The exact opposite is happening where I live, in a tax free State. The mall near me is BOOMING. It can be annoying trying to find parking spaces, or a seat in it’s humongous food court. The tax free aspect has people coming from at least 3 other states.
It makes me happy though. I love malls and have been sad at the decay I’ve seen.
My local mall is in a bit of a resurgence after circling the drain a decade ago, but I’m in/near a growing metro area and there’s been almost no new retail space added in the last twelve years. The big box discount sector hasn’t been growing with the population either. We actually lost one recently (a Meijer).
The high end mall in San Jose seems to be doing great, expanding and always busy. But the lower end malls who haven’t the resources to spiff themselves up are hurting. And here anyhow, where you can have open air shopping centers without worrying about snow, the top ones are also doing well, with a lot of business driven by restaurants of better quality than in malls. They collect big box stores.
One great thing about online retail for me is that since my kids are scattered, Amazon allows them to buy presents and ship them to where we have Christmas, which is a lot better than either shlepping them in suitcases or trying to buy stuff last minute.
Bolding mine: I did, and according to some of the Amazon reviews the online replacement wasn’t an exact match and leaked. One reviewer had posted the steps to alter the ends using a grinder so it would fit. I decided I’d rather pay the extra 15 bucks for the original. I called the store before going, and they had several of them.
Clowns are scary.
Our local mall is booming because its parent company not only has the resources but also because the mall is the only actual mall within reasonable driving distance of the city. There are some empty stores, but the anchors except for Sears seem to be doing sell, especially Target.
Two things I noticed the last time I was there: More restaurants/take out places (excluding the food court) and stripped down versions of several retailers. Many clothing stores, like Gap, are now postage stamp storefronts as opposed to the take-up-half-this-side retailers like H&M or Primark.
A lot of kids still use the mall as their hangout spot like we did when I was their age.
They recently closed the Sears in my town. It had been there for decades.
I was in there about six months ago looking at juicers. I was wondering if they were any good so I was reading reviews on my phone and then stumbled upon Amazon.
At Sears the juicer was $130. Amazon had it for $80 with free next-day delivery.
I went to the clerk/sales lady and asked about their price matching policy.
“Oh, we only price match with our competitors”
“Uh, ok, so who’s that?”
“Other local big box stores.”
“This is your competitor right here.” I show her my phone
Bye Bye Sears.
That’s how it is around here. The low-end sad mall that has high turnover and is anchored by a Wal-Mart is barely hanging on. The mid-range mall seems to be doing fine. It has TWO Macy’s ferchryinoutloud. The high-end mall, where I was just yesterday, was packed. It has nice department stores and a TESLA store. The *really *super high-end mall seems to be doing fine. It has a Neiman Marcus, Vesacse, and a place to buy MAZARATIs. I went into the Chanel store with my wife. Not a big store–about the size of a Cole Haan shoe store or something, but I counted 8 employees and we still had to wait 10 minutes for assistance–it was just teeming with customers.
I have no desire to buy clothes on-line. Especially pants. Depending on the pants, my waist size can result in pants too tight to button or bagging off of me. I was at Brooks Brothers a couple of months ago, and one style shirt fit really nice, and another (exact same neck/length) I could barely button. Hell if I’m going to try on clothes via mail. Maybe some folks are okay with ordering 8 items in order to get 2 or 3 to keep, and re-packaging and posting the rest back in the mail–but not me.
Echoing some of the above: the local higher-end mall is booming. So much so that they have added plans for a third “pod set” of buildings. There are some empty storefronts, but they are from failed chains, not failed shops. I expect them to be filled by summer.
We online just about everything. Both of us are standard sized, and we know how to adjust between brands. Neither of us has been in a regular clothes store in a decade or more. Shoes are even easier, and I can find EEE online, where I can never find them at a store.
Home Depot/Lowes, Ace Hardware, Vons/Staters/Trader Joe’s. That’s about it for offline shopping. And with an Amazon distribution center all of 20 miles from the house, I can order something when I get up in the morning and have it delivered before 8pm that evening.
It varies here. There is a large open outdoor shopping mall thingy (based on open plan malls in Arizona and California I expect) that is doing very well…they are expanding. There is a enclosed mall in mid-town that is doing very badly and seems to be going bust, with only a few stores or restaurants (and a theater) still open. The mall closest to me is doing somewhere in-between those extremes with some store fronts closed while most of the mall and food court plus the satellite restaurants still doing fine.
For my part, I don’t go to the mall to shop, so it’s not that big a deal. In my area, shops like Walmart (which I try to avoid if possible) and things like Home Depot or Lowes are doing fine, seemingly, so I am not seeing a huge shift away from offline retail. My WAG on this would be that it’s really the malls that are doing badly, and mainly because of the shift in attitude about them by the younger generation. When I was a teen or in my 20’s, malls were where a lot of kids hung out or spent their leisure time at. Since the kids were there, the parents were there…and since they were all there they bought stuff. Today’s kids don’t need or want to do that since there really isn’t that much for kids today to do there. You can usually get anything in the mall at some other store or online, so why go if there isn’t some killer app to draw the kids and the families there anymore?
One one hand, we live in a very small rural town almost 3 hours away from any major shopping areas, so online is the best way to go shopping for most things (not food!) Buying clothes and shoes can be ridiculously expensive, but I don’t wear sizes or styles carried in the retail in our area, and I wear a very unusual shoe size; I’ve never seen a store carry it.
OTOH, I needed to buy a particular shirt because I miscounted the last time I was in the big(ish) city. Online? I have to wait 2 weeks to get it from the retailer I got the shirts from, or wait 2 weeks to a month or pay $80 for expedited shipping from Amazon. I wish I had the time and money to go back to the big city to buy what I need. I wish I lived close enough that I could drive over and get what I need weekly instead of once a month.
I wonder how Amazon will work in the future. Drive all competition out of business, and they no longer have to be the best at price, availability, or service. Then they will be hated by everybody, and someone else will have to take their place.
There are two healthy malls near me in the Philly suburbs
The Plymouth Meeting Mall has a Boscov’s department store where I do pretty much all of my clothing shopping. They have a fantastic men’s department.
Then there’s the HUGE shopping complex in King of Prussia, which is still growing. The parking lots and multilevel parking garages are always packed, and there’s serious discussion of putting in a SEPTA spur going there from Norristown.