University Mall was torn down and replaced with a Target and fancy apartments. There is a very expensive strip mall or whatever, separate buildings for each store across University Avenue from Park Plaza.
The middle and lower classes have Wal-Mart, the upper class, wealthy have expensive shops.
I think malls got overbuilt. Lots of communities which could support one mall ended up with three or four malls. One of those malls will survive and the others will go bankrupt.
