Here in Alpharetta, GA a new outdoor mall opened up called Avalon. I never understood the outdoor mall thing. (Another one opened closer to downtown Atlanta called Atlantic Station). Then I went to Avalon. Wow! :eek: What a nice, enjoyable place to visit. Probably because it’s new, but there is a ton of people waking around and enjoying the place. To me you feel like you’re part of something just being there. There’s a green space in the center where kids can play and run around. In the winter it turns into an outdoor skating rink (I’ve been told). Residential condos and/or apartments are housed next to and above the retail spaces which makes it feel like a little community. I don’t know how big your outdoor mall is, rbroome, this one seems pretty big to me, but I would never drive from store to store once I was parked.
I wonder how long these new “lifestyle” plazas will last. I can’t comprehend the whole phenomena.
In the winter time, you have to trudge through snow to go from one store to another…not a lot of fun.
Rent is cheaper than a mall…But how important is that? These stores aren’t designed to appeal to the penny-pinching consumers, competing on price with Target and Walmart.
These plazas attract the upper middle class, with Macy’s, etc, and (as Aeschines said)the “frou-frou” grocery stores.
As long as everyything is new and yuppified/gentrified, it’s great.You can buy a new condo next to the trendy restaurant with live jazz bands. Cool. But what will happen 10 years from now, when the restaurant is replaced by a dive bar with hard rock music. Or when the public green space becomes a hang-out for rowdy teenagers? Who wants to live adjacent to noisy drunks?
I think people will look back fondly on the convenient malls of the “good ol’ days”
Ha! I blame the swipe keyboard 
If you’re trudging through snow from store to store, the mall’s property manager needs to be fired (barring extraordinary conditions where most people wouldn’t be shopping regardless). Sure you have rainy days or times when it’s just cold out but people are still willing to haul themselves across acres of parking lot on December 23rd at the traditional malls so I guess they’re willing to duck from store to store at the outdoor ones.
The outdoor malls I’ve seen aren’t immediately adjacent to residential any more than indoor malls are. There’s outlots and strip malls and banks and restaurants and business centers on the fringes. So you’re not likely to be living “next door” to one in any meaningful way. Keeping out the riff-raff can’t be much different than it is for an indoor mall. It’s still private property, the property manager still hires security, etc.
This is a story from the public radio program Marketplace about outdoor malls called The Grove and the Americana in the LA area. They seemed designed to model the downtown shopping districts of older towns and cities.
I know here in Kansas City many of the new shopping areas are living off of tax breaks and tax increment financing and I wonder what will happen when those end?
Remember the outlet mall craze where they built these outlet malls in rural areas? The one in Odessa Missouri is a ghost town now.
We have heavy snows in Kansas City maybe 4-5 days a year. Those would be big enough to keep people in their homes in general so I dont see that as a big factor. The outdoor malls have covered sidewalks so rain isnt a big problem.
Besides, many people LIKE being outdoors. They LIKE the bite of cold and the snow in their face (to a point).
Yes. This is a big part of what I meant by “boom and bust.” It’s not that hard, money-wise to build a new strip mall or lifestyle center in a trendy new area and get tenants because businesses typically sign 5-year leases and are more than happy to abandon one area to move to the latest and greatest. Meanwhile, the old developer is stuck with a moribund property with no future.
Some posters have talked about abandoned or nearly empty malls. One important factor is the anchor. In the good old days, you had more really healthy department stores to bring in foot traffic to the smaller stores. In the early 80s in Merrillville, Indiana, there were two indoor malls: the bigger/better mall anchored by Sears, JC Penny, and Carson Pirie Scott (that’s unchanged, except perhaps for the health factor–Ayre’s was in there too–I guess it’s Macy’s now, barf), and the smaller/worse (but still at one point more or less thriving) mall anchored by Montgomery Ward (now torn down, and MW is loooong gone). Yes, there was a time when MW could anchor a decent-sized mall, lol.
I once did some programming for Mervyn’s of California (which was owned by Dayton-Hudson*, which also owned Target).
Mervyn’s was dying fast - the IT department was housed in what had been a company-owned store.
Maybe some of these dead/dying malls can be re-purposed as campus-type office use.
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- which, as a hint to Nervyn’s, renamed itself Target Inc. Mervyn’s died completely a few years back.
I read recently that Sears is trying to turn a lot of it’s real estate that it can’t unload into data centers. Big enclosed spaces with easy access and upgradable utilities. To the extent that we need hundreds of data centers scattered around the country this is better than abandoning the buildings.
The new shopping center isn’t that big. I stubbornly walked from one end to the other. The issue though is that there are no covered sidewalks and each storefront is unique for that store (which makes installing sidewalk covers expensive and they would block some of the signage). One can walk, but one certainly isn’t invited to and it wouldn’t be comfortable. Most people that visit this mall do so for one store at a time. Window shopping isn’t really possible there.
I enjoyed going to the old mall. Going to the new one is like going to Walmart. A chore.
In the case of Sears, part of its problem is that their customer base moved to suburbia and they stayed downtown.
Those are going to be real hard to sell if the surrounding “downtown” has died, as have so many have.
Montgomery Wards made the same mistake and could not recover. The Wards* for SF was in the Tanforan shopping center south of town. It was one of the first “New, Modern, Enclosed!” malls.
Its space was still empty years after MW closed.
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- the business now calling itself “Wards” is NOT the old MW, does not accept MW gift certificates, does not honor warranties, etc.
More people work part time now. This is still counted as “employed” as far as the labor statistics are concerned.
I think there’s a few things in play, some of which will duplicate other comments. I base my opinions on my visits to see and take care of my parents out on the west side of Indianapolis, way out on Rockville Road. Maybe 15 years of observations up until my father moving into hospice a couple of years ago.
- Big box stores of the tilt-up variety seem to be very difficult to expand. Malls are a little easier, but both have to account for inconveniencing the customers while construction is underway.
- There are always developers willing to build to suit just a little farther out. I don’t think the big retailers ever own their stores and as such only have to wait out a lease and entertain pitches for new building locations and amenities.
- In a rapidly developing area, the concentration of population always seems to be moving out with the sprawl and the demographics in particular keep moving.
So in looking at my parents part of town, I remember when the first Target and Walmart and similar businesses were built. They were just on the outer edge of the existing built up areas and did quite well. But over time, the Super Target and Mega Walmart concepts were developed and it was impractical to expand the existing buildings, so they chased the westward growth and built bigger and better out a mile or two. Second and third tier retailers took over the old space if anything went in at all. And this seems to keep happening. Retail leapfrog. Meanwhile, the places we used to shop when I was a kid are total wastelands these days.
I will certainly miss Sears. Or maybe I just miss the Sears of the past, because I really don’t go there any more. My last memory of my local Sears was the strong mildew smell in the AC system that hasn’t been fixed for years and the cashier insisting they can’t check me out without a phone number.
Around here, the big new trend is outdoor malls built next to condo complexes-you don’t need a car. One (University Place) is near a public transit/AMTRAK station-so the builders were thinking ahead (to a car-less future). the place is very successful.
I have also seen a TON of new strip malls that have no tenants . One is about 3 miles from my brother-it was built 5 years ago-empty.
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Oak Brook just did a big renovation so they can’t be doing too poorly. They have the advantage of being an outdoor mall so they can sell the “town centre lifestyle” thing that many shopping centers are going for these days (versus the antiquated indoor model).
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Funny how tastes have come full-circle. Twenty five years ago, the outdoor or open-air mall was the horribly antiquated place, and developers were falling over themselves to put roofs over these places, add second levels, blow out some empty space to build a branch for the food court and put in grandiose carousels or similar “kid-friendly” attractions.
So now it’s time to peel off the roof and let in some daylight?
The “boom and bust” is really apparent in the University City area of Charlotte, NC, where there’s been an outward growth of the city and many big-box stores have abandoned buildings and moved to new locations that may be closer to the new freeway or at least have better parking lots. The jobs just moved a mile down the road, but what happens to the empty former place? A city can support just so many Spirit Halloween stores.
Huh. Where I grew up, Sears and Wards were anchor stores of the local suburban mall (Springfield Mall in Springfield, VA) back in the late 1970s. Even now, Sears is still an anchor store for indoor malls in plenty of places - not that that’s gonna save them, now that the indoor mall is in decline. But ISTM that both Sears and Wards got into the 'burbs in time; they went on the skids for other reasons.
Part of it was probably the hollowing out of the middle of the retail market, as more people went downscale (Walmart, etc.) or upscale (Nordstrom’s, etc.). J.C. Penney got caught in that same crossfire. This was happening before people started doing most of their shopping on the Web, but that obviously hasn’t helped them either.
Eh, it’s late July. Give it about a month or so, and a good chunk of the empty big box strip mall space will become “Spirit Halloween Superstores.”
That’s true. Interesting, Menard’s (regional hardware and dry goods chain) has a business model where they own all the property they have stores on. In fact, they not only own the store’s lot but also the adjoining outlots and make extra money by being the property manager for the various banks, medical clinics or fast food joints you see occupying those spaces.
Family Video is another chain that owns all their locations and leases extra space. If you see a strip mall with a Family Video in it, chances are that Family Video owns the strip mall and everyone else is sending them rent checks. Family Video obviously isn’t “box store retail” (I guess Menard’s qualifies though) but it’s an interesting model.