As others have said it isn’t necessarily consumer choice of convenience that has driven this. Consumers could very well prefer malls, all else being equal, but malls could be more expensive for stores and so they move out.
As for me, it depends on what I need to accomplish. The only time I’d prefer a stand-alone store is if it’s the only thing I need to do and the standalone store / strip mall will not be crowded. I’d prefer one enclosed centralized space if I would visit multiple stores and/or also eat or ALSO if it is a generally crowded time, because malls always have lots of places to park relative to standalone stores.
The White Flint Mall is now a hole in the ground, they are making more apartments out of it I believe. They might also be making it more like the Rockville town center where there are restaurants, stores and apartments all right there. The White Flint mall though was known to be going under for a few years at least.
Malls are really expensive - the HVAC alone creates a huge cost - if you are running a small store, you are also paying for utilities for a portion of the public space - which in a lot of malls is huge. You are also cleaning it, providing security, etc.
That makes it hard for a store to stay in business - their costs have to increase - and when you can get the same thing on the internet with very little overhead for the seller - its usually cheaper.
The Mall of America continues to be busy, but its a destination mall and it does well with destination shopping. The anchors don’t do well there - what does well is the impulse type purchases. People want to go and look - and they’ll buy things on a lark.
Downtown department stores were anchors for a lot of smaller cities. When the middle-class fled to the suburbs they stopped going downtown. Branch stores in the suburbs were easy to find by the end of the 1950s, even before the age of malls.
When the downtown stores died, a big reason for going downtown died with them. It wasn’t simple cause and effect, more part of the very large process of suburbanization after WWII. Downtown were dying before the big central department stores left. But the hole they left has never quite been refilled.
I was present at both the birth and the death of the mall that was closest to my home town. As a high schooler, I had snagged a job in one of the anchor stores (the classy department store) in the gourmet department (yup, they had such things back in 1973). Opening day was a big festive occasion with the mayor, governor, and other dignitaries present and speechifying and ribbon cutting, etc.
Thirty years later, right before I moved to Denver, I was at a friend’s baby consignment store that was one of the last stores remaining open in the mall on its last day, helping her pack up and haul out her merchandise. While we were packing, we heard the maintenance crew shut down the fountains for the last time. We swept the floor, locked the door, and turned out the lights for the last time. Like me, she had also been one of the eager young sales clerks on opening day all those years previously, so the moment was definitely a bittersweet one.
Two days later, the wrecking crew came in and tore the entire mall down.
And an even more recent threadwhere quite a few people recognized that outlet malls are actually being built, not closing down.
I liked Sports Authority because I could often get exactly the same item for 20% less than at Dick’s. But yeah, Sears, JCPenny, even Macy’s; the traditional anchor stores are struggling.
I wonder why that is? Auxiliary collateral damage?
I remember discovering the food court at an Oakland mall long ago. It was a great idea. Most of the food was pretty good eatin’, but not all that expensive, and if you wanted to hang out with a few friends over lunch, you didn’t have to agree on what kind of cuisine you wanted; just go to the booth you liked and meet in the middle. Then you could get something different for dessert.
What I’ve been seeing is the large enclosed malls are going away but the smaller 1950s/60s open-air “shopping plaza” or “Miracle Mile” dense business districts seem to be making a come-back. The way it was explained to me by a developer that style is not as dependent on having large anchor stores to survive or thrive.
They’re not going out in Thailand anytime soon. More and bigger are built every year, almost every month. If nothing else, they’re a good source of air conditioning for the sweaty masses who cannot afford such while shopping online at home.
Well, I shouldn’t say they build them “bigger” each year as the biggest one built to date, Siam Paragon, opened in late 2005, although after the red shirts torched Central World during the 2010 riots, they rebuilt that one to be bigger than Paragon. But they’re all pretty large, I’ll clue ya.
Recent years have also seen a trend here toward “community malls,” generally open air and of a much smaller size. But the shopping-mall behemoths are such an integral part of the government’s tourism promotion that they’re not going away.
In my area, it’s pretty much feast or famine. The Manassas Mall is a ghost town. You know it’s bad if one of your anchors is a Target that goes out of business. It was replaced by a Wal-Mart, which I guess is doing okay. The JC Penney went bust, but the Macy’s and Sears are hanging on.
But in Tyson’s, you’ve got Tyson’s I which is always packed. A huge movie theater; two food courts–it seems to be thriving. Right across the street is Tyson’s II which never seems to have much foot traffic, but it caters to the “if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it” crowd. There’s a Versace and a Chanel (cheapest handbag seems to be $5,000), and my wife insisted on buying me a pair of $600 shoes for my birthday. Oh, and you can buy a Mazerati for $230,000.
In between, there’s the Fair Oaks mall which also seems to be doing okay. Any mall that can support TWO Macy’s stores can’t be all that dead.
Yea I notice that too they seem to be more popular in the UK and Canada for some reason. Even in Asia they are building new malls where in the US they are closing malls.
It seems in the US big box stores and power centers is what killed malls. People don’t like going to 4 to 8 stores in the mall they like going to one store and that is it. So walmart or target is what people like getting clothes than going to mall and going to 4 to 8 stores.
May be more of culture of hating going to many stores:eek::eek::eek:.
Going to store and walking out with a shopping cart full than going to mall yea 4 to 8 stores this week and than 4 to 8 stores next week.All walking out carrying the items.
Where they can go to big box store like walmart or target and walk out with shopping cart full and they done for month.
Well because UK less car centric than the US than going to a mall every week they probably look at it different. Less of culture of where is my shopping cart, I must have every thing and be done for the month. I hate going to different stores and going shopping every week. Where for the most part big box stores and power centers solved that problem in the US.
In US culture lot of cities that is the case. White people left the city and moved to the suburbs where they got house and drive a SUV. And the down town area more poverty, homeless, gangs, drug addicts, blacks and immigrants. I think this is because of US white flight and segregation. Where in Canada and UK and France there is been more emphasis on down town and less of down town ghetto area like what you see in the US. Canada and the UK don’t have that Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, Tampa and south central Los Angeles so on.
More emphasis on down town and lack of need to spread out there was less ghetto like what you find in US cities.
And now the condo boom going on in Canada!! Would be big culture different than the US!! Where a house and car is very much part of American middle class culture. Like how can you like living in a condo or an apartment is really hard to understand culture difference.
Well I know there some condo boom going on in the US now like in Miami and Fort Lauderdale to take back the city and it is working well there!! But many other US city down town are still really ghetto.
