Our poor TV died after only 12 years, so we went to get a new one last Friday evening. We went to the local mall with some trepidation, and found the parking lot half empty. We came back with out truck to pick it up Saturday at 10 am, and were able to park two spaces from the store. Things were not exactly hopping 2 Saturdays before Christmas.
I went back that evening - and while more crowded, it wasn’t that much more than an average summer weekend. I went to the Stanford Shopping Center (high end) last night, and parking was easier than a usual day.
Silicon Valley is hardly the worst spot in the country. From here it looks like we’re in trouble. How is your mall doing?
I went to the Eaton Centre in Toronto last Sunday evening (open until 7!) with a new credit card and it was pretty crowded. You could still see the floor, though, so it wasn’t as crowded as previous years.
Day after Thanksgiving, Valley Fair traffic was backed up past Bascom (southbound 880), which is normal. Now, it seems to have dropped off, so it’s just the usual traffic. It seems more like a warm day in summer, instead of Christmas shopping madness. So, less than normal, but not a wasteland, either.
I was in Best Buy near home a couple of Saturdays ago, at about 5 pm. It was practically empty - not even normal Saturday-afternoon traffic. Same thing last Thursday, when I was walking around Greenwich Village - not even normal weekday foot traffic, let alone Christmas-season traffic, and most stores were empty, with the salespeople hardly bothering to ask people if they needed help. Stuff was on sale that NEVER goes on sale. It was almost like the sales staff knew nobody was going to be buying anything.
They are slowly closing down one local mall to redevelop it as a shopping/apartment complex. Do all American cities have a "“White” and a “Nonwhite” Mall?
There’s one mall near here that’s going gangbusters: the Niagara Outlets Mall. Almost every day the parking lot is full of Ontario-licensed vehicles. Maybe they haven’t heard that the Canadian dollar is falling again or something.
The closest thing my town has to a mall is basically a small plaza with a supermarket, electronics store, and a home improvement store as anchors, with a few smaller shops and restaurants scattered about.
When I went shopping at Riverside Senshu (mall complex little over an hour away) a couple weekends ago, it was fairly crowded. I had to wait in line forever (and consequently missed my train back home) to buy some coffee. So, across the Pacific, at least, the malls don’t seem to be in dire straits. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before reality sets in over here.
The Palm Beach Mall has really struggled in the bad economy. Sears and JCPenney seem to be doing alright, but many of the surviving stores are struggling. I say “surviving” because about 75 percent of the businesses have closed down. Others are having huge clearance sales to get rid of their inventory before they close their doors for good.
I went to the mall on Saturday morning to do some Christmas shopping, entering through JCPenney as usual. When I stepped out of JCPenney into the mall it was like entering a ghost town. All of the stores were dark, and the entrances were blocked by metal grates. It was incredibly eerie to walk past the stores (alone, I might add – there were no other customers) while hearing “It’s the most wonderful tiiiiime of the yeeear …” crackling on the PA system. If it had been a movie, that would have been the exact moment that the flesh-eating zombies attacked.
On the plus side, I got some really good bargains.
According to my mom’s friend, who went to one of our local malls last weekend, the parking lot was packed all the way to the farthest reaches. I was quite surprised to hear this - although the mall is the newest around and in a sort of upper-middle-class area.
On the opposite side of the Cleveland suburbs, we have Randall Park Mall which is just a shell of a mall and almost creepy to see.
I’ve honestly never heard of this. The malls up here seem to be pretty well integrated. Even the lowest-end malls I’ve encountered. Some of the high-end malls seem to be a lot whiter, I admit (although by no means completely)ll.
They’re full, too, by the way.
I work in a mall, and have to go to the larger mall close to my home frequently, and traffic is Way Down. When I went shopping this past weekend, I could park close to the door, and there were no crowds at all. The stores that are open later than normal hours (past 9 pm) are reporting that they have very little to do those last two hours. And our sales figures are scary-bad.
In Lexington KY, Fayette Mall is still doing pretty well but our old neighborhood mall, Turfland, closed this year. My mother attributes this to poor management, though she’s not specific about which bad management decisions led to its closing.
In Albuquerque Winrock Mall appears to be slowly dying, possibly because of the inability to compete with Coronado Mall, which is less than a mile away and very active.
My local mall is supposedly the highest grossing mall per sq. ft. in the U.S. It’s always packed–and it’s the only mall I’ve ever seen without any empty storefronts. The mall caters to a clientele primarily from Monterrey, MX–perhaps the wealthiest area of Mexico. (la plaza mall). We also have an outlet mall in Mercedes, Tx–a few miles down the road, that is doing very well. Technically, I am in Texas. However, the conventional wisdom is that we’re really close to the United States.
I went to Stonewood Center (Centre?) in Downey twice this week, once Sunday afternoon and again Monday night. The place was packed both times. The Mervyn’s store in that mall is going out of business, and even though half the stuff is gone, the checkout lines were huge.
I went to the mall on Saturday to do some errands. I kind of hate the mall, but I needed a new cable thingy to connect my iPod to the computer, and that’s where the Apple store is. Anyway, it was pretty damned busy. And I live in Michigan! I was surprised.
Someone mentioned empty storefronts. I see lots of those, even in the upscale malls. At Christmas, you would think some seasonal store would move in there.